the Reston culture. She was staring through the binocular eyepieces of the microscope at a small flask. The flask contained cells that had been infected with the simian-fever-virus that came from Monkey O53.
She turned to Geisbert. “There’s something flaky going on in this flask,” she said.
The flask was a typical virus flask. It was about the size of a person’s thumb and was made of clear plastic so that you could place it in a microscope and look into the flask. It had a black screw cap.
Geisbert stared through the eyepieces of the microscope. He saw a complicated world in the flask. As always in biology, the problem was to know what you were looking at. The patterns of nature are keep and complex, constantly changing. He saw cells all over the place. They were tiny bags, each containing a nucleus, which was a darker blob near the center. The cells looked a little bit like fried eggs, sunny-side up. The egg yolk would be the cell’s nucleus.
Living cells ordinarily stick to the bottom of a flask to form a living carpet—cells prefer to cling to something when they grow. This carpet had been eaten by moths. The cells had died and drifted away, leaving holes in the carpet.
Geisbert checked all the flasks, and most of them looked the same way, like moth-eaten carpet. They looked real bad, they looked sick. Something was killing these cells. They were swollen and puffy, fat looking, as if they were pregnant. Tom could see that they contained granules or specks. The specks looked like pepper. As if someone had shaken pepper over fried eggs. He may have seen reflection of light in the pepper, as if light was gleaming through crystals. Crystals? These cells were unrecognizably sick. And they were very sick, because the fluid was milky and clouded with dead cells, cells that had exploded.
They decided that their boss, Peter Jahrling, should have a look. Geisbert went to find Jahrling. He exited Level 3—removed his scrub suit and took a water shower and dressed in civilian clothes—and went to Jahrling’s office. Then he and Jahrling returned to the Level 3 lab. It took a few minutes for both of them to change in the locker room and put on scrub suits. When they were ready to go in—dressed like surgeons—they entered and sat down at the eyepieces of the microscope. Geisbert said to him, “There’s something very strange going on in that flask, but I’m not sure what it is. This isn’t like SHF.”
Jahrling looked. He saw that the flask had turned milky, as if it had gone rotten. “This is contaminated,” he said. “These cells are blown away. They’re crud.” The cells were exploded and dead. “They’re off the plastic,” he remarked. By off the plastic he meant that the dead cells had detached from the surface of the flask, and had floated away in the broth. He thought that a wild strain of bacteria had invaded the cell culture. This is an annoying and common occurrence when you are trying to grow virus, and it wipes out the flask. The wild bacteria consume the cell culture, eat it up, and make a variety of different smells in the air while they’re growing, whereas viruses kill cells without releasing an odor. Jahrling guessed that the flask had been wiped out by a common soil bacterium called pseudomonas. It lives in dirt. It lives in everyone’s backyard and under fingernails. It is one of the most common forms of life on the planet, and it often gets into cell cultures and wrecks them.
Jahrling unscrewed the little black cap and waved his hand over the flask to bring the scent to his nose, and then he took a whiff. Hm. Funny. No smell.
He said to Tom Geisbert, “Have you ever smelled pseudomonas?”
“No,” Tom replied.
“It smells like Welch’s grape juice. Here—” He offered the flask to Tom.
Tom sniffed it. There was no smell.
Jahrling took back the flask and whiffed it again. His nose registered nothing. But the flask was milky, and the cells were blown away. He was puzzled. He handed the flask back to Tom and said, “Put it in the beam, and let’s look at it.” By put it in the beam, he meant “look at it using the electron microscope,” which is much more powerful than a light microscope, and can see deeper into the universe within.
Geisbert poured some of the milky fluid out of the flask into a test tube and then spun it in a centrifuge machine. A button grayish ooze collected at the bottom of the test tube—a tiny pill of dead and dying cells. The pill was the size of a pinhead, and it had a pale brownish color. Geisbert thought it looked like a dab of mashed potato. He lifted out the button with a wooden stick and soaked the button in plastic resin to preserve it. But now, what was on his mind was the hunting season. Later that afternoon—Friday—he went home to get packed. He had been planning to drive his Ford Bronco, but it had broken down; so one of his hunting buddies met him in a pickup truck and they loaded Geisbert’s duffel bag and gun case into it and set off on his hunting trip. When a filovirus begins to amplify itself in a human being, the incubation period is from three to eighteen days, while the number of virus particles climbs steadily in the bloodstream. Then comes the headache.
THANKSGIVING
November 20-25
For Nancy and Jerry Jaax, it was the worst Thanksgiving of their lives. On Wednesday, November 22, they put their children in the family van and drove straight through the night to Kansas. Jaime was no twelve, and Jason was thirteen. They were used to long drives to Kansas, and they slept peacefully. Jerry had almost lost his ability to sleep since the murder of his brother, and Nancy stayed awake with him, trading places behind the steering wheel. They arrived in Wichita on Thanksgiving Day and ate a meal of turkey with Nancy’s father, Curtis Dunn, who was living with Nancy’s brother.
Nancy’s father was dying of cancer. He had gone through life fearing that he might come down with cancer—he once took to his bed for eight months while claiming he had cancer when, in fact, he did not—and now he had come down with real cancer. He had lost a lot of weight that fall. He was like a human skeleton, down to less than a hundred pounds, but he was still a relatively young man, and his hair was black and curly and oiled with Vitalis. He looked so terrible that the children were afraid of him. He did his best to show sympathy for Jerry. “How awful it was, what happened to you Jaaxes,” he said to Jerry. Jerry did not want to talk about it.
Nancy’s father sat and slept in a reclining chair most of the day.
At night, he couldn’t sleep on account of the pain, and he would wake up at three o’clock in the morning, and get out of bed, and rummage around the house, looking for something. He smoked cigarettes continually, and complained that he couldn’t taste his food, that he had lost his appetite.
Nancy felt sorry for him, but she felt a distance from him that she could not overcome. He was man of strong opinions, and lately, from the way he had been talking while he wandered about the house at night, it seemed that he was going to try to sell the family farm in Kansas and use the money to get himself to Mexico for a cure involving peach pits. Nancy was angry with him for having such ideas, and that anger was mixed with pity for him in his illness.
After they had finished their turkey with Nancy’s father, they drove out to Andale, Kansas, a town northwest of Wichita, and ate another dinner, with Jerry’s mother, Ada, and the rest of the Jaax family in Ada’s house on he edge of town, near the grain elevator. Ada was a widow who lived alone in a ranch house that looked out across beautiful wheat fields. The fields were bare and planted with winter wheat, and Ada sat in her chair in the living room and stared outdoors. She could not watch television because she was afraid she would see a gun. They sat around the living room and talked, telling stories about the old days on Ada’s farm, laughing and joking and trying to have a good time, and suddenly John’s name would come up. The conversation would flag into silence, and everyone would look at the floor, not knowing what to say, and someone would start crying, and then they would see tears running down Ada’s face.
She had always been a strong woman, and none of her children had ever seen her cry. When she felt she could not stop it, she would get up and leave the room, and go into her bedroom and close the door.
They set up tables in the kitchen and served roast beef—the Jaaxes did not like turkey. After a while, people drifted into the living room with plates in their hands and watched a football game. The women, including Nancy, cleaned up around the kitchen and helped with the children. Afterward, Nancy and Jerry stayed on in Wichita for a
