Sweet Talking Money. Harry Bingham

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СКАЧАТЬ You’ve got it equipped, rested, fed. What next?’

      ‘Next? You attack the enemy, I suppose. “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.”’

      Shakespeare hadn’t been on the Harvard med school syllabus and Cameron looked momentarily puzzled. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Exactly. You attack. But how? You’ve got tanks, planes, infantry – I don’t know, what do they have in armies? – artillery, missiles, all kinds of stuff, but do you just blaze off with everything, or is there some sequence you’re meant to follow? Do you just charge in, or do you co-ordinate things?’

      Now it was Milne’s turn to look puzzled. ‘Well, you have a commander-in-chief, I suppose. He gets information, develops a strategy, sends out orders …’ He shrugged again.

      Once again, Cameron looked radiant, as though one-to-one with Einstein. ‘Pre-cise-ly. Exactly right. Communication. Armies use radio, computers use program code. The human body uses – well, a whole bunch of stuff, but among other things, it uses peptides.’

      Milne began to nod. ‘Peptides, right … program code. This is the Immune Reprogramming part, correct?’

      Cameron nodded and tapped the Schoolroom on its baby-smooth dome. ‘Now watch.’

      Cameron nodded to Kati, who hit some keys on the PC and threw a switch on the Schoolroom. The Schoolroom’s hum increased, and its faint vibration could be felt working its way through the thick carpet on the floor, creeping out towards Cecily’s expensively tasteful wallpaper.

      ‘Like I say, we can’t promise much,’ said Cameron. ‘The peptide sequences are very specific. We don’t know the code for humans, and we certainly don’t know the code for kuru viruses in humans.’

      ‘So what are you doing?’

      ‘We can get your army properly equipped. Vitamins, minerals, all the rest of it. And we know some parts of the code, peptides which seem to be associated with a generalised performance in immune activity. It’s kind of basic, like getting your plan of attack from a training manual. But still, at this stage it’s as good as we can do.’

      Milne nodded.

      The Schoolroom hummed in the surrounding silence. On screen, the percentage of good cells ticked slowly upwards: 3%, 4%, 5%, 6%, 6.5%. The rate of increase slowed to a halt. It stopped. Cameron glanced across at Kati, who caught her intention and instructed the Schoolroom to stop. The hum died away. A grey cardboard tray of needles stopped its tiny glassware chatter.

      ‘That’s it?’ said Milne.

      Cameron peered intently at the screen, reading the hundred-and-twenty or so data parameters caught and measured by the Schoolroom. ‘This virus pretty much wiped out the Forés of New Guinea. I told you it was nasty.’

      ‘And don’t underestimate what we’ve just done,’ added Kati. ‘Your immune system was at two per cent competence. It’s now at six and a half per cent. You’re already three times better at fighting this disease, and that’s our most basic possible treatment programme.’

      ‘We could try to juice things up a little,’ said Cameron. ‘Now, if you were a rat, of course …’ She spoke briefly with Kati, discussing the on-screen data, and they agreed on some changes. Kati removed one tray of fluids from the Schoolroom and slotted another one home.

      Their guess seemed to be an accurate one. The percentage of reprogrammed cells began to creep upwards once again: 7%, 8%, 10%. Then, all of a sudden, the numbers shot upwards: 25%, 67%, 98%. Error messages flashed on-screen and Cameron and Kati sighed in simultaneous disappointment.

      ‘Isn’t that good?’ asked Milne. ‘Ninety-eight per cent? That virus is dead meat.’

      ‘True,’ said Cameron, ‘but so are you. We overcharged your immune system and it’s gone crazy. Your army isn’t just attacking the enemy, it’s attacking you. You’ve now got a highly serious auto-immune disease. If you were a patient, you’d be dead.’

      Kati typed an instruction on the PC, and the Schoolroom’s hum died away. A little click of glassware indicated the arrival of a bottle in a dispensing chamber. Cameron withdrew it and shook it up against the light from the broad sash windows, then dropped it regretfully into a clinical waste bin.

      ‘OK. We failed. Shame you’re not a rat.’

      ‘And if I were?’

      ‘Then instead of throwing away that bottle, I’d have injected it back into your arm.’

      ‘Reprogrammed cells only, right?’

      ‘Right. We chuck the bad ones. And we wouldn’t take a little ten-millilitre sample from you, we’d take half a pint. Every day. Until you’d licked the disease.’

      ‘And it’s OK just to throw away the cells that don’t make it?’

      ‘It’s not OK, it’s actually good. It stimulates the body to grow more cells. And since we’re saving the good ones and chucking the bad ones, you head towards a situation where most of the cells in your immune system are highly trained at destroying kuru viruses.’ She raised her hands, as though to show that she could do no more. ‘There’s no way you can stay ill under those circumstances. None at all.’

      Silence fell.

      Bryn looked at Milne. Milne looked at Bryn.

      ‘OK,’ said Milne, at last. ‘I’m interested.’

      4

      ‘Ha, ha, ha, Bryn, you’re a right berk, you are.’ Dai, Bryn’s brother, the former glory of the Pontypridd rugby pack, swung his leg back and kicked a hole right through the collapsing timber. ‘I must be a bloody ghost, like,’ he said, crashing against the side of the shed with all his weight and emerging in a shower of rotten wood on the other side. ‘I can walk through walls. Here, look here.’ He was about to give another demonstration of his supernatural powers, when Bryn intervened.

      ‘OK, OK, Dai, I can see the wall’s rotten, thank you. I was wondering whether you might be able to fix it up as well as knocking it down.’

      Dai clambered back through the hole he’d made, meditatively ripping off another chunk of planking on his way.

      ‘That all depends on the load-bearing timber.’

      He used a pocket knife to scrape at one of the main timbers supporting the roof. There was a layer of green slime on top, but underneath the wood was hard and good. He walked along the wall, testing the thick oak pillars. ‘Seems OK. Have you looked in the roof?’

      ‘Yes. The beams and roof trusses are basically fine. The rest of it’s a disaster.’

      ‘Ha, ha, ha, by God, Bryn, it’s a good job you didn’t get really drunk, otherwise God knows what you’d have bought. Dad’s cow barn looks a bloody palace compared.’

      He laughed, but all the time his eye was assessing what needed to be done. It wasn’t long before he delivered his verdict. ‘I’d say we can clean up the main structural timbers, rip away the rest of it – that’ll be a short bloody job, СКАЧАТЬ