Whiteout(25)
Miranda got to her feet, panting slightly. To her mortification, she felt perspiration break out on her throat. "I was looking for tissue paper." "I can see that. I want to know why you're in my house at all." Ned appeared in the doorway. "Hello, Jenny, I didn't hear you come in."
"Obviously I didn't give you time to sound the alarm," she said sarcastically.
"Sorry," he said, "but I asked Miranda to come in and—" "Well, don't!" Jennifer interrupted. "I don't want your women here." She made it sound as if Ned had a harem. In fact he had dated only two women since Jennifer. The first he had seen only once, and the second was Miranda. But it seemed childishly quarrelsome to point that out. Instead, Miranda said, "I was just trying to help Sophie." "I'll take care of Sophie. Please leave my house." Ned said, "I'm sorry if we startled you, Jenny, but—" "Don't bother to apologize, just get her out of here." Miranda blushed hotly. No one had ever been so rude to her. "I'd better leave," she said.
"That's right," Jennifer said. Ned said, "I'll bring Sophie out as soon as I can." Miranda was as angry with Ned as with Jennifer, though for the moment she was not sure why. She turned toward the hall.
"You can use the back door," Jennifer said.
To her shame, Miranda hesitated. She looked at Jennifer and saw on her face the hint of a smirk. That gave Miranda an ounce of courage. "I don't think so," she said quietly. She went to the front door.
"Tom, come with me," she called.
"Just a minute," he shouted back.
She stepped into the living room. Tom was watching TV. She grabbed his wrist, hauled him to his feet, and dragged him out of the house.
"That hurts!" he protested.
She slammed the front door. "Next time, come when I call."
She felt like crying as she got into the car. Now she had to sit waiting, like a servant, while Ned was in the house with his ex-wife. Had Jennifer actually planned this whole drama as a way of humiliating Miranda? It was possible. Ned had been hopeless. She knew now why she was so cross with him. He had let Jennifer insult her without a word of protest. He just kept apologizing. And for what? If Jennifer had packed a case for her daughter, or even got the girl to do it herself, Miranda would not have had to enter the house. And then, worst of all, Miranda had taken out her anger on her son. She should have shouted at Jennifer, not Tom.
She looked at him in the driving mirror. "Tommy, I'm sorry I hurt your wrist," she said.
"It's okay," he said without looking up from his Game Boy. "I'm sorry I didn't come when you called."
"All forgiven, then," she said. A tear rolled down her cheek, and she quickly wiped it away.
11 AM
"VIRUSES kill thousands of people every day," Stanley Oxenford said. "About every ten years, an epidemic of influenza kills around twenty-five thousand people in the United Kingdom. In 1918, flu caused more deaths than the whole of World War One. In the year 2002, three million people died of AIDS, which is caused by human immunodeficiency virus. And viruses are involved in ten percent of cancers."
Toni listened intently, sitting beside him in the Great Hall, under the varnished timbers of the mock-medieval roof. He sounded calm and controlled, but she knew him well enough to recognize the barely audible tremor of strain in his voice. He had been shocked and dismayed by Laurence Mahoney's threat, and the fear that he might lose everything was only just concealed by his unruffled facade.
She watched the faces of the assembled reporters. Would they hear what he was saying and understand the importance of his work? She knew journalists. Some were intelligent, many stupid. A few believed in telling the truth; the majority just wrote the most sensational story they could get away with. She felt indignant that they could hold in their hands the fate of a man such as Stanley. Yet the power of the tabloids was a brutal fact of modern life. If enough of these hacks chose to portray Stanley as a mad scientist in a Frankenstein castle, the Americans might be sufficiently embarrassed to pull the finance.
That would be a tragedy—not just for Stanley, but for the world. True, someone else could finish the testing program for the antiviral drug, but a ruined and bankrupt Stanley would invent no more miracle cures. Toni thought angrily that she would like to slap the dumb faces of the journalists and say, "Wake up—this is about your future, too!"
"Viruses are a fact of life, but we don't have to accept that fact passively," Stanley went on. Toni admired the way he spoke. His voice was measured but relaxed. He used this tone when explaining things to younger colleagues. His speech sounded more like a conversation. "Scientists can defeat viruses. Before AIDS, the great killer was smallpox—until a scientist called Edward Jenner invented vaccination in 1796. Now smallpox has disappeared from human society. Similarly, polio has been eliminated in large areas of our world. In time, we will defeat influenza, and AIDS, and even cancer—and it will be done by scientists like us, working in laboratories such as this."
A woman put up a hand and called out. "What are you working on here—exactly?"
Toni said, "Would you mind identifying yourself?"
"Edie McAllan, science correspondent, Scotland on Sunday."