The Andromeda Strain (27 page)

There were times when he saw man, with his giant brain, as equivalent to the dinosaurs. Every schoolboy knew that dinosaurs had outgrown themselves, had become too large and ponderous to be viable. No one ever thought to consider whether the human brain, the most complex structure in the known universe, making fantastic demands on the human body in terms of nourishment and blood, was not analogous. Perhaps the human brain had become a kind of dinosaur for man and perhaps, in the end, would prove his downfall.

Already, the brain consumed one quarter of the body’s blood supply. A fourth of all blood pumped from the heart went to the brain, an organ accounting for only a small percentage of body mass. If brains grew larger, and better, then perhaps they would consume more—perhaps so much that, like an infection, they would overrun their hosts and kill the bodies that transported them.

Or perhaps, in their infinite cleverness, they would find a way to destroy themselves and each other. There were times when, as he sat at State Department or Defense Department meetings, and looked around the table, he saw nothing more than a dozen gray, convoluted brains sitting on the table. No flesh and blood, no hands, no eyes, no fingers. No mouths, no sex organs—all these were superfluous.

Just brains. Sitting around, trying to decide how to outwit other brains, at other conference tables.

Idiotic.

He shook his head, thinking that he was becoming like Leavitt, conjuring up wild and improbable schemes.

Yet, there was a sort of logical consequence to Stone’s ideas. If you really feared and hated your brain, you would attempt to destroy it. Destroy your own, and destroy others.

“I’m tired,” he said aloud, and looked at the wall clock. It was 2340 hours—almost time for the midnight conference.

21
The Midnight Conference

THEY MET AGAIN, in the same room, in the same way. Stone glanced at the others and saw they were tired; no one, including himself, was getting enough sleep.

“We’re going at this too hard,” he said. “We don’t need to work around the clock, and we shouldn’t do so. Tired men will make mistakes, mistakes in thinking and mistakes in action. We’ll start to drop things, to screw things up, to work sloppily. And we’ll make wrong assumptions, draw incorrect inferences. That mustn’t happen.”

The team agreed to get at least six hours sleep in each twenty-four-hour period. That seemed reasonable, since there was no problem on the surface; the infection at Piedmont had been halted by the atomic bomb.

Their belief might never have been altered had not Leavitt suggested that they file for a code name. Leavitt stated that they had an organism and that it required a code. The others agreed.

In a corner of the room stood the scrambler typewriter. It had been clattering all day long, typing out material sent in from the outside. It was a two-way machine; material transmitted had to be typed in lowercase letters, while received material was printed out in capitals.

No one had really bothered to look at the input since their arrival on Level V. They were all too busy; besides, most of the input had been routine military dispatches that were sent to Wildfire but did not concern it. This was because Wildfire was one of the Cooler Circuit substations, known facetiously as the Top Twenty. These substations were linked to the basement of the White House and were the twenty most important strategic locations in the country. Other substations included Vandenberg, Kennedy, NORAD, Patterson, Detrick, and Virginia Key.

Stone went to the typewriter and printed out his message. The message was directed by computer to Central Codes, a station that handled the coding of all projects subsumed under the system of Cooler.

The transmission was as follows:

open line to transmit

UNDERSTAND TRANSMIT STATE ORIGIN

stone project wildfire

STATE DESTINATION

central codes

UNDERSTAND CENTRAL CODES

message follows

SEND

have isolated extraterrestrial organism secondary to return of scoop seven wish coding for organism end message

TRANSMITTED

There followed a long pause. The scrambler teleprinter hummed and clicked, but printed nothing. Then the typewriter began to spit out a message on a long roll of paper.

MESSAGE FROM CENTRAL CODES FOLLOWS

UNDERSTAND ISOLATION OF NEW ORGANISM PLEASE

CHARACTERIZE

END MESSAGE

Stone frowned. “But we don’t know enough.” However, the teleprinter was impatient:

TRANSMIT REPLY TO CENTRAL CODES

After a moment, Stone typed back:

message to central codes follows
cannot characterize at this time but suggest
tentative classification as bacterial strain
end message

MESSAGE FROM CENTRAL CODES FOLLOWS

UNDERSTAND REQUEST FOR BACTERIAL CLASSIFICATION
OPENING NEW CATEGORY CLASSIFICATION ACCORDING TO
ICDA STANDARD REFERENCE
CODE FOR YOUR ORGANISM WILL BE ANDROMEDA
CODE WILL READ OUT ANDROMEDA STRAIN
FILED UNDER ICDA LISTINGS AS 053.9 [UNSPECIFIED ORGANISM]
FURTHER FILING AS E866 [AIRCRAFT ACCIDENT]
THIS FILING REPRESENTS CLOSEST FIT TO
ESTABLISHED CATEGORIES

Stone smiled. “It seems we don’t fit the established categories.”

He typed back:

understand coding as andromeda strain
accepted
end message

TRANSMITTED

“Well,” Stone said, “that’s that.”

Burton had been looking over the sheaves of paper behind the teleprinter. The teleprinter wrote its messages out on a long roll of paper, which fell into a box. There were dozens of yards of paper that no one had looked at.

Silently, he read a single message, tore it from the rest of the strip, and handed it to Stone.

1134/443/KK/Y-U/9

INFORMATION STATUS

TRANSMIT TO ALL STATIONS

CLASSIFICATION TOP SECRET

REQUEST FOR DIRECTIVE 7–12 RECEIVED TODAY BY

EXEC AND NSC-COBRA

ORIGIN VANDENBERG/WILDFIRE

CORROBORATION NASA/AMC

AUTHORITY PRIMARY MANCHEK, ARTHUR, MAJOR USA

IN CLOSED SESSION THIS DIRECTIVE HAS NOT

BEEN ACTED UPON

FINAL DECISION HAS BEEN POSTPONED TWENTY

FOUR TO FORTY EIGHT HOURS

RECONSIDERATION AT THAT TIME

ALTERNATIVE TROOP DEPLOYMENT ACCORDING TO

DIRECTIVE 7–11 NOW IN EFFECT

NO NOTIFICATION

END MESSAGE

TRANSMIT ALL STATIONS

CLASSIFICATION TOP SECRET

END TRANSMISSION

The team stared at the message in disbelief. No one said anything for a long time. Finally, Stone ran his fingers along the upper corner of the sheet and said in a low voice, “This was a 443. That makes it an MCN transmission. It should have rung the bell down here.”

“There’s no bell on this teleprinter,” Leavitt said. “Only on Level I, at sector five. But they’re supposed to notify us whenever—”

“Get sector five on the intercom,” Stone said.

Ten minutes later, the horrified Sergeant Morris had connected Stone to Robertson, the head of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, who was in Houston.

Stone spoke for several minutes with Robertson, who expressed initial surprise that he hadn’t heard from Wildfire earlier. There then followed a heated discussion of the President’s decision not to call a Directive 7–12.

“The President doesn’t trust scientists,” Robertson said. “He doesn’t feel comfortable with them.”