The Andromeda Strain Part 4

In 1961, Stone himself won the n.o.bel 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.

Perhaps the most significant thing about Stone was that he had done n.o.bel-caliber work as a law student, for it demonstrated the depth and range of his interests. A friend once said of him: "Jeremy knows everything, and is fascinated by I the rest." Already he was being compared to Einstein and to Bohr as a scientist with a conscience, an overview, an appreciation of the significance of events.

Physically, Stone was a thin, balding man with a prodigious memory that catalogued scientific facts and blue jokes with equal facility. But his most outstanding characteristic was a sense of impatience, the feeling he conveyed to every one around him that they were wasting his time. He had a bad habit of interrupting speakers and finishing conversations, a habit he tried to control with only limited success.His imperious manner, when added to the fact that he had won the n.o.bel Prize at an early age, as well as the scandals of his private life-- he was four times married, twice to the wives of colleagues-- did nothing to increase his popularity.

Yet it was Stone who, in the early 1960's, moved forward in government circles as one of the spokesmen for the new scientific establishment. He himself regarded this role with tolerant amus.e.m.e.nt-- a vacuum eager to be filled with hot gas, " he once said-- but in fact his influence was considerable.

By the early 1960's America had reluctantly come to realize that it possessed, as a nation, the most potent scientific complex in the history of the world. Eighty per cent of all scientific discoveries in the preceding three decades had been made by Americans. The United States had 75 per cent of the world's computers, and 90 per cent of the world's lasers. The United States had three and a half times as many scientists as the Soviet Union and spent three and a half times as much money on research; the U. S. had four times as many scientists as the European Economic Community and spent seven times as much on research. Most of this money came, directly or indirectly, from Congress, and Congress felt a great need for men to advise them on how to spend it.

During the 1950's, all the great advisers had been physicists: Teller and Oppenheimer and Bruckman and Weidner. But ten years later, with more money for biology and more concern for it, a new group emerged, led by DeBakey in Houston, Farmer in Boston, Heggerman in New York, and Stone in California.

Stone's prominence was attributable to many factors: the prestige of the n.o.bel Prize; his political contacts; his most recent wife, the daughter of Senator Thomas Wayne of Indiana; his legal training. All this combined to a.s.sure Stone's repeated appearance before confused Senate subcommittees-- and gave him the power of any trusted adviser.

It was this same power that he used so successfully to implement the research and construction leading to Wildfire.

Stone was intrigued by Merrick's ideas, which paralleled certain concepts of his own. He explained these in a short paper ent.i.tled "Sterilization of s.p.a.cecraft," printed in Science and later reprinted in the British journal Nature. The argument stated that bacterial contamination was a two-edged sword, and that man must protect against both edges.

Previous to Stone's paper, most discussion of contamination dealt with the hazards to other planets of satellites and probes inadvertently carrying earth organisms. This problem was considered early in the American s.p.a.ce effort; by 1959, NASA had set strict regulations for sterilization of earth origin probes.

The object of these regulations was to prevent contamination of other worlds. Clearly, if a probe were being sent to Mars or Venus to search for new life forms, it would defeat the purpose of the experiment for the probe to carry earth bacteria with it.

Stone considered the reverse situation. He stated that it was equally possible for extraterrestrial organisms to contaminate the earth via s.p.a.ce probes. He noted that s.p.a.cecraft that burned up in reentry presented no problem, but "live" returns-- manned flights, and probes such as the Scoop satellites-- were another matter entirely. Here, he said, the question of contamination was very great.

His paper created a brief flurry of interest but, as he later said, "nothing very spectacular." Therefore, in 1963 he began an informal seminar group that met twice monthly in Room 410, on the top floor of the University of California Medical School biochemistry wing, for lunch and discussion of the contamination problem. It was this group of five men: Stone and John Black of Berkeley, Samuel Holden and Terence Lisset of Stanford Med, and Andrew Weiss of Stanford biophysics-- that eventually formed the early nucleus of the Wildfire Project. They presented a pet.i.tion to the President in 1964, in a letter consciously patterned after the Einstein letter to Roosevelt, in 1940, concerning the atomic bomb.

University of California Berkeley, Calif.

June 10, 1964 The President of the United States

The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Washington, D.C.

Dear Mr. President: Recent theoretical considerations suggest that sterilization procedures of returning s.p.a.ce probes may be inadequate to guarantee sterile reentry to this planet's atmosphere. The consequence of this is the potential introduction of virulent organisms into the present terrestrial ecologic framework.

It is our belief that sterilization for reentry probes and manned capsules can never be wholly satisfactory. Our calculations suggest that even if capsules received sterilizing procedures in s.p.a.ce, the probability of contamination would still remain one in ten thousand, and perhaps much more. These estimates are based upon organized life as we know it; other forms of life may be entirely resistant to our sterilizing methods.

We therefore urge the establishment of a facility designed to deal with an extraterrestrial life form, should one inadvertently be introduced to the earth. The purpose of this facility would be twofold: to limit dissemination of the life form, and to provide laboratories for its investigation and a.n.a.lysis, with a view to protecting earth life forms from its influence.

We recommend that such a facility be located in an uninhabited region of the United States; that it be constructed underground; that it incorporate all known isolation techniques; and that it be equipped with a nuclear device for self-destruction in the eventuality of an emergency. So far as we know, no form of life can survive the two million degrees of heat which accompany an atomic nuclear detonation.

Yours very truly, Jeremy Stone John Black Samuel Holden Terence Lisset Andrew Weiss ***

Response to the letter was gratifyingly prompt. Twenty-four hours later, Stone received a call from one of the President's advisers, and the following day he flew to Washington to confer with the President and members of the National Security Council. Two weeks after that, he flew to Houston to discuss further plans with NASA officials.

Although Stone recalls one or two cracks about "the G.o.ddam penitentiary for bugs," most scientists he talked with regarded the project favorably. Within a month, Stone's informal team was hardened into an official committee to study problems of contamination and draw up recommendations.

This committee was put on the Defense Department's Advance Research Projects List and funded through the Defense Department. At that time, the ARPL was heavily invested in chemistry and physics-- ion sprays, reversal duplication, pi-meson substrates-- but there was growing interest in biologic problems. Thus one ARPL group was concerned with electronic pacing of brain function (a euphemism for mind control); a second had prepared a study of biosynergics, the future possible combinations of man and machines implanted inside the body; still another was evaluating Project Ozma, the search for extraterrestrial life conducted in 1961-4. A fourth group was engaged in preliminary design of a machine that would carry out all human functions and would be self-duplicating.

All these projects were highly theoretical, and all were staffed by prestigious scientists. Admission to the ARPL was a mark of considerable status, and it ensured future funds for implementation and development.

Therefore, when Stone's committee submitted an early draft of the Life a.n.a.lysis Protocol, which detailed the way any living thing could be studied, the Defense Department responded with an outright appropriation of $22,000,000 for the construction of a special isolated laboratory. (This rather large sum was felt to be justified since the project had application to other studies already under way. In 1965, the whole field of sterility and contamination was one of major importance. For example, NASA was building a Lunar Receiving Laboratory, a high-security facility for Apollo astronauts returning from the moon and possibly carrying bacteria or viruses harmful to man. Every astronaut returning from the moon would be quarantined in the LRL for three weeks, until decontamination was complete. Further, the problems of "clean rooms" of industry, where dust and bacteria were kept at a minimum, and the "sterile chambers" under study at Bethesda, were also major. Aseptic environments, "life islands," and sterile support systems seemed to have great future significance, and Stone's appropriation was considered a good investment in all these fields.) Once money was funded, construction proceeded rapidly. The eventual result, the Wildfire Laboratory, was built in 1966 in Flatrock, Nevada. Design was awarded to the naval architects of the Electric Boat Division of General Dynamics, since GD had considerable experience designing living quarters on atomic submarines, where men had to live and work for prolonged periods.

The plan consisted of a conical underground structure with five floors. Each floor was circular, with a central service core of wiring, plumbing, and elevators. Each floor was more sterile than the one above; the first floor was non-sterile, the second moderately sterile, the third stringently sterile, and so on. Pa.s.sage from one floor to another was not free; personnel had to undergo decontamination and quarantine procedures in pa.s.sing either up or down.

Once the laboratory was finished, it only remained to select the Wildfire Alert team, the group of scientists who would study any new organism. After a number of studies of team composition, five men were selected, including Jeremy Stone himself. These five were prepared to mobilize immediately in the event of a biologic emergency.

Barely two years after his letter to the President, Stone was satisfied that "this country has the capability to deal with an unknown biologic agent." He professed himself pleased with the response of Washington and the speed with which his ideas had been implemented. But privately, he admitted to friends that it had been almost too easy, that Washington had agreed to his plans almost too readily.

Stone could not have known the reasons behind Washington's eagerness, or the very real concern many government officials had for the problem. For Stone knew nothing, until the night he left the party and drove off in the blue military sedan, of Project Scoop.

"It was the fastest thing we could arrange, sir," the Army man said.

Stone stepped onto the airplane with a sense of absurdity. It was a Boeing 727, completely empty, the seats stretching back in long unbroken rows.

"Sit, first cla.s.s, if you like," the Army man said, with a slight smile. "It doesn't matter." A moment later he was gone. He was not replaced by a stewardess but by a stern MP with a pistol on his hip who stood by the door as the engines started, whining softly in the night.

Stone sat back with the Scoop file in front of him and began to read. It made fascinating reading; he went through it quickly, so quickly that the MP thought his pa.s.senger must be merely glancing at the file. But Stone was reading every word.

Scoop was the brainchild of Major General Thomas Sparks, head of the Army Medical Corps, Chemical and Biological Warfare Division. Sparks was responsible for the research of the CBW installations at Fort Detrick, Maryland, Harley, Indiana, and Dugway, Utah. Stone had met him once or twice, and remembered him as being mild-mannered and bespectacled. Not the sort of man to be expected in the job he held.

Reading on, Stone learned that Project Scoop was contracted to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the California Inst.i.tute of Technology in Pasadena in 1963. Its avowed aim was the collection of any organisms that might exist in "near s.p.a.ce, " the upper atmosphere of the earth. Technically speaking, it was an Army project, but it was funded through the National Aeronautics and s.p.a.ce Administration, a supposedly civilian organization. In fact, NASA was a government agency with a heavy military commitment; 43 per cent of its contractual work was cla.s.sified in 1963.

In theory, JPL was designing a satellite to enter the fringes of s.p.a.ce and collect organisms and dust for study. This was considered a project of pure science-- almost curiosity-- and was thus accepted by all the scientists working on the study.

In fact, the true aims were quite different.

The true aims of Scoop were to find new life forms that might benefit the Fort Detrick program. In essence, it was a study to discover new biological weapons of war.

Detrick was a rambling structure in Maryland dedicated to the discovery of chemical-and-biological-warfare weapons. Covering 1,300 acres, with a physical plant valued at $100,000,000, it ranked as one of the largest research facilities of any kind in the United States. Only 15 per cent of its findings were published in open scientific journals; the rest were cla.s.sified, as were the reports from Harley and Dugway. Harley was a maximum-security installation that dealt largely with viruses. In the previous ten years, a number of new viruses had been developed there, ranging from the variety coded Carrie Nation (which produces diarrhea) to the variety coded Arnold (which causes clonic seizures and death). The Dugway Proving Ground in Utah was larger than the state of Rhode Island and was used princ.i.p.ally to test poison gases such as Tabun, Sklar, and Kuff-11.

Few Americans, Stone knew, were aware of the magnitude of U.S. research into chemical and biological warfare. The total government expenditure in CBW exceeded half a billion dollars a year. Much of this was distributed to academic centers such as Johns Hopkins, Pennsylvania, and the University of Chicago, where studies of weapons systems were contracted under vague terms. Sometimes, of course, the terms were not so vague. The Johns Hopkins program was devised to evaluate "studies of actual or potential injuries and illnesses, studies on diseases of potential biological-warfare significance, and evaluation of certain chemical and immunological responses to certain toxoids and vaccines."

In the past eight years, none of the results from Johns Hopkins had been published openly. Those from other universities, such as Chicago and UCLA, had occasionally been published, but these were considered within the military establishment to be "trial balloons"-- examples of ongoing research intended to intimidate foreign observers. A cla.s.sic was the paper by Tendron and five others ent.i.tled "Researches into a Toxin Which Rapidly Uncouples Oxidative Phosphorylation Through Cutaneous Absorption."

The paper described, but did not identify, a poison that would kill a person in less than a minute and was absorbed through the skin. It was recognized that this was a relatively minor achievement compared to other toxins that had been devised in recent years.

With so much money and effort going into CBW, one might think that new and more virulent weapons would be continuously perfected. However, this was not the case from 1961 to 1965; the conclusion of the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee in 1961 was that "conventional research has been less than satisfactory" and that "new avenues and approaches of inquiry" should be opened within the field.

That was precisely what Major General Thomas Sparks intended to do, with Project Scoop.

In final form, Scoop was a program to orbit seventeen satellites around the earth, collecting organisms and bringing them back to the surface. Stone read the summaries of each previous flight.

Scoop I was a gold-plated satellite, cone-shaped, weighing thirty-seven pounds fully equipped. It was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Purisima, California, on March 12, 1966. Vandenberg is used for polar (north to south) orbits, as opposed to Cape Kennedy, which launches west to east; Vandenberg had the additional advantage of maintaining better secrecy than Kennedy.

Scoop I orbited for six days before being brought down. It landed successfully in a swamp near Athens, Georgia. Unfortunately, it was found to contain only standard earth organisms.

Scoop II burned up in reentry, as a result of instrumentation failure. Scoop III also burned up, though it had a new type of plastic-and-tungsten-laminate heat shield.

Scoops IV and V were recovered intact from the Indian Ocean and the Appalachian foothills, but neither contained radically new organisms; those collected were harmless variants of S. albus, a common contaminant of normal human skin. These failures led to a further increase in sterilization procedures prior to launch.

Scoop VI was launched on New Year's Day, 1967. It incorporated all the latest refinements from earlier attempts. High hopes rode with the revised satellite, which returned eleven days later, landing near Bombay, India. Unknown to anyone, the 34th Airborne, then stationed in Evreux, France, just outside Paris, was dispatched to recover the capsule. The 34th was on alert whenever a s.p.a.ceflight went up, according to the procedures of Operation Scrub, a plan first devised to protect Mercury and Gemini capsules should one be forced to land in Soviet Russia or Eastern Bloc countries. Scrub was the primary reason for keeping a single paratroop division in Western Europe in the first half of the 1960's.

Scoop VI was recovered uneventfully. It was found to contain a previously unknown form of unicellular organism, coccobacillary in shape, gram-negative, coagulase, and triokinase-positive. However, it proved generally benevolent to all living things with the exception of domestic female chickens, which it made moderately ill for a four-day period.

Among the Detrick staff, hope dimmed for the successful recovery of a pathogen from the Scoop program. Nonetheless, Scoop VII was launched soon after Scoop VI. The exact date is cla.s.sified but it is believed to be February 5, 1967. Scoop VII immediately went into stable orbit with an apogee of 317 miles and a perigee of 224 miles. It remained in orbit for two and a half days. At that time, the satellite abruptly left stable orbit for unknown reasons, and it was decided to bring it down by radio command.

The antic.i.p.ated landing site was a desolate area in northeastern Arizona.

Midway through the flight, his reading was interrupted by an officer who brought him a telephone and then stepped a respectful distance away while Stone talked.

"Yes?" Stone said, feeling odd. He was not accustomed to talking on the telephone in the middle of an airplane trip.

"General Marcus here," a tired voice said. Stone did not know General Marcus. "I just wanted to inform you that all members of the team have been called in, with the exception of Professor Kirke."

"What happened?"

"Professor Kirke is in the hospital," General Marcus said. "You'll get further details when you touch down."

The conversation ended; Stone gave the telephone back to the officer. He thought for a minute about the other men on the team, and wondered at their reactions as they were called out of bed.

There was Leavitt, of course. He would respond quickly. Leavitt was a clinical microbiologist, a man experienced in the treatment of infectious disease. Leavitt had seen enough plagues and epidemics in his day to know the importance of quick action. Besides, there was his ingrained pessimism, which never deserted him. (Leavitt had once said, "At my wedding, all I could think of was how much alimony she'd cost me.") He was an irritable, grumbling, heavyset man with a morose face and sad eyes, which seemed to peer ahead into a bleak and miserable future; but he was also thoughtful, imaginative, and not afraid to think daringly.

Then there was the pathologist, Burton, in Houston. Stone had never liked Burton very well, though he acknowledged his scientific talent. Burton and Stone were different: where Stone was organized, Burton was sloppy; where Stone was controlled, Burton was impulsive; where Stone was confident, Burton was nervous, jumpy, petulant. Colleagues referred to Burton as "the Stumbler," partly because of his tendency to trip over his untied shoelaces and baggy trouser cuffs and partly because of his talent for tumbling by error into one important discovery after another.

And then Kirke, the anthropologist from Yale, who apparently was not going to be able to come. If the report was true, Stone knew he was going to miss him. Kirke was an ill-informed and rather foppish man who possessed, as if by accident, a superbly logical brain. He was capable of grasping the essentials of a problem and manipulating them to get the necessary result; though he could not balance his own checkbook, mathematicians often came to him for help in resolving highly abstract problems.

Stone was going to miss that kind of brain. Certainly the fifth man would be no help. Stone frowned as he thought about Mark Hall. Hall had been a compromise candidate for the team; Stone would have preferred a physician with experience in metabolic disease, and the choice of a surgeon instead had been made with the greatest reluctance. There had been great pressure from Defense and the AEC to accept Hall, since those groups believed in the Odd Man Hypothesis; in the end, Stone and the others had given in.

Stone did not know Hall well; he wondered what he would say when he was informed of the alert. Stone could not have known of the great delay in notifying members of the team. He did not know, for instance, that Burton, the pathologist, was not called until five a.m., or that Peter Leavitt, the microbiologist, was not called until six thirty, the time he arrived at the hospital.

And Hall was not called until five minutes past seven.

It was, Mark Hall said later, "a horrifying experience. In an instant, I was taken from the most familiar of worlds and plunged into the most unfamiliar. " At six forty-five, Hall was in the washroom adjacent to OR 7, scrubbing for his first case of the day. He was in the midst of a routine he had carried out daily for several years; he was relaxed and joking with the resident, scrubbing with him.

When he finished, he went into the operating room, holding his arms before him, and the instrument nurse handed him a towel, to wipe his hands dry. Also in the room was another resident, who was prepping the body for surgery-- applying iodine and alcohol solutions-- and a circulating nurse. They all exchanged greetings.

At the hospital, Hall was known as a swift, quick-tempered, and unpredictable surgeon. He operated with speed, working nearly twice as fast as other surgeons. When things went smoothly, he laughed and joked as he worked, kidding his a.s.sistants, the nurses, the anesthetist. But if things did not go well, if they became slow and difficult, Hall could turn blackly irritable.

Like most surgeons, he was insistent upon routine. Everything had to be done in a certain order, in a certain way. If not, he became upset.

Because the others in the operating room knew this, they looked up toward the overhead viewing gallery with apprehension when Leavitt appeared. Leavitt clicked on the intercom that connected the upstairs room to the operating room below and said, "h.e.l.lo, Mark."

Hall had been draping the patient, placing green sterile cloths over every part of the body except for the abdomen. He looked up with surprise. "h.e.l.lo, Peter," he said.

"Sorry to disturb you," Leavitt said. "But this is an emergency."

"Have to wait," Hall said. "I'm starting a procedure."

He finished draping and called for the skin knife. He palpated the abdomen, feeling for the landmarks to begin his incision.

"It can't wait," Leavitt said.

Hall paused. He set down the scalpel and looked up. There was a long silence.

"What the h.e.l.l do you mean, it can't wait?"

Leavitt remained calm. "You'll have to break scrub. This is an emergency."

"Look, Peter, I've got a patient here. Anesthetized. Ready to go. I can't just walk--"

"Kelly will take over for you."

Kelly was one of the staff surgeons.

"Kelly?"

"He's scrubbing now," Leavitt said. "It's all arranged. I'll expect to meet you in the surgeon's change room. In about thirty seconds."

And then he was gone.

Hall glared at everyone in the room. No one moved, or spoke. After a moment, he stripped off his gloves and stomped out of the room, swearing once, very loudly.

Hall viewed his own a.s.sociation with Wildfire as tenuous at best. In 1966 he had been approached by Leavitt, the chief of bacteriology of the hospital, who had explained in a sketchy way the purpose of the project. Hall found it all rather amusing and had agreed to join the team, if his services ever became necessary; privately, he was confident that nothing would ever come of Wildfire.

Leavitt had offered to give Hall the files on Wildfire and to keep him up to date on the project. At first, Hall politely took the files, but it soon became clear that he was not bothering to read them, and so Leavitt stopped giving them to him. If anything, this pleased Hall, who preferred not to have his desk cluttered.

A year before, Leavitt had asked him whether he wasn't curious about something that he had agreed to join and that might at some future time prove dangerous.

Hall had said, "No."

Now, in the doctors' room, Hall regretted those words. The doctors' room was a small place, lined on all four walls with lockers; there were no windows. A large coffeemaker sat in the center of the room, with a stack of paper cups alongside. Leavitt was pouring himself a cup, his solemn, ba.s.set-hound face looking mournful.

"This is going to be awful coffee," he said. "You can't get a decent cup anywhere in a hospital. Hurry and change.

Hall said, "Do you mind telling me first why--"