A top-secret message with a predetermined list of names is sent out. One of the names is misspelled.

Allison Stone answers a knock on the door at one o’clock in the morning to find two military men. They ask for her husband, Jeremy Stone. Allison fetches him from the party inside the house. He does not have time to change out of his dinner jacket before the men whisk him away. Stone has never heard of Project Scoop before, but he is handed a top-secret file.

While the car travels to the airport, Stone remembers a presentation by a strange English scientist named J. J. Merrick about extraterrestrial life. Merrick insisted that the laws of probability dictated that humanity was not alone in the universe. Merrick suggested that humanity’s first interactions with extraterrestrial life would likely be with “organisms similar to, if not identical to, earth bacteria and viruses” (33), many of which may be dangerous.

A prodigiously talented, Nobel Prize-winning scientist himself, Stone was one of the few who gave serious thought to Merrick’s ideas. Stone is one of the most famous scientists in America, even if his private life is somewhat scandalous. Merrick’s ideas intrigued Stone, who wrote his own papers about the potential threat of bacterial contamination faced by astronauts.