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

directly across the hall. They made him use a bedpan, and they emptied it for him, and he washed
himself at the sink in his room. The steam radiator under the window hissed and banged, and it made his
room feel stuffy. He wanted a cigarette. He slid open one of the room's casement windows just a crack,
got out his cigarettes, and lit one. The nuns were not happy with that, and ordered him to keep his
window closed.
That Sunday, a Benedictine priest named Father Kunibert made rounds through the hospital,
offering holy communion to the sick. He was an older man, not strong on his legs, and he worked his
way down through the building, so that he wouldn't have to climb stairs. On the first floor at the end of
the corridor, he put his head in Room 151 and asked the patient if he wished to receive communion. The
young man was not interested. The medical report informs us that he "refused communion" and that "the
priest was advised that his services were not desired."
When the nuns weren't looking, Peter continued to smoke, with his window open a crack. Cold
air would pour in, filling the room with a brisk scent of the outdoors mixed with chirps of sparrows.
The tetracycline wasn't working, so the doctors started him on chloramphenicol. He had a sense
of creeping malaise, an anxious feeling that things weren't right, that the drugs weren't working on his
typhoid. He was restless, couldn't get comfortable, and he took out his colors and his brushes and began
to paint. When he became tired of that, he sketched with a pencil. There wasn't much to see out his
window-a nursing sister in a white habit hurrying down a walkway, patches of snow, branches of bare
beech trees crisscrossing a sky of cobalt blue.

Monday and Tuesday passed. Every now and then a nun would come in and collect his bedpan.
His throat was red, and he had a cough, which was getting worse. The back of his throat developed a
raw feeling, and he sketched and painted. At night, he may have suffered from dreadful, hallucinatory
dreams.
The inflamed area in his throat was no bigger than a postage stamp, but in a biological sense it
was hotter than the surface of the sun. Particles of smallpox virus were streaming out of oozy spots in the
back of his mouth and were mixing with his saliva. When he spoke or coughed, microscopic infective
droplets were being released, forming an invisible cloud in the air around him. Viruses are the smallest
forms of life. They are parasites that multiply inside the cells of their hosts, and they cannot multiply
anywhere else. A virus is not strictly alive, but it is certainly not dead. It is described as a life-form.
There was a cloud of amplified virus hanging in Room 151, and it was moving through the hospital. On
Wednesday, January 14th, Peter's face and forearms began to turn red.


Stripper
JANUARY 15, 1970

The red areas spread into blotches across Peter Los's face and arms, and within hours the blotches
broke out into seas of tiny pimples. They were sharp feeling, not itchy, and by nightfall they covered his
face, arms, hands, and feet. Pimples were rising out of the soles of his feet and on the palms of his hands,
and they were coming up in his scalp and in his mouth, too. During the night, the pimples developed tiny,
blistery heads, and the heads continued to grow larger. They were rising all over his body, at the same
speed, like a field of barley sprouting after rain. They were beginning to hurt dreadfully, and they were
enlarging into boils. They had a waxy, hard look, and they seemed unripe. His fever soared abruptly
and began to rage. The rubbing of pajamas on his skin felt like a roasting fire. He was acutely conscious
and very, very scared. The doctors didn't know what was wrong with him.
 By dawn on Thursday, January 15th, his body had become a mass of knob-like blisters. They
were everywhere, all over, even on his private parts, but they were clustered most thickly on his face and
extremities. This is known as the centrifugal rash of smallpox. It looks as if some force at the center of
the body is driving the rash out toward the face, hands, and feet. The inside of his mouth and ear canals