wasn’t running. I looked at the exit. Then I turned and opened the steel door and walked into the air lock. The door snapped shut behind me. At the far side of the air lock there was another steel door. I opened it and entered Level 4.
I FOUND MYSELF STANDING in a narrow corridor with walls made of cinder blocks. Martha and Jeremy weren’t in sight. I needed air. I looked up and saw a rack of air hoses hanging from the ceiling. I reached up and plugged a hose into my suit. The roaring noise began again, and a rush of air filled my suit, the suit tightening with the pressure. I looked around.
Several pairs of Christopher Robin–style rubber boots were lined up next to the air lock door. You were supposed to wear these boots in Level 4, to protect the bunny feet of the space suit from tearing as you walked around. I stepped into a pair of the boots, feeling nervous. The walls and floor were covered with thick-looking, beige paint—the paint was actually a layer of plastic resin that coated the inner surfaces of the hot zone, like the lining of a swimming pool, keeping it waterproof and airtight.
Martha appeared, coming around a corner. She plugged herself into an air hose. Then she handed me a Bic ballpoint pen. It was a Level 4 hot pen, and it would never leave Level 4, except as a melted lump.
Then we unplugged our air hoses and walked down the corridor. The rooms in Hot Suite AA-5 were small and cramped. They held typical laboratory equipment, the sort that you might find in any medical research lab in a university or corporation. I was struck by the ordinariness of Level 4. There were refrigerators, centrifuges, cabinets stocked with lab supplies. A couple of computers sat on counters. Nothing about the place suggested the presence of dangerous viruses, except for the unforgettable fact that we were inside space suits. There were sinks with water faucets. Wastewater from the sinks ran into collection tanks where the waste was sterilized. There was a room that had nothing in it except for two large chest freezers. They were hot freezers, hot as hell; I wondered if they contained Ebola, but I didn’t dare ask. The freezers were locked and were equipped with alarms. They could be opened only with combination keypads.
I followed Jeremy and Martha around a corner into a small room, where we plugged in our air hoses. Shelves and counters ran around the walls. A sign said:
The line had been left blank, since that day the researchers were working with an Unknown.
On one counter sat an incubator—a metal box that was kept warm inside, at a temperature of 37 degrees Celsius, which is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperature of a human body. Martha opened the incubator and removed a rack full of small plastic flasks containing the Unknown. The flasks were sealed tightly with screw caps and contained a pinkish fluid. The fluid was a nutrient bath for a layer of living cells from the kidney of a monkey that were growing on a flat inner surface of each flask. Tiny drops of the blood of victim John Doe had been introduced into these flasks. If Doe’s blood contained a virus, the virus would be likely to infect the monkey cells. Then the cells would start dying—shriveling up and bursting—and this would be evidence that the flask contained a virus that had come originally from John Doe’s blood.
As yet, there was no direct evidence that John Doe had been infected with a virus. He might have died from some other cause. (Other illnesses, such as malaria, can mimic some of the symptoms of Ebola or Marburg, but we had to assume that John Doe had already been tested by doctors who’d ruled out the more common infections and illnesses.) It was the job of the researchers to determine whether the blood contained a virus and, if so, to try to identify it. This was detective work. The procedure was that of Sherlock Holmes: you rule out possibilities until only one possibility remains.
Martha wanted to look at the monkey cells to see if any of them showed signs of being infected with a virus. She sat down at a counter and placed one of the little flasks under a microscope. She did not open the flask. She stared into the eyepieces of the microscope through her faceplate, turning her head back and forth. “DO YOU KNOW HOW HARD IT IS TO GET YOUR HEAD COCKED SO YOU CAN SEE INTO A MICROSCOPE?” she yelled over the unending roar of air. She stood up. “DO YOU WANT TO LOOK?”
I sat down on the chair before the microscope. I had difficulty seeing through my faceplate into the eyepieces. I began twisting my head around. Finally I got a clear look through the microscope into the flask.
I could see glittering fields of monkey cells, reddish gold in color. Were they sick or healthy? They were just cells to me. As for the X virus, if any particles of it had been present in the cells they would not have been visible through the microscope. Virus particles are too small to be seen with an optical microscope. Most viruses can be seen only with an electron microscope, which magnifies things that are extremely small. A cold virus particle sitting at the base of an eyelash hair would be like a peanut sitting by the Washington Monument.
As I was staring into the eyepieces of the microscope, I felt a popping sensation. Something felt weird around my chest. My suit began to feel sloppy and loose. But I was interested in the cells and wasn’t paying attention to my space suit. Eventually, though, I moved away from the microscope and stood up. That was when I realized that my space suit had blown open in the hot zone.
AIR WAS RUSHING OUT around my neck and chest, pouring out of the suit. With a growing sense of alarm, I looked down to try to see what was happening, but couldn’t see anything. The lower part of my helmet hood blocked the view. I started feeling around with my gloves, but couldn’t get much sensation, for the gloves were thick and clumsy. I began tugging on something, some sort of fabric. To my horror, I realized that I was grabbing at my surgical scrubs. I was feeling around
I knew what had happened. As I had been bending over the microscope, the movement had twisted the zipper that ran across the suit’s chest, and the lips of the zipper had pulled apart, and the pressure in the suit had opened it completely. And now I couldn’t get the zipper closed. I almost threw a tubular cast.
“DO I HAVE A PROBLEM HERE?” I yelled.
Jeremy had been working with his back toward me. He swung around, looked at me, and swore. He moved toward me, holding his palms outward. He ran his palms back and forth on my chest, closing the zipper.
My suit swelled up and tightened, regaining pressure.
“HOW BAD WAS THAT?” I asked.
He looked a little embarrassed. “THE ZIPPERS GET WORN. THEY CAN POP OPEN.”
I had ended up with a ratty old piece of Army gear, a space suit that belonged to nobody. A little voice started speaking in my head.
Martha was looking into my eyes again.
The little voice went on:
Jeremy tried to soothe me. He assured me that the incident was not, in fact, an exposure to a hot agent. The suits did occasionally pop open, he admitted. “THE THING IS, YOUR SUIT HAD POSITIVE PRESSURE THE WHOLE TIME,” he explained. “THE AIR WAS FLOWING DOWN PAST YOUR FACE AND OUT OF THE OPENING. NOTHING COULD GET INTO YOUR SUIT. IT COULDN’T MOVE UP TO YOUR FACE.”
I really wanted to believe that an Unknown virus was not having an encounter with me inside my space suit. The air had been gushing out, I told myself. The flow would have carried any particles of a hot agent out of my suit. Anyway, if something had gotten in, by now it was too late to panic. I told the scientists that I wanted to remain in Level 4. After that, I touched my chest zipper frequently to make sure it was closed.
The researchers had work to do. Martha intended to open a flask of the Joe Doe Unknown. She carried one of the flasks to a Steriguard safety hood—a cabinet that produced a curtain of air blowing between the virus samples and the person sitting there. This air curtain acted as a shield, preventing any drifting particles from coming near the researcher. The cabinet also had a sliding glass door. If you opened the glass too far—potentially releasing a virus into the air of the hot zone—an alarm would go off.
With a pair of tweezers, Martha picked up a glass slide that had spots of reactive compound on it. It was called a spot slide. You drop liquid samples of virus on the spots, and if a spot changes color, it helps you identify the virus. “WE HANDLE GLASS WITH TWEEZERS BECAUSE YOU DON’T WANT TO PICK UP ANYTHING MADE OF GLASS WITH YOUR FINGERS,” she said. “YOU NEVER WANT TO CUT YOURSELF IN HERE.”
