The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [115]
That one was too important to leave unanswered, but all Lisa said was “Yes.”
Of course she’d considered the possibility that Stella really had found what she thought she had—but she’d rejected it. If Morgan Miller had discovered a life-extension treatment whose only deficiency was that it worked only on women, he wouldn’t have kept it entirely to himself. Even Helen Grundy and Stella Filisetti didn’t think that badly of him. They thought badly enough of Lisa to believe she’d conspired with him to keep it quiet, but they hadn’t been able to suppose that Morgan would simply let her grow old and die with all the rest. Even they accepted that if Morgan Miller had drawn up a list of his own personal Ice Age Elite, she would be on it.
There had to be something else: something that Stella Filisetti had missed; some obstacle that Morgan had stumbled over, that had carried on bruising his shins for forty years.
Lisa wanted to tell Mike that she was deeply sorry he had been caught up in it, and sorry that his ex-wife’s meddling would surely torpedo his attempts to cling to the vestiges of his career. She wanted to commiserate with him because her own career had been similarly blighted. She wanted to tell him, in the most heartfelt manner she could contrive, that it might all be for the best, because they should never have allowed themselves to sink so deeply into the ruts that had somehow consumed their lives. She wanted to try to convince him that they had been good citizen mice for far too long, putting up no resistance to the shrinkage of their personal space, refusing to get excited about the stultification of their options. She wanted to ask him whether it was really all bad to be a Calhounian rat, raging against the injustice of circumstance. She wanted to assure him that everything might still work out for the best, not merely for themselves, but for the world.
But she had no time.
Even if it had all been true, she had no time.
“Okay,” Grundy said when the silence had dragged on and on to the limits of bearability, even though it had lasted no more than ten or fifteen seconds. “Go.”
“You have to go first,” Lisa told him, “but you’ll have to leave your mobile with me. I need to use it.”
Chan had already moved around the Rover to the passenger door. Lisa’s final demand was a trifle excessive, but Mike didn’t have to ask why she wanted the phone. He simply nodded and handed it over before turning on his heel and opening the driver’s door. He glanced back only once before getting in and slamming it shut. Then he drove away, so fast that his onboard computer had to be flashing red warnings. Lisa pressed the automatic-dial button on Grundy’s phone and then hit 1.
The surge of relief she felt when Helen Grundy answered on the second ring with a monosyllabic “Yes?” hit Lisa like a tidal wave. She knew how utterly foolish she would have felt had she been unable to make that crucial contact.
“It’s Lisa Friemann, Helen,” she said, her voice sounding so leaden in her ears that she could hardly recognize it as her own. “We need to talk.”
On another occasion, under different circumstances, Lisa might have found something to savor in the silence that followed, knowing as she did what a heady cocktail of shock and fear must have prompted it. On this occasion, she was content merely to wait for a further response.
“What are you doing with Mike’s phone?” Helen Grundy asked, confirming Lisa’s suspicion that a call from any other instrument would probably have been blocked out.
“Mike’s not here,” Lisa said. “I sent him away. I’m alone. This is between you and me.”
“Well?” Helen said after another pause for thought. “What do you want?”
“It’s a matter of hours now, Helen. The computer people are working on the corrupted phone records. It’ll take them a while to figure