The Hot Zone

by Richard Preston

A hot virus from the rain forest lives within a twenty-four-hour plane flight from every city on earth. All of the earth’s cities are connected by a web of airline routes. The web is a network. Once a virus hits the net, it can shoot anywhere in a day—Paris, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, wherever planes fly. Charles Monet and the life form inside him had entered the net.

What annoyed him was the fact that the bits of meat were wrapped in aluminum foil, like pieces of leftover hot dog.

You never ask a lawyer for permission to do something. We are going to do the needful, and the lawyers are going to tell us why it’s legal.”

“As a veterinarian, I have certain responsibilities with regard to the transportation of dead animals, sir. I can’t just knowingly ship a dead animal with an infectious disease across state lines.”

They have good aim when they spit, and they aim for your face. She worried more about her eyes than anything else. Ebola has a special liking for the eyes. Four or five virus particles on the eyelid would probably do it.

A six-foot-tall man and a ten-pound monkey are pretty evenly matched in a stand-up fight. The monkey will be all over the man. By the end of the fight, the man may need hundreds of stitches, and could be blinded.

You fitted a syringe into the socket, and you slid the pole into the cage and gave the monkey a shot. You also needed a tool to pin the monkey down, because monkeys don’t like needles coming at them.

incredibly hot—I mean, wall to wall with virus.” Everyone at the Institute thought John Coleus was going to die. “Around here,” Peter Jahrling told me, “we were frankly fearful that this guy had bought the farm.” The C.D.C. decided not to put him into isolation. So Coleus visited bars and drank beer with his friends. While he was incubating the virus.

All four men eventually tested positive for Ebola Reston virus. They had all been infected with the agent.

Did you ever hear of fly fishing for crocodiles?” Robin said. “No.” “You put a piece of meat on a chain. A piece of meat this big. And the flies are all over the place! Now there’s some fly fishing! They stink, those crocodiles. You’ll be standing in shallow water, and they’ll swim up on you. And the water is muddy. And you can’t see them. And unless you can smell them, you don’t know they’re there. And then—pfft! They drag you down. End of story.

If the elephants have been tusking out the rock of Kitum Cave at a rate of a few pounds a night, the cave could easily have been carved by elephants over a few hundred thousand years. Ian Redmond figured this out. He calls it speleogenesis by elephants—the creation of a cave by elephants.

In a sense, the earth is mounting an immune response against the human species. It is beginning to react to the human parasite, the flooding infection of people, the dead spots of concrete all over the planet, the cancerous rot-outs in Europe, Japan, and the United States, thick with replicating primates, the colonies enlarging and spreading and threatening to shock the biosphere with mass extinctions. Perhaps the biosphere does not “like” the idea of five billion humans.