Free The Hot Zone by Richard Preston Page A

their hoses and peered into the cages. One bank of cages contained two isolated monkeys. They were the so-called control monkeys. They had not been injected with Ebola virus, and they were healthy.
    As soon as the two Army officers appeared in space suits, the healthy monkeys went nuts. They rattled their cages and leaped around. Humans in space suits make monkeys nervous. They hooted and grunted—
“Ooo! Ooo! Haw, wah, haw!”
And they uttered a high-pitched squeal:
“Eek!”
The monkeys moved to the front of their cages and shook the doors or leaped back and forth,
whump, whump, whump
, watching Jaax and Johnson the whole time, following them with their eyes, alert to everything. The cages had elaborate bolts on the doors to prevent fiddling by primate fingers. These monkeys were creative little boogers, she thought, and they were bored.
    The other bank of cages was mostly quiet. This was the bank of Ebola cages. All the monkeys in these cages were infected with Ebola virus, and most of them were silent, passive, and withdrawn, although one or two of them seemed queerly deranged. Their immune systems had failed or gone haywire. Most of the animals did not look very sick yet, but they did not display the alertness, the usual monkey energy, the leaping and the cagerattling that you see in healthy monkeys, and most of them had not eaten their morning biscuits. They sat almost motionless in their cages, watching the two officers with expressionless faces.
    They had been injected with the hottest strain of Ebola known to the world. It was the Mayinga strain of Ebola Zaire. This strain had come from a young woman named Mayinga N., who died of the virus on October 19, 1976. She was a nurse at a hospital in Zaire, and she had taken care of a Roman Catholic nun who died of Ebola. The nun had bled to death all over Nurse Mayinga, and then, a few days later, Nurse Mayinga had broken with Ebola and died. Some of Nurse Mayinga’s blood had ended up in the United States, and the strain of virus that had once lived in Nurse Mayinga’s blood now lived in small glass vials kept in superfreezers at the Institute, which were maintained at minus one hundred and sixty degrees Fahrenheit. The freezers were fitted with padlocks and alarms and were plastered with biohazard flowers and sealed with bands of sticky tape. The first line of defense against a hot agent is sticky tape, because it seals cracks. It could be said that without sticky tape there would be no such thing as biocontainment.
    Gene Johnson, the civilian scientist, had thawed a little bit of Nurse Mayinga’s frozen blood and had injected it into the monkeys. Then, as the monkeys became sick, he had treated them with a drug in the hope that it would help themfight off the virus. The drug did not seem to be working.
    Nancy Jaax and Tony Johnson inspected the monkeys, moving from cage to cage, until they found the two monkeys that had crashed and bled out. Those animals were hunched up, each in its own cage. They had bloody noses, and their eyes were half-open, glassy, and brilliant red, with dilated pupils. The monkeys showed no facial expression, not even pain or agony. The connective tissue under the skin had been destroyed by the virus, causing a subtle distortion of the face. Another reason for the strange faces was that the parts of the brain that control facial expression had also been destroyed. The masklike face, the red eyes, and the bloody nose were classic signs of Ebola that appear in all primates infected with the virus, both monkeys and humans. It hinted at a vicious combination of brain damage and soft-tissue destruction under the skin. The classic Ebola face made the monkeys look as if they had seen something beyond comprehension. It was not a vision of heaven.
    Nancy Jaax felt a wave of unease. She was distressed by the sight of the dead and suffering monkeys. As a veterinarian, she believed that it was her duty to heal animals and relieve their suffering. As a