From the very first chapter (when one member of a surveillance team, looking down at a seemingly-dead desert town, says 'We'd better go down and take a look'), Crichton's reader is sucked into the kind of Saturday afternoon fantasy that used to be the staple of movie house matinees during the fifties, and still shows up with welcome regularity on all those Million Dollars Movies.

Since the enterprising virus multiplies at a giddy rate, they must, of course, do in the thing by the time it gets to Phoenix. Watson) set to work in a secret, five-story, underground bacterial research center in Nevada-part of 'Project Wildfire.' Their object is to identify and neutralize a lethal virus brought back from the upper atmosphere by a Scoop satellite that has crashed in the middle of the Arizona desert. The Andromeda Strain tells of how a group of super-scientists (at least one of whom is a toned-down version of J. Thankfully, fiction is more entertaining than life. Unfortunately, it didn't happen, Houston, unwilling to sacrifice such other-worldly germs, packed them and the astronauts off to the Lunar Receiving Station free of any presidential contamination.

Only two months ago, I remember hearing someone's garbled version of the proposed Apollo recovery that had our trio of astronauts stepping onto the Hornet and then shaking hands with President Nixon before being packed off into a world of saran-wrapped sterility-all in all, a delightful thought, in which the nation and the moon germs could only stand to gain. Dealing as it does with a research satellite that returns to earth lethally contaminated, there has rarely been such a right book at such a right time. THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN by Michael Crichton would probably not be selling as well as it is, if it were not for the nation's current narcissistic delight with its space program.

The andromeda strain book