Forty Signs of Rain

‘In just a sec.’ She moved down the bench.

Brian said, ‘This better work, because Derek just told the press that it was the most promising self-healing therapy of the decade.’

Leo was startled to hear this. ‘No. You’re kidding.’

‘I’m not kidding.’

‘Oh not really. Not really.’

‘Really.’

‘How could he?’

‘Press release. Also calls to his favourite reporters, and on his webpage. The chat room is already talking about the ramifications. They’re betting one of the big pharms will buy us within the month.’

‘Please Bri, don’t be saying these things.’

‘Sorry, but you know Derek.’ Brian gestured at one of the computer screens glowing on the bench across the way. ‘It’s all over.’

Leo squinted at a screen. ‘It wasn’t on Bioworld Today.’

‘It will be tomorrow.’

The company’s website Breaking News box was blinking. Leo leaned over and jabbed it. Yep – lead story. HDL factory, potential for obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, heart disease …

‘Oh my God,’ Leo muttered as he read. ‘Oh my God.’ His face was flushed. ‘Why does he do this?’

‘He wants it to be true.’

‘So what? We don’t know yet.’

With her sly grin Marta said, ‘He wants you to make it happen, Leo. He’s like the Roadrunner and you’re Wile E. Coyote. He gets you to run off the edge of a cliff, and then you have to build the bridge back to the cliff before you fall.’

‘But it never works! He always falls!’

Marta laughed at him. She liked him, but she was tough. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘This time we’ll do it.’

Leo nodded, tried to calm down. He appreciated Marta’s spirit, and liked to be at least as positive as the most positive person in any given situation. That was getting tough these days, but he smiled the best he could and said, ‘Yeah, right, you’re good,’ and started to put on rubber gloves.

‘Remember the time he announced that we had haemophilia A whipped?’ Brian said.

‘Please.’

‘Remember the time he put out a press release saying he had decapitated mice at a thousand r.p.m. to show how well our therapy worked?’

‘The guillotine turntable experiment?’

‘Please,’ Leo begged. ‘No more.’

He picked up a pipette and tried to focus on the work. Withdraw, inject, withdraw, inject – alas, most of the work in this stage was automated, leaving people free to think whether they wanted to or not. After a while Leo left them to it and went back to his office to check his e-mail, then helplessly to read what portion of Derek’s press release he could stomach. ‘Why does he do this, why why why?’

It was a rhetorical question, but Marta and Brian were now standing in the doorway, and Marta was implacable: ‘I tell you – he thinks he can make us do it.’

‘It’s not us doing it,’ Leo protested, ‘it’s the gene. We can’t do a thing if the altered gene doesn’t get into the cell we’re trying to target.’

‘You’ll just have to think of something that will work.’

‘You mean like, build it and they will come?’

‘Yeah. Say it and they will make it.’

Out in the lab a timer beeped, sounding uncannily like the Roadrunner. Beep-beep! Beep-beep! They went to the incubator and read the graph paper as it rolled out of the machine, like a receipt out of an automated teller – like money out of an automated teller, in fact, if the results were good. One very big wad of twenties rolling out into the world from nowhere, if the numbers were good.

And they were. They were very good. They would have to plot it to be sure, but they had been doing this series of experiments for so long that they knew what the raw data would look like. The data were good. So now they were like Wile E. Coyote, standing in midair staring amazed at the viewers, because a bridge from the cliff had magically extended out and saved them. Saved them from the long plunge of a retraction in the press and subsequent Nasdaq free-fall.

Except that Wile E. Coyote was invariably premature in his sense of relief. The Roadrunner always had another devastating move to make. Leo’s hand was shaking.

‘Shit,’ he said. ‘I would be totally celebrating right now if it weren’t for Derek. Look at this –’ pointing – ‘it’s even better than before.’

‘See, Derek knew it would turn out like this.’

‘The fuck he did.’

‘Pretty good numbers,’ Brian said with a grin. ‘Paper’s almost written too. It’s just plug these in and do a conclusion.’

Marta said, ‘Conclusions will be simple, if we tell the truth.’

Leo nodded. ‘Only problem is, the truth would have to admit that even though this part works, we still don’t have a therapy, because we haven’t got targeted delivery. We can make it but we can’t get it into living bodies where it needs to be.’

‘You didn’t read the whole website,’ Marta told him, smiling angrily again.

‘What do you mean?’ Leo was in no mood for teasing. His stomach had already shrunk to the size of a walnut.

Marta laughed, which was her way of showing sympathy without admitting to any. ‘He’s going to buy Urtech.’

‘What’s Urtech?’

‘They have a targeted delivery method that works.’

‘What do you mean, what would that be?’

‘It’s new. They just got awarded the patent on it.’

‘Oh no.’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Oh my God. It hasn’t been validated?’