Michael Crichton: The Andromeda Strain

She stepped back and started to close the door, but one man had already slipped into the hall. He stood near the door, erect and very polite, with his hat in his hand. "I'll just wait here, ma'am," he said, and smiled at her.

She walked back to the party, trying to show nothing to the guests. Everyone was still talking and laughing; the room was noisy and dense with smoke. She found Jeremy in a corner, in the midst of some argument about riots. She touched his shoulder, and he disengaged himself from the group.

"I know this sounds funny," she said, "but there is some kind of Army man in the hall, and another outside, and two others with guns out on the lawn. They say they want to see you."

For a moment, Stone looked surprised, and then he nodded. "I'll take care of it," he said. His attitude annoyed her; he seemed almost to be expecting it.

"Well, if you knew about this, you might have told-"

"I didn't," he said. "I'll explain later."

He walked out to the hallway, where the officer was still waiting. She followed her husband.

Stone said, "I am Dr. Stone."

"Captain Morton," the man said. He did not offer to shake hands. "There's a fire, sir."

"All right," Stone said. He looked down at his dinner jacket. "Do I have time to change?"

"I'm afraid not, sir."

To her astonishment, Allison saw her husband nod quietly. "All right."

He turned to her and said, "I've got to leave." His face was blank and expressionless, and it seemed to her like, a nightmare, his face like that, while he spoke. She was confused, and afraid.

"When will you be back?"

"I'm not sure. A week or two. Maybe longer."

She tried to keep her voice low, but she couldn't help it, she was upset. "What is it?" she said. "Are you under arrest?"

"No," he said, with a slight smile. "It's nothing like that. Make my apologies to everyone, will you?"

"But the guns-"

"Mrs. Stone," the military man said, "it's our job to protect your husband. From now on, nothing must be allowed to happen to him."

"That's right," Stone said. "You see, I'm suddenly an important person. " He smiled again, an odd, crooked smile, and gave her a kiss.

And then, almost before she knew what was happening, he was walking out the door, with Captain Morton on one side of him and the other man on the other. The man with the rifle wordlessly fell into place behind them; the man by the car saluted and opened the door.

Then the car lights came on, and the doors slammed shut, and the car backed down the drive and drove off into the night. She was still standing by the door when one of her guests came up behind her and said, "Allison, are you all right?"

And she turned, and found she was able to smile and say, "Yes, it's nothing. Jeremy had to leave. The lab called him: another one of his late-night experiments going wrong."

The guest nodded and said, "Shame. It's a delightful party."

In the car, Stone sat back and stared at the men. He recalled that their faces were blank and expressionless. He said, "What have you got for me?"

"Got, sir?"

"Yes, dammit. What did they give you for me? They must have given you something."

"Oh. Yes sir."

He was handed a slim file. Stenciled on the brown cardboard cover was PROJECT SUMMARY: SCOOP.

"Nothing else?" Stone said.

"No sir."

Stone sighed. He had never heard of Project Scoop before; the file would have to be read carefully. But it was too dark in the car to read; there would be time for that later, on the airplane. He found himself thinking back over the last five years, back to the rather odd symposium on Long Island, and the rather odd little speaker from England who had, in his own way, begun it all.

In the summer of 1962, J. J. Merrick, the English biophysicist, presented a paper to the Tenth Biological Symposium at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. The paper was entitled "Frequencies of Biologic Contact According to Speciation Probabilities." Merrick was a rebellious, unorthodox scientist whose reputation for clear thinking was not enhanced by his recent divorce or the presence of the handsome blond secretary he had brought with him to the symposium. Following the presentation of his paper, there was little serious discussion of Merrick's ideas, which were summarized at the end of the paper.

I must conclude that the first contact with extraterrestrial life will be determined by the known probabilities of speciation. It is an undeniable fact that complex organisms are rare on earth, while simple organisms flourish in abundance. There are millions of species of bacteria, and thousands of species of insects. There are only a few species of primates, and only four of great apes. There is but one species of man.

With this frequency of speciation goes a corresponding frequency in numbers. Simple creatures are much more common than complex organisms. There are three billion men on the earth, and that seems a great many until we consider that ten or even one hundred times that number of first contact would consist of a plague brought back from the bacteria can be contained within a large flask.

All available evidence on the origin of life points to an evolutionary progression from simple to complex life forms. This is true on earth. It is probably true throughout the universe. Shapley, Merrow, and others have calculated the number of viable planetary systems in the near universe. My own calculations, indicated earlier in the paper, consider the relative abundance of different organisms throughout the universe.

My aim has been to determine the probability of contact between man and another life form. That probability is as follows:

FORM: PROBABILITY

Unicellular organisms or less (naked genetic in formation):.7840

Multicellular organisms, simple:.1940

Multicellular organisms, complex but lacking coordinated central nervous system:.0140

Multicellular organisms with integrated organ systems including nervous system:.0018

Multicellular organisms with complex nervous system capable of handling 7+ data (human capability):.0002

TOTAL: 1.0000

These considerations lead me to believe that the first human interaction with extraterrestrial life will consist of contact with organisms similar to, if not identical to, earth bacteria or viruses. The consequences of such contact are disturbing when one recalls that 3 per cent of all earth bacteria are capable of exerting some deleterious effect upon man.

Later, Merrick himself considered the possibility that the first contact would consist of a plague brought back from the moon by the first men to go there. This idea was received with amusement by the assembled scientists.

One of the few who took it seriously was Jeremy Stone. At the age of thirty-six, Stone was perhaps the most famous person attending the symposium that year. He was professor of bacteriology at Berkeley, a post he had held since he was thirty, and he had just won the Nobel Prize.

The list of Stone's achievements- disregarding the particular series of experiments that led to the Nobel Prize- is astonishing. In 1955, he was the first to use the technique of multiplicative counts for bacterial colonies. In 1957, he developed a method for liquid-pure suspension. In 1960, Stone presented a radical new theory of operon activity in E. coli and S. tabuh, and developed evidence for the physical nature of the inducer and repressor substances. His 1958 paper on linear viral transformations opened broad new lines of scientific inquiry, particularly among the Pasteur Institute group in Paris, which subsequently won the Nobel Prize in 1966.

In 1961, Stone himself won the Nobel Prize. The award was given for work on bacterial mutant reversion that he had done in his spare time as a law student at Michigan, when he was twenty-six.