The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton

was nervous, jumpy, petulant. Colleagues referred to Burton as “the Stumbler,” partly because of his tendency to trip over his untied shoelaces and baggy trouser cuffs and partly because of his talent for tumbling by error into one important discovery after another.
    And then Kirke, the anthropologist from Yale, who apparently was not going to be able to come. If the report was true, Stone knew he was going to miss him. Kirke was an ill-in-formed and rather foppish man who possessed, as if by accident, a superbly logical brain. He was capable of grasping the essentials of a problem and manipulating them to get the necessary result; though he could not balance his own checkbook, mathematicians often came to him for help in resolving highly abstract problems.
    Stone was going to miss that kind of brain. Certainly the fifth man would be no help. Stone frowned as he thought about Mark Hall. Hall had been a compromise candidate for the team; Stone would have preferred a physician with experience in metabolic disease, and the choice of a surgeon instead had been made with the greatest reluctance. There had been great pressure from Defense and the AEC to accept Hall, since those groups believed in the Odd Man Hypothesis; in the end, Stone and the others had given in.
    Stone did not know Hall well; he wondered what he would say when he was informed of the alert. Stone could not have known of the great delay in notifying members of the team. He did not know, for instance, that Burton, the pathologist, was not called until five a.m., or that Peter Leavitt, the microbiologist, was not called until six thirty, the time he arrived at the hospital.
    And Hall was not called until five minutes past seven.
    It was, Mark Hall said later, “a horrifying experience. In an instant, I was taken from the most familiar of worlds and plunged into the most unfamiliar.” At six forty-five, Hall was in the washroom adjacent to OR 7, scrubbing for his first case of the day. He was in the midst of a routine he had carried out daily for several years; he was relaxed and joking with the resident, scrubbing with him.
    When he finished, he went into the operating room, holding his arms before him, and the instrument nurse handed him a towel, to wipe his hands dry. Also in the room was another resident, who was prepping the body for surgery—applying iodine and alcohol solutions—and a circulating nurse. They all exchanged greetings.
    At the hospital, Hall was known as a swift, quick-tempered, and unpredictable surgeon. He operated with speed, working nearly twice as fast as other surgeons. When things went smoothly, he laughed and joked as he worked, kidding his assistants, the nurses, the anesthetist. But if things did not go well, if they became slow and difficult, Hall could turn blackly irritable.
    Like most surgeons, he was insistent upon routine. Everything had to be done in a certain order, in a certain way. If not, he became upset.
    Because the others in the operating room knew this, they looked up toward the overhead viewing gallery with apprehension when Leavitt appeared. Leavitt clicked on the intercom that connected the upstairs room to the operating room below and said, “Hello, Mark.”
    Hall had been draping the patient, placing green sterile cloths over every part of the body except for the abdomen. He looked up with surprise. “Hello, Peter,” he said.
    “Sorry to disturb you,” Leavitt said. “But this is an emergency.”
    “Have to wait,” Hall said. “I’m starting a procedure.”
    He finished draping and called for the skin knife. He palpated the abdomen, feeling for the landmarks to begin his incision.
    “It can’t wait,” Leavitt said.
    Hall paused. He set down the scalpel and looked up. There was a long silence.
    “What the hell do you mean, it can’t wait?”
    Leavitt remained calm. “You’ll have to break scrub. This is an emergency.”
    “Look, Peter, I’ve got a patient here. Anesthetized. Ready to go. I