The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [38]
“Yes,” she said, “I certainly am.”
Lisa hadn’t expected it to be quite as easy as that. She guessed it wasn’t just Peter Grimmett Smith who had found himself short of resources; his employers probably thought they were scraping the bottom of the barrel by appointing him to investigate. From the viewpoint of the MOD, this was a minor distraction—a nuisance they would have been glad to leave alone, had they only dared.
On the other hand, she couldn’t let his willingness to take her aboard lull her into a false sense of security. The fact that he needed her didn’t mean that he trusted her.
“In that case,” Smith said, “I have to impress upon you that everything that passes between us from this moment on is confidential. You don’t repeat it—not even to Chief Inspector Kenna or Detective Inspector Grundy. Is that clear?”
“As crystal,” she said. “What have you got that Kenna hasn’t?”
He nodded, presumably approving her businesslike attitude. “We commandeered Miller’s phone records,” he said. “Two calls leaped out screaming—both made within the last week, both to institutions he’d never contacted before, both asking for appointments to visit. And before you ask—no, we didn’t have his phone tapped. He put a tape on the calls himself.”
That wasn’t easy to believe. “Morgan set a tape to record his own phone calls?”
“Not a permanent one. He just activated his answerphone during those particular calls. As if he wanted to make sure there was a record. As if he knew he might need one—even though he only asked for appointments to visit. He got the appointments within minutes, but that’s not surprising. He’s a biologist of some standing, even if he hasn’t published much recently.”
“Who did he call?” Lisa wanted to know.
“The first call was to the local offices of the Ahasuerus Foundation.”
Lisa had heard of the Ahasuerus Foundation. It had been set up by some buccaneering sleazeball who’d made a fortune playing the stock market during the Great Panic of ’25, ostensibly to sponsor research into technologies of longevity and suspended animation. At least a dozen similar outfits had been set up during the last half-century by aging millionaires offended by the thought they couldn’t take their ill-gotten gains with them.
“And the other?”
“That’s a little weirder—some crackpot outfit in Swindon called the Institute of Algeny. Algeny apparently—”
“I know what the word means,” Lisa told him.
Smith raised his eyebrows slightly. “Perhaps you could explain it to me,” he said mildly. “The on-line dictionary wasn’t very clear.”
“It was a coinage of the 1990s that never really caught on, although Morgan approved of it. It was derived by analogy with alchemy. Alchemy was a pseudoscience of inorganic transformations that assumed all metals were evolving gradually into gold, and might be given a helping hand to fulfill their aspirations if only the art could be properly understood and mastered. Algeny is an organic equivalent that assumes all organisms are striving to better themselves, and that we’re already in the process of mastering the art that will allow men to become supermen.”
Smith nodded. Lisa’s explanation had obviously added a measure of enlightenment to what he’d learned from the dictionary. “So the most obvious thing that the two institutions Miller contacted have in common—” he began tentatively.
“—is a strong interest in technologies of longevity,” Lisa finished for him.
“Miller’s not a young man,” Smith observed. “Do you think he was a potential buyer?”
Lisa considered the possibility, then shook her head. She felt that a shadow had fallen over her, and knew it must show on her face. “He was deeply ambivalent about the process of growing