Ken McClure - Trauma

“We’re trapped!” said Sarah.

“Come on!” said Lafferty.

“But where?”

Lafferty indicated the lift and pulled Sarah towards it.

“If he’s going to search the basement we can beat him to the front door!”

He slid open the door to the lift and they got in. The lift was long and narrow. Lafferty didn’t have to be a genius to work out why. He pressed the ‘up’ button and nothing happened. He pressed it again and then four times rapidly in succession. Still nothing. He looked around for some kind of brake switch or emergency button that might have been holding the car, but there was none. There was only one other button. It had a down arrow on it. In desperation, he pressed it and the lift door slid shut. He looked at Sarah with amazement on his face as they both realised that they were going down. They had got on in the basement but they were definitely going down!

Sarah let her head slump forward on to Lafferty’s chest and he shared her dejection.

Lafferty broke away from Sarah and bunched his fists in readiness. He had no idea what to expect when the lift doors opened, but he was going to go down fighting. The doors slid back to reveal nothing more sinister than a plain, green-painted wall. They stepped out into a narrow corridor leading to two swing doors. There was no point in going back up in the lift. It did not reach the upper floors. It simply connected the Sigma lab to this sub-basement. The long narrow car had been designed to carry coffins. The missing bodies did not go off to some fancy private clinic; they obviously came here.

Sarah looked first through the glass in the swing doors and let out her breath in a low whistle. Lafferty took a look and saw what seemed to him a unit very much like HTU. It was lit with low green lighting and each bed was surrounded with life-support machinery. The patients were enclosed by inflated plastic bubbles.

There did not seem to be any staff around, so Lafferty and Sarah went in through the doors and approached the nearest bubble. “Oh my God,” said Sarah, putting her hand to her mouth. “It’s John’s son! It’s Simon Main!”

“But he’s dead!” exclaimed Lafferty. “What’s he doing here?”

“They’re all dead,” said Sarah, looking up the line. “Brain dead. But their bodies are still being kept ventilated and nourished.”

They moved on to the next bubble and found Martin Keegan. Pumps and relays clicked and hissed perpetual life into him.

“I don’t understand,” said Lafferty. “What’s the point of it all? If they are all brain dead, why keep them on the machines?”

“I’m not sure,” whispered Sarah. “Maybe this will tell us something.” She had seen a plastic clip-board hanging on the wall between the two bays. She lifted it off its hook and read, “MAIN. CHALLENGE DOSE 5, VARICELLA ZOSTER, 10.7 PFU per ml.”

“Mean anything?” asked Lafferty.

Sarah nodded thoughtfully and turned the page. “KEEGAN, PROTECTION I, PRIMARY COMPLETE, SECONDARY +2, CHALLENGE 1 DUE +14. H. SIMPLEX.”

“Well?” prompted Lafferty.

“They are using these people as human cell cultures,” said Sarah, not hiding her distaste. “Their bodies are being used as laboratory animals.”

“What do you mean?”

“Viruses won’t grow outside living cells,” said Sarah. “To work with them in the lab you need some kind of cell culture system to keep them alive. This usually takes the form of a tissue culture system — usually animal cells growing artificially in glass bottles with some kind of liquid nutrient. It’s not as good as using human cells but the availability of human cells is, of course, limited — and they don’t survive well in artificial culture anyway. They tend to die off after a few days.”

“But if you use a whole person...” said Lafferty, looking down at Martin Keegan.

“Precisely,” said Sarah. “They’re using whole bodies as living tissue cultures for viruses.”

“But what for?” asked Lafferty.

“The record cards suggest that Simon Main’s body has been immunised with the Herpes vaccine and been challenged five times with the virus, the last time with Varicella zoster .”

“And Martin Keegan?”

“I think the code means that he has just been given his primary dose of vaccine. He still has to get a second injection in two days and then he will be challenged with Herpes simplex virus in fourteen days’ time.”

“My God,” said Lafferty, his voice betraying the revulsion he felt. “This is repulsive.”

“This must be how they developed and tested their vaccine so quickly,” said Sarah. “They were using a human model from the beginning, so there was no need for small animal tests followed by time-consuming, expensive tests on primates.”

“But surely the Department of Health must have asked questions?” asked Lafferty. “If they granted a licence for the vaccine they must have known how it was developed and tested?”

“You would think so,” said Sarah.

“There must have been paperwork, surely?”

Sarah said quietly, “The government put up half the money for the Head Trauma Unit.”

“Good God,” whispered Lafferty as he saw what she was suggesting. “They knew all along what was happening to these people.”

“Just another case of the end justifying the means.”

“It’s incredible!”

“I remember my father telling me of the anguish that ran through the medical profession after the full extent of the Nazi medical experiments became known after the war. All that pain and suffering with people in the camps being subjected to nightmarish experiments. And all in the cause of advancing medical science. But the worst thing, he said, was not the fact that people who called themselves doctors had carried out such atrocities, it was the awful fact that they had advanced medical knowledge. In doing the unspeakable they achieved what normal researchers would have taken ten times as long to accomplish. It seemed somehow like a...”

“Triumph of evil,” said Lafferty.

“Yes,” agreed Sarah.

“Evil does triumph sometimes,” said Lafferty. “The important thing is to continue recognising it as evil, and not to start crediting it as being anything else. And this,” he said looking around him, “is evil.”

The sound of raised voices coming from the far end of the room interrupted them and brought home the hopelessness of their position. Lafferty looked around then pointed to the bed on which Martin Keegan lay. “Get under!” he whispered.

Sarah slid under the bed and Lafferty followed with a great deal more awkwardness. He found his face pressed up against a glass tank that was receiving the waste products from Keegan’s body. The voices were getting louder and they could now hear what was being said.

Murdoch Tyndall’s voice said angrily, “This can’t go on, Sotillo. We’ll have to delay introduction of the vaccine.”

“Nonsense!” replied Sotillo. “It’s a chance in a million reaction. We can’t let just one isolated case ruin the whole project. There’s too much at stake.”

“But we don’t know that it’s just one case, Sotillo,” protested Tyndall. “We don’t have enough figures.”

The two men had stopped in front of Martin Keegan’s bed. Lafferty could see by their feet that they were facing each other.

“Look!” said Sotillo. “This is no time to get cold feet. There’s always a risk with any kind of vaccination. We’ve just had a bit of bad luck, that’s all.”

“And what happens if it isn’t just a bit of bad luck?” argued Tyndall. “I say we call a halt until we know for sure.”

“No!” said Sotillo. “We go ahead as planned.”