"Richard Preston - The Hot Zone" - читать интересную книгу автора (Richard Preston)

some kind of bacterial infection, they gave him injections of antibiotics,
but the antibiotics had no effect on his illness.
The doctors thought he should go to Nairobi Hospital, which is the
best private hospital in East Africa. The telephone system hardly worked,
and it did not seem worth the effort to call any doctors to tell them that
he was coming. He could still walk, and he had to get to Nairobi. They
put him in a taxi to the airport, and he boarded a Kenya Airways flight.
A hot virus from the rain forest lives within a twenty-four-hour plan
flight from every city on earth. All of the earth's cities are connected
by a web of airline routes. The web is a network. Once a virus hits the
net, it can shoot anywhere in a day-Paris, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles,
wherever planes fly. Charles Monet and the life form inside him had
entered the net.
The plane was a Fokker Friendship with propellers, a commuter
aircraft that seats thirty-five people. It started its engines and took
off over Lake Victoria, blue and sparkling, dotted with dugout canoes of
fishermen. The Friendship turned and banked eastward, climbing over green
hills quilted with tea plantations and small farms. The commuter flights
hat drone across Africa are often jammed with people, and this flight was
probably full. The plane climbed over belts of forest and clusters of
round huts and villages with tin roofs. The land suddenly dropped away,
going down in shelves and ravines, and changed in color from green to
brown. The plane was crossing the Eastern Rift Valley. The passengers
looked out the windows at the place where the human species was born.
They saw specks of huts clustered inside circles of thornbush, with cattle
trails radiating from the huts. The propellers moaned, and the Friendship
passed through cloud streets, lines of puffy Rift clouds, and began to
bounce and sway. Monet became airsick.
The seats are narrow and jammed together on these commuter airplanes,
and you notice everything that is happening inside the cabin. The cabin
is tightly closed, and the air recirculates. If there are any smells in
the air, you perceive them. You would not have been able to ignore the
man who was getting sick. He hunches over in his seat. There is
something wrong with him, but you can't tell exactly what is happening.
He is holding an airsickness bag over his mouth. He coughs a deep
cough and regurgitates something into the bag. The bag swells up.
Perhaps he glances around, and then you see that his lips are smeared with
something slippery and red, mixed with black specks, as if he has been
chewing coffee grounds. His eyes are the color of rubies, and his face is
an expressionless mass of bruises. The red spots, which a few days before
had started out as starlike speckles, expanded and merged into huge,
spontaneous purple shadows; his whole head is turning black-and-blue. The
muscles of his face droop. The connective tissue in his face is
dissolving, and his face appears to hang from underlying bone, as if the
face is detaching itself from the skull. He opens his mouth and gasps
into the bag, and the vomiting goes on endlessly. It will not stop, and
he keeps bringing up liquid, long after his stomach should have been
empty. The airsickness bag fills up to the brim with a substance known as
vomit negro, or the black vomit. The black vomit is not really black; it
is a speckled liquid of two colors, black and red, a stew of tarry