“Not a gene, as such, although there must be genes that produce the components of the system. What they think you’ve got is a chemical apparatus that operates alongside genetic systems, influencing the way in which certain exons collaborate in producing family sets of proteins.”
“That’s enough jargon for now,” I told him. “Cut to the bottom line. What am I—a walking antibiotic factory?”
“No. What you’ve got isn’t protection against bacteria, or viruses, or prions—but it might be a defense against some kinds of cancers. It might suppress some sorts of tumors by inhibiting the development of modified cells within specific tissues.”
“Not just bladder tissue?”
“No—although it’ll take time to figure out exactly where the limits lie.”
“So I’m immune to some kinds of cancer—but that it could take years to figure out exactly which ones, and how many.”
“Not immune, but certainly less vulnerable. And it’s more complicated than that. There’s a selective cost as well as a selective benefit, which is presumably why the condition’s so rare.”
I could guess that one. Mum had been in her late thirties when she had me, after leading a fairly colorful life. Gran had been just as old when she had Mum. “Infertility,” I said. “Babies are tumors too.”
“That’s a crude way of putting it,” Hascombe said. “But yes, as well as suppressing tumors, it probably suppresses the great majority of implanted embryos. If it didn’t, we’d probably all have something like it integrated into our immune systems. Natural selection couldn’t do that for us—but somatic engineers might. What you have isn’t an all-purpose cancer cure, and wouldn’t necessarily be more efficient than the cancer treatments we already have—but once we understand exactly how it works, it might have other uses.”
I nodded, to show that I could follow the argument. Then I said: “And what, exactly, does it have to do with Special Services? Or am I supposed to believe the standard line about all biowarfare research being purely for defense?”
“All our biowarfare research is purely for defense,” the colonel said, with a perfectly straight face. I remembered what he’d said about our humble nation not having an enemy in the world, except maybe for Zimbabwe and Jamaica, but that not being enemies wasn’t the same thing as being on the same side.
“Once we understand how it works,” I guessed, “we might be able to refine it. Maybe it will throw up better cancer cures—but that’s not what interests you. I slipped through the net, but if the net were refined...selective sterilization by subtle and stealthy means. Not the kind of thing that you could make huge profits out of, in the open marketplace—but Special Services have broader interests than mere profit.”
“Now you’re being melodramatic, Darren,” he said, blithely.
This isn’t some conspiracy-theory movie. This is everyday life. We have to be careful to examine every emerging possibility, to analyze its implications for national security...its capacity to disturb or distort the status quo. That’s what you have to do too—examine every emerging possibility, analyzing its implications for your personal security....”
“...And its capacity to fuck up the status quo,” I finished for him. “What’s your offer, Mr. Hascombe?”
He didn’t object to my failure to address him by his rank. “Security,” he said. “The other parties will only offer you money, but they’ll cheat you if and when they can. You could spend a lot of time in court, one way and another. On the other hand...did you know that because GSKC recruited you under the provisions of the National Service Act, your notional employer, at this moment in time, is His Majesty’s Government? Technically, you’re on secondment. I don’t have the power to confiscate GSKC’s data, but I do have the power to confiscate you. Your mother’s a free agent, of course, but your grandmother is a state pensioner, and thus— technically, at least—unable to enter into any contractual arrangements without the permission of HMG. Not that we want to delve into a can of worms if we can avoid it. We’d rather work with all of you as a family, according to the principle of informed consent. We like families—they’re the backbone of every healthy society.”
I wondered how many healthy societies he thought there were in the world, and how many he expected to stay that way. If he’d told me the truth—which I wasn’t prepared to take for granted—I was a walking miracle. I was also a walking time-bomb. Everybody knew that there were too many people in the world, and everybody had different ideas as to which ones ought to stop adding to the problem. Given that everybody and his cousin already had enough of me to start doing all kinds of wild and woolly experiments, I probably wasn’t absolutely necessary to the great crusade, but I was young and I was fit, and neither Mum nor Gran had ever produced a milligram of semen, or ever would.
I was rare all right—rare and interesting. Nobody had ever thought so before, but the last twenty-four hours had changed everything.
“GSKC could offer me security,” I pointed out. “They have people to look after their people.” But I was already reconsidering the question of why Hascombe’s oppo had taken GSKC’s lawyer by the throat, and what the move had been intended to demonstrate.
“We have an army at our disposal,” Hascombe pointed out. “Not to mention a police force, various Special Services and the entire formal apparatus of the law of the land. The people who look after our people are very good at it. But it’s your choice, Darren. I wish I could tell you to think about it, but I’m afraid we’re in a hurry. You can have five minutes, if you like.”
He didn’t mean that I had five minutes to decide whether to go with him or stay with GSKC. He meant that 1 had five minutes to decide whether to go quietly and willingly or to start a small war.
Personally, I quite liked the idea of the war, but I had other people to consider now—and not just Mum and Gran. It was just beginning to dawn on me that for the first time in my life, I was faced with a decision that actually mattered, not just to me or people I knew but to any number of people I would never even meet.
People had been taking the piss out of me all my life, for any reason and no reason at all: because I was called Darren; because I didn’t even know my Dad’s name; because I only had three GCSEs and not an ology among them; because I was so desperate and so useless that I’d had to sign up as a guinea pig in order to pay my share of the household expenses; because I was still living with my Mum at twenty, in a miserable flat in a miserable block in an officially-designated high crime/zero tolerance estate; and because I was the kind of idiot who couldn’t even do a half-way decent job of being a kidnap victim or a spy.
Now, things were different. Now, I was rare, and interesting. I was a national resource. I was a new cure for cancer and a subtle weapon in the next world war. No more Hungarian pinot noir for me; from now on, whatever I chose to do, it would be classy claret all the way.
In a way, I knew, the man from Special Services was holding a gun on me in exactly the same way as the fake fat blonde-—but everyone does what he has to do when the situation arises. It wasn’t his fault. He couldn’t come to me with a fistful of fifty-euro notes, because that wasn’t the game he was playing.
But what game should I be playing, now I had some say in the matter?
I knew that the world was full of people who’d have said that a fistful of fifty-euro notes was the only game worth playing, even though it was crooked. Some, I knew, reckoned that it was the only game in town, because governments and Special Services didn’t count for much any more in a world ruled by multinational corporations like GSKC. But even on an officially-designated high crime/zero tolerance estate you learn, if you’re not completely stupid, that money isn’t the measure of all things. You only have to watch enough movies to figure out that what people think of you is the important thing, and that not having the piss taken out of you any more is something you can’t put a price on. To qualify as a kidnap victim is one thing, to be a double agent is another, and to be a walking can
cer cure is something else again, but what it all comes down to in the end is respect. Jeremy Hascombe was offering me a better choice than Matthew Jardine or Dr. Hartman, even though he wasn’t offering me any choice at all about where I was going and who was going to be subjecting me to all manner of indignities with the aid of hypodermic syringes, dust busters, and all effective hybrids thereof. He was offering me the choice of doing my duty like a man.
“Okay, Colonel,” I said. “I’ll play it like a hero, and smile all the while. I don’t suppose you brought me anything decent to wear? I don’t want to walk out of here in my pajamas.”
“No, I didn’t,” said the colonel, who was too uptight a man to let his gratitude show, “but your mother did. She thought you might need a change of clothes, just in case you could come home for Sunday lunch after all.”
It was just as he’d said: family is the backbone of any healthy society. Perhaps it always will be. Who, after all, can tell what the future might hold?
<
* * * *
ANOTHER BAD DAY IN BEDLAM
There is no doubt that being required to sit in judgment over one’s peers is a profoundly uncomfortable business. A person thus appointed becomes gradually detached from the group; his former colleagues become suspicious of him, and he of them. Friendship gives way to paranoia. Nevertheless, the job has to be done, and somebody has to do it.
I never applied for the post of chairman of the Ethics Committee; I was asked to do it. They said, of course, that I was the person best qualified for the job, mainly because of my declared interest in the philosophy of medicine, although my “personal experience at the sharp end of ethical decision-making” was also mentioned—but all that was just soft soap and insensitivity. The simple fact was that my role was changing anyway, and the people in Admin took the opportunity to redefine it in a way that killed two birds with one stone.
My role was changing because the government’s policy of returning the mentally ill to what is euphemistically known as “the community” had inevitably wrought great changes in specialized hospitals like the Maudsley. We had been forced to undergo a virtual sea change in the mid-1990s. As the high priests of hi-tech moved in, eager to get on with the serious genetic engineering and the transplant surgery, old-fashioned psychotherapists were suddenly in surplus. Those who couldn’t find decent posts elsewhere and couldn’t be persuaded to take early retirement had to be found other duties. Not that being chairman of the Ethics Committee was a full-time job; I still had to offer what comfort and treatment I could to an ever-growing list of out-patients.
I never realized the extent to which I’d been marginalized within the hospital community until one of the nurses let slip that the DNA-cowboys—who’d never been colleagues, finding me already , in place when they arrived—had nicknamed me “Doctor Death”. I never knew for sure who coined the term, but I always suspected Dr. Gabriel. He was the real leader of the team, in terms of charisma if not rank, and he was the one whose ethical precepts were most definitely different from mine, he being a devout Catholic while I was an atheistic humanist. Maybe I over-reacted, but the nickname hurt. It was bad enough being the man who all-too-frequently had to take the final responsibility for life-or-death decisions—every one of them recalling to mind what had happened to Carol—without being mocked and insulted for doing it. No doubt Gabriel would have been a lot happier if the job had gone to a Jesuit, but that wasn’t any excuse for his attitude to me.
I suppose that if it hadn’t been Gabriel I saw with his arm around the heavily pregnant teenager, I probably wouldn’t have given them a second glance. I wouldn’t have followed them with my eyes as they moved through the reception area, I wouldn’t have craned my neck to look at the car she got into, and I certainly wouldn’t have gone to the desk to ask the secretary if she knew the patient’s name. On the other hand, once I’d begun the sequence, there was enough in the situation to keep my curiosity going.
For one thing, the girl was luminously beautiful, in a Latin sort of way, and she looked so incredibly happy. Gabriel was wearing a smile that was smug even by his standards while he escorted her to the door—and that in itself was odd, because he wasn’t in the habit of escorting patients to the door. He didn’t actually have patients, as such. He was no mere healer of the sick; he was a cutting-edge research scientist, and proud of it. Then again, the car the girl got into was a black limousine with darkened windows: the kind that high-powered diplomats and mafia bosses ride around in. I didn’t immediately decide to make a note of the number-plate, but I couldn’t help noticing it as it drew away because it looked like one of those “cherished plates” for which companies and individuals pay high prices, and was thus easy to remember. It was OD 111X.
The secretary gave me a funny look when I said “Do you know the name of the patient who was with Dr. Gabriel a moment ago?” but I am a senior consultant, so she could hardly refuse to tell me.
“That’s Ms. Innocente,” she said. “She’s a regular.”
“Oh yes, of course,” I replied—I don’t know why, because I’d never heard the name before, and there was no real reason to pretend that I had. “She must be nearly due now.”
“Under two weeks,” said the secretary, who liked to show that she was on the ball. “She’s booked in for the twenty-third.”
I was so intent on being blasé about it that I was halfway back to my office before it occurred to me that one of the things the comprehensively re-vamped Maudsley didn’t have was a maternity ward.
* * * *
It was after seven when I got home. Chris had been home from school for three hours, but he was well used to looking after himself. The last vestiges of a bacon and mushroom pizza were still hanging about in the kitchen; he wasn’t one for hasty washing up. He was in his room as usual, mesmerized by his computer-screen.
“Hi Dad,” he said, when I looked in to offer in him a cup of coffee. “Another bad day in Bedlam?” It was one of those stale jokes that become mere ritual. The Maudsley is also known as the Bethlehem Royal Hospital; it’s the direct descendant of the asylum that Simon Fitzgerald set up in 1247 for the Order of the Star of Bethlehem, which came to be popularly known as Bedlam.
“They all are,” I told him, wearily. “I hope that’s homework you’re doing.”
He sighed deeply. “It’s nothing nefarious,” he assured me, in a defensive fashion. More than a year had passed since the visit from the police and the official warning about accessing confidential data, and as far as I knew he’d been a little angel ever since. But how close an eye could a single father who worked the kind of hours I did be expected to keep on his teenage son?
I made the coffee, and took both cups up to Chris’s room, intending nothing more than to exchange a few polite words in lieu of what the Americans call “quality time”. I’d almost forgotten about Dr. Gabriel and the pregnant teenager, but when we’d both run out of platitudinous pleasantries and fell silent, something about the cryptic rows of data that were marching across the green-lit screen while Chris watched in total fascination tripped a switch in my memory.
“I don’t suppose you could trace a car number, could you?” I said, impulsively.
He looked up at me in frank astonishment. “You want me to hack into the police computer?” he said, incredulously.
I must have blushed crimson. “Well, no,” I said. “Isn’t there a legal way of doing it?”
“Sure,” he said. “Semi-legal, anyway. Every big commercial consultancy in the country has that sort of thing in their databanks. Mind you, there are some people who might be uneasy about the ethics of their trading in that kind of information. Do you want me to put it on your credit card, or are you actually asking me to pull a stroke and get it for free?”
There are times when being chairman of an Ethics Committee becomes positively oppressive, to the extent that one actually yearns to defy the rules. No one can be a saint all the time, especially someone who never had the appropr
iate training. I’d done my fair share of kicking over the traces when I was a teenager.
“I have to get a bite to eat,” I said. “I’ll come back later. If you happened to have found out by then who owns a car with the license-plate OD 111X, I certainly wouldn’t ask you how you knew.”
To my astonishment, he gave me the most incredible smile. It was as though real communication had been established between us for the very first time.
“O-kay,” he said. “Anything else you’d like to know?”
I blinked, and hesitated. His enthusiasm to help was so blatant that I felt obliged to follow up. I realized, belatedly, that this was probably the first time I’d ever asked him to do anything which I couldn’t have done for myself, and the fact that it was slightly shady made it all the more precious to him. I thought hard for a couple of moments, and then said: “If I gave you a couple of passwords, could you get into the hospital records—specifically the records of the DNA-research unit?”
“Your hospital?” he said, disbelievingly.
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