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

seen Los but had broken with severe ordinary smallpox. On the day after Barbara Birke died,
Magdalena Geise lost her memory completely and blanked out for three weeks. Finally, as her scabs fell
off and her mind returned, she did her best to comfort the scared little girl who was crying in the bed on
the other side of the room. She did all she could for Rialitsa Liapsis. Magdalena was in Wimbern for
twelve weeks, longer than anyone else, and when she emerged she had gone bald, and her face, scalp,
and body were a horrendous mass of smallpox scars. She returned to work as a student nurse in the
hospital, and wore a wig, but the patients were frightened by her appearance, and the doctors finally had
to take her off the ward. A year later, Magdalena Geise's hair began to grow back, but it would take her
ten years to get over her feelings of embarrassment about her appearance. Her religious faith helped her.
Eventually, she married, had children and grandchildren, and found deep happiness and fulfillment. Her
appearance today is that of a normal middle-aged woman with no disfigurement. Rialitsa Liapsis grew up
and had children, and today the two women are friends.
Barbara Birke had had a friend at the hospital, another nursing student, Sabina Kunze, a tall,
angular young woman with blond hair. Birke's death left an opening in the cloister, and Kunze decided to
take her friend's place, and she made the vows and devoted her life to the work that she felt her friend
would have accomplished had she lived. In the stories of Rialitsa, Magdalena, and Sabina, we see that
the human spirit is tougher than variola.
Most of the people who broke with smallpox were patients and staff from the second and third
floors of St. Walberga, and almost none of them had seen Peter Los's face. Doctors Richter and Posch,
along with Wehrle, traced the spread of the virus and concluded that seventeen of the victims caught the
virus directly from Los. Two other victims caught it from people who had caught it from Los. One of the
people who caught it from him was a nun in a room in the cloistered corridor on the third floor. She
survived, but another nun who was put in her room afterward came down with smallpox, went confluent,
and died.
A man named Fritz Funke had arrived at the hospital one day to visit his sick mother-in-law, who
was in the isolation ward at the same time Los was there. Funke waited a few minutes in a lobby, then
put his head up to a door that was propped open a crack. The door opened onto the isolation corridor.
Funke pleaded through the crack with a doctor to let him in, but the doctor forbade it. During the
minute or so that Fritz Funke had held his face up to the door, he inhaled a few particles of variola. He
had been vaccinated as an adult, in 1946, but his immunity had worn off, and two weeks later Funke was
rushed to Wimbern inside a plastic bag. He survived a wicked case of smallpox. Today, the
bioemergency planners know Fritz Funke as the Visitor, and they wonder about his case and see it as a
disturbing example of variola's ability to spread easily through the air out of a hospital to a vaccinated
visitor who barely poked his head into a ward. In the end, there were nineteen cases of variola after
Los's, and there were four deaths.
Peter Los entered the stage of crust, in which the pustules begin to lose their pressure. They can
rupture and leak, and they begin to develop into brown scabs that cover the body. During this phase, the
bed linens of the victim become drenched with pus and extremely offensive. This was the most
dangerous phase of the illness, for death often happens at the beginning of the crust, just as the patient
seems to be turning the corner. But Los pulled through, and eventually they set a date for his release. A
German television show called Tage found out about it and made plans to interview him, but he had no
interest in being seen by millions. Two days before he was due to be discharged, he either climbed the
fence or someone let him out, and he went home to his family. Eventually, he left Meschede, moved to
West Berlin, and took various odd jobs there. It is said he went to Spain and lived on a houseboat for a
time.

One cold, dry day in April 1970, three months after Peter Los had been admitted to the hospital,
an expert in aerosols from West Berlin arrived at St. Walberga, bringing with him a machine for making
smoke. Doctors Wehrle, Posch, and Richter wanted to find out exactly how the virus had traveled
through the hospital. The smoke man placed his machine in the middle of Los's old room and loaded it