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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 knows what the multiplier of smallpox would be today, and there is only one way to find out. If it has a mulitplier of something between five and twenty, it will likely spread explosively, because five or fifteen or twenty multiplied by itself every two weeks or so can get the world to millions of smallpox cases in a few months, absent effective control. It has taken the world twenty years to reach roughly fifty million cases of AIDS. Variola could reach that point in ten or twenty weeks. The outbreak grows not in a straight line but in an exponential rise, expanding at a faster and faster rate. It begins as a flicker of something in the straw in a barn full of hay, easy to put out with a glass of water if it’s noticed right then. But it quickly gives way to branching chains of explosive transmission of a lethal virus in a virgin population of nonimmune hosts. It is a biological chain reaction.
    Peter Los gave variola to seventeen people. Thus the initial multiplier of the disease was seventeen. Then the multiplier dropped dramatically under the effect of vaccinations and quarantine, and went quickly to zero. The chain reaction stopped. The human population was like a nuclear reactor, and the vaccine was a set of emergency control rods that were in place and ready to go, and were slammed into the reactor as fast as possible by doctors who knew exactly what they were doing.
    “The main lesson of Meschede,” Paul Wehrle said to me, “is that you have to be sure of the vaccine you are using.”
    DURING THE SCABBING PHASE, the survivors of the Meschede outbreak shed many small dark discs of dried brown skin. The scabs peppered their bedsheets and clothing, and were found scattered on the ground where they had walked. The scabs were the lifeboats of variola. The virus particles were nested in a protective web of clotted blood—the scabs were survival capsules raining from the bodies of now recovering and immune people. The virus could wait patiently for some time in a dry scab, in the hope of finding another nonimmune host, if
hope
is a word that can be applied to a virus. Variola encountered walls of resistant humanity extending all around it, and the ring of containment held at the headwaters and mountains of the Ruhr—variola disappeared from that place on the earth, and has not been seen there since.

T O B HOLA I SLAND
    Jumper
    THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO
    SOMEWHERE BETWEEN ten thousand and three thousand years ago, smallpox jumped from an unknown animal into a person and began to spread. It was an emerging virus that made a trans-species jump into people from a host in nature. Viruses have many means of survival, and one of the most important is a virus’s ability to change natural hosts. Species become extinct; viruses move on.
    There is something impressive about the trans-species jump of a virus. The event seems random yet full of purpose, like an unfurling of wings or a flash of stripes as a predator makes a rush. A virus exists in countless strains, or quasi-species, that are changing all the time yet are stable as a whole; together, they make a species. The quasi-species of a virus are like the surface of a flowing rapids, buffeted and shaped by the forces of natural selection. The form of the virus is stable, even while the edges and surface of the river are ever in motion and shifting a little, and the river of the virus always seeks new outlets. If a particular strain of a virus that lives in an animal manages to invade a person, it may be able to replicate there, and it may get to someone else. If it keeps moving, the result is an unbroken chain of human-to-human transmission. The virus has opened a new channel to immortality. This is what HIV did about fifty years ago in central or west Africa, when two different