The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [39]
“A seller, then,” Smith said.
Lisa shook her head to that too. “No,” she said softly. “I don’t think so.”
Smith didn’t bother to point put that there didn’t seem to be an obvious third alternative—unless the Ahasuerus Foundation and the Institute of Algeny had something less obvious in common. “Neither institution is British,” he commented, watching closely for Lisa’s reaction. “The Swindon outfit’s European Union, but its headquarters are in Germany. Ahasuerus is American.”
“Intellectual activity is as global as commerce nowadays,” Lisa pointed out. “In any case, the EU and the USA are the best of buddies, united against the menaces of hyperflu, international terrorism, and illicit economic migration.”
“True,” said Smith in a tone that suggested it wasn’t the whole truth. The MOD probably figured that the nation’s friends needed more careful watching than its enemies did.
Lisa waited for the MOD man to continue—which he did after a contemplative pause. “So tell me, Dr. Friemann,” he said, “what would a man like Dr. Miller do with a new technology of longevity if he happened to stumble across one while playing games with genetically modified mice?”
Lisa didn’t open her mouth to begin a reply, because she knew full well that she wouldn’t be able to finish the first sentence before doubts consumed it and spat it out. She needed more time to weigh the possibilities and to recalculate her assessments of the situation as she had so far found it. She shuffled uncomfortably in her seat, not because the chair was badly designed, but because the ambience of the seminar room had begun to call forth fugitive memories of long-past pressures and intellectual discomforts.
As long ago as 1999, she knew, a gene had been discovered whose modification extended the normal life span of a mouse by a third. It had triggered an assiduous search for more, which had still been in full swing in 2002, but Morgan had never deigned to participate. He had correctly predicted that the equivalent gene in humans would turn out to have been activated already by the processes of natural selection that had extended the human life span in the interests of parental care. Was it conceivable, she wondered, that even though he hadn’t been in the hunt, Morgan had nevertheless contrived to stumble upon a transformation that allowed mice to live much longer than their natural spans without exposing them to the long-understood rigors of calorific restriction? If so, it might have provided a motive powerful enough to inspire his kidnappers—and maybe a motive powerful enough to take the precaution of destroying every single mouse in Mouseworld.
Lisa wondered if Morgan’s paranoia about overpopulation might have been sufficiently intense to stop him from publishing an experimental finding that might have made the problem even worse—but she quickly rejected the hypothesis. As she had already told Peter Grimmett Smith, Morgan wasn’t that kind of man. Nor was he the kind of man who would automatically seek custodians for any kind of secret inside such fringe organizations as the Ahasuerus Foundation and the Institute of Algeny—in which case, why on earth had he contacted them? The fact that he had might have persuaded someone—someone who didn’t know him as well as she did—that he might have a secret worth stealing. In these troubled times, even a hint might have been enough to move someone to take desperate measures to steal his secret.
“Do you think someone inside one of the two organizations had Morgan snatched?” Lisa asked.
“It’s an appealing hypothesis,” Smith conceded. “If not,