Andromeda Strain

Day 1 : Contact
Chapter 1. The Country of Lost Borders


We start the chapter with the introduction of Lieutenant Roger Shawn, who is apparently entirely doomed.

There is something sad, foolish, and human in the image of Shawn leaning against a boulder, propping his arms on it, and holding the binoculars to his eyes. Though cumbersome, the binoculars would at least feel comfortable and familiar in his hands. It would be one of the last familiar sensations before his death.

Lieutenant Shawn is half of a covert army team who are attempting to locate and retrieve a research satellite that recently fell to earth. His partner is Private Lewis Crane, who I assume is also going to die, though the text doesn't actually say anything about his oncoming fate.

Then there's a fairly detailed description of how the two men are slowly triangulating the exact location of the satellite with the use of a single radio van even though it would have been much faster and easier if they had used two vans. But two army vans were deemed to be too alarming to the populace by the higher-ups, despite the particular area this satellite having come down in being in the middle of the Arizona desert and thus not having much of a populace to alarm.

In fact, the only populace for miles is the town of Piedmont, population fourty-eight I have to assume incredibly stubborn people. Which the satellite appears to have landed in the exact centre of.

This makes no sense to the two Army men, as they expected that if something fell from the sky into Main street, or if someone had found it outside town and brought it in that a media storm would have been called down on the place almost immediately. Which, okay, I can see. But it's also nearly eleven at night, and the satellite has only been on the ground for... let's be generous and say eight-ish hours

For six hours, the van had been closing on the Scoop satellite. Now they were almost there.

I would think that any media that had been alerted would have said something along the lines of 'oh neat, we'll be there tomorrow' if they had gotten the news anytime around late afternoon or evening. Things falling from the sky are indeed news, but they're not really big news unless they landed on somebody.

The team also notes that there are no lights on in town whatsoever, not even at its single motel, which is much stranger. As are the circling birds above the town that look like vultures.

How nocturnal are vultures, I wonder?

*a quick wikipedia check later…*

Okay, the answer seems to be 'not very, if at all'. So circling vultures at nearly eleven at night is very weird indeed.

So, without bothering to call in to tell anyone back at Base about what the situation is looking like, or make a note in a log book, or anything logical like that, both men decide to leave the van and hike into town to see what's going on.