The cages had elaborated bolts on the doors to prevent fiddling by primate fingers. These monkeys were creative little boogers, she thought, and they were bored.
The other bank of cages was mostly quiet. This was the bank of Ebola cages. All the monkeys in these cages were infected with Ebola virus, and most of them were silent, passive and withdrawn, although one or two of them seemed queerly deranged. Their immune systems had failed or gone haywire. Most of the animals did not look very sick yet, but they did not display the alertness, the usual monkeys energy, the leaping and the cage rattling that you see in healthy monkeys, and most of them had not eaten their morning biscuits. They sat almost motionless in their cages, watching the two officers with expressionless faces.
They had been injected with the hottest strain of Ebola known to the world. It was the Mayinga strain of Ebola Zaire. This strain had come from a young woman named Mayinga N., who died of the virus on October 19, 1976. She was a nurse at a hospital in Zaire, and she had taken care of a Roman Catholic nun who died of Ebola. The nun had bled to death all over Nurse Mayinga, and then, a few days later, Nurse Mayinga had broken with Ebola and died. Some of Nurse Mayinga’s blood had ended up in the United States, and the strain of virus that had once lived in Nurse Mayinga’s blood now lived in small glass vials kept in superfreezers at the Institute, which were maintained at minus one hundred and sixty degrees Fahrenheit. The freezers were fitted with padlocks and alarms and were plastered with biohazard flowers and sealed with bands of sticky tape, because it seals cracks. It could be said that without sticky tape there would be no such thing as biocontainment.
Gene Johnson, the civilian scientist, had thawed a little bit of Nurse Mayinga’s frozened blood and had injected it into the monkeys. Then, as the monkeys became silk, he had treated them with a drug in hope that it would help them flight off the virus. The drug did not seem to be working.
Nancy Jaax and Tony Johnson inspected the monkeys, moving from cage to cage, until they found the two monkeys that had crashed and bled out. Those animals were hunched up, each in its own cage. They had bloody noses, and their eyes were half-open, glassy, and brilliant red, with dilated pupils. The monkeys showed no facial expression, not even pain or agony. The connective tissue under the skin had been destroyed by the virus, causing a subtle distortion of the face. Another reason for the strange faces was that the parts of the brain that control facial expression had also been destroyed. The masklike face, the red eyes, and the bloody nose were classic signs of Ebola that appear in all primates infected with the virus, both monkeys and humans. It hinted at a vicious combination of brain damage and soft-tissue destruction under the skin. The classic Ebola face made the monkeys look as if they had seem something beyond comprehensive. It was not a vision of heaven.
Nancy Jaax felt a wave of unease. She was distressed by the sight of the dead and suffering monkeys. As a veterinarian, she believed that it was her duty to heal animals and relieve their suffering. As a scientist, she believed that it was her obligation to perform medical research that would help alleviate human suffering. Even though she had grown up on a farm, where her father had raised liverstock for food, she had never been able to bear easily the death of an animal. As a girl, she had cried when her father had taken her 4-H Club prize steer to the butcher. She liked animals better than many people. In taking the veterinarian’s oath, she had pledged herself to a code of honor that bound her to the care of animals but also bound her to the saving of human lives through medicine. At times in her work, those two ideals clashed. She told herself that this research was being done to help find a cure for Ebola, that t was medical research that would help save human lives and might possibly avert a tragedy for the human species. That helped reduce her feeling of unease, but not completely, and she kept her emotions off to one side.
Johnson watched Jaax carefully as she began the removal procedure.
Handling an unconscious monkey in Level 4 is tricky operation, because monkeys can wake up, and they have teeth and a powerful bit, and they are remarkably strong and agile. The monkeys that are used in laboratories are not organ-grinder monkeys. They are large, wild animals from the rain forest. A bite by an Ebola-infected monkey would almost certainly be fatal.
First Nancy inspected the monkey, looking through the bars. It was a large male, and he looked as if he was really dead. She saw that he still had his canine fangs, and that made her nervous. Ordinarily the monkey would have had its fangs filed down for safety. For some reason, this one had enormous natural fangs. She stuck her gloved fingers through the bars and pinched the monkey’s toe while she watched for an eye movement. The eyes remained fixed and staring.
“GO AHEAD AND UNLOCK THE CAGE,” Lieutenant Colonel Johnson said. He had to shout to be heard above the roar of air in their space suits.
She unlocked the door and slid it up until the cage gaped wide open. She inspected the monkey again. No muscle twitches. The monkey was definitely down.
“ALL RIGHT, GO AHEAD AND MOVE HIM OUT,” Johnson said.
She reached inside and caught the monkey by the upper arms and rotated him so that he was facing away from her, so that he couldn’t bit her if he woke up. She pulled his arms back and held them immobile, and she lifted the monkey out of the cage.
Johnson took the monkey’s feet, and together they carried him over to a hatbox, a biohazard container, and they slid the monkey into it. Then they carried the hatbox to necropsy room, shuffling slowly in their suits. They were two human primates carrying another primate. One was the master of the earth, or at least believed himself to be, and the other was a nimble dweller in trees, a cousin of the master of the earth. Both species, the human and the monkey, were in the presence of another life form, which was older and more powerful than either of them, and was a dweller in blood.
Jaax and Johnson moved slowly out of the room, carrying the monkey, and turned left and then turned left again, and entered the necropsy room, and laid the monkey down on a stainless-steel table. The monkey’s skin was rashly and covered with red blotches, visible through his sparse hair.
“GLOVE UP,” Johnson said.
They put on latex rubber gloves, pulling them over the space suit gloves. They now wore three layers of gloves: the inner-lining glove, the space suit glove, and the outer glove. Johnson said, “WE’LL DO THE CHECK LIST. SCISSORS, HEMOSTATS.” He laid the tools in a row at the head of the table. Each tool was numbered, so he called the numbers out loud.
They went to work. Using blunt-ended scissors, Johnson opened the monkey while Jaax assisted with the procedure. They worked slowly and with exquisite care. They did not use any sharp blades, because a blade is a deadly object in a hot zone. A scalpel can nick your gloves and cut your fingers, and before you even feel a sensation of pain, the agent has already entered your blood stream.
Nancy handed tools to him, and she reached her fingers inside the monkey to tie off blood vessels and mop up excess blood with small sponges. The animal’s body cavity was a lake of blood. It was Ebola blood, and it had run everywhere inside the animal: there had been a lot of internal hemorrhaging. The liver was swollen, and she noticed some blood in the intestines.
She had to tell herself to slow her hands down. Perhaps her hands were moving too quickly. She talked herself through the procedure, keeping herself alert and centered. Keep it clean, keep it clean, she thought. Okay, pick up the hemostat. Clamp that artery ‘cause it’s leaking blood. Break off and rinse gloves. She could feel the Ebola blood through her gloves; it felt wet and slippery, even through her hands were clean and dry and dusted with baby powder.
She withdrew her hands from the carcass and rinsed them in a pan of disinfectant called EnviroChem, which sat in a sink. the liquid was pale green, the color of Japanese green tea. It destroys viruses. As she rinsed her gloves in it, the liquid turned brown with monkey blood. All she could hear was the noise of the air blowing inside her suit. It filled her suit with a roar like a subway train coming through a tunnel.
A virus is a small capsule made of membranes and proteins. The capsule contains one or more strands of DNA or RNA, which are long molecules that contain the software program for making a copy of virus. Some biologists classify viruses as “life forms,” because they are not stricky known to be alive. Viruses are ambiguously alive, neither alive nor dead. They carry on their existence in the borderlands between life and nonlife. They are dead. They can even form crystals. Virus particles that lie around in blood or mucus may seem dead, but the particles are waiting for something to come along. They have a sticky surface. If a cell comes along and touches the virus and the stickiness of the virus matches the stickiness of the cell, then the virus clings to the cell. The cell feels the virus sticking to it and enfolds the virus and drags it inside. Once the virus enters the cell, it becomes a Trojan horse. It switches on and begins to replicate.
