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

with a can of black soot. The doctors raised the window a couple of inches, in a re-creation of what Los
had done when he disobeyed the nuns. They also left the door to the lobby propped open a crack, as it
had been during the outbreak, when Fritz Funke had put his face up to it and come away infected with
smallpox.
The smoke man switched on his machine, there was a whining sound, and a cloud of black
smoke poured out of a nozzle and headed for Los's door and billowed down the hallway of the isolation
ward. Paul Wehrle ran along with it. The smoke went through the cracked-open door and poured into
the lobby, and from there it boiled up the stairs to the second floor and then went to the third floor. As it
came out of the stairwell it drifted along the upper hallways. It got through the closed doors of the
cloistered hallway on the third floor, and it sprinkled a number of sick nuns with black dust.
"The patients got more of a treatment than they'd bargained on when they went to the hospital,"
Wehrle said to me. "They were individually sooted with high-grade soot."
The soot had an energizing effect on the Sisters of Mercy-like a rock thrown into a hornet's nest.
They began running up and down the stairs, crying out, "Stoppt diesen Idioten aus Berlin! Schaltet
seine Maschine ab!"-- "Stop this idiot from Berlin! Turn the machine off!"
The smoke man ignored them.
Meanwhile, Richter and Posch had gone outdoors and were standing on the lawn. Wehrle heard
them shouting, and he opened a window and looked out.
The smoke was seeping outdoors under the raised casement window and flowing in a thin,
fanlike sheet up the walls of the hospital. Wehrle ran around and began opening the upper windows just
a crack. To his amazement, the smoke came into the upper rooms from outside, having crept up the
walls. Someone had contracted smallpox in each of those upper rooms. "It was quite a demonstration
of physics, and it told us how the people had become infected," Wehrle recalled.
The smoke man was not at all surprised. He hardly raised an eyebrow. This is exactly what
smoke does, he explained to the smallpox doctors. When there's a fire inside a building, naturally the
smoke goes all through the building, and in cold weather it climbs the outside walls. Smallpox particles
are the same size as smoke particles, and they behave exactly like smoke. A biological wildfire had
occurred in Los's room, and the viral smoke had gotten into the upper floors of the hospital.
Today, the people who plan for a smallpox emergency can't get the image of the Meschede
hospital out of their minds. It is a lesson in the way smallpox particles have a propensity to drift long
distances, and in how a victim of the virus can escape notice for days in a hospital. Peole who are
coming down with smallpox have days of early illness, when the virus is leaking into the air from their
mouths but they haven't begun to develop a rash on their skin. A doctor would never suspect that such a
patient had smallpox, because it looks like flu. The virus had ballooned in Meschede, going out of one
man's mouth and into the bodies of many who had never seen him, most of whom had no idea of his
existence until after they had become infected. Dr. Karl Heinz Richter and his colleagues had performed
a remarkable feat of biodefense. They were well prepared, they were ready to move in an instant, they
had huge respect for the virus, and they had the full force of the WHO's Smallpox Eradication Program
behind them. Even so, twenty percent of the people inside the south wing of the St. Walberga Hospital
contracted smallpox. Eighty percent of them were on floors above Los's floor, and with the exception of
Father Kunibert, not one f them had provably seen Los's face.
When epidemiologists study the spread of infectious diseases, they work with mathematical
models. A key in any of these models is the average number of new people who catch the disease from
each infected person. This number is technically called R-zero but more simply is called the multiplier of
the disease. The multiplier helps to show how fast the disease will spread. Most experts believe that the
multiplier of smallpox in the modern world-a world of shopping malls, urban centers, busy international
airports, tourism, cities and nations with highly mobile populations, and above all nearly no immunity to
smallpox - would be somewhere between three and twenty. That is, each person infected with smallpox
might give it to between three and twenty more people. Experts disagree about this. Some feel that
smallpox is hardly contagious. Others believe it would spread shockingly fast. The fact is, nobody