"Richard Preston - The Demon In The Freezer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Preston Richard)

Germany.
Peter Los was twenty years old, a former apprentice electrician with no job who had been
journeying in pursuit of dreams that receded before him. He was tall and good-looking-thin now-with a
square, chiseled face and dark, restless, rather guarded eyes under dark eyelashes. He had short, curly
hair, and he wore faded jeans. He was traveling with a backpack, in which he'd tucked brushes, pencils,
paper, and a set of watercolor paints, and he carried a folding easel.
Peter Los is alive today in Germany. The details of his character have been forgotten by the
experts, but his case and its aftermath haunt them like the ruins of a fire.
Los had been living in a commune in the city of Bochum while he studied to be an electrician, but
the members of the commune had split ideologically. Some favored a disciplined approach to communal
living, while others, including Peter, favored the hippie ideals of the sixties. In August 1969-the month of
the Woodstock music festival - eight members of the Bochum commune, including Peter, packed
themselves into a Volkswagen bus and set off for Asia on an Orientreise. There were six men and two
women on the bus, and they were apparently hoping to find a guru in the monasteries of the Himalayas,
where they could meditate and seek a higher knowledge, and possibly also find good hashish. They
drove the bus down through Yugoslavia to Istanbul, crossed Turkey, and went through Iraq and Iran,
camping out under the stars or staying in the cheapest places. They rattled across Afghanistan on the
world's worst roads, and the Volkswagen bus made it over the Khyber Pass. They hung out in Pakistan,
but things didn't go as well as they had hoped, and they didn't connect with a guru. The two women lost
interest in the trip and went back to Germany, and toward December, three men in the group drove the
Volkswagen into India and down the coast to Goa, to attend a hippie festival called the Christmas
Paradise. Peter stayed behind in Karachi, and ended up languishing with hepatitis in the Civil Hospital.
An eastbound train took Peter and his father and brother out of Dsseldorf, and traveled through
the industrial heart of northern Germany, past seas of warehouses and factories made of brown brick. It
is unlikely that Peter would have had much to say to his father at this point. He would have lit a cigarette
and looked out the window. The train arrived at the Ruhr River, and it followed the course of the river
into the fir-clad mountains of the Sauerland, winding upstream under skies the color of carbon steel, until
it reached Meschede.
Meschede is a cozy place, where people know one another. It nestles in a valley at the
headwaters of the Ruhr, beside a lake. It had been snowing in Meschede, and the hills and mountains
surrounding the city were cloaked in snowy firs. It was New Year's Eve. Peter and his family celebrated
the new decade, and he caught up with old friends and rested, recovering from his illness.
The weather was cloudy and dark, but in the second week of January the clouds broke away
from the mountains, and clear air poured down from the north, bringing dry cold and blue skies. At the
same time, influenza broke out in the town, and many people became sick with coughs and fevers.
Around Friday, January 9th, Peter began to feel strange.
He was tired, achy, restless, and by the end of the day he was running a temperature. Then, on
Saturday, his fever spiked upward, and he was very sick in the night. On Sunday morning, his family
called an ambulance, and he was taken to the largest hospital in town, the St. Walberga Krankenhaus.
He brought his art supplies and his cigarettes with him.
Dr. Dieter Enste examined Peter. He was recovering from his hepatitis, but perhaps he had
typhoid fever, which is contagious, and which he could have caught in the hospital in Pakistan. They
placed him in the isolation ward, in a private room, Room 151, and they started him on tetracycline.
The St. Walberga Hospital was staffed by the Sisters of Mercy, who served as nurses. The
hospital was spare, simple, neat, and spotlessly clean. The isolation ward took up the entire first floor of
the south wing, which was a semidetached building, three stories tall, covered with brown stucco, with a
staircase that ran through the middle. The nuns told Peter to keep his door closed and not to leave his
room for any reason.
He settled in on that Sunday morning and quickly began to feel better, and his fever almost went
away. Even so, the nuns forbade him to leave the room, not even to use the bathroom, though it was