Hall concludes that the patient is suffering from gastrointestinal (GI) bleeding, and he orders up four units of blood. Jackson revives for a moment but then slips back into unconsciousness, vomiting blood.

He gives the unconscious Jackson a physical examination. For sterilization security, Hall crawls through a tunnel and walks into an inflated plastic suit that effectively cuts him off from everything except the task at hand. A lab technician explains the computerized tests that have so far been performed on them. Hall examines the two survivors, Peter Jackson and the baby. This tells them that the bacteria is still active. The scientists next try a monkey it too dies within a moment of getting close to the capsule. The rat is placed next to the capsule it dies almost instantly. They use a black Norway rat to determine if the bacteria in the recovered Scoop capsule is still active. He also considers the possibility of a collision with a meteor. The report shows some kind of system malfunction that led to “orbital instability.” Stone realizes that the satellite might have collided with one of the estimated seventy-five thousand man-made orbiting objects around the earth, including broken-off scraps of metal.

Stone hands out files containing the records of Scoop VII’s six-day flight, which show that on the second day, it went out of stable orbit. Third, considered the most likely, would be an earth organism taken into space by a spacecraft, mutating in space, and returning quite different, capable of causing lethal harm. If such bacteria were to be brought down to earth by a satellite, humans would have no immunity to it. Second, bacteria that left the surface of the earth eons ago but lodged in the upper atmosphere. Leavitt helped to draw up a study for the Wildfire Project that tried to answer the question of where would a bacteria that caused a new disease come from. Karp’s work was dismissed by other scientists, but Stone and Leavitt were interested. Two years later, the bacteria were destroyed in a lab explosion. These bacteria had no cell nucleus, so he did not know how they reproduced. They then join Stone and Burton in the conference room, where Stone reports on the work of a biochemist named Rudolph Karp, who claimed in 1961 to have found bacteria in meteorites. He has a nutrient-filled liquid and a vitamin pill for breakfast, which will sustain him for eighteen hours. Hall is awakened by an automated female voice, and he goes to the cafeteria, where he joins Leavitt.

The andromeda strain novel