Skyfire

by Sam Galliford

  "‘Sit still, Mark,’ I said. ‘I’ll get us some scotch.’

  "‘Good idea,’ he answered, and then looked at me puzzled. ‘But not scotch, Gerry. I don’t like whisky, you know that. Hate the stuff. But if you’ve got a decent bottle of brandy, I’m sure we could do that some damage.’

  "‘Brandy it is, then,’ I grinned. ‘Two glasses?’

  "‘I think there is only two of us,’ he giggled. ‘So, two glasses should be ample.’

  "We were only playing, of course. We were not drunk, merely relaxed and acting the part. But it was good to have my old friend back again.

  “‘So, what do you want to talk about?’ I asked him.”

  Again, Gerard hesitated.

  “Aunt Gwendoline, what Mark told me next I still don’t know how to take in. Some of the implications of what he said are so terrible, so horrible, so unbelievable that I don’t know that they ought to be repeated.”

  “Continue,” insisted Aunt Gwendoline.

  “But I have no reason to believe that what Mark said to me is even true. In many ways it is unbelievable, and it could simply have been his now warped sense of humour interacting with a couple of bottles of red wine and some brandy to have a big joke on me.”

  “Gerard, my dear boy, how many times do I have to tell you that I have lived more than eighty years through what has been the most tumultuous century in the history of our species. Do not concern yourself that I shall find whatever it is you have to say so shocking that I shall call for the smelling salts and hesitate to speak to you ever again. Now please go on.”

  “I don’t know how to,” he appealed to her in some desperation, “except in his own words.”

  “Then those are the ones you must use,” she answered patiently.

  The buzz of the biplane engine had returned to her ears, announcing itself quietly, purring its threat in the far distance and casting its shadow of unease over her sitting room. It was coming towards them. She scanned her senses to try and spot it with its young pilot, with his trim moustache and scar on his forehead and his fistful of notes in his left hand that he waved at her as he sped away. She brought her focus back to her grand-nephew sitting in indecision in the chair opposite her.

  “I require to know every detail of what your friend Dr Brinsley said,” she commanded. “Please tell me.”

  Chapter 42

  Gerard braced himself. "I said to Mark, ‘So what do you want to talk about?’

  "‘Para nitroso alpha naphthyl three amine,’ he replied.

  “I shook my head to make sure I had heard him correctly.”‘Para nitro … that sounds like the name of one of your chemicals,’ I answered. ‘Either that or one of us has had too much brandy.’

  "‘You are absolutely correct on the first. It is the name of a chemical and it’s not a very nice one either.’

  "‘It wouldn’t be with a name like that,’ I replied. ‘Para nitrate whatever is a bit of a mouthful to come out with. Couldn’t you call it something simpler, like Fred.’

  "‘Try PNA,’ he replied. ‘That’s its usual abbreviation.’

  "‘PNA,’ I repeated.

  "‘Exactly, got it in one.’

  "‘So why do you want to talk about PNA?’ I asked.

  "‘Because it’s nasty,’ he answered. ‘It’s just about the nastiest chemical ever to come out of the chemistry division of the weapons research laboratories of our much esteemed Ministry of Defence. It’s not a very nice chemical at all.’

  "‘I suppose it wouldn’t be, coming out of a stable like that,’ I shrugged. ‘What does it do?’

  "‘It causes cancer.’

  "‘That is nasty,’ I agreed.

  "I couldn’t see where the conversation was going but I wasn’t yet bothered enough to attempt to stop it.

  "‘Tell me,’ he continued after an exaggerated pause, ‘have you ever wondered how much of the published medical literature on cancer research has come out of the weapons research laboratories of our Ministry of Defence and its counterparts in the United States, Russia, France, Japan and, for all I know, China and India and a few other places as well?’

  "‘I’ve never asked the question,’ I replied.

  "‘Well, I’ll tell you. It’s a lot, a hell of a lot. In fact there was a period during the nineteen sixties and seventies when more than sixty percent of all literature published on cancer causing chemicals came out of such establishments. They did a lot of cancer research in the Ministry of Defence, a hell of a lot.’

  "‘It’s nice to know our money was being well spent,’ I commented somewhat sarcastically. ‘I gather they didn’t come up with a cure or anything like that, otherwise we would have heard about it.’

  "‘You’re too nice, Gerry,’ he replied. ‘Far too nice. They weren’t interested in curing it. What they wanted to know was how to cause it.’

  "He leaned across the table, helped himself to another brandy and gave me such an odd smile it made it difficult for me to gauge what he was going to say next.

  "‘It was all done with the best of motives,’ he continued. ‘The argument went “if we don’t develop and research these chemicals and find out how nasty they are, then how will we know what to do when an enemy uses them against us?”. So they spent our taxpayers’ millions creating literally thousands of new and increasingly nasty cancer causing chemicals and testing them to make sure they worked. And that’s just what is published in the scientific and medical literature and does not include all the others that are still hidden under the Official Secrets Act and its American, Russian, French, Chinese and so on counterparts.’

  "‘I suppose they were right in a way,’ I countered. ‘Whatever the motives for their original research, we have ended up with a heap of knowledge about those chemicals and what they can do. We at least now know what additives not to put in our food; environmental agencies now know enough to make sure that our workplaces are safe; and defunct industrial sites are properly cleaned up before developers move in to build desirable homes that would otherwise give residents nasty tumours. You’d have to agree all that is a good thing’

  "‘Don’t be so bloody naive, Gerry,’ he replied shortly. ‘These chemicals were created with warfare in mind. It was the mad, military fashion of the time that led to their existence. The generals of the day dreamed about flying aeroplanes over swathes of enemy troops and spraying them with chemicals like PNA so they would all fall down and die of cancer.’

  "‘So, we can only be thankful that it never happened,’ I answered.

  "I found the thread of the conversation was beginning to make me feel uncomfortable and I was trying to defuse it. And as he spoke Mark became different to how he had been earlier on in the evening. He became buoyed up, but irrationally so. He gave the impression of being triumphant and pleased with himself to the point of being belligerent, or at least boastful as he pressed on with his argument. If I hadn’t known him better, I would have said he had just snorted something except that I knew that all he had consumed all evening had been red wine and by now a quarter of a bottle of brandy.

  "‘You mentioned the sixties and seventies,’ I said. ‘Do I take it that all this cancer producing weapons establishment work ceased after that?’

  "‘Just about,’ he nodded. ‘And for two reasons. In the first place, military fashions change just like everything else. By the mid nineteen eighties it had occurred even to the military minds of the day that cancers take time to develop, so spraying enemy troops with cancer causing chemicals was not going to stop an invading army in its tracks. The enemy troops might eventually get cancer, but in the meantime they will still have knocked out most of your tanks and infantry and clobbered your air force as well. What was needed was something faster acting. It was at that point that some bright spark dangled nerve gases under the noses of the generals and they went for them like a shot. All funding for chemical weapons research was diverted into creating compounds that instantaneously turn human beings into writhing heaps of fused nervous sy
stems and chemical carcinogenesis was left to wither on the vine.’

  "‘Not a very nice picture of our species,’ I commented. ‘But you said there were two reasons why the work stopped. What was the other one?’

  "‘PNA,’ he grinned.

  "‘You mean that nasty chemical you mentioned at the start of this conversation?’

  "‘Exactly,’ he beamed. ‘It’s a ridiculously simple chemical, which is why it was just about the first one to be discovered in the research. It’s very easy to synthesise. My first year undergraduates could do it almost blindfold except that I would never let them try. A year later they would all be riddled with some of the most aggressive and untreatable cancers known to medicine and be dying like flies. PNA has never been tested on humans, of course, at least not intentionally or as far as anyone is prepared to admit, but it proved so ferociously lethal in laboratory rats that it wasn’t considered necessary to test it on any higher animal.’

  "‘It’s sounding more ghastly by the minute,’ I commented.

  "‘It’s more than that,’ he continued enthusiastically. ‘It is the best. It has remarkably innocent looking crystals, long and needle-like and faintly tinted with yellow. Looking at them you wouldn’t think that they could harm a fly. Yet they dissolve in water, are tasteless, have no smell, and the amount required to kill you is minimal. Imagine six grains of sugar on a spoon, that would be enough. And twenty five years after it was first made, with millions and millions of pounds, dollars, roubles and yen spent on creating and testing literally thousands more previously unknown cancer producing chemicals, nobody managed to come up with anything more lethal than PNA. It was the gold standard. Nothing was more effective, and by the end of the nineteen eighties the weapons research establishments all over the world had just about given up all hope of improving on it. So the research ground to a halt.’

  "I was beginning to feel quite nauseated by his commentary.

  "‘So we’ve got the king of the cancer causing chemicals. I suppose that’s some sort of achievement for mankind,’ I concluded.

  "‘It most definitely is,’ he laughed. ‘Especially when you know how it works.’

  "‘Do I really want to know this?’ I asked.

  "‘Yes, you do, Gerry my friend. Because it is important.’

  "He was looking at me so intensely his eyes were sparkling, and not just with the brandy. He was excited in the way that, under other circumstance, always made him a joy to work with. But these were not those other circumstances.

  "‘Then you’d better tell me,’ I replied. ‘But be quick about it because I want to go to bed.’

  "He leaned slowly back in his chair, took a large swallow of brandy and beamed at me.

  "‘If you swallow some PNA,’ he expounded, ‘or even touch some of the crystals, it goes straight into your bloodstream. Twenty minutes later, I could analyse your blood until the cows come home and I wouldn’t be able to find even a trace of it. I could take bits of your tissue from any of your organs, kidneys, lungs, stomach, anywhere, and I still wouldn’t be able to find any. It would be gone. And since you wouldn’t have been aware that you had swallowed it then, after twenty minutes, there would be no evidence that it had ever existed in your body.’

  "‘It’s untraceable,’ I summarised.

  "‘After twenty minutes, yes,’ he agreed. ‘That is unless you knew what you were looking for. But by that time it would be too late.’

  "‘How do you mean?’ I asked.

  "‘It would not really have disappeared, of course, but it would have been changed inside your body. As I said, it has never been tested on humans but the best guess is that, within ten minutes of you swallowing it, it will have entered your cells. By eight hours it will have become incorporated into your DNA, and once part of your DNA it sets a clock ticking, tick, tick, tick, tick, and it cannot be stopped. And the first thing you would know about that clock would be some six months later when you went to your doctor because you were not feeling well. There would be the usual tests which would take a few more days to weeks, and what they would eventually show would be that you had well advanced cancers in your gullet and stomach. If you left it another month before you went to see your doctor, the cancers would have spread to your kidneys and liver. Another month and they would be in your lungs and after that everywhere. You would be dead within a year. Gerry, Gerry old pal, I’m sorry. I seem to have upset you.’

  "‘You’re not exactly describing fun and games on bonfire night,’ I choked.

  "‘Gerry, please. I am sorry. I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t realise it would upset you so. Maybe I have gone a little over the top. Here, have another brandy. You’re the dearest friend I’ve got so please don’t be upset. I don’t know what I would have done this past year if it hadn’t been for you and Sue. Sorry, sorry old chum, truly I am. Please forgive me.’

  "‘I’m going to make some coffee,’ I replied. ‘Do you want some?’

  “Any thought I had of finishing the evening and going to bed was gone. My thoughts were racing in all directions. It wasn’t only what Mark had been saying about cancer causing chemicals that upset me. I had never thought about it before, but being a chemist I suppose he would have to know a fair bit about them for safety’s sake, his own and his students. But it was the way he told me about them that disturbed me more than anything else, particularly the one he called PNA. There was a fire in him that I found particularly unsettling. Its intensity was frightening.”

  Aunt Gwendoline noted her grand-nephew’s distress. His conversation with his friend had not been pleasant. Indeed, she had found it more than worrying herself. She looked down at Rani and saw she was sitting up, alert, sniffing the air and poised to point in the manner of her breed. Something was approaching. She strained every nerve to listen. If only she still had the young ears she had all those years ago, then maybe she would hear it coming too. But nothing reached her over the ticking of her clocks and the shaking tones of Gerard’s unsettled voice.

  Chapter 43

  “I believed him when Mark said I am his dearest friend, Aunt Gwendoline, and I still do,” Gerard sighed. "Our friendship is important to him and I could not regard him in any other light. He is a friend, a very dear friend. He just shocked me very much with what he had said. When I returned with the coffee, he was calmer and had poured us both another brandy.

  "‘It’s true,’ he continued. ‘I really don’t know how I would have managed the last few months without the help of you and Sue, particularly those last three or four weeks when I was sozzled most of the time. By the way, where is Sue? I noticed she wasn’t here this evening. Is she away on one of her courses?’

  "‘She is not here anymore,’ I replied. ‘She left. We’ve separated and gone our separate ways.’

  "‘Gerry, no. I’m so sorry, I didn’t know. I’ve been out of circulation for a while. When did that happen? She didn’t leave because of me, did she? I know I caused a bit of trouble but surely she would have seen that it was only temporary, didn’t she?’

  "‘She didn’t leave because of you, Mark, even though you did, as you say, cause a bit of trouble,’ I answered. ‘In fact, it was more than a bit, it was a lot. And, no, it was not obvious that it was only temporary. To be blunt, we were seriously discussing how to get you into long term care for your alcoholism.’

  "‘Oh, Gerry, I am sorry. You two were my best friends. I wouldn’t have done that to you for the world. Tell me she didn’t leave because of me.’

  "‘You didn’t do it, Mark. Sue and my relationship had come to an end and our interests were drifting apart. The ruckus you caused might have provided an excuse for the final split but it was not the reason for it. Now let the matter drop, will you?’

  "‘Do you still see her?’

  "‘No.’

  "He was quiet for a few seconds while he drank some coffee and swallowed some more brandy. It was difficult to see what was going on in his mind but he seemed genuinely upset by the news.

  "
‘You were seriously thinking about how to get me into care for my alcoholism,’ he said at last. ‘That’s real friendship. You could have just dropped me like all my other so-called friends. I must have been very convincing.’

  "‘What the hell do you mean, convincing? You were smashed, night after night. You turned up drunk to your lectures, half-empty scotch bottles were found in your desk drawer in your laboratory, more empties were found in the rubbish, and when you turned up here you were reeking of whisky. It was coming out of your every pore. And I thought you didn’t drink whisky anyway.’

  "‘I don’t,’ he replied. ‘I can’t stand the stuff.’

  "I stopped, puzzled. I was still angry with him but the casualness with which he agreed with me silenced me.

  "‘Then why on earth did you decide to go on a class A bender every night for weeks on end by drinking scotch whisky?’ I finally asked him.

  "‘Because that is what the Craters’ drink,’ he replied.

  "‘Jesus Christ,’ I said.

  “Sorry for the blasphemy, Aunt Gwendoline, but I had no other reply to give him. His logic escaped me. I didn’t know where the conversation was heading, what he meant, or anything. All I knew was that his answer was the last one I expected to my essentially rhetorical question. I was stunned.”

  Rani stood up in a heightened state of alert, sniffing the air more vigorously as if trying to locate a quarry, her tail stump stilled in concentration. Aunt Gwendoline sat rock still in her chair. She waited for the noise of the biplane or the heat of the blazing skyfire to manifest itself but she heard or felt neither. Nothing stirred in her sitting room.

  “What happened next?” she asked calmly.

  “Nothing, immediately,” answered Gerard. “A silence fell between us until at last Mark spoke and for the next couple of hours I just sat and listened. It was a long and frequently interrupted monologue. At times, Mark was crying as he told his story and it wasn’t only because of the wine and brandy. At other times, he was angry. There was a lot of anger in what he said. And at yet other times, it seemed as if he was crowing, laughing in a triumphant manner before plunging back into the depths of despair. It was not a pretty story and I’m still not sure how much of it I believe or even want to believe. But it was a huge and horrific switchback of a two hour ramble that he embarked upon and I just hope that a lot of it is not true.”