God dammit...
I shook off the sickening self-pitying regrets. I should have got over it by this time, I told myself. A decent period of mourning was reasonable, but three years along the road I should have stopped looking back. I supposed rather uneasily that I wouldn’t be free of nostalgia until the last of the horses I’d ridden was heading towards Centaur Care. Not even then, if many like Peterman turned up on my doorstep.
The minute I switched off the set the telephone rang and I listened to Lizzie’s voice sounding surprised.
‘Hello! I thought I’d get your answering machine. I thought you’d be at Cheltenham.’
‘I didn’t go.’
‘So it seems. Why not? Is your head all right?’
‘Nothing to worry about. I keep wanting to go to sleep.’
‘Thoroughly natural. Listen to nature.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Thanks for lending me Aziz. What a fascinating young man.’
‘Is he?’
‘Too bright for his job, I’d say.’
‘Why do you think so? I need bright drivers.’
‘Most drivers can’t discuss the periodic table of elements, let alone in French.’
I laughed.
‘Just think about it. Anyway,’ she said, ‘I’ve a report on your tubes.’
It took me a few seconds to work out which tubes she meant, typical of the sluggish state of my brain.
‘Tubes,’ I said. ‘Oh, great.’
‘They each contained 10 ccs of viral transport medium.’
‘Of what?’
‘To be precise about the ingredients, the tubes contained bovine albumin, glutamic acid, sucrose and an antibiotic called Gentamicin, all in sterile water at a balanced pH of 7.3.’
‘Er...’ I said, reaching for a pencil. ‘Spell all that slowly.’
She laughed and did so.
‘But what’s it for?’ I asked.
‘For transporting a virus, as I said.’
‘But what virus?’ My mind thought irrationally of Michelangelo, which was nonsense. Michelangelo needed a different sort of tube.
‘Any virus,’ Lizzie said. ‘Viruses are highly mysterious and barely visible even under an electron microscope. One can usually only see their results. You can also detect the antibodies the invaded organism develops to defend itself.’
‘But...’ I paused to organise a few scattering thoughts, ‘was there any virus in the tubes?’
‘It’s impossible to say. It looks likely, considering that the tubes were carefully sealed and were being carried in the dark in a vacuum flask — and incidentally, the vacuum flask would have been necessary to maintain the tubes in a chilled environment, say 4 °C, not a hot one — but you’ve had those tubes for days, haven’t you?’
‘They were being carried in one of my horseboxes a week ago today.’
‘That’s what I thought. Well, viruses will only survive outside a living organism for a very short time. Viral transport medium is used for taking virally infected matter from a sufferer to a laboratory for testing, and for infecting another organism for research purposes, but viruses don’t live long in the medium or on culture plates.’
‘How long?’
‘It would depend. The conflicting views here in the university say for as little as five hours or for as many as forty-eight. After that, any virus would be inactive.’
‘But Lizzie...’
‘Yes, what?’
‘I mean... I don’t really understand.’
‘You’re hardly alone,’ she said. ‘There are about six hundred known viruses, probably there are at least double that number, and they are all unidentifiable by sight. They’re particles of DNA or RNA surrounded by a coating of protein. They are cylindrical or polyhedral in shape, but you can’t tell what they do by looking at them. They’re not like bacteria, where the organisms are recognizable individually by their appearance. Most viruses look the same. They live by invading living tissue and reproducing in animal cells — for animal, read also human. Flu, colds, polio, smallpox, measles, rabies, AIDS, dozens of things. Everyone knows their effects. No one knows how they evolved. Some, like flu, are constantly changing.’
In silence I thought about what she’d told me until in the end she said, ‘Freddie? Are you still there?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Do you mean,’ I asked slowly, ‘that you could take some flu virus from someone and transport it for miles and infect someone else, without the people even meeting?’
‘Sure, you could. But why would you?’
‘Malice?’ I suggested.
‘Freddie!’
‘You could, couldn’t you?’
‘As far as I gather, you’d have to have a large inoculum in a small amount of medium, the pathogenicity of the virus would have to be high and the receptor would have to be highly susceptible.’
‘Is that straight Professor Quipp?’
She said tartly, ‘Since you ask, yes.’
‘Lizzie,’ I said apologetically, ‘it’s just that I need it in plain English.’
‘Oh. Well, in that case, what it means is that you’d have to have a very active virus and as much of it as possible in relation to the amount of medium, and the person receiving it would have to be likely to catch the infection. It wouldn’t be any good trying to infect someone with the present strain of flu if they’d been inoculated against it. You couldn’t give polio to anyone who’d taken the Salk vaccine, or give smallpox or measles to protected people. There’s no proven vaccine yet against AIDS, and AIDS is terrifying because it may be that it changes, like flu, though that’s not established so far.’
‘If it was flu virus in the tubes,’ I asked, thinking, ‘would you inject it?’
‘No, you wouldn’t. Flu is spread through respiratory droplets or saliva. You’d have to squirt the medium up someone’s nose. That might do it.’
‘Or sprinkle it on their cornflakes?’
‘Not really reliable. A respiratory virus would have to go into the respiratory tract, not the stomach. From the nose or lungs it could invade the whole system, but it might not have any effect if you injected it into a muscle or straight into the bloodstream.’ She paused. ‘You do have gruesome thoughts.’
‘It’s been a gruesome week.’
She agreed with the assessment. ‘Is my dear little helicopter still exactly where I left it?’
‘Yes. What do you want me to do with it?’
‘My partners suggest putting it on a low-loader and bringing it home.’
‘Do you think it can be salvaged?’ I probably sounded surprised, but there were bits of it, she said, that looked unharmed. The tail rotor, for example, and the main rotor’s linkage, the most expensive part of the works. A helicopter could be rebuilt. It would have to stay as it was, though, she said, until after the aircraft crash inspector had been to see it and made a report. Even ground accidents, it seemed, had to go through the mill.
‘Talking of viruses,’ I said, ‘we’ve had a doozy in the computer.’
‘A what?’
‘A killer. No vaccine given in time, alas.’
‘What exactly are you talking about?’
I told her.
‘Inconvenient,’ she said. ‘Let me know if you need anything else.’
‘I will. Incidentally, Aziz said you were a nice lady.’
‘So I should hope.’
I laughed with affection and disconnected and from my bedroom window watched a zippy small car drive onto my tarmac and stop with a shocked jolt within first sight of the Jaguar-Robinson embrace.
My visitor, as I was delighted to see as she stood up in the open air to stare at the wreckage, was Maudie Watermead; blonde, slight, forever legs in blue denim.