Parnell had always intended to stop when he’d reached that part of the San Diego material in which the attempts had been made to connect – and then intrude – the spike-shaped haemag-glutinin protein into a receptive human host cell, and awoke at two a.m., startled, cold and disorientated, to discover he’d sprawled across the table, too close to the remains of a now near-sickening, pre-cooked lasagne. The last litre bottle of wine, now empty like the glass, was on the table beside it. Parnell ached, from how he’d slumped for however long it had been, and his stomach churned from the smell of the abandoned food. His eyes felt as if there was grit or sand in them every time he blinked, and blurred when he initially tried to focus upon the papers to see what section he’d reached. Parnell forced himself to clear the table and dispose of the debris of the meal, leaving his clothes where they fell, almost literally to crawl into bed, his last conscious thought that he’d reached that part of the research from which he most hoped to find a way forward – everything he remembered reading before epitomized the purity of research science, but hadn’t taken his mind any further forward in any direction.
Parnell awoke again, later than he had intended, still gritty-eyed but glad he’d cleared away and didn’t have to leave the previous night’s litter festering in his urgency to get back to McLean. He was still the first to arrive, deeply into what he’d expectantly decided to be the genesis for their specific interest, before Beverley came into the unit, closely followed, almost in procession, by everyone else.
Parnell waited until they were at their benches before emerging from his office. ‘I know I’m going against our established schedule but anyone had any startling revelations overnight from what you might have read?’
There was no immediate response. Then Deke Pulbrow said: ‘We’re not big enough, don’t have sufficient resources, to do what we’re trying to do. You count how many countries contributed to decode the domestic chicken genome? Six countries, with all the resources of six leading scientifically advanced institutions. Competing against which there’s just six of us – six ordinary people, not six countries – you making up the seventh, Dick. What chance do you think we’ve genuinely, practicably, got?’
‘It comes down to fractions,’ admitted Parnell. ‘You saying, because it’s fractions, we shouldn’t try?’
‘No,’ denied Pulbrow, at once. ‘What I’m saying is that we’re pissing into the wind to imagine we’ve a chance in hell of finding anything, no matter how hard we try. And I can’t imagine anyone trying any harder than us guys are trying.’
There was another brief silence. Parnell said: ‘Deke’s point is taken. Anyone else?’
‘I’m not proposing I break away from the new regime, reading all that there is here for us to read, but I’d like to run another string through the synthesizer,’ said Sato.
‘Go ahead,’ agreed Parnell at once. ‘Anyone else?’
This time there was no response. Parnell said: ‘OK, let’s keep reading. Anyone get any brilliant ideas, let’s hear them right away.’
As he read, with growing acceptance that he wasn’t going to get a lead, Parnell felt the disappointment of the others at San Diego’s unsuccessful efforts to find link between their 1918 flu discovery and the genome map they’d chosen from one of the most commonly eaten Chinese chickens, although conceding immediately that the connection was not the direct focus of their investigation but a naturally ongoing – and maybe ultimately successful – progression of it. Initially the only movement in the outside laboratory had been Sean Sato moving around his equipment, but that soon ended. No one bothered to leave for a coffee break, all accepting Kathy Richardson’s offer to bring it in. Lunch was more to rest wearily fogged eyes than to eat. No one took more than half an hour away from their desks or benches.
Without any conscious decision, six o’clock had evolved into the time for their end-of-day review, and that Friday night Parnell stuck rigidly to it, coming out of his side office precisely on time and bringing everyone up with the cry of: ‘OK, guys. Day’s over, as well as the week. Make it a full weekend. I know you’re going to take stuff home, like I am, but keep it light. The way we’re working we’re going all of us to end up brain-dead, and brain-dead we’re no use to anyone, certainly not to wives or partners or loved ones…’ He was instantly aware of the abrupt attention from everyone at the remark, not sure himself why he’d said it. It had just come naturally and there hadn’t been any clog of emotion when he’d said it. He hadn’t even been thinking of Rebecca. ‘Let’s clear our minds and our heads and start again on Monday,’ he concluded.
Parnell didn’t intend waiting until Monday, of course. And he had other work in mind, as well.
Parnell arrived at McLean just after seven on the Saturday morning, his reading until midnight bringing him two thirds of the way through the Scripps material. He put what remained of the American documentation beside that from San Diego on his desk, everything temporarily suspended, sure what he intended would only take up the morning, possibly even less. He accepted that there would have to be an explanation for the rest of the unit when they saw the obvious evidence of an experiment, but was unconcerned about it. He was, after all, working in his spare time, and by Monday he would have completed all the necessary reading, so he’d be further ahead than anyone else. On all their benches and desks there were sections of both dossiers obediently left for the following week. Parnell concentrated his experiment upon the medicines to which the additional expectorants and the rifofludine partial-preservative had been added, recording the dosages of each to his carefully separated test mice, from each of which he first took a blood sample to provide a comparative DNA string to measure the effect, if any, of the new formulae against the old. He was almost at the end of his preparation when the other idea came to him and he physically stopped what he was doing, considering it. With the exception of the three new constituents, every drug had gone through the required three-phase licensing process, and those three ingredients could not, in themselves, be humanly harmful. He wasn’t, anyway, considering human testing as such, just a shortcut to extend the experiments beyond mice.
He prepared each petrie dish with a measured sample of every brand product containing liulousine, beneuflous and rifofludine. It was difficult extruding the vein in his left arm and he inserted the hypodermic awkwardly, hurting himself, but he managed to withdraw sufficient blood identically to match the drug measures already in the culture dishes.
He was concentrating so totally upon storing them that he didn’t hear Beverley Jackson come into the laboratory. The first he knew of her presence was when she said: ‘What the hell are you doing?’ And so startled was he that he came close to dropping the culture dish in his hand.
He turned to face her at the door, aware that the shirt sleeve of his left arm was still rolled up and that the hypodermic, with some blood remaining in the chamber, was lying very obviously on the bench alongside Russell Benn’s samples.
‘I’m just working my way through something,’ Parnell said, inadequately.
Beverley came further into the room, absorbing everything as she did so. ‘For Christ’s sake, Dick, you’re experimenting on yourself! What is it? What have you injected? Tell me you haven’t done anything stupid! Holy Christ!’
‘Stop it,’ he said, hoping his calmness would calm her. ‘I haven’t injected myself with anything. I just needed human blood and I was the only donor.’
‘What for?’ she persisted, looking more intently at the neatly stacked bottles and phials. Before Parnell could answer she said: ‘They came from the chemical division a couple of days back, right?’