The Andromeda Strain

A military satellite comes down near Piedmont, Arizona, and within hours nearly everyone in the town is dead. Two people survive: an elderly man and an infant. Nothing in the town explains why those two were spared.

The Wildfire group, a hand-picked team of scientists, is sent to a secret underground laboratory in the Nevada desert. Their task is to identify the organism the satellite carried and to work out what the old man and the baby share that let them live.

The book is a techno-thriller written in the manner of a government report. Charts, documents and plausible science fill the pages, so the story reads as a record of an investigation rather than a conventional narrative.

As the scientists work, the organism begins to change in ways nobody predicted. The laboratory's own safeguards turn into a hazard. Reading it is cold and procedural, with tension that builds from method and data rather than from action. It was adapted as a 1971 film directed by Robert Wise.