few days to help Nancy’s father get to the hospital for his cancer treatments.
Then they drove back to Maryland in the van with their children.
Dan Dalgard spent an uneasy Thanksgiving week. On Monday, he called Peter Jahrling at the Institute to find out if Jahrling had any further news about what had been killing the monkeys at Reston. Jahrling now had a tentative diagnosis. It looked like they really did have SHF. Bad for monkeys, no problem for humans. He said to Dalgard that he felt strongly that it was simian fever, but he was reluctant to say so categorically. He wanted to play it carefully until the final tests were finished.
Dalgard hung up the phone believing that his decision to sacrifice the monkeys in Room F had been correct. Those monkeys had been inflected with simian fever and would have died anyway. What now worried Dalgard was the possibility that the virus had somehow escaped from Room F. It might be quietly working his way through the building, in which case monkeys might start dying in other rooms. And then the virus would be very hard to control.
On Thanksgiving morning, Dan and his wife drove to Pittsburgh, to be with Dan’s wife’s parents. They drove back to Virginia on Friday, and Dan headed over to the monkey house to see if there had been any changes. He was shocked by what he found. Over Thanksgiving, five monkeys had died in Room H, two doors down the hall from Room F. So the virus was moving, and what was worse, it was skipping rooms as it moved. How could it do that? Five dead monkeys in one room during the night… He felt very uneasy.
MEDUSA
November 27, 0700 Hours, Monday
Early on Monday morning of the week following Thanksgiving, Tom Geisbert went to work at the Institute wearing blue jeans, a flannel shirt, and cowboy boots, as a kind of memento of his time in the woods. He was anxious to check up on the button of dead monkey cells that he had harvested from the little flask just before he had gone hunting. He wanted to look at the cells in his electron microscope to try to find some visual evidence that they were inflected with simian fever.
The button was a dot the size of toast crumb, embedded in a tiny plug of yellow plastic. He unlocked a filing cabinet and removed his diamond knife. A diamond knife is a metal object no larger than a small pocket-size pencil sharpener—about an inch long. It costs about four thousand dollars. It has a diamond edge—a large, flawless prism—sharp diamond, a gem-quality stone.
He carried the diamond knife and the plug of plastic containing the toast crumb of cells into the cutting room. He sat down at a table, facing the cutting machine, and fitted his diamond knife into it, taking extreme care not to let his fingers touch the edge of the knife. One touch of a fingertip would destroy it. The diamond would also cut your fingertip, perhaps badly. The knife is extraordinarily sharp. It has the sharpest cutting edge of any tool on earth. It is sharp enough to split a virus cleanly in half, like a razor blade going through a peanut. If you consider the idea that a hundred million viruses could cover the dot on this i, then you get an idea of the sharpness of a diamond knife. If you happened to cut yourself with it, it would go through you skin without resistance, as if your skin were air—and it would split individual blood cells as it went through your finger. And then the knife edge would be covered with skin oil and blood cells, and would be ruined.
Tom looked into the eyepieces of a microscope that was attached to the cutting machine. Now he could see the toast crumb clearly. He threw a switch, and the machine hummed, and the sample began to move back and forth, the toast crumb sliding across the edge of the diamond knife. The cutting machine worked like a deli slicer, peeling off slices about this size: .
The slices fell onto a droplet of water, and rested on the surface. Each contained as many as ten thousand cells, and the cells themselves were split by the knife. The blade peeled off slice after slice. They spread out like lily pads.
He took his eyes away from the microscope and looked around the table until he found a wooden stick that had a human eyelash glued to it with a droplet of nail polish. It was a device for handling the slices. The eyelash had come from one of the women in the lab—it was generally believed that she had superior eyelashes for this kind of work, not too thick and not too thin, tapered, ending in fine points. He poked the eyelash into the water droplet and stirred it, separating the slices from one another. With the tip of the eyelash, he then lifted a few damaged slices out of the water and wiped them on a piece of tissue paper to get rid of them.
Next, using a pair of tweezers, he picked up a small metal grid. The grid was this size—•—and it was made of copper. Holding the grid with his tweezers, he dipped it into the water and brought it up slowly underneath a floating slice, like a fisherman lifting up a dip net. The slice was now stuck to the grid. Still holding the grid with his tweezers, he put it into a tiny box. He carried the box down the hall to a darkened room. In the middle of the room stood a metal tower taller than a person. This was his electron microscope. My scope, he thought; he was very fond of it. He opened the tiny box, lifted out the grid with tweezers, and fitted it into a steel rod the size of a tire iron— the sample holder, as it was called. He slid the rod into the microscope until it clanked, locked in place. Now the slice, sitting on the grid, which was held in place by the tire iron, was positioned in the microscope, centered in the beam of electrons.
He switched off the lights in the room and sat down at a console that was covered with dials and digital readouts. In the middle of the console there was a viewing screen. The room had become the command deck of a starship, and the viewing screen was a window that looked down into the infinity within.
He hit a switch, hunched down in his chair, and put his head close to the viewing screen. His face glowed greenish in the light of the screen, and was reflected in the glass: long hair, serious expression, deep-set eyes that scanned the terrain. He was looking into a corner of one cell. It was like looking at a landscape from high altitude. It was a cellscape. What loomed before his eyes was a huge complicated vista, crowded with more detail than the mind could absorb. You could spend days scanning cells, looking for a virus. In one slice, there might be thousands of cells that needed to be searched—and you still might not find what you were looking for. The incredible thing about living systems is that no matter how small the view, it is just as complicated as ever. He could see forms and shapes that resembled rivers and streams and oxbow lakes, and he could see specks that might be towns, and he could see belts of forest. It was an aerial view of rain forest. The cell was a world down there, and somewhere in that jungle hid a virus.
He turned a knob, and the cellscape drifted across his field of view, and he wandered through it. He zoomed in. The scene rushed up toward him.
His breath stopped. Wait a minute—there was something wrong with this cell. This cell was a mess. It wasn’t just dead—it had been destroyed. It was blown apart. And it was crawling with worms. The cell wall-to-wall with worms. Some parts of the cell were so thick with virus they looked like buckets of rope. There was only one kind of virus that looked like rope. A filovirus.
He though, Marburg. This stuff looks like Marburg. He hunched over the screen. His stomach screwed up into a knot and turned over, and he felt an unpleasant sensation. The puke factor. He almost panicked, almost ran out of the room shouting, “Marburg! We’ve got Marburg!” He thought, Is this really happening? He sucked in his breath. He didn’t know if this thing was Marburg, but it sure as hell looked like a filovirus, a thread virus. Then an image came into his mind—an image of Peter Cardinal’s liver cells exploded and flooded with snakes. He brought the image into mental focus and compared it with what he saw on the screen. He knew exactly what the Cardinal strain looked like because he had memorized its curlicues and Cheerio shapes. What the virus did to that boy… the devastating effect on that boy’s tissue… oh, man!—oh, man!—Peter and I smelled this stuff. Peter and I have been handling this stuff, and this is a Biosafety Level agent, Marburg… oh, man… A foul feeling washed over him, a sudden awareness of male reproductive glands hanging on the exterior of the body between the legs… testicles the size of pears, black and putrid, the skin peeling off them.
He began snapping photographs with his microscope. Several negatives came out of the machine. He
