Bugged by Outer Space

Bugged by Outter Space

THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN by Michael Crichton. 295 pages. Alfred Knopf. $5.95.

This small, highly mechanized volume has been timed as perfectly as the moment of Apollo 10's splashdown. It is as up to date as this week's man-in-the-moon headlines, as plausible as the current plan to place returning U.S. astronauts in bacteria-proof "biological isolation garments." The book's thesis: puny man, poised on the edge of the new world of space, runs a great danger of upsetting the old world of earth. Each space capsule re-entering from orbit in the unknown is a potential bearer of extraterrestrial organisms capable of unleashing a biological plague.

In The Andromeda Strain, this almost happens. An American probing satellite is picked up on its return by the unwary inhabitants of a small Arizona town. Curious, they open it, inspect it and proceed to die, variously and mysteriously--except for a new baby and an old lush. A four-man scientific team, spearhead of a vast prepackaged program called Operation Wildfire, is immediately dispatched to a sealed-off underground laboratory in the Nevada desert, where both survivors and the capsule are brought. There the specialists attempt to track down the unknown microcosm, identify it as a source of contamination, and produce an antidote. Meanwhile the entire nation is placed on a biological alert.

Much of what follows, unfortunately, should not be imposed on any reasonably alert reader. Though the author, a young Harvard Medical School student, deserves good marks for his science, fiction is his failing. The level of the prose is droningly simplistic--a prose style only partly justified by the fact that the main characters are laconic scientists. The characterization of the scientists and the lush seem to have been retrieved from the memory bank of some tired computer. And the magic of the gadgetry gradually cloys and clutters in the mind.

What is left afterward is the impression of a few feverish laps around the laboratory, an oppressive feeling that the spreading bacteria may be less of a threat than the organized technology necessary to fight it. The book remains essentially a great short story, distended to novel length, that closes on a dying fall.

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