Free The Hot Zone by Richard Preston Page B

scientist, she believed that it was her obligation to perform medical research that would help alleviate human suffering. Even though she had grown up on a farm, where her father had raised livestock for food, she had never been ableto bear easily the death of an animal. As a girl, she had cried when her father had taken her 4-H Club prize steer to the butcher. She liked animals better than many people. In taking the veterinarian’s oath, she had pledged herself to a code of honor that bound her to the care of animals but also bound her to the saving of human lives through medicine. At times in her work, those two ideals clashed. She told herself that this research was being done to help find a cure for Ebola, that it was medical research that would help save human lives and might possibly avert a tragedy for the human species. That helped reduce her feelings of unease, but not completely, and she kept her emotions off to one side.
    Johnson watched Jaax carefully as she began the removal procedure. Handling an unconscious monkey in Level 4 is a tricky operation, because monkeys can wake up, and they have teeth and a powerful bite, and they are remarkably strong and agile. The monkeys that are used in laboratories are not organ-grinder monkeys. They are large, wild animals from the rain forest. A bite by an Ebola-infected monkey would almost certainly be fatal.
    First Nancy inspected the monkey, looking through the bars. It was a large male, and he looked as if he was really dead. She saw that he still had his canine fangs, and that made her nervous. Ordinarily the monkey would have had its fangs filed down for safety. For some reason, this one had enormous natural fangs. She stuck hergloved fingers through the bars and pinched the monkey’s toe while she watched for any eye movement. The eyes remained fixed and staring.
    “GO AHEAD AND UNLOCK THE CAGE,” Lieutenant Colonel Johnson said. He had to shout to be heard above the roar of air in their space suits.
    She unlocked the door and slid it up until the cage gaped wide open. She inspected the monkey again. No muscle twitches. The monkey was definitely down.
    “ALL RIGHT, GO AHEAD AND MOVE HIM OUT,” Johnson said.
    She reached inside and caught the monkey by the upper arms and rotated him so that he was facing away from her, so that he couldn’t bite her if he woke up. She pulled his arms back and held them immobile, and she lifted the monkey out of the cage.
    Johnson took the monkey’s feet, and together they carried him over to a hatbox, a biohazard container, and they slid the monkey into it. Then they carried the hatbox to the necropsy room, shuffling slowly in their suits. They were two human primates carrying another primate. One was the master of the earth, or at least believed himself to be, and the other was a nimble dweller in trees, a cousin of the master of the earth. Both species, the human and the monkey, were in the presence of another life form, which was older and more powerful than either of them, and was a dweller in blood.
    Jaax and Johnson moved slowly out of the room, carrying the monkey, and turned left and then turned left again, and entered the necropsy room, and laid the monkey down on a stainless-steel table. The monkey’s skin was rashy and covered with red blotches, visible through his sparse hair.
    “GLOVE UP,” Johnson said.
    They put on latex rubber gloves, pulling them over the space-suit gloves. They now wore three layers of gloves: the inner-lining glove, the space-suit glove, and the outer glove. Johnson said, “WE’LL DO THE CHECK LIST. SCISSORS. HEMOSTATS.” He laid the tools in a row at the head of the table. Each tool was numbered, and he called the numbers out loud.
    They went to work. Using blunt-ended scissors, Johnson opened the monkey while Jaax assisted with the procedure. They worked slowly and with exquisite care. They did not use any sharp blades, because a blade is a deadly object in a hot zone. A scalpel can nick