Antibodies 5

© Copyright. Beverly Taff.

Characters.
Nana Bev, Interplanetary prospector.
Jamie, Bev’s younger prospecting Partner.
Dennis Potter Freight manager and old friend of Beverly’s.
Jack Godfrey Yard foreman and walking boss.
Charlotte and Lucy - Jamie’s younger dancing & clubbing friends.
Rose and Violet. Real girl friends of Jamie, Charlotte and Lucy.
Dr Williams Virologist

Chapter 5

The following morning, Jamie and I were casually shopping somewhat disinterestedly through the city centre when Jamie suddenly stopped, paused, then started walking backwards comically to fetch up at a smallish shop window that we had just passed.

“What? I demanded as I turned around, wondering what she was up to.”

She just wagged her head sideways and intimated the numerous electronic devices in the window display. Her raised eyebrow demanded that I follow into the little shop, so for want of anything better to do, I followed her in.

Once inside, we saw two young oriental lads who were fiddling with phones as we fetched up at their counter.

Jamie, being very attractive, immediately attracted their attention and they both turned to serve her. I grinned at the dramatic display of testosterone as they simultaneously asked.

“Yes Miss?”

“My Nan want’s a voice synthesiser,” Jamie declared and the one nearest the display stepped victoriously to pick out several models.

We tried out several models until I was satisfied with the effects that made me sound like a basso proffundo.

“This’ll do, and a cheap burner phone please.”

The other boy quickly reached for one and we made our purchases then left. Outside in the park, I dialled Doctor Williams.

“Hello, Doctor Williams?” I spoke in my deeply distorted bass voice.

There was a long pause before she answered.

“Who is this please?”

“I delivered the blood to you yesterday afternoon. Have you tested it yet?”

Her flustered answer came back.

“I- I- Not yet we’re still testing it. Who is this?”

“Let’s just say the omega girl or the it girl.”

I replied in the incongruously deep distorted voice.

“What do you mean by that?”

“I deposited the blood sample on your cottage door-step yesterday.”

“How can I know that. Prove it!”

“The Passwords on the bottles. I can give you them.”

“What! Do it,- do it now. This is no time to be playing games.”

I gave her the passwords followed by the string of random numbers I had written on the two labelled bottles. There was a deafening silence.

“Who are you?” she almost croaked as her voice cracked.

“From the shock in your voice, I take it you’ve already learned some stuff about the blood samples.”

“Yes. The donors are almost certain to be immune to Verdaspiro 1.”

“Yes. I can confirm. I’m immune. So is the other donor!”

“Who are you!!?” Doctor Williams almost screeched down the phone.

“That’s not important.” I countered. “What I want to know is if you can derive a vaccine or serum from the samples we sent?”

“Why d’you want to know about that.”

“Cos we’ve only got so much blood to give.”

“Ah. Yes! Of course. Well; given time, we should be able to develop some sort of vaccine. Receiving your blood samples has taken us forward a huge step. Is it possible to supply more?”

“Only as much as a normal blood transfusion would allow.” I continued. “So for two people, that’s about half a litre per donor every six to eight weeks. According to the blood, transfusion bank rules.”

There was a long pregnant silence which told me that Doctor Williams was probably consulting with colleagues.

“My colleagues here tell me that’ those are the normal delivery and donation terms so when can we meet you to discuss them?”

“We don’t meet.” I told them bluntly. “The blood is delivered anonymously, then the delivery agency disappears again.”

“But there’s a whole host of complications and unknowns to address.” She complained.

“I’m sure there is, but there’s also a whole host of dangers facing us, the main one is being kidnapped and exploited by some other foreign government agency; or worse, some exploitative gang or cult.

“I don’t have to tell you that you’d be well protected.” She tried to sound convincing but Jamie and I were in full agreement about staying anonymous.

“Yes; by keeping us well locked up.” Jamie interrupted. “No thank you; we stay anonymous and we stay free.

“That is going to be difficult for you and us. Is that somebody else speaking?”

“”Yes. I'm the second donor and we understand the difficulties.” Jamie finished. “You’ll have to take it or leave it.”

“If you remain hidden, how will we keep in contact?” Dr Williams pressed.

“We call you.” I instructed them. ”Don’t call us unless there’s a serious emergency. We’ll advise you when we’re making a delivery then tell you where after the drop.

If or when, you do eventually derive a functional vaccine," I continued, "call us immediately and we’ll supply extra blood immediately. We’re not inhumane monsters.”

While Doctor Williams digested our terms, Jamie added one last rider.

“Do not try to drag our identities out of the girls Charlotte and Lucy or Rose and Violet. If you try, we will immediately cease to donate blood.”

The silence at Doctor Williams’s end was deafening.

The following afternoon, to show good will, Jamie and I delivered half a litre of blood each. Then we instructed Doctor Williams where to find it. That following evening we called her after working hours. She must have had the phone attached to her headphones because she answered immediately.

“Did you get the blood?” I asked.

“Yes thank you.”

“And are the four girls walking free?”

“Tomorrow morning we’ll release them. We’ve had to alert them to reinforce the privacy and secrecy issues.”

“Good. By the way, is their blood producing useable antibodies?” I checked.

“Not that we can discern so far. They’ve agreed to come in for tests every month so that we can check.”

“We’ve no objections to that,” I replied, “anything to lift the burden from us.”

“By the way,” Jamie added as she nodded affirmation to me. “We suggest you use a bit of the second delivery to vaccinate yourselves. You have our joint permission to do that.”

I smiled approval at Jamie’s words. Firstly, Jamie had laid claim to our right to determine who to, and how the vaccine should be administered. It was only right that the team now tasked with combatting the Verdospiro 1 virus, should at least be immunised.
ooo000ooo

After having completed our philanthropic duties, Jamie and I congratulated ourselves (somewhat conceitedly I must confess,) and then we took off on a walking holiday. Two weeks later, we were reporting to Dennis Potter’s freight yard to collect another cargo of mining equipment.

Dennis was glad to see us for there was a mountain of paperwork concerning my various interplanetary interests.

“I wish you’d warn me when you’re buggering off on holiday. Look at this bloody pile!” Dennis complained.

“My company, my liberty,” I grinned as I ploughed through the correspondence.

Outside, Jamie was supervising the loading and it was early evening before we finally lifted off, firstly for Mars, then next to Jupiter’s moons.

The voyage proved to be a typically normal venture. We delivered to Mars without incident then to Europa, -one of Jupiter’s moons-.

With the outward-bound voyage completed we got orders for loading on Ganymede and that gave us several options to choose our own route home. There were several moons plus Mars and Jupiter coming into conjunction with our preferred route home so we had a choice of fuel-saving ‘sling-shot’ options and that meant money saved.

As Jamie mused over our return Journey I could hear her mind clunking away so I asked what was on it, - her mind that is-.

“I was wondering about that asteroid. You know the green-eyed beasty that irradiated us.”

“What about it?” I asked.

“Well if that thing did ‘slingshot around the sun', we could check her course, and we might be able to locate her.”

“To what end?” I asked, suspecting some hairbrained idea. (Jamie was good at those.)

“Well, if old ‘green eye’ fucked with our bodies, we might be able to find her again and establish her exact course. Then we could organise a trip with a passenger ship to make another rendezvous and fly-by with a couple of hundred other passengers aboard. If they reacted like we did, it would expand the bank of blood donors by irradiating them like us.”

“Fuck me Jamie, that’s such a crazy idea that it might work. How would the additional radiation affect us though? Overdosing and all that?”

“We could sit in our own ‘lead-lined’ cabin while the conjunction occurs.”

“Yeah. That’d sit well with the other passengers,” I mocked.

“Not if it’s explained right.” Jamie pressed. “We describe exactly how we approached and how long we were exposed to old green eye. On top of that, we only ask for volunteers and precisely explain the known risks.”

“What about the authorities.” I observed.

“What about them?” Jamie countered. “They’re just as desperate as everybody else to cure this bug.”

“It would mean, we have to come clean and reveal our identities.”

“Hey! If it means I can walk down the street without worrying and go clubbing and dancing again without clumping around in a hazard suit, then bring it on.”

Jamie dancing in her hazard suite!!!!!

I had to smile. The last image of Jamie trying to dance like a ‘jack-in-a-box’ in the hazard suit had drawn a totally involuntary belly laugh from me. Her idea of an ‘interplanetary radiation cruise,’ might not be all that crazy.

Bearing in mind, we had choices of our route home and little time difference between the journeys, I agreed with Jamie insofar as it might serve to try and locate exactly where the asteroid was and the likely route it was taking.

Fortunately, we had all the mathematical, navigational parameters immediately to hand in Digger’s electronic log. It was an easy task to determine the likely course the asteroid had taken after our encounter but the problem was the uncertain factors caused by the asteroid’s intersection of the Earth’s and it’s lunar satellite. We could not determine exactly how much its’ track had ‘kinked’ between the Earth and the Moon after we had parted ways.

The slightest deviation in the few tens of thousands of miles close to Earth and the Moon would extrapolate into millions of miles of dislodgement after a journey of some hundreds of millions of miles, away out near Jupiter or Saturn’s orbits.

I left Jamie to do the maths ‘by hand’ then compared her figures with the computer predictions. They proved to be satisfactorily comparable and Jamie smirked with satisfaction. She had passed the complexities of space navigation and was now proven fit to fly and navigate her own ship. I took a bottle of champagne from my locker and we shared a toast.

“Cheers Babe’s. You’ve come a long way from once being a spaceship docker in a freight yard.” I congratulated her.

“All down to you Nana,” she responded as we clinked glasses.

I squinted as the ship altered to its homeward course. Despite the distance, the sun still had enough glare to dazzle me before the visor automatically shaded. Then we settled down to contemplate our second rendezvous with ‘green-eye’,( our private name for the asteroid that had benignly changed our metabolisms.)

A day later, we were both searching for ‘green-eye’ when we spotted her via our radiation sensors. They had been attuned to maximum sensitivity and we actually detected the asteroid on our ‘black scanner’ rather than the conventional radar scanner.

“Would you look at that.” Jamie tapped the screen with a crooked finger. “It’s pulsing like a miniature pulsar.”

“Yeah. It’s weird. Those were the pulsing waves that made us feel sick. The trouble is, we won’t be able to get close enough to find out why.” I added.

“Well, my calculations were pretty much spot on Nana. So what now?”

“Well, I don’t intend to go close this time, I simply want to plot it’s course until or unless the authorities want to get some volunteers to repeat what we unwittingly did. Now we know where old ‘green-eye’ is and where she’s bound, we can carry on home to Earth.”

As I spoke, I was checking the collision avoidance computer and we confirmed that ‘green-eye’ was bound for Jupiter.

“Best place for her.” Jamie surmised.

“Yeah but not before we’ve got more donors. I don’t fancy being stuck with a needle in my arm every six to eight weeks just to give a few people a chance at life. Besides, the world would be a pretty lonely place with just a few thousand survivors.”

“But a much better place maybe.” Jamie suggested softly.

“I dunno babes. I remember reading once that it would take about ten million people to support a modern industrial type of society like today’s world. You know, Farmers, doctors, teachers, engineers, and so on.”

“We could do without a few religious or political scumbags,” Jamie grinned.

“And lawyers maybe as well.” I added for good measure.

“Well. Tomorrow it’s Earth again." Jamie sighed. "Back to hazard suits and two metre bubbles.”

ooo000ooo