Read Online The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston - Free Book Online

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. People 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 of 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