Sweet Talking Money. Harry Bingham

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СКАЧАТЬ ladders, like so many healthy puppies. They didn’t know it, but they owed their lives to Cameron’s Immune Reprogramming. Larousse used her hands to check inside the sleeping area, but they came away empty.

      ‘Nothing. No problems at all. Oh, except that this one has lost part of its tail.’

      Cameron inspected the rat. It was thinner than the others, a constant target of playground bullying. ‘Benito. Shame. He had such a nice tail.’

      Larousse let her boss linger round the cages a little longer before interrupting. The end of an experiment is the busiest part, collecting all the data which records the precise success or failure of the work. ‘I guess I should start taking blood samples from all the survivors?’

      ‘Right. Get it centrifuged and refrigerated. We can begin the lab analysis tomorrow.’

      ‘OK, sure. And … the controls, Cameron. These little guys are dying. You want me to …?’

      ‘Oh, sure, yes, of course. I mean, right away.’

      ‘How do you want me to do it?’ Larousse was gentle. Most experimenters didn’t care what happened to their animals at the end of an experiment, but Cameron Wilde wasn’t like that. There were different injections you could give to put a rat to sleep, and Cameron was bound to have views on the kindest method.

      ‘You know,’ said Cameron, ‘exactly like we did the others.’

      ‘I don’t understand. We didn’t do the others. They just died.’

      Cameron stared at her assistant, slowly understanding what she had meant. ‘Oh, no. We’re not putting them down, Kati. I’d never … No way. We’re going to try and get the little guys well. Build them up again. We’re going to do the full Immune Reprogramming on all of them.’

      ‘Do the whole thing?’ Larousse was astonished. After a long and complex development period, Cameron’s Immune Reprogramming technique had been put to the test in this one amazing experiment. Nothing in scientific history had ever worked better – not on rats, anyway – but it was still time-consuming, laborious and expensive. ‘Do we have the funds, even?’

      Cameron’s eyes flashed with anger. ‘I don’t care if we’ve got the funding. I’m not going to let these little guys die just because we can’t be bothered to cure them. Christ, if we don’t owe it to them by now … We’re going to get them better, and then they’re all going to go off to PEACH. If I can’t afford that, I’ll keep the little guys myself.’ PEACH was the Post-Experiment Animal Care Hostel – a pricey but deluxe outfit run by a couple of dedicated Boston animal-lovers.

      ‘Yeah, sure, Cameron. That’s fine. Actually, I’m delighted. That’s great news. God, I love working with you.’

      Cameron stared around the room. Since the discovery of penicillin, medical history has all been about the search for the magic bullet: pills which wipe out a bug, leaving everything else intact. With bacteria, the search was successful. One by one, killer diseases like tuberculosis, scarlet fever, whooping cough and diphtheria began to fade out of existence – slain by the magic bullets of antibiotics. There was a time when scientists were optimistic that all diseases would follow suit, that infectious disease would literally be eliminated.

      But then the failures began. Viruses began to shrug off vaccinations. Bacteria grew resistant to antibiotics. New diseases sprang up out of nowhere. Scientists don’t say so out loud, but they’re worried. The drugs companies won’t admit it, but their bullets are failing.

      Cameron wasn’t surprised. The way she figured it, drugs can never defeat infectious disease. Bacteria reproduce every twenty minutes, five hundred generations in a week. In the time it takes a new drug to be developed, approved and marketed, the bacteria it was designed to kill have evolved far, far away from the original specimens.

      Cameron’s alternative was simple. What’s the only known way of killing all viruses and all bacteria, no matter how weird and wonderful, no matter how foreign or strange? Answer: the human body. Most of the time, our bodies deal with everything: viruses and bacteria, prions and moulds, insect bites and toxins. You can put fifty people in a room packed full of influenza virus, but only five of them will come down with flu – the five who are stressed, or unhappy, or malnourished, or sleep-deprived, or recovering from some other illness. The other forty-five just deal with it.

      And that was Cameron’s answer. To reprogram the human immune system to deal with its failures. To teach the immune system to do what it does best. This had been her mission in life ever since entering Harvard Medical School as an exceptionally gifted sixteen-year-old. Now aged just twenty-nine, she had carried out the most ambitious experiment in the history of viral disease, and come away with the most brilliant results ever achieved. But that was rats. The next step was to repeat the trick with humans.

      Cameron looked at the rat cages once again: the empty ones where the controls had been, the others where the treated rats hurtled round in skidding clouds of sawdust.

      ‘Let’s make this the last animal experiment we ever do, OK, Kati?’

      Larousse grinned approval as she busied herself with needles and collection bottles. ‘Have you thought more about publication?’ she asked.

      ‘Uh-huh,’ said Cameron. ‘The Journal of the American Academy of Medicine are quite keen, I think.’

      ‘Keen? They’ll bite your hand off.’

      ‘I hope so. The next phase of this is going to be pricey. We’ll need a decent write-up to secure our funding.’

      Larousse put down her rats, needles and bottles.

      ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘There are a hundred and fifty rats in this room who ought to be dead or dying, and just look at them. Not a trace of disease. None of them. Not in half a year. Your problem isn’t going to be getting money. It’ll be how to fight it off.’

      Larousse was wrong, of course. Dead wrong. As wrong as wrong could be. But don’t blame her. Larousse was a scientist, and what do they know about money?

       THREE

      1

      The loneliest place in the world is easy to find: a luxury hotel in a foreign city and a phone with no one to call.

      It was six weeks now since Bryn’s life had broken to pieces on the rocks. Cecily had promised him that her decisions were for ever – or, to put it bluntly, that she was as stubborn as a donkey. Bryn knew this. He’d have been less surprised to meet Mount Rushmore on walkabout than to find Cecily changing her mind. All the same, he’d done what he could. On the assumption that she’d gone home to her parents, he’d tried to call her there. It was Cecily’s mum who answered.

      ‘Oh God, Bryn, it’s you,’ she’d said, not unkindly.

      ‘Yes, I was hoping that I could maybe speak to –’

      ‘Yes, yes. Of course you were.’

      Her voice was sympathetic and unhappy and Bryn then knew straightaway that Cecily hadn’t just left him, she’d left him for somebody СКАЧАТЬ