Richard Preston - Panic in Level 4

Martha wanted to look at the monkey cells to see if any of them showed signs of being infected with a virus. She sat down at a counter and placed one of the little flasks under a microscope. She did not open the flask. She stared into the eyepieces of the microscope through her faceplate, turning her head back and forth. “DO YOU KNOW HOW HARD IT IS TO GET YOUR HEAD COCKED SO YOU CAN SEE INTO A MICROSCOPE?” she yelled over the unending roar of air. She stood up. “DO YOU WANT TO LOOK?”

I sat down on the chair before the microscope. I had difficulty seeing through my faceplate into the eyepieces. I began twisting my head around. Finally I got a clear look through the microscope into the flask.

I could see glittering fields of monkey cells, reddish gold in color. Were they sick or healthy? They were just cells to me. As for the X virus, if any particles of it had been present in the cells they would not have been visible through the microscope. Virus particles are too small to be seen with an optical microscope. Most viruses can be seen only with an electron microscope, which magnifies things that are extremely small. A cold virus particle sitting at the base of an eyelash hair would be like a peanut sitting by the Washington Monument.

As I was staring into the eyepieces of the microscope, I felt a popping sensation. Something felt weird around my chest. My suit began to feel sloppy and loose. But I was interested in the cells and wasn’t paying attention to my space suit. Eventually, though, I moved away from the microscope and stood up. That was when I realized that my space suit had blown open in the hot zone.

AIR WAS RUSHING OUT around my neck and chest, pouring out of the suit. With a growing sense of alarm, I looked down to try to see what was happening, but couldn’t see anything. The lower part of my helmet hood blocked the view. I started feeling around with my gloves, but couldn’t get much sensation, for the gloves were thick and clumsy. I began tugging on something, some sort of fabric. To my horror, I realized that I was grabbing at my surgical scrubs. I was feeling around inside my space suit.

I knew what had happened. As I had been bending over the microscope, the movement had twisted the zipper that ran across the suit’s chest, and the lips of the zipper had pulled apart, and the pressure in the suit had opened it completely. And now I couldn’t get the zipper closed. I almost threw a tubular cast.

“DO I HAVE A PROBLEM HERE?” I yelled.

Jeremy had been working with his back toward me. He swung around, looked at me, and swore. He moved toward me, holding his palms outward. He ran his palms back and forth on my chest, closing the zipper.

My suit swelled up and tightened, regaining pressure.

“HOW BAD WAS THAT?” I asked.

He looked a little embarrassed. “THE ZIPPERS GET WORN. THEY CAN POP OPEN.”

I had ended up with a ratty old piece of Army gear, a space suit that belonged to nobody. A little voice started speaking in my head. What are you doing here? the voice said. You’re in an Ebola lab in a fucking defective space suit. I started to feel giddy. It was an intoxicating rush of fear, a sensation that all I needed to do was relax and let the fear take hold, and I could drift away on waves of panic, screaming for help.

Martha was looking into my eyes again.

The little voice went on: You’re headed for the Slammer.

Jeremy tried to soothe me. He assured me that the incident was not, in fact, an exposure to a hot agent. The suits did occasionally pop open, he admitted. “THE THING IS, YOUR SUIT HAD POSITIVE PRESSURE THE WHOLE TIME,” he explained. “THE AIR WAS FLOWING DOWN PAST YOUR FACE AND OUT OF THE OPENING. NOTHING COULD GET INTO YOUR SUIT. IT COULDN’T MOVE UP TO YOUR FACE.”

I really wanted to believe that an Unknown virus was not having an encounter with me inside my space suit. The air had been gushing out, I told myself. The flow would have carried any particles of a hot agent out of my suit. Anyway, if something had gotten in, by now it was too late to panic. I told the scientists that I wanted to remain in Level 4. After that, I touched my chest zipper frequently to make sure it was closed. Habits can save your life.

The researchers had work to do. Martha intended to open a flask of the Joe Doe Unknown. She carried one of the flasks to a Steriguard safety hood—a cabinet that produced a curtain of air blowing between the virus samples and the person sitting there. This air curtain acted as a shield, preventing any drifting particles from coming near the researcher. The cabinet also had a sliding glass door. If you opened the glass too far—potentially releasing a virus into the air of the hot zone—an alarm would go off.

With a pair of tweezers, Martha picked up a glass slide that had spots of reactive compound on it. It was called a spot slide. You drop liquid samples of virus on the spots, and if a spot changes color, it helps you identify the virus. “WE HANDLE GLASS WITH TWEEZERS BECAUSE YOU DON’T WANT TO PICK UP ANYTHING MADE OF GLASS WITH YOUR FINGERS,” she said. “YOU NEVER WANT TO CUT YOURSELF IN HERE.”

Martha opened the flask containing the Unknown. She took up a push-button pipette—a device that is used in biological labs for moving very small quantities of fluid from one place to another.

She inserted the tip of the pipette into the open flask and pushed a button, and the pipette sucked up a small amount of the liquid containing the Unknown X. She positioned the pipette over the glass slide and placed droplets of the liquid on the slide. Her hands moved with deft precision.

“DO YOU WANT TO TRY DOING THIS?” she asked.

I sat down in front of the safety cabinet. She handed me another flask. I had difficulty removing the cap from the flask. My heavy rubber space-suit gloves were impossible. I picked up the pipette and began dropping the liquid into a row of small test tubes, so that tests could be done on it. Even this simple task proved to be achingly slow and difficult. I couldn’t see how anyone could do medical research wearing Mickey Mouse gloves and a space suit. The fact that the Army researchers were able to do it every day made me appreciate the depth of their skill and training. My cheek began to itch, but I couldn’t figure out how to scratch it, since my head was inside a helmet hood. When I had finished the task, I closed the flask and held it up to the light.

The liquid shimmered inside; I was face-to-face with a presumed Level 4 Unknown. My cheek was itching badly. “HOW DO YOU DEAL WITH AN ITCH IN ONE OF THESE SUITS?” I asked.

“YOU DON’T,” Jeremy shouted above the unending roar of air.

Eventually the two researchers wrapped up a certain phase of their work. Thus far, they still had no information about what had killed John Doe.

Martha remarked that it was time to check on the monkeys.

“THERE ARE MONKEYS IN HERE?” I asked nervously. The little voice started up again: Are they infected? Go now to the exit.

Of course there were monkeys in here, Jeremy said. They had been vocalizing—screeching—the whole time, but the rushing sound of air in our space suits had drowned out their cries, he explained. He detached his air hose and began walking down a corrider, evidently heading for the monkeys.

“DO THEY HAVE BLOODY NOSES?” I asked.

The monkeys were fine, Jeremy said. He led me through a door into the largest room in Hot Suite AA-5. It was lit with flourescent lights. Along two walls of the room, stainless steel wire cages were stacked from floor to ceiling. Most of the cages were empty, but several of them held monkeys.

“THESE MONKEYS ARE SURVIVORS,” Jeremy said.

The monkeys were excited to see us. They raced back and forth in their cages, their eyes fixed on us. They were rhesus monkeys. Two of them sported wicked-looking canine fangs. (“Organ-grinder monkeys they aren’t,” one Army scientist had remarked.) The largest one, a male, bared his canines at me, staring at me with wide, fierce-looking eyes.