The Cobra Event

by Richard Preston

“Razebi ego dushu!” Yevlikov yelled. Fuck his soul.

A typical virus particle is a thousand times smaller than a cell. If a virus particle were an object about an inch across, a human hair would be a thousand feet across. Viruses use their software code to take over a cell and direct the cell’s own machinery to make more virus particles.

TAQUEANT COLLOQUIA EFFUGIAT RISUS HIC LOCUS EST UBI MORS GAUDET SUCCURRERE VITAE “How’s your Latin, Dr. Austen?” Nathanson said. “Hmm. Let’s see…‘Speech quiets the place where Death is happy…’? That can’t be right.” He smiled. “It means, ‘Let conversation cease, let the smile flee, for this is the place where Death delights to help Life.’ ”

The Manhattan morgue emitted an endless Gregorian chant of smell.

Charles Darwin who first understood that evolution is caused by natural selection, and that natural selection is death. He also understood that vast amounts of death (vast amounts of natural selection) are required to effect a small permanent change in the shape or behavior of an organism. Without huge amounts of death, organisms do not change over time. Without death, life would never have become more complex than the simplest self-copying molecules. The arms of a starfish could not have happened without countless repetitions of death. Death is the mother of structure.

“Manhattan is not like other places. People come to Manhattan to live alone. It means they often die alone. We handle a surprising number of putrefied bodies. What you are smelling is the stench of loneliness, Dr. Austen.” Kly took the shoulders, grasping them through the pouch, while Dudley took the feet.

“Ephaphtha. It’s a good-luck word. It’s what Jesus said when he threw a demon out of a deaf-and-dumb man. He stuck his finger into the guy’s ear, and he put a dab of his spit on the guy’s tongue. Then he said, ‘Ephaphtha.’ It means, ‘Be opened.’ And the demon came out.”

BRAIN VIRUSES can act fast. A brain virus can take a person from apparent good health to a fatal coma in a matter of hours. Viral agents that grow in the central nervous system spread along nerve cells. You can go to bed healthy and never wake up.

“Conduct your blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind.”

When a species overruns its natural habitat, it devours its available resources. It becomes weakened, vulnerable to infectious outbreaks. A sudden emergence of a deadly pathogen, an infectious killer, reduces the species back to a sustainable level, These mass dyings happen all the time in nature.

Viruses play an important role in nature: they keep populations in check. Now

There is no more dangerous human being than a public health doctor, he thought. Public health doctors are largely responsible for the uncontrolled boom in the human population that is destroying the earth. The public health doctors are environmental criminals of the highest degree. Even now they are trying to cause an extinction of a natural species, the extinction of the smallpox virus.

Historians describe the Black Death as something that just “occurred” at the end of the Middle Ages. They don’t make the connection: the Black Death did not just “occur”; it was the biological event that ended the Middle Ages. And the world is overdue for another biological event. If it doesn’t happen soon, how many species will disappear, how many beautiful tracts of primeval rain forest will vanish forever? If the public health doctors keep up their work, they will practically destroy the world.