The Cassandra Complex

The question was addressed to Mike, but it was the sergeant who took it upon himself to answer. “Nobody saw or heard a thing,” he said. “Detached house, nice neighborhood, four in the morning, power out—what do you expect? We still don’t know for sure that he was taken. He was definitely at home the previous evening, but he could have gone out under his own steam after the blackout.”

“Why would he do that?” Lisa countered.

“How would I know?” Hapgood said, seemingly stifling the temptation to add an insubordinate expletive by way of punctuation. “According to Sweet, the guy was the next best thing to a comic-book weird scientist. Obsessive-compulsive type.”

From the corner of her eye, Lisa saw Mike Grundy wince. The sergeant obviously wasn’t yet party to all the relevant gossip.

“His work was reckoned as an obsession only because he never found what he was looking for,” Lisa observed calmly. “If his particular Holy Grail hadn’t proved quite so elusive, his single-mindedness would be called commitment and he’d have a book-length entry in every encyclopedia on the net.”

“Holy Grail?” Hapgood queried sarcastically. For a detective, he was surprisingly slow on the uptake.

“The prize,” she said. “The panacea.”

“A cure for hyperflu?”

Lisa supposed that it was a natural guess, even though the hyperflus had been around for only seven years. “Not a cure for a specific disease,” she informed the young man wearily. “Not even for a whole class of diseases. Something even more basic than that. A general-purpose, targetable transformer that would make allgene therapies easier to administer and more precise. When he started out, cancers were still a major killer and everyone was trying to tailor virus transformers to take them out—‘magic bullets,’ the jargon used to call them. Morgan was working at the most fundamental level, trying to design a vector that could take any DNA cargo into any type of specialized cell and deliver it to any chromosomal address, according to need or demand. If he’d found it, it would have provided a method of attacking all genetic-deficiency diseases, all cancers, and most kinds of injury. One-shot medicine—just turn up at the clinic, list your symptoms, get your tailor-made injection, go home cured. A vector like that would have had other functions too, but the main incentive was medical. As individual solutions to specific problems turned up year after year, though, the pressure to develop a multipurpose delivery service eased off.

“In the end, Morgan seemed to most of his colleagues to be searching for a solution to a problem that no longer existed. It didn’t lessen his determination to find it.”

“And did he?” asked the sergeant, fishing for a motive.

“No,” Lisa admitted. “And even if he had, it wouldn’t be worth kidnapping him to get it—not unless someone’s dreamed up a brand-new killer app that no one else managed to think of during the last forty years.”

“But that kind of research iswar relevant, isn’t it?” Mike put in. “If Morgan had found it, it would provide a general defense against biowarfare agents, wouldn’t it?”

“Actually, no,” said Lisa. “We already have defenses against the individual hyperflus and their kin—the problem is that they mutate so quickly and so promiscuously that they keep one step ahead of our immune systems. Morgan’s new delivery system wouldn’t get around that problem. Nor would it fortify us against the nextwave of biowarfare agents, which will undoubtedly be transformers themselves. If this mess has anything to do with Morgan’s research, it must relate to something he found by accident—but if Morgan had discovered anythingrelevant to biowar defense, he’d have handed it straight to the MOD. He wouldn’t even have asked for a quid pro quo. Obsessive-compulsive he might be, but he’s not conscienceless, and he would nevertry to play political or commercial games with something that might save lives.”

“According to Sweet,” DS Hapgood put in, “he was nutty about overpopulation. Just like the Gaean Libs. Always argued that plague war was inevitable, and not entirely a bad thing, Sweet said.”

“That’s right,” said Lisa. “Morgan always said that everything that’s happening now had been inevitable for nearly a century, and easily foreseeable to anyone with half a mind at least since the days of his childhood. He’s always argued that the coming collapse would have an upside as well as a down—but that doesn’t mean he regards it as any less hideous and tragic than it seems to be working out to be. He’d never have admitted to obsession, but he always pleaded guilty to being a victim of the Cassandra Complex: the sense of powerlessness and world-weariness that comes from knowing that terrible things are going to happen without anyone being able to prevent them. The Gaean Libs and other pious econuts might be prepared to tell the world that the death of millions of people is a blessing and exactly what Mother Ecosphere needs, and that we all deserve everything we get, but Morgan Miller despised that kind of sanctimony. If he’d stumbled across a cure for hyperflu, he’d have done everything he could to get it to everyone who might benefit from it. Believe me, I know.”

She became uncomfortably aware that everybody in the room was staring at her, embarrassed by the intensity of her polemic. Jerry Hapgood had finally got the message, and he shut up—but Mike Grundy had heard that kind of sermon far too many times to give it his full attention, and he was still mulling over the conversation he and Lisa had had at the door of Mouseworld. “What if it weren’t a new means of defense?” he asked quietly. “What if it were a new means of attack?”

That, Lisa had to admit, was a horse of a different color. If Morgan hadhad a secret, and a powerful motive for keeping it… .

“This is all rather hypothetical, isn’t it?” said Judith Ke

“It was my fault,” Mike put in quickly. “We were sidetracked.”

“I needed a cup of coffee more than I needed sealant,” Lisa said. “Given that you ordered me to stick around instead of going back to the labs with Steve or to Professor Miller’s house, I thought I’d be best employed in helping to fit the various pieces of the puzzle together. If your people are trying to establish Morgan Miller as the prime suspect in this affair, they’re barking up the wrong tree, and if I can direct them to more profitable lines of inquiry, I might be able to save you a great deal of work.”

“How many of the mice in the burned-out lab belonged to Morgan Miller?” Ke

“I doubt that there were more than a couple of hundred involved in current experiments,” Lisa told her. “Stella Filisetti will probably be able to give you an exact number, and a full account of any transformations Morgan had carried out on them.”

“What about mice left over from old experiments?”

“I don’t know,” Lisa admitted. “He probably had a hand in designing twenty or thirty disease models, and at least as many strains transformed for other purposes.”

The predatory gaze switched targets, focusing on Mike Grundy. “Do we know for sure that Miller went home yesterday evening?” the chief inspector asked. “The officers at the house have surely confirmed that much?”

“Yes,” he acknowledged.

“Is there any evidence that anyone else was present? Did he have any visitors, apart from the unwanted ones?”

Lisa inferred the question meant that Stella Filisetti wasn’t at home, or anywhere else that she could be easily located. Mike seemed to hesitate between a straightforward negative answer and the more honest rejoinder that although nobody had reported any such evidence, he didn’t really know. Eventually, he said nothing. Instead, he picked up his mobile and called the officer at the scene for an update. There was a long pause while they waited for a response.