Richard Preston - Panic in Level 4

I reached up, grabbed an air hose, pulled it downward (it came down from a spring coil). I plugged the hose into a socket near my waist.

My suit inflated with a roaring sound. Cool, dry air began flowing around my body. The air was constantly being bled from exhaust ports in the suit, while the suit remained inflated. I felt the air blowing downward past my face, coming from vents inside the helmet. The airflow was designed to keep the suit under constant positive pressure, so that if the fabric developed a hole or a breach, air would flow out of the suit, and wouldn’t allow any dangerous organisms to flow in.

The high flow of air inside the suit created an almost deafening roar, which made it difficult to hear anything. The researchers had to shout to carry on a conversation in Level 4.

Jeremy closed his suit and pressurized it.

In front of us was a stainless steel door. It had a biohazard symbol on it, dark red, and the words

Martha took a hose and socketed it into her suit, pressurizing it. Then she turned and faced me. She placed herself between me and the steel door. Our suits bumped together. She pushed herself up against me until our faceplates made contact. “HOW ARE YOU DOING?” she asked. It was hard to hear her voice over the roar of the air.

“I’M FINE.”

She looked into my eyes. I thought she was examining me for any signs of claustrophobia—flushed skin, sweat standing on my face, wide staring eyes.

Evidently I looked all right. She caught Jeremy’s eye and stepped aside.

I took up my notebook and pencil, holding them awkwardly in one of my suit gloves, and we faced the steel door.

Martha looked down at my glove. “WHERE ARE YOU GOING WITH THAT NOTEBOOK?”

“IN THERE,” I shouted, indicating the door leading to Level 4.

She began laughing behind her faceplate. “IT’S FINE TO BRING YOUR NOTEBOOK INTO BL-4, BUT IT WILL NEVER COME OUT AGAIN. IT WOULD HAVE TO BE AUTOCLAVED”—cooked in a pressure oven. “THE PAPER WOULD DISSOLVE.”

So I couldn’t take notes. We would be in Level 4 for at least an hour. I wouldn’t be able to recall nearly enough. “I NEED SOME WAY OF TAKING NOTES. WHAT AM I GOING TO DO?”

“YOU COULD TRY THIS.” She handed me a sheet of flexible white plastic material, rather like paper, but, she explained, it was coated with Teflon. The researchers used this material in place of paper in a hot zone. You could write on it with a pen. It could be sterilized without damage.

“WHAT ABOUT MY PENCIL?” I asked. “CAN I TAKE THAT IN?”

“UH-UH,” Jeremy said, inspecting my mechanical pencil and shaking his head. “THAT’S GOT A SHARP TIP. PUNCTURE YOUR SUIT. SHE’LL GIVE YOU SOMETHING TO WRITE WITH WHEN WE GET TO THE HOT SIDE.”

When you moved from one room to another, you had to detach your air hose momentarily, walk without pressure in the suit, and then plug into the next air hose. As soon as the air hose was disconnected, your space suit would deflate.

Martha unclipped her air hose, and her suit went limp around her, shrinking down. She opened the steel door and stepped into the air lock and closed the door behind her. A moment later, Jeremy unclipped his air hose, and his suit went limp, and he stepped through the air lock door.

This left me alone momentarily in the staging room inside a pressurized suit. I looked back at the door we had come in through. I could do it. I could just leave. Open my space suit and climb out of it, and go back to the locker room and put my clothes on. These people wouldn’t care; they’d probably be relieved to see me go.

I unplugged my air hose. My space suit lost pressure and collapsed around me. Things got quiet: my air wasn’t running. I looked at the exit. Then I turned and opened the steel door and walked into the air lock. The door snapped shut behind me. At the far side of the air lock there was another steel door. I opened it and entered Level 4.

I FOUND MYSELF STANDING in a narrow corridor with walls made of cinder blocks. Martha and Jeremy weren’t in sight. I needed air. I looked up and saw a rack of air hoses hanging from the ceiling. I reached up and plugged a hose into my suit. The roaring noise began again, and a rush of air filled my suit, the suit tightening with the pressure. I looked around.

Several pairs of Christopher Robin–style rubber boots were lined up next to the air lock door. You were supposed to wear these boots in Level 4, to protect the bunny feet of the space suit from tearing as you walked around. I stepped into a pair of the boots, feeling nervous. The walls and floor were covered with thick-looking, beige paint—the paint was actually a layer of plastic resin that coated the inner surfaces of the hot zone, like the lining of a swimming pool, keeping it waterproof and airtight.

Martha appeared, coming around a corner. She plugged herself into an air hose. Then she handed me a Bic ballpoint pen. It was a Level 4 hot pen, and it would never leave Level 4, except as a melted lump.

Then we unplugged our air hoses and walked down the corridor. The rooms in Hot Suite AA-5 were small and cramped. They held typical laboratory equipment, the sort that you might find in any medical research lab in a university or corporation. I was struck by the ordinariness of Level 4. There were refrigerators, centrifuges, cabinets stocked with lab supplies. A couple of computers sat on counters. Nothing about the place suggested the presence of dangerous viruses, except for the unforgettable fact that we were inside space suits. There were sinks with water faucets. Wastewater from the sinks ran into collection tanks where the waste was sterilized. There was a room that had nothing in it except for two large chest freezers. They were hot freezers, hot as hell; I wondered if they contained Ebola, but I didn’t dare ask. The freezers were locked and were equipped with alarms. They could be opened only with combination keypads.

I followed Jeremy and Martha around a corner into a small room, where we plugged in our air hoses. Shelves and counters ran around the walls. A sign said:

The line had been left blank, since that day the researchers were working with an Unknown.

On one counter sat an incubator—a metal box that was kept warm inside, at a temperature of 37 degrees Celsius, which is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperature of a human body. Martha opened the incubator and removed a rack full of small plastic flasks containing the Unknown. The flasks were sealed tightly with screw caps and contained a pinkish fluid. The fluid was a nutrient bath for a layer of living cells from the kidney of a monkey that were growing on a flat inner surface of each flask. Tiny drops of the blood of victim John Doe had been introduced into these flasks. If Doe’s blood contained a virus, the virus would be likely to infect the monkey cells. Then the cells would start dying—shriveling up and bursting—and this would be evidence that the flask contained a virus that had come originally from John Doe’s blood.

As yet, there was no direct evidence that John Doe had been infected with a virus. He might have died from some other cause. (Other illnesses, such as malaria, can mimic some of the symptoms of Ebola or Marburg, but we had to assume that John Doe had already been tested by doctors who’d ruled out the more common infections and illnesses.) It was the job of the researchers to determine whether the blood contained a virus and, if so, to try to identify it. This was detective work. The procedure was that of Sherlock Holmes: you rule out possibilities until only one possibility remains.