Five prominent biophysicists have set up theWildfire Project, to investigate the frightening possibilities of a biological emergency. They send an urgent warning to the President of the United States, that sterilisation procedures for returning space probes may not be adequate to guarantee uncontaminated re-entry to the atmosphere.Two years later,Project Scoopsends seventeen satellites into the fringes of outerspace to ‘collect organisms and dust for study’. But the real aim of the mission is kept secret – they have been sent to discover new biological weapons of war.Then in the middle of the night, one of the probe satellites fromProject Scoopcrashes onto the tiny town of Piedmont, in northeastern Arizona. Soon after, all but two of the inhabitants are found dead from a strange disease that dried the very blood in their veins and caused death in minutes…The Andromeda Strain.Time is running out for the scientists…they must discover the biological link between the two survivors and trace what is causing the horrifying virus. For they know it is only a matter of time before it will spread through their country, killing millions, and only they have the knowledge to stop it from doing so…