Brian Freemantle - Dead End

‘Let’s start our list with it,’ decided Parnell, unwilling for a specific discussion to become too protracted this soon. He decided, too, against remarking upon their seemingly unconscious adoption of his operating plan: to do so would have sounded schoolmasterly and he considered he’d already suffered too much from that himself. Instead he said: ‘I think things have started well. I do want drug rejection and resistance to be on our agenda. That is where we might make our most obvious, hopefully even quick, contribution…’ He nodded towards Lapidus. ‘We’re all familiar with the diseases that have already been genetically coded. I want our work to identify others high on our agenda, even before we start properly liaising with the people next door…’ He hesitated, nodding now towards his side office. ‘On the subject of doors, mine isn’t ever going to be closed. Any problems, difficulties, anything at all upsetting anyone, I want to know about it and I want them solved, not gestating out of their proper proportions. Thank you for coming to work with me. I think it’s going to turn out just fine.’ Did he really think that? First an anticlimax. Now uncertainty about something he couldn’t identify… unless, that is, it was not about his international acclaim as a genetic explorer, but self-doubt at his personal competence to control, administrate, financially supervise and lead, as he was determined to lead along the forever-God’s-gifted upward spiral. Parnell was as unaccustomed to self-doubt as he was to commercial science. He wasn’t sure he liked either.

Parnell was surprised at the same-day response from Dwight Newton, promptly although not prematurely on time for the agreed meeting, the earlier uncertainties boxed away, hopefully forever. Neither was to be ashamed of: each was understandable, acceptable.

There was no avuncular, standing-in-readiness greeting this time from the research and development vice president. Instead the stick-thin man remained behind his desk, gazing up from between humped shoulders, spider’s-leg fingers at momentary rest before him.

Easily remembering the upbeat, reach-for-the-sky presentations at the seminar, Parnell enthused about his opening encounter with his staff, unembarrassed at the hypocrisy of intentional phrases like ‘team players’ and ‘pulling together’ as he recounted that morning’s gathering.

The scuttle-ready hands remained unmoving. Newton said: ‘I told you I always wanted to know what was going on.’

‘I’ve just told you!’

‘I would have liked to have sat in on it.’

‘It was a getting-together of a team. Nothing formal. Nothing formative.’

‘I would still have liked to have been there.’

‘I’ve found where the washrooms are now,’ retorted Parnell. ‘And can go there all by myself and I wash my hands afterwards.’

‘I don’t understand that remark,’ protested Newton.

‘You asked to be fully informed of everything that happens in my section. You just have been. Fully informed. I don’t expect everything I say or do or initiate to be monitored. I’ve been given the responsibility of a department, which I intend to fulfil according to the terms of my employment.’

‘I’ve made it perfectly clear to you that I want to know every intended genetic research project before it is initiated, not after. There could be conflict with other, parallel research…’

‘Not if it’s carried out as it should be, with total co-ordinated exchanges between every section,’ broke in Parnell.

‘I am the ultimate co-ordinator,’ said Newton. ‘I’ll decide if there’s a conflict or unnecessary duplication.’

‘What appears to be parallel duplication can’t be avoided if my section genetically compares and cross-references matching although alternative experimentation: that’s the whole purpose of pharmacogenomics being set up here, forming a part of what becomes a whole.’

‘I will co-ordinate and decide upon everything that is conducted in the research and development division of this organization,’ pedantically insisted Newton, the fingers at last scrabbling back and forth in exasperation. ‘I’ll make that clear in a written memorandum, which perhaps I should have done earlier. There seems to have been some verbal misunderstanding.’

There was no benefit in any longer revolving on this argumentative carousel, Parnell recognized. Just as he recognized the weak threat of putting this latest disagreement on written record. ‘I came here to talk about something else.’

‘What?’ demanded the research vice president, the peculiar fingers drumming out his impatience at the dispute ending on Parnell’s terms, not his.

‘Science – all sciences – benefit from exchange, from the cross-fertilization of ideas.’

‘Are you lecturing consciously to irritate or aren’t you aware how you sound!’

‘I want to set up a dedicated website,’ announced Parnell.

The hands stopped. Newton became quite still, his rising colour the only indication of his incredulity, heightened when he finally spoke by the way in which he spaced the words. ‘You-want-to-do-what?’

‘Set up a website dedicated to my section,’ repeated the more controlled Parnell. ‘Upon which…’

‘… Every competitor can log on and work out not just what you but every other Dubette research section might be working on and anticipate every patent and licence before we even apply for it! Are you actually expecting me to take you seriously!’

He hadn’t properly balanced the counter-argument, conceded Parnell. ‘I think that’s a minimal danger, dependent entirely upon how the research is set out. What I propose…’

‘Let’s hypothesize, just to amuse ourselves and show this up as the insane, absurd idea it is,’ persisted Newton, relentlessly. ‘Let’s say someone outside the company suggests something you incorporate. Whose copyright – exclusive patent or licence – will it be? How many civil courts in how many countries do you imagine we’d keep in business for the next millennium arguing infringement or plagiarism actions?’

‘Let me tell you…’ Parnell tried, yet again.

‘No!’ refused the other man, loudly. ‘You’re not going to tell me anything. I am going to tell you. You will not set up any dedicated website, now or in the foreseeable future… if, indeed, the future for you here at Dubette is foreseeable. I will put my refusal – and my reasons for it – in writing, too. And attach to it the legally binding and agreed confidentiality agreement signed by you, as a condition of your employment. To which I want a written response from you that you’ve read that agreement and fully understand it. Let’s start right now. You understand everything, every single thing, I’ve just told you?’

Parnell burned with the humiliation, accepting that he’d not only been out-argued but that the defeat was entirely of his own making. Shortly he said: ‘Yes, I understand.’

‘The next time we talk I want common sense, not nonsense,’ said Newton, warmed by the conviction that he’d irreparably punctured all the previous insufferable arrogance. He couldn’t remember enjoying himself so much for a long time.

‘It sounds like a one-victim massacre, if there is such a thing,’ sympathized Rebecca.

‘It was,’ admitted Parnell. ‘God knows what Kathy imagined I’d done when I dictated the reply Newton insisted upon.’ Kathy Richardson was the greying, middle-aged divorcee whom he’d finally engaged as his secretary, the only position Dwight Newton hadn’t insisted be considered by the appointments committee.

‘Hardly a day to celebrate,’ said Rebecca. They were eating in her uncle’s restaurant, accustomed now to the food and wine choice being made for them and to Ciro sometimes talking them through special dishes he’d created, always ‘just for you two’.