The Cassandra Complex

by Brian Stableford

  “Like most biological-warfare research, antibody packaging has a certain amount of general medical significance, but the main reason people have remained interested in it is that it might provide a way to disguise defensive measures taken in advance of biological warfare. At its most elementary, the idea is that a domestic population can be clandestinely immunized against a bioweapon by secreting antibodies in a locally distributed product that wouldn’t normally be suspected as a carrier.”

  “And beyond the elementary?” Smith prompted.

  “In theory, at least, there are more subtle ways to tackle the problem. You could, for instance, use surreptitious vectors to import dormant genes capable of producing antibodies into tissue cells that normally have nothing to do with the immune system, but that could—if and when necessary—be activated by a switching mechanism broadly similar to those that already exist to determine which genes are expressed in which kinds of tissues. Effectively, it’s a calculatedly cumbersome system, which splits the process of infection resistance in two. No antibodies show up in advance of the bioweapon’s launch, but as soon as it’s launched, the launchers can distribute the trigger to their own personnel without it being obvious to any onlooker that it’s a defense mechanism.”

  “Isn’t that overcomplicated?” Smith asked dubiously.

  “Of course it is,” Lisa agreed. “That’s the whole point of biowarfare. Sneaky is best. But if I were planning World War Three, I probably wouldn’t approach the problem that way. I’d probably be looking at smart fibers and second skins. If I were on the Containment Commission, I’d be looking to issue the population with some very smart suits.” She was looking hard at him, trying to gauge his reaction, but he was spooky enough to have an efficient poker face.

  “Morgan Miller was once an expert on retroviruses, I believe,” he said, abruptly changing tack.

  “A long time ago,” Lisa agreed. “In the early years of the century, retroviruses were the vectors of choice for transforming animal eggs stripped from the ova of slaughtered livestock. Morgan’s search for an all-purpose transformer focused on that kind of carrier mechanism until 2010 or thereabouts, when anti-viral research moved into the next phase. Don’t be misled by the AIDS connection, though—not all retroviruses were bad news even back then. The ones Morgan worked with were constructive. I doubt that he bothered to keep library specimens in living mice, in Mouseworld or anywhere else, although he may have had a few frozen down and he’d have kept full sequence data for any novel types he put together. Is there some particular reason that the MOD is interested in retroviruses?”

  She didn’t expect an answer to the question and she didn’t get one.

  “We have all his publications from that era, of course,” Smith said. “What we don’t know is how much work he did that was never written up.”

  “All university staff wrote up everything they could in those days,” Lisa assured him. “Publication wasn’t just the currency of promotion back then—it was the high road to grant funding. The patent wars confused the situation, of course, but once the intellectual-property situation was clarified, he’d have put everything on the record that would go.”

  “Including failed experiments?”

  “There’s no such thing as a failed experiment,” Lisa told the MOD man wryly. “Those experiments also serve the cause; they merely confirm the null hypothesis. But everyone has runs that get fouled up and are quietly dropped from the record, and everyone has the kind of dull results that they always mean to write up when they’ve nothing better to do, but never quite get around to because something better always turns up in time. Then again, there are the incomplete sequences—sets of data that need a little something extra to cover all the angles and make them genuinely meaningful. Sometimes it’s so difficult to block off the last few holes in a story that doesn’t have much of a punch line anyway that it hardly seems worth the effort. So, yes—even though Morgan would have put everything on the record that was fit to be put, he probably had all kinds of results that never got that far, including sequences for all kinds of viral transformers—retros and every other kind of artificial we’ve classified. But the idea that any one of them might be a recipe for a powerful bioweapon, or a defense against one, is the stuff of crude melodrama. It Ed Burdillon was working on some new method of antibody packaging for you, and Morgan was helping him, I’d have to say that that’s far more likely to have attracted unwelcome attention than his old work on retroviruses.”

  “I see,” Smith said unconvincingly. “You do understand, Dr. Friemann, that all our biowarfare research is purely defensive.”

  “Of course I do,” Lisa agreed, taking care not to sound too sarcastic.

  “Could a defense mechanism of any kind that would fit under the rubric of antibody packaging be short-circuited? If an enemy knew how the antibodies were to be packaged, but didn’t know exactly what was to be included in the package, could the whole system be attacked? Could one, for instance, deploy a virus to attack an entire antibody-packaging system?”

  “Maybe,” Lisa said, “but we’re getting into deep hypothetical water here. Unless you care to tell me exactly what it is that Ed Burdillon was asked to do, and why your bosses think that Morgan’s particular expertise might have had a special bearing on the problem, I can’t make a useful judgment.”

  Either Smith didn’t know the answer himself or he didn’t care to tell her yet—which didn’t surprise Lisa in the least. “We’re here,” he said as the Jaguar swung into the entrance of an underground parking lot.

  While the vehicle paused at the booth outside the opaque screen that covered the entrance to the lot, Lisa had time to look up at what appeared to be a perfectly ordinary office building. Whatever kind of ID the blond driver was holding up to the security guard at the barrier must have impressed him, because he saluted as he pressed the button that raised the screen, then waved them through.

  “Let’s see what Ahasuerus has to tell us,” Smith said as he reached across to open Lisa’s door for her, even though her left hand would have been perfectly adequate to the task.

  NINE

  The building into which Lisa and Peter Grimmett Smith ascended was indeed perfectly ordinary, at least by the standards of recent construction. The elevator from the parking lot took them only as far as the lobby atrium, where they had to pass through a metal detector before being allowed to approach the reception desk. The edge of the circular desk was surmounted by a transparent wall made of some chitinoid substance that glittered eerily as its curves reflected the light of the high-set mock chandeliers.

  Smith passed a smartcard through a narrow slit in the wall. The bored teenage girl who accepted it fed it to her station with the world-weary air that was currently de rigueur among what the tabloids called “slaves of the machines.”

  “That’s okay, Mr. Smith,” she said after consulting her screen. “Dr. Goldfarb’s waiting for you. Take elevator number nine. This afternoon’s code is 857. Thank you for your patience.”

  Lisa tried to remember when “Thank you for your patience” had replaced such vapid formulas as “Have a nice day” in the standard lexicon of programmed social interaction, but she couldn’t put a date on it. Patience had been in such short supply for so long that the mantra might have come into use at any time between 2001 and 2030.

  The principal design features of the high-rise had, of course, predated the establishment of the Containment Commission by some twenty years. Their ostensible purpose in the 2020s had been to offer protection against the ever-present menaces of client rage and employees inclined to “go postal.” Unfortunately, the equipment of such edifices with “fortress hearts” had quickly demonstrated that the quality of a fortress is only as good as the people and systems manning it. It hadn’t taken more than a couple of years to reveal the many kinds of chaos that could be created in such a building by a systems crash, and only a couple of years more to reveal how much worse such chaos could become if it were boosted by a
ctive malice.

  Arguments had raged for years as to how much better each new generation of “foolproof software” really was—until the advent of new plagues had brought about a sudden reversal of public opinion as the millions of people who had to work within the carcasses of these monstrosities suddenly realized the advantages of careful isolation. The building housing the West-of-England office of the Ahasuerus Foundation was probably host to more than a hundred different megacorp groups and close to a thousand human employees, whose chances of picking up even so much as a common cold within its walls were negligible. Even the fiercest plague war was highly unlikely to touch inhabitants of institutions like this one, provided they kept their cars clean and their clothes smart. It also helped if they lived alone.

  No wonder the world is overfull of workaholics, Lisa thought as the elevator smoothly carried them up to the thirty-first floor. While conversation was suspended, she took the opportunity to ring Mike Grundy and ask for news. He reported that Chan still hadn’t checked in and that his own attempts to see Ed Burdillon at the hospital had been thwarted by Smith’s men. He also confirmed that her flat was still out of bounds. Lisa asked him to transfer her car, some clean clothes, and a few other essentials of everyday life to the Renaissance. He promised to see to it.

  “Did your people get anything useful from Ed Burdillon?” she asked Smith when she’d returned the phone to her belt.

  “Nothing useful,” Smith told her, so glumly that it had to be true. “We passed the clothes he was wearing to Forrester—let’s hope he can come up with something.”

  The elevator car was capable of sideways movement through “unmanned corridors,” as well as vertical movement in its shaft, so it eventually delivered them direct to a door that was supposedly unreachable by any other means.

  Dr. Goldfarb was a little man in a dark-blue suit. The suit was as smart in the new sense as Peter Grimmett Smith’s, and considerably smarter in the old sense. Although the texture of Goldfarb’s skin implied that he was five or ten years younger than Smith and Lisa, he was wearing gold-rimmed spectacles that would not have looked out of place in a Dickensian costume drama; either he was something of a poseur, Lisa deduced, or he was untreatably phobic about lasers.

  Goldfarb ushered his visitors through the reception area and into his station-packed inner sanctum. He seemed to be in sole charge of the office at present, although there were two chairs in each section. He politely offered both the chairs in the inner office to his visitors, but Smith declined and Lisa thought it best to do likewise. It was as if none of the three wanted to offer any of the others the psychological advantage of standing.

  “I’m afraid that I really can’t offer you much help,” Goldfarb said, securing his quasiDickensian image by rubbing his hands together to emphasize his helplessness and his regret.

  “This is both a police matter and a matter of national security,” Smith informed him coldly. “I understand that you need to operate a policy of strict confidentiality, but Morgan Miller’s life may be in danger. We need to know exactly what he told you.”

  “Oh, yes, of course” Goldfarb was quick to say. “I’ve been in touch with New York, and they agree entirely that we must cooperate fully. The problem is that Professor Miller really didn’t give me any significant information when he visited. I’ve made a tape of our entire interview for you, but I fear that you won’t find it very useful.”

  As he spoke, he picked up a wafer from the console to his left and held it out to Lisa. Lisa accepted it, then glanced at Smith to see if he wanted it passed on to him immediately. When he made no sign, she put it in the breast pocket of her tunic.

  “Thank you,” said Smith.

  “I’m not trying to hide anything,” Goldfarb insisted, although no one had insinuated by word or gesture that he was. “Professor Miller came here primarily to ask me questions about the organization. He’d read our mission statement and had made what seemed to me to be a reasonably comprehensive study of the research projects we currently sponsor, but he seemed slightly anxious about certain unfortunate rumors that have circulated in the tabloid press….”

  “I presume that what you mean,” Peter Grimmett Smith observed, although he didn’t inject any measurable sarcasm into the statement, “is that he wanted to make sure you’re a real research institute, not a bunch of crackpot conspirators.”

  Goldfarb actually blushed, but he didn’t go so far as to wince. “If you want to put it so crudely,” he conceded. “Professor Miller was anxious to ascertain that we would make responsible use of any data that he might pass on to us.”

  “But he didn’t tell you what the data in question might be?” Smith asked. Lisa didn’t think much of Smith’s interrogatory technique, but he was severely handicapped by his reluctance to ask the questions he actually wanted answered. To introduce the topic of antibody packaging would be recklessly indiscreet.

  “As you’ll see for yourself when you look at the transcript,” Goldfarb murmured defensively. Lisa realized that one reason why Smith hadn’t taken the wafer from her was that he was signaling to Goldfarb that he knew perfectly well that the transcript could easily have been doctored and didn’t consider it worth the silicon and rare earth it was printed on. “All he said,” Goldfarb added when he realized that Smith and Lisa were waiting for him to go on, “is that he’d been trying to solve a seemingly intractable problem for nearly forty years, and that although he’d failed, he thought he ought to make his data available so that other researchers wouldn’t have to repeat all his wasted stratagems.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Lisa said immediately. “I’ve known Morgan Miller for thirty-nine years, and I’ve followed every step of his quest to solve the problem of developing a universal transformation system. Even if he hasn’t published every last detail of his failed attempts, there’s nothing esoteric about the work. Anyway, why should he think that an organization like yours would be interested in his records? He’s never done anything specifically relevant to longevity research or suspended-animation techniques.”

  “Really?” said Goldfarb, who seemed genuinely surprised. “I must admit that isn’t the impression he gave me. When you look at the transcript—”

  “What is the impression he gave you?” Smith butted in.

  Goldfarb hesitated, but only for a moment. “Well,” he said, blushing again, “I did get the impression that the data to which he referred was directly relevant to the core element of our mission statement.”

  “The extension of the human life span?” Smith was quick to clarify.

  “The fostering of human emortality,” Goldfarb corrected him. Glancing sideways at Lisa, he added: “That’s emortality with an ‘e.’ Our founder disliked the word immortality’ because he thought it implied an inability to die no matter what, whereas—”

  “I know what emortality means,” Lisa said through slightly gritted teeth. “I’m a scientist, not a community policeman—and I’ve known Morgan Miller well for nearly forty years. Are you suggesting that Morgan was engaged throughout that time on some clandestine line of research that he never even mentioned to me?”

  Goldfarb shrugged. “I know nothing about the circumstances …” he began, but trailed off in evident confusion, unable to decide where the sentence ought to go.

  “But you’re definitely telling us that whatever this line of research was, it was unsuccessful?” Smith put in. “According to what he told you, he only wanted to save others from wandering up the same blind alleys, not knowing that they’d already been checked.”

  “That’s what he told me,” Goldfarb agreed hesitantly. It didn’t need a psychologist to spot the implied “but.”

  “And what did you tell New York?” Smith demanded.

  Goldfarb didn’t reply. He and his superiors had obviously agreed that he had a duty to override the issues of confidentiality that were relevant to his conversation with Morgan Miller, but Smith’s question presumably went beyond that decision. “It wa
s just an impression I got,” the little man said defensively.

  “We’ve already taken note of the fact that you’re the kind of man who forms a lot of impressions,” Smith said rather intemperately. “What did you tell New York?”

  “Nothing,” Goldfarb insisted. “It’s just… I’m trying to help you here … it’s just that scientists nowadays have got into the habit of playing their cards very close to their chests. Miller came here fishing for information, and I wasn’t entirely sure that he’d have bothered doing that if his results had been as uniformly negative as he said they were. I told New York that I thought he was probably keeping something up his sleeve.”

  Goldfarb was blushing again, having obviously considered the possibility that it might have been his “impression” that had prompted Morgan Miller’s kidnapping. It didn’t seem very likely to Lisa, but in a crazy world, it sometimes didn’t need much to trigger precipitate responses.

  “That was rather irresponsible, don’t you think?” she put in.

  “There’s also the possibility that he’d missed something,” Goldfarb retorted, shifting his ground uncomfortably. “Scientists don’t always have a clear view of the implications of their own results, especially if they haven’t exposed them to any kind of peer review. I told New York that I thought Miller might be uncertain about the causes for his failure, and that he might want someone else to take a look at his results in case they could pick up something he’d overlooked. He did seem … well, frustrated. As if he were annoyed with himself for not having solved what must have seemed at first to be a minor obstacle, even after all this time. There was something about the manner of his approach that suggested desperation.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” Lisa said, unable to contain her annoyance. “You may think you’re a good judge of character, Dr. Goldfarb, but the person you’re describing isn’t Morgan Miller, and the Morgan Miller I know never gave me the slightest hint that he was working on any kind of longevity technology. None of this rings true. I don’t have a clue as to why he came to you, but if he really said what you say he said, in the way you say he said it, then he must have been playing a part. He was spinning you a line, maybe because he wanted to find out something about Ahasuerus—or you—that he couldn’t find out without trickery.”