"Richard Preston - The Hot Zone2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Preston Richard)

not know what to do. Then, on the third day after his headache started,
he became nauseated, spiked a fever, and began to vomit. His vomiting
grew intense and turned into dry heaves. At the same time, he became
strangely passive. His face lost all appearance of life and set itself
into an expressionless mask, with the eyeballs fixed, paralytic, and
staring. The eyelids were slightly droopy, which gave him a peculiar
appearance, as if his eyes were popping out of his head and half-closed at
the same time. The eyeballs themselves seemed almost frozen in their
sockets, and they turned bright red. The skin of his face turned
yellowish, with brilliant starlike red speckles. He began to look like a
zombie. His appearance frightened the temporary housekeeper. She didn't
understand the transformation in this man. His personality changed. He
became sullen, resentful, angry, and his memory seemed to be blown away.
He was not delirious. He could answer questions, although he didn't seem
to know exactly where he was.
When Monet failed to show up for work, his colleagues began to wonder
about him, and eventually they went to his bungalow to see if he was all
right. The black-and-white crow sat on the roof and watched them as they
went inside. They looked at Monet and decided that he needed to get to a
hospital. Since he was very unwell and no longer able to drive a car, one
of his co-workers drove him to a private hospital in the city of Kisumu,
on the shore of Lake Victoria. The doctors at the hospital examined
Monet, and could not come up with any explanation for what he might have
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


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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