You say you hate the way Corinth does business. OK. So put them out of business. Not by publishing research papers. Who’s ever heard of a corporation going under because of some damn research paper? Hit ’em where it hurts: their bottom line. We’ll pitch our salesmen against their salesmen, our results against theirs.’ He put his hand on Cameron’s arm and said very gently, ‘It sounds mad, I know, but the stockmarket is your friend. You fight them in the laboratory, and I’ll fight them in the marketplace. If we get it right, the whole world will be reprogramming its immune system and nobody, but nobody, is going to be popping Corinth’s little poison pills.’
The scientist paused. ‘Why are you doing this? You want to save the world? Or do you just want to make your million?’
‘Make a million?’ Bryn smiled sympathetically. ‘No. I’d like to get rich, seriously rich, a hundred million rich. If I do a little good along the way, then that’s great. But I don’t pretend that I’m doing this for the good of my soul.’
‘Uh. Well, that’s clear enough, anyway.’
The world fell silent as Cameron thought. This was the biggest decision of her life, the hardest, the most painful. But also, as she thought about it, the easiest. Her reputation was gone, her funding, her hopes of scientific acclaim. Her only hope was sitting in front of her, a battered-looking steamroller of a man, someone she scarcely knew.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘You win. I give up. Let’s do it.’
4
The U-Haul depot opened at dawn and Bryn was first in line. He was about to sign out a mini-van, but Cameron shook her head. ‘Too small,’ she said. So Bryn hired a truck and bought a hundred and twenty orange crates at five bucks each.
‘You an experienced driver?’ asked the boiler-suited rental guy. ‘Them streets outside are an inch of snow laying atop of an inch of ice.’
‘Finalist in the Welsh all-terrain truck-drivers’ championship,’ said Bryn. ‘Would’ve won ’cept some bastard shunted me.’
‘You don’t say?’ The rental guy took a different set of keys from the board behind him. ‘Here, take the Toyota. Transmission on the Volvo is shot to shreds. Same price. Don’t mention it. Finalist, huh?’
It was a good job the rental guy chose to stay reading his Off-Road Biker inside his oppressively warm glass booth, else he’d have seen Bryn slide twice coming out on to the road and only miss a negligence suit by the fewest of inches as an outraged motorist swerved angrily away from the outcoming truck.
‘You even know how to drive?’ said Cameron.
‘I’m a quick learner.’
Once in Cameron’s office, they worked fast, with Cameron’s spirits rising rapidly as her sense of adventure took hold.
‘Kati?’ she said.
‘Uh-huh?’ Kati shifted a stack of paper into a crate and stood up, flexing her back.
‘Our new colleague, Bryn. Part crazy, wouldn’t you say?’
‘You’ve found a part that’s sane?’
‘Paranoiac, for sure, and what do you think? A little hypomanic, could be?’
‘Uh, I guess. Mental health. Not my field.’
Bryn said nothing, just worked to clear the office as fast as he could. He’d filled sixteen crates and already his back was beginning to sing out warnings.
‘Bryn?’ said Cameron.
‘Yes?’
‘There are some pretty good drugs these days. I could put you on something.’
‘Lithium,’ said Kati. ‘Have you thought about lithium?’ ‘Yeah, good, start you on lithium, maybe? Or you want me to refer you to a specialist?’
Bryn dropped the crate that he was holding.
‘Your ethics committee.’ he said. ‘The one that was going to investigate you. Have you ever heard of it in your life before?’
‘I’ve never been framed in my life before,’
‘They wanted you to collect up all your research data, protocols, everything.’
‘Just like a committee, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Then hand it to them.’
‘Not much point collecting it otherwise.’
‘Corinth. Not an ethics committee. Corinth. Fantastic idea. They just ask you to collect everything significant from your last five years of research and hand it over to them. Perfect. That’s why we need to clear out tonight. Make bloody sure that they get nothing, nothing at all.’
Cameron paused. Then, ‘Not just paranoia, Kati. Schizophrenoform psychosis. Florid stage. Lithium, for sure. But I’d have to think about chlorpromazine. Maybe clozapine, risperidone.’
‘You think I’m nuts,’ said Bryn. ‘You find me any reference to that ethics committee, anywhere, ever.’
‘Kovacs had the run of this office and my lab,’ said Cameron. ‘If they wanted stuff, they could have just taken it,’
‘For God’s sake, woman,’ said Bryn, more impatiently than he’d intended. ‘Have you ever actually opened your eyes in here? Look at this place.’
Even after twenty-four crates of paper had been cleared and stacked, the room was still overflowing with paper. Cardboard trays of collection bottles sat on top of computer keyboards which rested on paper foothills that led up to the mountains all around. The four anglepoise lamps sat like herons pecking nourishment from the sea of clutter. Cameron looked around.
‘It’s kind of … crowded, I guess.’
They worked on for a while in silence. It was back-breaking labour, and one by one the two women, short of sleep and short of food, dropped out, leaving Bryn to finish. His own back complained angrily now, and his dodgy knee had twisted badly on the icy pavement outside. At length, with the office empty but for the computer hardware, the anglepoise lamps, the bare workbenches, and the sheets of chipboard idle on their concrete blocks, Bryn stopped. Cameron had collapsed with exhaustion and delayed-onset shock and was snoring away on one of the chipboard sheets, covered up with Bryn’s greatcoat.
‘OK, then. One at a time,’ said Bryn, beginning to load the PCs into crates.
Kati hesitated, instead of helping him. ‘Technically –’ she began.
‘I know. Technically, these PCs belong to the biotech crowd, not you. But then technically, as an employee of Berger Scholes, I shouldn’t be doing what I’m doing. And technically, Brent Huizinga didn’t do anything criminal by destroying your reputation and sabotaging your work.’
He yanked out the power cords and Kati, silently and solemnly, helped him to steal them.
5
The final stage was the laboratory. Kati took a quick inventory of the place where she’d spent so many hours.
‘This PC,’ she said. ‘And this.’
She placed her hand on a domed chamber about four feet in diameter. It was built of white metal, had a control panel at the side, and a number of leads connecting it to the computer.
‘And this would be … ?’
‘The correct term for this would be the White Blood Cell Immune Modulation and Reprogramming Facility.’ Kati stroked the domed surface with affectionate familiarity. ‘But since it’s where blood cells come to learn how to be better blood cells, we usually just call it the Schoolroom.’
Watched anxiously by Kati every step of