LITMIR.BIZ

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now that’s the interesting part. The lifespan of a normal adult housefly, well fed, is six weeks. That’s more or less how long my B flies are living. But the flies in tank A, which receive tiny amounts of the formula in their food, are consistently living thirty to thirty-five per cent longer, around eight weeks.’

      Ben narrowed his eyes. ‘You’re sure about that?’

      She nodded. ‘We’re into our third generation, and the results are holding.’

      ‘This is just a recent breakthrough, then?’

      ‘Yeah, we’re really at the first stage. I still don’t know why it’s working, how to explain the effect. I know I can get better results, and I will…And when I do, it’s going to fire a chilli pepper up the asses of the scientific community.’

      He was about to reply when his phone rang. ‘Shit. Sorry about this.’ He’d forgotten to turn it off for the interview. He took the phone out of his pocket.

      ‘Well? Aren’t you going to answer it?’ she asked, raising one eyebrow.

      He pressed REPLY and said, ‘Hello?’

      ‘Loriot here. I received your message.’

      ‘Thanks for calling back, Monsieur Loriot,’ Ben said, glancing apologetically at Roberta and raising a finger as if to say ‘this’ll just take a minute’. She shrugged and took a sip of her coffee, then snatched a piece of paper from her desk and started reading it.

      ‘I would be interested in meeting you. Would you like to come out to my home this evening for a drink and a talk?

      ‘That would be great. Where do you live, Monsieur Loriot?’

      Roberta threw down the sheet, sighed and exaggeratedly checked her watch.

      ‘My home is the Villa Margaux, near the village of Brignancourt, on the other side of Pontoise. It is not far from Paris’

      Ben noted down the details. ‘Brignancourt,’ he repeated quickly, trying to get the conversation over without being impolite to Loriot. The man might be an important contact. But if you’re going to play the journalist, at least try to do it with a bit of professional fucking style, he thought, irritated with himself.

      ‘I will send my car to pick you up’, said Loriot.

      ‘OK,’ Ben said, writing on his pad. ‘Eight forty-five tonight…Yes…Looking forward to that…Well, thanks again for calling back…Goodbye.’ He switched off the phone and dropped it back in his pocket. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said to Roberta. ‘It’s off now.’

      ‘Oh, don’t worry about it.’ She let him hear the edge of sarcasm in her voice. ‘Not like I have a job to go to, is it?’

      He cleared his throat. ‘Anyway, this formula of yours…’

      ‘Yup?’

      ‘Have you tried it out on other species? What about humans?’

      She shook her head. ‘Not yet. That’d really be something, wouldn’t it? If the results matched the fly experiment, the life expectancy of a healthy human could increase from, say, eighty years to about a hundred and eight years. And I think we could do even better.’

      ‘If one of your flies was sick or dying, would this thing have the power to cure whatever was wrong with it, keep it alive?’ he asked tentatively.

      ‘You mean, does it have medicinal properties?’ she replied. She clicked her tongue and sighed. ‘I wish I could say yes. We’ve tried giving it to dying flies in group B to see what would happen, but they still died. So far it only seems to work preventatively.’ She shrugged. ‘But who knows? We’re only getting started here. With time, we might be able to develop something that won’t just extend life in healthy specimens, but will cure illnesses in sick ones, maybe even stop one from dying indefinitely. If we could replicate that effect in humans, ultimately…’

      ‘Sounds like you might have discovered some kind of elixir of life?’

      ‘Well, let’s not pop the cork just yet,’ she said with a chuckle. ‘But I think I’m onto something, yeah. Problem is lack of funding. To really get it out there and verified you’d have to launch some serious clinical trials. Those can take years.’

      ‘Why can’t you get funding from medical companies?’

      She laughed. ‘Boy, you are really naïve. This is alchemy we’re talking about. Witchcraft, voodoo, hokum. Why do you think I’m running this operation out of a spare bedroom? Nobody takes me seriously since I wrote about this stuff.’

      ‘I heard you’d had some trouble over it.’ ‘Trouble?’ She snorted. ‘Yeah, you might say that. First I was plastered all over the cover of Scientific American– some wiseguy editor put a witch’s hat on me and a sign round my neck saying “Unscientific American”. Next thing, those assholes at the university gave me the boot, left me hanging out to dry. Hasn’t exactly helped my career. They even fired poor old Michel from his lab-tech post. Said he was wasting university time and money on my hocus-pocus project. He’s the only one who’s stood by me through all this. I pay him what I can, but it’s been tough for both of us.’ She sighed and shook her head. ‘Bastards. But I’ll show them.’

      ‘Have you got any of your formula here?’ he asked. ‘I’d be keen to see it.’

      ‘No, I haven’t,’ she said firmly. ‘I ran out, need to make some more up.’

      He watched her eyes for signs of a lie. Hard to tell. He paused for a moment. ‘So, do you think there’s any chance you might let me have a copy of your research notes?’ he asked, hoping the request didn’t come over as too bold. He toyed with the idea of offering her money for them, but that would have made her instantly suspicious of him.

      She wagged her finger. ‘Ha ha. No way, pal. Anyway, you think I’d be dumb enough to write down the formula?’ She tapped her head. ‘It’s all in here. This is my baby, and nobody’s getting their hands on it.’

      He grinned ruefully. ‘OK, forget I mentioned it.’

      There were a few seconds of silence between them. Roberta looked at him expectantly, then placed her hands flat on her knees as though to signal the end of the interview. ‘Anything else I can help you with, Ben?’

      ‘I won’t take up any more of your time,’ he said, worrying that he’d blown it by asking to see her notes. ‘But if you get any major breakthroughs, will you give me a call?’ He handed her a card.

      She took it, and smiled. ‘If you want, but don’t get too excited. It’s a slow process. Call me again in, say, three years’ time.’

      ‘It’s a date,’ he said.

Chapter Eleven

      Roberta Ryder suddenly looked much less the austere scientist, with her wavy dark red hair let down past her shoulders and the labcoat switched for a denim jacket. ‘Michel, I’m going out. You can take the rest of the day off, OK?’ She got her sports holdall from the bedroom, grabbed her car keys and headed off for her weekly session at the martial arts centre across town in Montparnasse.

      As she drove she was thinking about her interview with the journalist Ben Hope. She always had to come over like the ballsy, tough, defiant maverick scientist who was going to show ‘em all one day…it was the image she clung to. Nobody knew about the fragile reality of her situation. They didn’t know about the fears she had, the worries that kept her awake at night. The day she’d been fired from the university, she could so easily have packed a bag and jumped on the next flight home to the States. But she hadn’t. She’d stayed to tough it out. Now she was wondering at the wisdom of that decision. Had all the sacrifices she’d made been worth it? Was she just chasing rainbows,

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