Five prominent biophysicists give the United States government an urgent warning: sterilisation procedures for returning space probes may be inadequate to guarantee uncontaminated re-entry to the atmosphere.
Two years later, Project Scoop sends seventeen satellites info the fringes of space in order to "collect organisms and dust for study".
Then a probe satellite falls to the earth, landing in a desolate area of northeastern Arizona. In the nearby town of Piedmont, bodies lie heaped and flung across the ground, faces locked in frozen surprise.
The terror has begun...
