The Andromeda Strain
Michael Crichton, 1969
Knopf (1969); HarperCollins (current)
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061703157
Summary
This book recounts the five-day history of a major American scientific crisis. As in most crises, the events surrounding the Andromeda Strain were a compound of foresight and foolishness, innocence and ignorance. Nearly everyone involved had moments of great brilliance, and moments of unaccountable stupidity....
Thus begins this extraordinary novel of the world's first space-age biological emergency.
The Andromeda Strain sets forth with almost documentary verisimilitude the unfolding story of "Project Wildfire"—the crash mobilization of the nation's highest scientific and medical resources when an unmanned research satellite returns to earth mysteriously and lethally contaminated.
Four American scientists, chosen in advance for their experimental achievements in the fields of clinical microbiology, epidemiology, pathology, and electrolyte chemistry, are summoned under conditions of total news blackout and utmost urgency to Wildfire's secret laboratory five stories beneath the Nevada desert.
There—surrounded by banks of the most sophisticated computer-assisted equipment, and sealed off from the outside world except for a telecommunications link with the national security apparatus—they work against the threat of a worldwide epidemic to find an antidote to the unknown microorganism that has inexplicably killed all but two inhabitants (an elderly derelict and an infant) of the tiny Arizona town where the satellite was retrieved.
Step by step they begin to unravel the puzzle of the Andromeda Strain, until, terrifyingly, their microbacterial "adversary" ruptures the hypersterile seal of the laboratory and their already desperate search for a biomedical answer becomes a split-second race against an atomic deadline.
With its narrative force, its scientific detail, its suspense—as four brilliant individualists work together under ultimate pressure—this novel makes real for the reader the real world of today's science and medicine at the top-secret levels of the Science-Space-Military high command. (From the publisher.)