Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journeys to the Edge of Science by Richard Preston

the end of the hallway was a French door. Its mullioned glass panes were covered with translucent paper. The panes glowed.
    We went along the hallway. We passed a bathroom and a bedroom door, which was closed. The bedroom belonged to Malka Benjaminovna Chudnovsky. We passed a sort of cave containing vast amounts of paper. This was Gregory’s bedroom, his junkyard. We passed a small kitchen, our feet rolling on computer cables. David opened the French door, and we entered the living room. This was the chamber of the supercomputer. A bare lightbulb burned in a ceiling fixture. The room contained seven display screens, two of which were filled with numbers; the other screens were turned off. The windows were closed and the shades were drawn. Gregory Chudnovsky sat on a chair facing the lit-up screens. He wore a tattered and patched lamb’s wool sweater, a starched white shirt, blue sweatpants, and the hand-stitched two-tone socks. From his toes trailed a pair of heelless leather slippers. His cane was hooked over his shoulder, hung there for convenience. “Right now, our goal is to compute pi,” he said. “For that we have to build our own computer.” He had a resonant voice and a Russian accent.
     

    The Chudnovsky Mathematician: Gregory and David Chudnovsky in Gregory’s New York City apartment, 1992.
Irena Roman
     
    “We are a full-service company,” David said. “Of course, you know what ‘full-service’ means in New York. It means ‘You want it? You do it yourself.’”
    A steel frame stood in the center of the room, screwed together with bolts. It held split-open shells of personal computers—cheap PC clones, knocked wide open like cracked walnuts, their meat spilling all over the place. The brothers had crammed superfast logic boards inside the PCs. Red lights on the boards blinked. The floor was a quagmire of cables.
    The brothers had also managed to fit into the room masses of empty cardboard boxes, and lots of books (Russian classics, with Cyrillic lettering on their spines), and screwdrivers, and data-storage tapes, and software manuals by the cubic yard, and stalagmites of obscure trade magazines, and a twenty-thousand-dollar engineering computer that they no longer used. “We use it as a place to stack paper,” Gregory explained. From an oval photograph on the wall, the face of Volf Chudnovsky, their late father, looked down on the scene. The walls and the French door were covered with sheets of drafting paper showing circuit diagrams. They resembled cities seen from the air. Various disk drives were scattered around the room. The drives were humming, and there was a continuous whir of fans. A strong warmth emanated from the equipment, as if a steam radiator were going in the room. The brothers were heating the apartment with silicon chips.

     

    “M YASTHENIA GRAVIS is a funny thing,” Gregory Chudnovsky said one day from his bed in his bedroom, the junkyard. “In a sense, I’m very lucky, because I’m alive, and I’m alive after so many years. There is no standard prognosis. It sometimes strikes young women and older women. I wonder if it is some kind of sluggish virus.”
    It was a cold afternoon, and rain pelted the windows; the shades were drawn, as always, and the room was stiflingly warm. He lay against a heap of pillows with his legs folded under him. His bed was surrounded by freestanding bookshelves packed and piled with ramparts of stacked paper. That day, he wore the same tattered wool sweater, a starched white shirt, blue sweatpants, and another pair of handmade socks. I had never seen socks like Gregory’s. They were two-tone socks, wrinkled and floppy, hand-sewn from pieces of dark blue and pale blue cloth, and they looked comfortable. They were the work of Malka Benjaminovna, his mother. Lines of computer code flickered on the screen beside his bed.
    This was an apartment built for long voyages. The paper in the room was jammed into bookshelves along the wall, too, from