The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [46]
She didn’t expect an answer to the question and she didn’t get one.
“We have all his publications from that era, of course,” Smith said. “What we don’t know is how much work he did that was never written up.”
“All university staff wrote up everything they could in those days,” Lisa assured him. “Publication wasn’t just the currency of promotion back then—it was the high road to grant funding. The patent wars confused the situation, of course, but once the intellectual-property situation was clarified, he’d have put everything on the record that would go.”
“Including failed experiments?”
“There’s no such thing as a failed experiment,” Lisa told the MOD man wryly. “Those experiments also serve the cause; they merely confirm the null hypothesis. But everyone has runs that get fouled up and are quietly dropped from the record, and everyone has the kind of dull results that they always mean to write up when they’ve nothing better to do, but never quite get around to because something better always turns up in time. Then again, there are the incomplete sequences—sets of data that need a little something extra to cover all the angles and make them genuinely meaningful. Sometimes it’s so difficult to block off the last few holes in a story that doesn’t have much of a punch line anyway that it hardly seems worth the effort. So, yes—even though Morgan would have put everything on the record that was fit to be put, he probably had all kinds of results that never got that far, including sequences for all kinds of viral transformers—retros and every other kind of artificial we’ve classified. But the idea that any one of them might be a recipe for a powerful bioweapon, or a defense against one, is the stuff of crude melodrama. It Ed Burdillon was working on some new method of antibody packaging for you, and Morgan was helping him, I’d have to say that that’s far more likely to have attracted unwelcome attention than his old work on retroviruses.”
“I see,” Smith said unconvincingly. “You do understand, Dr. Friemann, that all our biowarfare research is purely defensive.”
“Of course I do,” Lisa agreed, taking care not to sound too sarcastic.
“Could a defense mechanism of any kind that would fit under the rubric of antibody packaging be short-circuited? If an enemy knew how the antibodies were to be packaged, but didn’t know exactly what was to be included in the package, could the whole system be attacked? Could one, for instance, deploy a virus to attack an entire antibody-packaging system?”
“Maybe,” Lisa said, “but we’re getting into deep hypothetical water here. Unless you care to tell me exactly what it is that Ed Burdillon was asked to do, and why your bosses think that Morgan’s particular expertise might have had a special bearing on the problem, I can’t make a useful judgment.”
Either Smith didn’t know the answer himself or he didn’t care to tell her yet—which didn’t surprise Lisa in the least. “We’re here,” he said as the Jaguar swung into the entrance of an underground parking lot.
While the vehicle paused at the booth outside the opaque screen that covered the entrance to the lot, Lisa had time to look up at what appeared to be a perfectly ordinary office building. Whatever kind of ID the blond driver was holding up to the security guard at the barrier must have impressed him, because he saluted as he pressed the button that raised the screen, then waved them through.
“Let’s see what Ahasuerus has to tell us,” Smith said as he reached across to open Lisa’s door for her, even though her left hand would have been perfectly adequate to the task.
NINE
The building into which Lisa and Peter Grimmett Smith ascended was indeed perfectly ordinary, at least by the standards of recent construction. The elevator from the parking lot took them only as far as the lobby atrium, where they had to pass through a metal detector before being allowed to approach the reception desk. The edge of the circular desk was surmounted by a transparent