Biohazard

Yet the state shared the blame for Ustinov's accident. My visits to Vector had shown me under what pressure we were placing our best scientists. Sandakchiev had never ceased to complain about the inhuman pace at which his workers were being driven. It was dangerous, as well as scientifically unsound. No technician should have worked long hours with such a contagious organism. People tired easily in the heavy protective suits required for Zone Three. Their reflexes slowed down, and it was easy to become careless. Adding to our problems, Marburg research had begun at Vector before a supply of antiserum was on hand.

Ustinov's illness lasted nearly three weeks. Throughout that time, none of his colleagues was allowed to stop working.

Sandakchiev's cryptogram arrived early that afternoon. It was long, detailed, and bleak.

Ustinov had been injecting Marburg into guinea pigs with the help of a lab technician, working through a glove box. He was not in a full space suit and was wearing two thin layers of rubber gloves instead of the thick mitts normally required for such work in Zone Three. The gloves provided the flexibility to control the laboratory animals, who will otherwise squirm and try to wriggle out of a technician's grip.

Our rules required that animals targeted for injection be strapped to a wooden board to hold them securely in place. That day, Ustinov wasn't following procedure. He decided to steady the guinea pigs with his gloved hand. Perhaps he thought it would help calm them. Or perhaps he was in too much of a hurry.

The technician became distracted and nudged him accidentally. Ustinov's hand slipped just as he was pressing down on the syringe. The needle went through the guinea pig and punctured his thumb, drawing blood.

The needle went in no farther than half a centimeter, but the faint spot of blood indicated that liquid Marburg had entered his bloodstream. As soon as he realized what had happened, Ustinov called the duty supervisor from the telephone inside the lab.

From then on, the procedures established for such emergencies were followed to the letter. Doctors and nurses dressed in protective suits were waiting for him as he emerged from the disinfectant shower. They rushed him to the small hospital in the Vector compound, a twenty-bed isolation facility sealed off from the outside with thick walls and pressure-locked doors.

Physicians did what they could to make Ustinov feel comfortable while waiting for the antiserum to arrive from Moscow. He was in no doubt of the danger he faced, but there were periods when he believed he could escape alive. He was lucid enough to describe what had happened in precise scientific detail and to calculate the exact amount of Marburg coursing through his veins. His wife hurried over from her lab, but neither she nor their children were permitted inside the hospital. She was later allowed a few private visits, until the sight of her suffering husband became too much to bear. Every day for the next fourteen days the cryptograms arriving at my office in Moscow described the evolution of Ustinov's disease in dry, clinical language. Attending physicians and colleagues later supplied the human details.

Ustinov at first maintained his sense of humor, joking with nurses and occasionally planning his next experiments aloud. Within a couple of days he was complaining of a severe headache and nausea. Gradually, he became passive and uncommunicative, as his features froze in toxic shock. On the fourth day his eyes turned red and tiny bruises appeared all over his body: capillaries close to his skin had begun to hemorrhage.

Ustinov twitched silently in his bed while the virus multiplied in his system. Too tired to speak, or to turn over, or to eat, he would drift in and out of consciousness, staring for long periods of time at nothing. Occasionally, lucidity would return. He called for paper during those brief moments to record the progress of the virus as it foraged through his body. Sometimes he burst into tears.

On the tenth day, his fever subsided and he stopped retching. As brilliant a scientist as he was, Ustinov began to entertain the delusion that he was improving. He started smiling again and asked about his family.

The cryptograms describing the disease's remission inspired some in our office in Moscow to hope for the impossible. But I was matching the progression of Ustinov's symptoms with clinical reports of the 1967 Marburg outbreak, and nothing in those reports gave me any reason for confidence.

I gave a daily briefing on Ustinov's condition to Kalinin. He passed the information on to senior officials in the Kremlin.