by Tim Neilson
Then in your case, after having achieved a sufficiently high concentration of C-14, you would not only have to extract it from the gaseous compound, but then ensure that the C-14 atoms, not other carbon atoms, ended up in precisely the right place in whatever artificial molecular antibody you were attempting to manufacture. I cannot conceive of how such a process could be operated economically, if it were possible to operate it at all.
Not so good, thought Daniel despondently. If Crick relied on the writer’s judgement, he might well have abandoned the project at this point. And perhaps that meant he never did anything that would prevent Derwent & Graham from patenting their later work.
Or did it? He tried to recall what James had said about patent law. To foil Derwent & Graham’s patent applications, as best he could recall, it wasn’t necessary for Crick to have actually even conducted experiments, let alone manufactured a product. As he remembered it, the issue was more about what Crick had known than what he had done.
But what had he known? Daniel read on.
Assuming that it was practicable, is there really a demand for increased efficiency of antibiotics that would justify such cost?
Maybe not then, thought Daniel, but perhaps there is now. With bacteria and viruses emerging with increased resistance to ordinary broad-spectrum antibiotics, medicine needed to produce ever-more specific antibodies to treat ever-more specific strains of antigen. A discovery that turned a chemical compound from having only one highly specific therapeutic benefit into a new form of effective broad-spectrum antibody could be hugely important, he speculated. Maybe it’s important enough to justify the kind of costs required to produce the stuff. Derwent & Graham seem to think so, anyway. He refocused on the letter.
And of course, the whole question of subatomic particles travelling backwards in time …
In deference to the other users of the library Daniel restrained himself from jumping into the air and yelling in triumph.
… is totally theoretical. I cannot imagine any organisation funding such a speculative and extremely costly project.
Not till now, thought Daniel. He eagerly scanned the rest of the papers in front of him but found nothing further of any interest. No matter. He was looking forward to telling Cam about his discovery.
Daniel was not the only one who was pondering over the written word. Uncharacteristically, Tina was reading and thinking. In her case, the thought-provoking screed was a series of lengthy text messages from Alex. When she received the first one and noted the phone number from which it had arrived she unconsciously flinched, anticipating an impatient tirade of complaint about her failure to communicate with him. But to her surprise there had been no hint of recrimination. It started with an expression of hope that she and Anna were having a good time. Along with her relief at the tone of his message, Tina felt a twinge of guilt about her non-disclosure of James’s participation in the trip. Alex’s text went on to declare how much he missed her and how he was looking forward to her returning to Australia. The conciliatory tone was sustained through the rest of that first message; it continued in a second text and then a third. It could hardly be described as eloquent, but Tina could tell that a lot of care had gone into its composition. It was certainly different from the abrupt, carelessly spelled and expressed – usually in the imperative – communications he normally sent. In some parts of his messages, he seemed to be suggesting he would be paying her more regard in future. She re-read these passages carefully, trying to determine whether she was deluding herself by interpreting them that way. She decided that she wasn’t.
Although she’d not been consciously aware of it, a great cloud had weighed on her, but now it suddenly lifted. She felt optimistic, or at least slightly hopeful, about returning home and restoring her relationship with Alex. Maybe they could recapture the early euphoria they’d had before it declined so dismally. Maybe there would also be an end to an indefinable sense she’d felt for so long, but never admitted to herself, that something wasn’t quite right in Alex’s relationship with Anna.
Thoughts of Anna inevitably led to a mental image that included Daniel. And, of course, whenever she, Anna and Daniel were together, James was usually there, too – therefore, it was natural he appeared in her mind’s eye.
That recollection dispelled the happy simplicity of her train of thought. She couldn’t remember once, in the whole time she’d been in England, having an enjoyable moment thinking about Alex, yet she’d been happy with James and Anna – happy, that is, except on those occasions when she had felt troubled by James’s association with Claudia.
What did she want? And, if her inclinations did go towards James rather than Alex, could she get what she wanted? From what she’d overheard at the breakfast table Claudia had no intention of splitting up with James, and James seemed content to go along with that.
I have to reply to Alex, she thought, but composing a response proved impossible. First, she needed to clarify her own thoughts. She pocketed her phone, intending to wait for some impulse to emerge within her and guide her actions without her having to make a rational decision. That was her usual modus operandi. It didn’t always turn out well for her, but it seemed to work better than attempting to think logically.
Claudia peered through the minuscule white-framed panes of glass. She was in front of a tiny café – one shop in a row of slate-roofed, two-storey dwellings lining a narrow winding street near the town centre. Most of the tables inside were occupied. A couple of backpackers were poring over some sort of iPad or laptop; two middle-aged women, whom Claudia judged to be locals, were chatting amiably to each other; and at the back of the shop sat an elderly white-haired man, head bowed as if sunk in deep meditation, absent-mindedly stirring a hot drink. Luckily two customers exited, leaving a table vacant just inside the door. Although the café certainly wasn’t in a bustling part of town, it wasn’t the most private location they could have chosen, but neither of them made a move to press on further.
“Will this do?” she asked. James was happy to concur, so they went in, took their seats and waited for service.
“No, nothing at all,” James said, in response to Claudia’s question as to whether he’d heard from Daniel. “But that’s the way it should be. Anna told him not to contact us, so if anyone’s still watching they may not pick up that he’s come to help. We’re not even certain that he’s in the country. I just went to London with Anna and Tina; while they went shopping, I went to the Oxford and Cambridge Club – I’ve got reciprocal rights there – and left him Anna’s written instructions. I haven’t been back to check whether he’s collected the note. Anna said that she told him to let Cam know if he wasn’t going to be coming. Has Cam said anything about him?”
Claudia confirmed that he hadn’t.
“So we must assume for the present that he’s on the job.”
“He knows how to contact us if he finds anything, though, doesn’t he?” Claudia asked.
“Oh, yes, he knows how to get in touch with Cam and he’s got phone numbers for me and Anna. Maybe Tina’s as well. He’ll let us know when the time’s right.”
“I just can’t believe that a supposedly reputable company like Derwent & Graham would behave like this,” Claudia mused.
“Yes, it surprised me, too,” admitted James. “Maybe I’m naïve but I can’t imagine any of the big corporates I work for being like that. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of them can be ruthless in a business or legal sense, and we’ve all read about cases where some executive has pushed things too far and ends up getting charged with committing some sort of white-collar crime. But this is totally different.”
“It’s a pity,” Claudia reflected. “I can understand the drug companies being obsessive about protecting their product rights, but surely they could come to an arrangement with someone like Cam who really isn’t interested in competing with them.”
“It’s a little more complex than that,” James told her.
“Really? I mean surely it would
be better to harness his talents to produce a new product for them rather than crush him and not have anything to show for it.”
“The world needs cooperation at least as much as it needs competition,” James stated solemnly.
“From your tone I take it that’s a quotation,” Claudia ventured. “Who said it?”
James nodded. “Sir Frank Rolland.”
“Famous?” asked Claudia in a manner indicating that she had never heard of him.
“Not really,” admitted James, “but he should be, even though he lived a long time ago. He did some amazing things.”
They chatted for a while about Claudia’s work, James’s impending return to Australia, and a variety of other matters until Claudia announced she had to get back to her College to do some teaching.
The backpackers had departed a while earlier, but Claudia could still hear the ladies in animated discussion about the faults and failings of various acquaintances, and she could see over James’s shoulder the old man was still sitting, his drink apparently finished but seemingly deep in thought. They paid their bill and exited into the sunlight. The old man raised his head, gazing after them as they left, but the ladies gave them only a flicker of a glance, insufficient to interrupt the flow of character-assassinating gossip.
As they stepped out onto the footpath James’s phone rang.
“James, it’s Cam,” an excited voice informed him. “I’m back at Pembroke with Daniel. No, don’t worry about all that spy stuff, we’re beyond that now. Wait till you see what Daniel’s found.”
James and Claudia hurried along the narrow footpaths, into Trumpington Street and on to the main entrance of the College. As they scurried through the tunnel James glanced to one side, and thought, irrelevantly, that it was perhaps understandable a university more than 800 years old didn’t regard online communications as a reason to remove the old-fashioned notice board with its pinned sheets of paper.
Claudia glanced regretfully up at Cam’s window. James had, of course, immediately told her how animated Cam had been on the call. She was clearly torn between attending punctually to her official duties and finding out whether Cam’s excitement was justified.
“You’ll let me know as soon as you can,” she begged James. He hastily assured her he would. Claudia tore herself away, while James sprinted through the doorway and up the old wooden staircase leading to Cam’s room.
Elsewhere, Tina had been staring fixedly into a shop window, but mentally she was flitting back and forth between Cambridge and Melbourne. She dawdled over composing a response to Alex. No matter how laboriously she worked at it, she found it impossible to write a text she was happy with. While she struggled to write, she struggled also to decide whether she really wanted to give Alex a second chance or whether she would rather ditch him for James. She was uncomfortably aware the second of those alternatives didn’t seem to be totally within her control. However, it didn’t fully occur to her that her indecision over her objectives was largely the cause of her inability to articulate a clear message.
Faced with a problem of this kind, she would usually ask Anna’s advice. Yes, Anna could be hypercritical at times, and often her advice ran totally contrary to Tina’s own impulses. Nevertheless, Tina had total faith in Anna’s devotion to Tina’s best interests, and a near superstitious awe of her sister’s intelligence, reinforced by Anna’s track record of seemingly effortless success with her own life.
But somehow this time she felt reluctant to reveal her concerns – even to Anna. Perhaps especially to Anna. Ever since she started going out with Alex, Tina had been dimly aware that Anna was not entirely impressed by him. That knowledge undoubtedly influenced her willingness to talk about him to Anna. Fears that she didn’t even recognise prompted her to be afraid her sister might tell her to dump Alex, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear that. Yet, in a way, the slim chance that she would say the opposite was equally worrying.
Had she been able to consider the matter consciously she might have reasoned Alex’s latest message was an opportunity to change Anna’s perceptions, or at least persuade her to give him a second chance. But as it was, her entrenched instinctive reticence held sway, and so she hadn’t revealed the new development to Anna. Perhaps Tina’s mind was also influenced by the annoyance Anna had displayed over her behaviour when Claudia was around. If she disclosed her problems to Anna, inevitably mentioning James in the process, Anna would almost certainly deduce their connection with her coldness towards Claudia. And how would she react to that revelation?
Whatever her motivation, Tina failed to obtain her sister’s guidance. She toiled over her reply and pressed ‘send’, unconvinced she’d managed to find the right tone between being too positive to be honest and too ambivalent to be constructive. Immediately, she experienced a reaction of dread. Was she afraid of getting a hostile reply? Or was she concerned about getting an enthusiastic one?
The training her father had given her was thorough. She was, unusually, deep in thought, and her gaze was at least nominally focused on the window display. But she didn’t fail to notice instantly when a familiar face appeared as a reflection in the glass. She turned, still not quite fully emerged from her reverie.
“Snap out of it,” Anna commanded. “Come on.” They hurried along the pavement, Anna pocketing her phone as they strode. Tina wasn’t sure where they were going or why it was so important they went there, but deduced that Anna had just received a message of significance. They reached Pembroke and swung into the entrance, veering right as soon as they reached the quadrangle inside, at which point Tina stopped and tensed, as if confronted by sudden danger.
“What’s wrong?” demanded Anna irritably. Tina didn’t reply. She felt it wasn’t the right moment to explain why she’d been shocked to see the look of intense longing that Claudia had just given James before scurrying off. She forced herself to follow Anna towards the entrance to the staircase on which Cam’s rooms were situated, and which James had just raced into a moment before.
They entered Cam’s study just after James. Cam and Daniel were waiting, evidently excited and eager for the others to arrive. James and Anna breathlessly asked what had happened. Even Tina was swept up in the sense of anticipation, so much so that she forgot about the tableau she’d just witnessed in the quadrangle and prepared to listen.
Cam proffered some sheets of paper. “Look at this,” he urged James, while making it difficult for him to do so by waving them enthusiastically. James managed to take possession and started examining them.
“See? They’re the photocopies Daniel just got,” he explained. “Crick wrote the originals.” James continued to appraise them cautiously.
“Look at that bit. He’s talking about heavy isotopes,” Cam persisted, sensing to his dismay that James wasn’t as immediately exhilarated by the document as he and Daniel. “See? And antibodies. It’s clear.” James nodded, and kept reading.
“But that’s not the important part. Look at this one,” Cam went on, “it’s a letter to Crick. See this bit here. It’s talking about separating different isotopes. Here it’s talking about uses against antibodies,” he went on, building up to his grand finale, glancing nervously and noticing that James’s neutral manner hadn’t altered. “And there,” he continued, jabbing at the sheet of paper in triumph, “it spells out in black and white that Crick had told him his ideas were based on time travel of subatomic particles.”
He stared pleadingly at James, silently begging him to confirm the new information was all they needed to thwart Derwent & Graham and liberate Cam to continue with his project. James continued to stare impassively at the papers, as if reluctant to make eye contact, or as if thinking rapidly to try to find an escape from an unpleasant conclusion. Finally, he looked up.
“It’s certainly helpful,” he ventured, but Cam, Daniel and Anna didn’t need him to say anything more to sense the impending ‘but’.
“What’s the problem then?” Daniel demanded angrily, waving away Anna�
��s attempts to calm him down.
“Let’s assume this is good enough to prove Crick was thinking of using the time-travelling capacities of subatomic particles for antibacterial or antiviral purposes, and that he’d had the idea unstable isotopes might do that better than ordinary atoms.”
“Well isn’t it?” Daniel asked.
“Yes, very probably,” James agreed. “But even if it does stand up in a court of law – and there are very detailed precise rules about what evidence can be used and how it is proved, we’d need to get confirmation – I don’t think it’s enough to invalidate Derwent & Graham’s patent.”
“But that can’t be right,” Cam insisted passionately. “We’ve got clear proof Crick had the idea first.”
“Yes, that’s right. He had the idea. But you can’t patent an idea. It needs to be something more specific. For example, Alexander Fleming was the first person to notice penicillin spores killed bacteria, but there was no way he would have been given a patent over the whole concept of antibiotics.”
“This isn’t the same,” Daniel protested.
“No, it’s only an analogy,” James agreed. “But the same principle applies here. And the reverse applies too. You can’t stop someone getting a patent for something specific just by showing it depends on some piece of knowledge that was already known. That would make patent law impossible. Almost everything is an advance on previous ideas, not some totally new creation. Look, you definitely should get these checked out by a lawyer. And I’ll ask Slim. Maybe I misunderstood how he explained it to me. But I’m pretty sure he’ll say, ‘close but no cigar’.”
Daniel and Cam continued to argue forcefully with James, but eventually James persuaded them it didn’t matter what the three of them thought, and the only sensible thing to do was to let the experts decide.
