Read The Demon in the Freezer for Free Online Page B

on the Woodstock on this page, it would be an object the size of a smallish watermelon, perhaps sitting on the grass beside the Volkswagen bus. A spore of anthrax would be an orange. On that same scale, a particle of smallpox would be a mulberry. (The particles of the common cold are the smallest virus particles found in nature; a cold virus would be a marijuana seed under the seat of the Volkswagen bus parked at Woodstock.) Three to five mulberries of smallpox floating into the air out of the Woodstock dot on the page would be invisible to the eye and senses, yet they could start a global pandemic of smallpox.
    AS DR. RICHTER pondered the view in the microscope, he was not unprepared for the national emergency it implied. Three years earlier, he had laid out a plan for what would be done if smallpox broke out on his watch. Now it was happening. He lined up an older pox expert, Dr. Josef Posch, and they were joined by another colleague, Professor Helmut Ippen. They organized a quarantine at the hospital, they got vaccine ready, and they gathered biohazard equipment, which Richter had previously stockpiled. He also made a telephone call to the offices of the Smallpox Eradication Program at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland, asking for help.
    The WHO occupies a building constructed in the nineteen fifties on a hill above Geneva. It is surrounded by the flags of the world’s nations. In 1970, the Smallpox Eradication Program (SEP) was a relatively new effort at the WHO—it was inaugurated in 1966. The smallpox program operated out of a cluster of tiny cubicles on the sixth floor—the cubicles were exactly four feet wide, but they had a magnificent view southward across Lake Geneva toward Mont Blanc. Although the cubicles of the smallpox program were tiny and jammed together, the unit had a deserted feel, because at any given time more than half of the staff members were away, dealing with smallpox in various parts of the earth.
    Dr. Richter ended up talking with an American doctor on the staff named Paul F. Wehrle, who spoke a little German. Dr. Wehrle (his name sounds like
whirly
) was a tall, thin, courtly epidemiologist with brown hair and green eyes who had a habit of wearing a jacket and tie with a white shirt when he went into the field, because he felt that a well-dressed doctor would inspire confidence in the midst of the shit terror of a smallpox outbreak. Wehrle now lives in quiet retirement with his wife in Pasadena. “I have unfortunately turned eighty,” he remarked to me, “but fortunately I have all of my hair, most of my teeth, and at least some of my brain.”

    A single smallpox virus particle (virion) from a pustule in human skin. Negative contrast electron microscopy, magnified about 150,000 times, showing the “mulberry” structure of the proteins on the surface of the particle. The photograph was made in 1966 by Frederick A. Murphy, who could be described as the Ansel Adams of electron microscopy.

    Diagram of a smallpox virus particle showing its surface and internal structure.Its dumbbell core (the dogbone) is visible; the dumbbell holds the genome of the virus, which consists of about 187,000 letters, or nucleotides, of DNA. (Both images courtesy of Frederick A. Murphy, School of Veterinary Medicine, University of California at Davis.)

    When Dr. Richter told him what was going on in Meschede, Dr. Wehrle understood the picture only too well. The WHO rule was to keep smallpox patients
out
of hospitals, because they could spread the virus all too easily—hospitals are amplifiers of variola. Smallpox could essentially sack a hospital, infecting doctors and nurses and patients, and from there the virus would continue out into the community and beyond. The WHO recommended keeping smallpox patients at home under the care of vaccinated relatives. Since there was nothing a doctor could do for a patient with smallpox, it was just as well to keep the patient away from