The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [102]
“I see,” she said. “Knockout mice are perfect models of genetic-deficiency diseases, but the efficacy of antibody-packaging systems can only be assessed in the context of a whole population—ideally, a population under stress. And there you were, spending hours every day in a room whose four walls showed stable populations under stress, all of them running smoothly in the same ancient groove. So you decided to convert two of them into experimental populations by introducing your own transformed mice to see how they would get on.”
“Only one,” Chan said. “I wanted to split the replicates two and two, but Morgan insisted that my intervention should be minimal. I introduced the transformed mice into Paris. Technically, it was a criminal act in that it bypassed the university’s Ethics Committee as well as the Departmental Committee, but I thought it criminal in a higher sense that the Mouseworld experiment had been allowed to stagnate. I insisted that you be kept out of it, Lisa, because I knew you could not countenance any such argument in your professional capacity, but I hope you can see that my conviction was deep and sincere.”
“Cut the crap and tell me what happened to the fucking mice,” Lisa instructed him brutally. Bradford Road was giving way to North Road and her rendezvous with Mike was only a few hundred yards away. Her onboard computer still had not registered a single offense.
“They died,” Chan said in a hurt tone. “They could not survive among the citizen mice. The reason, I believe—”
She hadn’t time to listen to speculation. The fact was all that mattered. “So the experiment failed? It was a complete bust—and please don’t feed me that crap about there being no failed experiments in science.”
“It was a failure,” he admitted. “It did not seem significant at the time, when Morgan and I were trying so many different things, but—”
“But when Ed Burdillon roped you into testing his new antibody-packaging system, you couldn’t help wondering whether it would run into exactly the same problem. So you—and I do mean you, in the narrow sense—were thrown into paroxysms of doubt as to whether you ought to confess to your ancient crime, on the off chance that it might save the Containment Commission from pinning all its hopes on a nonstarter. Except, of course, you couldn’t quite figure out who to confess it to—and when the lunatics who snatched Morgan also took the trouble to torch the evidence of your ancient crime, you really got your knickers in a twist. And that, to cut a long guilt trip short, is when you finally thought of me.” The junction of North End Road and Ralph Allen’s Drive was visible now, and she could see Mike Grundy’s car, parked and waiting.
“I thought you would know what to do,” Chan said lamely. “I did not.”
“For a certified genius,” Lisa said angrily, “you truly are completely fucking stupid. I really used to look up to you, you know?” She was extremely annoyed with herself, because she knew this was a bad time to be fighting back tears of frustration and disappointment. It didn’t make her feel any better to know that neither Peter Grimmett Smith nor Mike Grundy would have had the faintest idea of what she was on the verge of crying about. The only person who could possibly have understood was Morgan.
“Yes,” Chan admitted miserably. “I know.”
“I wish I had time to figure out exactly what the hell you’re talking about, and whether it matters,” she said as she brought the car to a lurching halt at the junction, “but I don’t. I have to spring Morgan, and I only have a couple of hours to do it in. So I’m going to hand you over to Mike, and he’ll take you to Peter Grimmett Smith. You tell Smith everything, except maybe where you saw me last. You can give him my apologies for not being there to translate your explanations for him, and for not being there period. But tell him it really is for the best that I do this