The Fourth Kind of Time Read online

  It’s odd though, because it’s just one project, and not one that looks like a certain winner anyway.

  If it was just me being threatened, I hope I’d have the nerve to keep going. But I can’t justify putting other people at risk, especially when there are plenty of other good ideas around, and this one is likely to be shot down because of the legal problems anyway.

  I am assuming that Derwent & Graham is behind it. There’s no one else I can think of who’d care about stopping us. It’s a bit of a shock that a company that’s meant to be so respectable would get involved in this kind of behaviour, especially when it looks like it can win by legally strangling us. Maybe D & G’s legal position isn’t as good as I thought, but if it isn’t, none of the lawyers I’ve spoken to can identify why.

  Anyway, the reason I emailed you to stop, and told you I was stopping as well, is that I’m pretty sure my emails have been hacked. It occurred to me that if someone is going after my lab colleagues they may go after anyone else who’s helping me too.

  I thought about telling the whole story in my email, but then I decided I’d better not to let them know that I was telling you about my suspicions. The reason I’ve sent this letter is just in case. If there’s anything suspicious or strange going on around you, be careful. Sorry to have dragged you into this. I hope that this is the end of it.

  Regards

  Cam

  James looked up at the others, confused. He instinctively turned to Daniel for guidance. But it was Anna who spoke first.

  “So that’s that then,” she remarked acerbically. Daniel nodded in agreement.

  “As soon as we can clear our decks here,” Anna continued, “we’ll go to England and …”

  “What?” gasped Daniel and James in unison.

  “… Finish investigating all the possible Crick and Burnet correspondence, of course,” Anna responded, as if amazed at their obtuseness. “We’re not going to stand by while Cam gets bullied like that.”

  “Of course not,” replied James, although it was with a considerable lack of emphasis, while Daniel appeared to be about to speak and then changed his mind.

  “You can’t come,” Anna instructed Daniel. “Cam thinks that whoever is making these threats knows you have been helping him search. We shouldn’t take any risks and should assume that whoever’s behind this will be watching you, and that means if we’re going to keep it secret, you’d better stay right out of it.”

  “Yes, of course,” Daniel agreed vigorously.

  Anna was silent for a second. She knew that what she had just proposed was good sense, but she’d expected an argument in order to get her way. It was very unlike Daniel to passively accede to being told to butt out of helping a friend. Knowing Daniel, she couldn’t believe that the physical threats had deterred him. So what’s got into him? Better not to open up that line of discussion, Anna thought. It’s much more sensible to move on, she decided, having got what she wanted on that aspect of her plans.

  “So, when do we go?” Tina interrupted, excitedly.

  “What do you mean ‘we’?” demanded Anna. “I told you right at the start of this that it was a job for people with brains.”

  “But you told me that if it got dangerous, I could be in on it,” Tina insisted indignantly. “While you’re doing all that science stuff, I’ll keep a watch out for trouble.”

  Anna’s heart sank. She remembered saying something like that. It would be no use now saying that the only reason she’d made that promise was because she never imagined that she would have to deliver on it. She tried to quickly find an escape route.

  “How are you going to get to England?” she challenged. “You’ve only just moved into that flat and you can hardly afford to pay the rent and bills. And don’t start thinking you’re going to get an airfare out of me,” she warned. “And don’t even think about asking Dad or I’ll kill you.”

  Tina subsided, despondent and slightly resentful, but without an answer.

  James looked at Tina with amused sympathy. He wasn’t all that keen on travelling across the world in order to do things that might attract adverse attention from unknown sociopaths. However, he knew that Tina had a very different outlook on life. It occurred to him, also, in the light of past experiences, that if he were to be in the vicinity of danger it would be preferable to have Tina close by rather than 16,000 kilometres away.

  He found himself saying, “We can work something out. I’ve got heaps of frequent flyer and hotel points racked up.”

  Tina swung around, gazing at him with intense joy and gratitude. Anna swung around, too, glaring at him with considerably less approval, but she subsided quickly into resignation. Tina then started prattling enthusiastically about the kinds of things that a young woman would naturally think of in anticipation of her first trip overseas – what clothes she would take, what clothes she would buy when she was there, how she would smuggle her gun in her luggage …

  “Are you absolutely out of your mind?” yelled Anna fiercely. “If you even think about doing something as stupid as that you’re not coming, even if I have to get Dad and Uncle Joe to tie you up and lock you in a shed till James and I get back.”

  Tina stared truculently into the middle distance.

  “You’ll get yourself sent to jail for years,” Anna stormed. Tina remained stubbornly facing away.

  “And they’ll confiscate the gun,” put in James. Tina turned on him radiating possessiveness so intensely that James backed away as if pushed by a strong physical force. But soon Tina dropped into a mood of defensiveness, realising that what James said was the truth.

  “Alright,” she said sullenly. It was Anna’s turn to gaze gratefully at James.

  James hoped what he was thinking wasn’t motivated solely by cowardice, but he decided even if it was he had better say it.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t do this. I mean if there’s someone willing to do harm to Cam to stop his work shouldn’t we respect his decision? Particularly with what he said about having no way of telling whether it would stay at a not-serious level. He didn’t go into detail but he could mean serious violence, even something life-threatening.”

  Anna acknowledged the validity of his argument.

  “But you’d have to think that Derwent & Graham would stop short of murder,” she said. “They don’t seem to have gone that far yet, anyway. And even if they were ruthless enough to do it, I think that it would be an absolute last resort.”

  “Why?” asked James.

  “If they don’t want Cam’s idea to become reality, they won’t want any progress he’s made on it getting any publicity in case other scientists or companies pick up on it. While Cam’s alive they can rely on him and his colleagues to keep any good results secret. But if a man Cam’s age, in good health, suddenly dies there’s sure to be a thorough enquiry. They’d have to be worried that the truth would come out. And if it did, there’d be all sorts of journalists and other busybodies desperate to find out what Cam had been working on.

  “Even if they find Cam hasn’t dropped it, I think they’ll gradually escalate the pressure, hoping he does and that he’ll keep his mouth shut before it gets to the stage of anything drastic happening.”

  James was not entirely comforted by her analysis. He could think of lots of things short of actual killing that he’d prefer not to provoke.

  “But you’re right, James,” Anna conceded. “Even if I’m right – and I may be wrong – we can’t do it until we get Cam’s permission. But till then we might as well check our calendars,” she reflected. “We shouldn’t make it too soon. We might as well finish all the investigations we can here before we go over.”

  James nodded.

  “But we can’t use email to get permission, and I’d be hesitant to use the phone either. How will we tell Cam?” he asked.

  What will I tell Alex? thought Tina guiltily.

  James wondered why the ambience in Japanese restaurants was almost always more subdued than would be the case in
comparably crowded venues with different cuisine. Was it just the nature of the typical clientele? Or was there something about the décor? This place, for example, he thought, crams in as many tables as any other sort of restaurant. Despite it being well patronised the conversation was conducted at a comparative murmur. The lack of natural light gave it a subterranean feel, and the minimal decoration of the light teak walls (except for the obligatory paper screens separating a private room from the main dining area) exuded a deliberately tepid, neutral tone. Not that James had any objection to his friend, an intellectual property lawyer nicknamed ‘Slim’, having chosen it as a meeting point. He re-read the text message he had received a few minutes earlier advising that Slim was on his way. He must be just about …

  “Sorry about that.” Slim approached the table and proceeded to deprecate those of his fellow barristers who took an eternity making submissions for a simple consent order when all decent members of the Bar were waiting to get away for lunch. “And you don’t dare switch on your phone to send a ‘sorry to hold you up’ message until you’re clear of the courtroom.”

  Slim sat down at the table. James assured him that no harm had been done by the delay. However, a further amount of time was then lost as Slim, in an exuberant mood, gleefully recounted a few further anecdotes before they got around to ordering the tempura and Asahis. Only then did it occur to Slim to ask why James wanted to speak to him.

  James explained, as best he could, the work that Cam had been doing and Derwent & Graham’s attitude towards it.

  “By the way,” he asked, “what’s D & G like in that kind of dispute?”

  “Much the same as any other,” Slim replied, with an offhand shrug. “They all play the game hard.”

  James had expected as much. In light of Cam’s recent revelation, he wanted to find out how hard that actually might be. He felt, though, that he could hardly start by asking whether intellectual property disputes were sometimes settled violently. Even though Slim usually acted for the ‘generics’, not the ‘originators’, he might take offence at the idea that his work was just part of an upmarket preliminary to some organised crime standover tactics.

  “How hard?” asked James, in a tone intended to convey casual abstract interest. Slim stared at him quizzically.

  “What sort of things do you mean?” he asked, bewildered.

  “Oh, nothing in particular,” James said airily. “I suppose I was thinking in part of misleading affidavits, suppression of discovery of documents, that sort of thing, but, well, other stuff …”, and before the surprised Slim could intervene, he temporised, “like economic pressure say, some sort of use of market dominance …”

  Slim shook his head. “I don’t know much about any out-of-court tactics,” he said. “They wouldn’t need to let me in on that kind of thing. But I think they try to keep it pretty clean in the litigation process. If they got caught out doing something wrong in one case, pretty soon the whole IP world would know about it and they’d have blown their credibility in every other case they tried to run.”

  It seemed Slim didn’t have any positive knowledge about pharmaceutical companies acting outside the law, but he couldn’t confirm for certain that it didn’t happen. Oh well, he may have some useful input on the legal issues, James thought.

  He plunged on with a description of Cam’s attempted counterattack via Crick and Burnet. Initially Slim’s professional interest was clearly aroused, and his enthusiastic enquiries sparked James into optimism. But as the exposition went on Slim’s effervescence waned. So much so, that when James concluded by revealing that Cam was dropping the idea, Slim merely nodded.

  “So I was wondering,” James went on, feeling that he might as well get the verdict signed, sealed and delivered, “do you think there’s any possible use in Cam keeping going? I mean, given that we’ve only just started looking?”

  Slim meditated upon his reply, but James could tell what his answer was going to be, and that he was just trying to break the bad news as gently as possible.

  “I can’t say for certain,” he began. “Without actually looking at the patent specifications, I don’t even know what the crucial aspects of D & G’s rights actually are. Its patent might actually be over a way of making the product, rather than on any design feature of the product itself. I mean Fleming, Florey and Chain got the Nobel Prize for their work on penicillin, but the product would have been almost valueless if Pfizer hadn’t come up with an economical way of mass producing it. And patent law isn’t identical in every country so even if Cam’s stuffed in some places he may find a loophole in others. But …”

  James had only scraped through intellectual property in law school and had never worked in the area. He understood enough, however, to follow Slim’s description of the position. He didn’t need to be told that a patent could be obtained for an invention only if the invention had sufficient ‘novelty’. Slim then reminded him, even if the invention had never actually been made or designed before, it might not be sufficiently ‘novel’ to be patented if its only ‘novel’ features would have been ‘obvious’ to anyone who actually thought about making something of the relevant type. Likewise, Slim filled him in on the details of how a patent might be denied if there were sufficient existing information, publicly available – so-called ‘prior art information’ – to enable any suitably skilled person to make the invention.

  “OK,” James summed up, “Cam can win if he can show that D & G’s patent is only about something ‘obvious’, or if it’s only about things that have been publicly described clearly enough before.”

  “Yes,” admitted Slim, “but think how hard it’s going to be for him. He’s got a Nobel Prize winner comparing the idea to science fiction. I don’t know what it is that makes D & G’s idea work, but it doesn’t seem to have been ‘obvious’ to Burnet, or to Crick for that matter. If there had been some massive advance in knowledge since Burnet and Crick’s time …”

  “Cam wouldn’t need to bother delving all the way back to their days,” James interpolated.

  “Yes, that’s true,” Slim agreed. “So ‘obviousness’ doesn’t look like a likely avenue for Cam. And it doesn’t look good for him on the ‘prior art information’ front either. I mean, whatever Crick told Burnet it seems that Burnet killed the idea and Crick accepted it. Cam’s got two problems. First, if Burnet was so dismissive, Crick probably didn’t have any definite, detailed, and plausible plan in mind. And you can’t stop D & G getting a patent just by showing that someone once said ‘hey, wouldn’t it be good if high concentrations of heavy isotopes made medical treatments more effective?’ And even if Crick did say something more useful, it doesn’t look like it ever became public enough to be relevant.”

  “It’s hopeless then?” James asked.

  “Not absolutely,” Slim conceded, “but it’s a bit like having one ticket and hoping to win TattsLotto.”

  They left it there and reverted to the kind of inane drivel that was more normal in conversations among their social circle. When they emerged into the bustle of the food court in which the restaurant was situated and headed their separate ways, James thought to himself that, very often – with great regularity, in fact – someone or other does actually win TattsLotto.

  Chapter 7

  Action Stations

  Like many air travellers coming directly from Australia, they arrived in London at a dismal hour of the early morning. It was summer in England and it was already light by the time they cleared customs and immigration and boarded a Piccadilly Line tube train. Shortly, they emerged from the tunnel leading out of Heathrow on an overground section of line.

  Tina’s early impressions from her views out of the window were of densely packed mud-coloured houses of unremarkable style, interspersed with industrial and commercial buildings of equally negligible architectural appeal. She gazed melancholically at the scenes flashing past, alternating her attention to inside the train with equally unenthusiastic glances at the other passengers. The
train had not been crowded at Heathrow but gradually filled with passengers as it stopped at succeeding stations en route to the centre of the city. They all exuded the passive resignation of those who are regularly obliged to get up early in the morning and commute to a mundane day of hard work. Unquestionably, the western section of the Piccadilly Line did not showcase London at its best, especially before and during the morning commuter rush. It was no doubt understandable that Tina, not knowing what was to come, felt somewhat let down from her enthusiastic imaginings of what the trip would be like.

  But in truth, she’d been struggling from well before her first sight of England. Thinking ahead was not one of Tina’s strong points and so she wasn’t consciously troubled by the repair work she would need to do with Alex when she returned to Australia. Still, lurking beneath the surface, Tina subconsciously knew she’d have to face Alex at some point.

  She had bid an affectionate farewell to Fatty, left in the care of a cousin – one of three who were sharing the duties of minding her flat, Anna’s place, and James’s house. After earlier events, James had been glad to have someone to protect his property, but was unsure whether he ought, in good conscience, allow Anna’s cousins to undertake that duty. He’d asked Anna’s opinion about exposing them to the risk of a repeat intrusion and she had assured him that he needn’t have any concerns.

  “They’re like Tina,” she explained. “They’re probably hoping that something like that will happen!”

  Tina’s goodbyes to Alex, on the other hand, had been, as Anna reported discreetly to James, ‘difficult’. They would have been even more so, except that Tina had tactfully omitted to mention to Alex one aspect of her trip – that she and Anna were being accompanied on the trip by an unattached male friend, James, who was generously subsidising Tina’s travel expenses. But even though that detail hadn’t been discussed, the experience had been fraught. For a while after Tina and Alex parted she’d experienced a sense of relief, even happiness. That relief had worn off, and ever since she’d been emotionally subdued, and seemed likely to remain so.