The Fourth Kind of Time Read online

  First Published in Australia by Aurora House

  www.aurorahouse.com.au

  This edition published 2020

  Copyright © Tim Neilson 2020

  timothydgneilson.com

  Book interior and e-book design: Amit Dey

  Cover design: Luke Harris

  The right of Tim Neilson to be identified as Author of the Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  ISBN number: 978-0-6486795-1-6 (Kindle)

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Distributed by:

  Ingram Content: https://www.ingramcontent.com/

  Australia: phone +613 9765 4800 | email [email protected]

  Milton Keynes UK: phone +44 (0)845 121 4567 | email [email protected]

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  Bertrams UK: https://www.bertrams.com/BertWeb/index.jsp

  phone +44 (0)1603 648400 | email [email protected]

  Aurora House is a Forest Friendly publisher.

  To my nephew Quinn, hoping that all the surprises in his life are pleasant ones.

  I am of course immensely grateful to the educational institutions mentioned in this book which I was lucky enough to attend.

  And although I never studied at Cambridge, I am grateful to Professor Ken Smith and other Fellows of Pembroke College for some delightful social occasions there.

  Contents

  Prologue

  1 – Help Wanted

  2 – Money Wanted

  3 – Know Your Enemy

  4 – On Guard

  5 – Discouragement

  6 – Recalled to Duty

  7 – Action Stations

  8 – Being Sensible

  9 – Problems at Home

  10 – Problems on Tour

  11 – Predators and Prey

  12 – Defensive Driving

  13 – Conrad’s Bell

  14 – A Change of Heart

  15 – Expectations

  16 – More Changes of Hear

  17 – Old Acquaintance

  18 – Revelations

  About the Author

  Author’s Note

  No character presented in the present from the perspective of this novel is intended to be a portrait of any real person. The thoughts, words and actions attributed in this book to those characters are entirely fictitious, except for the prologue, which is based on events which really happened. This applies to the human characters, anyway. The exploits of ‘Fatty’ the cat, improbable though they may seem, are taken directly from real life.

  Characters presented solely in the past from this book’s perspective are, with two exceptions, historical characters who the book seeks to portray in a manner consistent with all publicly available information on them. (For example, Conrad’s bell is, truly, in safe keeping at the Geelong College.) The book does, however, contain much fictional matter concerning unpublished work and private correspondence of those characters.

  One exception is ‘Jimmy’ Graham, who is as fictitious as his business partner.

  The other is Michael Keary. Mr Keary is very real, but he retired too long ago to have actually taught the young James Bentley. I am confident, though, that generations of Mr Keary’s past students would attest to the verisimilitude of the scene in which he is portrayed.

  Prologue

  Her first attempt to rouse her daughter from slumber had been perfunctory and routine. The second had been made with affectionate tolerance. The third – irritable and peremptory. It was only at the fourth attempt she suspected something might be wrong.

  She experienced an internal physical convulsion of fear. As reality hit, she was only dimly conscious of her own actions, but then she temporarily lost all awareness of her own existence. The decision to phone emergency services had the unemotional clarity of a mathematical theorem.

  She delivered her description of the situation with objective precision, carrying out the subsequent instructions with detached diligence. It was only afterwards, during the seemingly interminable wait for the ambulance to arrive, that she realised the symptoms of her own terror. Even then she was scarcely aware of her own condition as she focused intently on the unconscious figure.

  The hospital staff had been uniformly deliberate, alert and assiduously calm. She had noticed though, because she craved it so desperately, that none of them had said anything reassuring. Something viral, the doctors were almost certain, but they didn’t know what exactly. She knew enough about medicine to realise that it was not good news.

  The hospital bed was surrounded by equipment. Her daughter’s body was punctured by needles attached to plastic tubes. A mask ensured the girl’s fitful breathing delivered enough oxygen for her needs. At frequent intervals a nurse or doctor would appear and check various beeping and flashing metal boxes. The signals meant nothing to her, but the faces she scanned around the room told her unmistakeably that things were not getting any better.

  Nor did the doctors pretend otherwise. They told her plainly that they weren’t doing anything – they couldn’t do anything – to destroy the virus affecting her daughter. All they could do was support her body’s steadily diminishing efforts to cling to life. She wanted to be told that somehow everything would work out, that the immense array of technology being applied to her daughter could not fail to restore her to life and health. But they couldn’t tell her that. The truth was her daughter’s vital signs were receding. Her deterioration was steady. Her daughter was heading towards death.

  It seemed obscenely incongruous that in the corridor outside the ward were staff, visitors and patients strolling and chatting, and even joking cheerfully. She yearned to be able to transplant some of that normality into her daughter’s body, as if an infusion of mere feelings could change the course of reality. Wildly she looked around – doctors, nurses, gadgets, drugs – nothing could pull her daughter from the abyss, while just metres away were the fortunate others for whom death was still a theory.

  At one level she understood that the physical world was failing her. But such was her absorption in her daughter’s plight that she didn’t even notice the changes in her own mental processes. Unconsciously she switched to seeking intervention from the non-physical. Distraught and helpless, she began to pray – intensely, fiercely, urgently, angrily, but above all pleadingly – to the God she had so often denied.

  Consumed by her unselfconscious cry for help, she lost awareness of her surroundings, even of the physical presence of the daughter for whose life she was begging.

  When, finally, she re-emerged into the perceptible world, she observed a doctor moving noiselessly among the cords, wires and tubes. As he examined the various screens and dials, he seemed surprised at what he observed. And it wasn’t the surprise of dismay, but instead the surprise of unexpected hope.

  The doctor was talking at her. She could scarcely grasp his explanation of the data displayed on the screens and monitors. She couldn’t process his warnings about getting her hopes up. Only one message reached her. Her daughter’s condition had ‘stabilised’ – death was not yet in retreat, but it had ceased to advance.

  An hour passed, and the doctor dared to suggest her daughter was ‘recovering’.

 
; Drained, and too numb to feel any strong emotions, she was surprised to notice the ward had a window and, better yet, the sun was shining gently through.

  “Of course,” she said some time later to her friend James Bentley, “the prayer couldn’t have had anything to do with it. There must be some scientific explanation.”

  Chapter 1

  Help Wanted

  “She was right of course,” asserted Daniel Page, when James had finished telling the story.

  “What makes you think that?” challenged James Bentley, as he had so often before during his debates with Daniel.

  They’ll be at it for least five minutes, probably more like ten, thought Anna Rischelli. They were supposed to be discussing how to help their friend Campbell Fletcher, who had contacted them from the other side of the world, at Cambridge University, to ask them to help him defend a very promising line of medical research from being shut down by a multinational pharmaceutical company. However, Anna had been going out with Daniel for long enough to know that he and James couldn’t resist a good philosophical disagreement.

  She glanced over at the kitchen and smiled. Her sister Tina was rummaging in a drawer, frowning intensely. Tina tended to be remarkably casual about adverse consequences – even very dangerous ones – that might flow from her actions, yet here she was almost paralysed with fear that she would make some ghastly cooking blunder and leave her guests hungry. It might have helped, thought Anna, if Tina had paid attention back when our mother tried to teach us how to prepare food.

  Anna approached the other side of the bench.

  “You’re a guest,” protested Tina. “Go and sit down.”

  Anna gestured towards the debate in progress. Tina nodded sympathetically.

  “Isn’t that bad for her?” Anna asked, observing Tina passing chunks of pure bacon fat to a fluffy dark brown cat.

  “Fatty doesn’t think so,” responded Tina. She made as if to throw one of the bacon pieces into the kitchen tidy, prompting a fiercely indignant meow from Fatty. The point thus proved, Tina handed it over and turned triumphantly to Anna. Anna raised her hands in a gesture of mock surrender, and returned her attention to the conversation in the lounge room.

  “It’s totally impossible for science to prove that miracles can’t occur,” James was saying. “Think of what the scientific method actually is – hypothesis, prediction, controlled reproducible experiment, result, conclusion. What’s the controlled reproducible experiment for something which by its very nature is uncontrollable and irreproducible?”

  “You’re playing with semantics,” said Daniel.

  James insisted he wasn’t.

  Another five minutes, Anna decided.

  She gave an irritable sigh, annoyed at Daniel and James’s inability to stick to practicalities. After all, Cam was a friend and he needed their help. Also, the research he needed help with had the potential to deliver enormous benefits to vast numbers of suffering people. Still, there was nothing she could do immediately.

  Her gaze shifted to the fourth guest who was stretched out in the best chair, staring idly at the television. Anna frowned imperceptibly.

  She reassured herself that she wasn’t motivated by envy – not much, anyway. Whenever her phone received an incoming photo of Tina and Alex’s adventures – exhilarated after parasailing over a tropical beach, smiling contentedly in a lodge après ski, grinning in anticipation of rafting a river – she felt glad her sister was enjoying herself with such a seemingly compatible partner. She did, however, undoubtedly have mixed feelings. She told herself that her concerns were purely practical, like whether it was wise for Tina to be spending every cent she earned on such ventures, especially now that she’d moved out of home and was incurring full living expenses.

  Stop it, she ordered herself. Tina’s still young enough to be able to enjoy life as much as she can now. She can look after her future later.

  No, her feeling of unease was, she admitted, based on something different. Look at him there, not making any effort to be sociable. But she knew she was being unfair. Tina had insisted on doing the cooking, so it was reasonable for Alex to let her. And ignoring Daniel and James in full flight was just basic sanity. Even so, Anna couldn’t help thinking that it was typical of Alex’s general demeanour towards her sister, while Tina seemed to regard herself as lucky to have Alex around to live an exciting life with. Anna suspected Alex shared Tina’s assessment of the situation – Tina was lucky to have him.

  Only once Anna had hinted to Tina that, just maybe, Alex was becoming a bit too habitually casual in his attitude towards her. “Oh, that’s just Alex,” Tina had responded dismissively.

  Well maybe it was, but that didn’t mean Tina should accept it.

  Anna wondered whether she was being biased against Alex. Or, more likely, was it Tina who couldn’t see things clearly? Sometimes a couple consisted of a genuinely nice person who had hooked up with someone unbearable, and in many of those cases the nice person never seemed to notice their partner’s objectionable behaviour. Idly, Anna wondered how the nice person managed to ignore something so obvious to everyone else. Maybe they did notice, but just suppressed any reaction to it. Were their perceptions so warped by their relationship that they didn’t think their partner’s conduct was repellent? Or did they develop a defence mechanism to the bad behaviour by shutting off their senses when such a performance commenced? She wondered guiltily whether she was blind to Daniel’s faults, or, even more worryingly, whether Daniel ignored some aspect of her behaviour.

  Once she had hoped Tina would dump Alex for James, but that hadn’t happened. Anna blamed herself in part for that. When the idea had occurred to Tina, shortly after getting to know James, Anna hadn’t been at all encouraging. Tina had, perhaps, taken her elder sister’s lead and refrained from pursuing that possibility. Of course, James hadn’t given her any encouragement. He was so obtuse about such things he probably hadn’t given Tina a romantic moment’s thought.

  A pity, thought Anna. Not that James and Tina are obviously suited to each other, quite the opposite in fact, but sometimes an attraction of opposites works. And even if James is hardly the most sensitive person on the planet, he’d at least try to anticipate what Tina wanted. James would be so much better than Alex – I’d even put up with him and Daniel’s … Oh, that reminds me ...

  She tuned in to the continuing debate.

  “Over fifteen hundred years ago Saint Augustine confirmed to the Christian world that time as we experience it is just a by-product or component of this physical universe,” James was saying. “And as I understand it science now accepts that that may be true. Christians believe that God isn’t a part of the physical world, but created it and exists independently of it, so God can operate outside time. It follows that, in the types of cases we’re talking about, the Christian creator God can answer today’s prayer by causing some biochemical circumstance to have pre-existed. And, if it matters, God’s intervention needn’t necessarily be anything pre-existing or anything contrary to normal events at all. So far as we know some movements of subatomic particles are random, at least to our perceptions. Perhaps all it would take would be for one subatomic particle in one antibody to go one way rather than another …”

  “Cam’s hoping so,” interjected Anna, judging the time to be ripe.

  “Cam?” asked Daniel, momentarily bewildered. “Oh, yes, of course.”

  “Cam, of course, yes,” echoed James. “What does he want us to do?”

  Chapter 2

  Money Wanted

  “You understand why they’re doing this, don’t you, Dr Fletcher?” the company’s Assistant General Counsel asked Cam. Like many of London’s older structures, the building had been gutted to accommodate the company’s modern offices, which included the teak and chrome interior of the conference room, in sharp contrast to the building’s external eighteenth-century limestone façade. Similarly, the power-dressing attire of the room’s occupants contrasted with Cam’s ancient tweed
jacket and faded trousers. Not that Cam was embarrassed by the discrepancy in attire. Whenever he visited London in an attempt to get money out of a drug company for one of his projects, he made sure he looked like a scientist and not a financier.

  “In general terms, yes,” he replied. “Derwent & Graham are an ‘originator’, like you, and they’ve probably spent hundreds of millions of US dollars developing their heavy isotope antigen techniques, and they don’t want anyone else to get a free ride on their research expenditure.”

  The Assistant General Counsel and her corporate colleagues nodded.

  “But what I don’t understand,” Cam went on, “is why they’re trying to stop my work. I’m not dealing with antibiotics or antiviral treatments at all. My work is all about painkillers and D & G isn’t in the painkiller market at all, let alone using heavy isotopes in that field.”

  “That’s true,” one of the ‘suits’ agreed, “but you’ve worked with us and with other originators before, plenty of times, and you know how it works. Once we’ve got something we think we can patent and market, we lodge patent applications for what we really want to use it for, but at the same time we lodge applications to patent it for just about any other purpose we can think of.”

  Cam nodded.

  “If a ‘generic’ wants to get a free ride on our research, they’ll try to say that what they’re doing is slightly but crucially different to the product we’re putting to market. Then they claim the difference means that what they’re doing is outside the scope of our monopoly rights over the product. But because we’ve lodged patent applications for so many other uses, they have to fight their way through our ‘patent thicket’. Even if they end up getting all our competing applications ruled invalid, we will still have slowed them up for several years through the legal system.”

  Cam knew how the game was played. He couldn’t help thinking there must be a better way for the pharmaceutical industry to deploy its knowledge for the benefit of humanity. He knew better than to say so, though. He was fully aware of the colossal amounts of money that such research could cost. He also knew that expensive research projects weren’t always successful, so the ones that paid off needed to cover not only their own costs but also the costs of the unprofitable ones.