Pauline Ashwell - Hunted Head

Illustrations by Jonathan and Lisa Hunt

Sandy had known for weeks that it was probably coming, so the feeling of sickness that struck her on reading the formal notice that her grant was not to be renewed was unexpected. It was also unfair. She was working on the situation; taking steps. There were still a couple of foundations which had not so far sent a form letter regretting that this year’s cash was all committed. And there were several laboratories with the kind of facilities she needed, to which she had not yet had time to apply. She was a damn good technician and had the references to prove it; she was willing to take minimal wages if she could have a couple of yards of bench space and access to a steriliser. It was a bargain for any lab with microorganisms to be looked after. She’d make them see that, if she could just get an interview…

So this was not a catastrophe. Just one more rotten thing in a day that had started with a split fingernail, followed by the sight—no, spectacle of Danny in the cafeteria, sitting between a blonde and a brunette, with a redhead opposite; all three no doubt hanging on his every slurp (anyone who expected words before he had drunk at least two cups of coffee would be out of luck, so early in the day).

One of them at least was said to be rather bright… Well, they were all pretty, they’d have learned their way around; whatever happened would be purely recreational on both sides. It took a Plain Brain who’d never dated anybody but nerds to—

Why the hell had she let him get away with it? Well, Danny wasn’t stupid—not where his own interests were seriously involved. He had got at her through a weak point she hadn’t seen the need to guard: professional pride. To be humbly consulted by The Hunk about his problems in getting mutant Rhabditis to breed, because everybody knew she was a whizz at culturing micro-critters, was irresistible.

Come to that, why should she have resisted, at that point? Fellow scientists ought to help one another, within reason. That was where she slipped up. It was reasonable to list things he should check on—pH of the nutrient gel, possible contaminants. But she shouldn’t on any account have offered to make up a new batch, even if she could do it about ten times as fast as he could. And most emphatically, when he started beefing about the difficulty of using a micro-pipette, she should have shown him how to use it once, and then stood by and criticised; not taken pity on the clumsy lunk and picked out the necessary number of males and unfertilised females from the wriggling mass of transparent worms herself. That had not only cost hours she didn’t have to spare, it had set a really bad precedent…

And, of course, once he had a sufficient biomass of the hybrids to do the fashionable part of the work, the DNA analysis, he’d dumped her.

She should have followed the advice of the chairman of her dissertation committee; concentrated on raising bacteria-free cultures of just two species of protozoa and compared their DNA. Even with the present squeeze on postgraduate grants, projects involving DNA were mostly getting by. Instead, she’d allowed herself to get fascinated by the astonishing variety of things that could be achieved within a single cell, and gone all out to cultivate as many as she could. She had successfully raised fifty-three species of ciliates in bacteria-free media during the first year, and had planned to spend the second relating the differences to success or otherwise in various environments. What, for instance, was the evolutionary advantage of being unable to synthesise an essential component of nucleotides?

Interesting, the chairman had said; but grants committees these days were not impressed by natural history. But that was what she was good at; getting micros to live and reproduce under conditions that were wholly unnatural for them. She had thought she was proving the chairman wrong when her proposal was accepted. Then had come a 10 percent cut in the cash available for postgraduate studies…

But if only the old fuddy-duddy had had the strength of mind to insist that she followed his advice—

No, she was not going to start thinking like that. She had always insisted on doing things her way, ever since she got out of the orphanage, so any troubles she had were nobody’s fault but her own.

But now she had been reminded of another bit of lousiness to come; a meeting with her chairman. No doubt he would express his regrets and refrain, very obviously, from pointing out that he had told her so. Give him his due, he might be a has-been who had published only hackwork since he got tenure, but he was always ready to listen. Not like some…

Better take another look in her pigeonhole, though; had she ever had a session with him that hadn’t been canceled at least once? But this time there were no message slips with her name, in the pigeonhole marked J. No excuse for not getting it over with—

“Miss Jennings?”

Sandy’s heart gave a jolt. She spun round and stared up—and up—

Of course it wasn’t him, how could it be? This man was bigger, and stronger looking, and so much more threatening—

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I startled you.”

“Yea, I—It doesn’t matter. I have to go.”

She slid sideways with her back to the pigeonholes, to avoid going past him, and hurried away. She was headed in the wrong direction, and going round three sides of the campus meant she was going to be late, and this was all bloody stupid. It was not even as though he was a stranger—just that fellow who turned up sometimes at seminars and so on, supposed to be doing research on the literature. But she’d never heard him speak before; he had the same faint accent, and it brought it all back—

If the chairman noticed that she was sweating and out of breath he was too polite to comment, and his expression of regret was mercifully short. Sandy was getting set to leave when it appeared that he had something else to say.

“Er… Miss Jennings, Dr. Marius was enquiring about you.”

“Who?”

“Ma-ri-us. You haven’t met him? He spends a certain amount of time on campus, mostly in the library. A tall man—”

“Hey! Built like a bruiser and dresses like a banker? Dark hair—?” “Um. Yes. Yes, I should say that described him rather neatly… He… er… well, he has a number of contacts in the University administration, and the recent cuts in postgraduate funding are not precisely secret—”

“He knows I’m getting the push,” said Sandy impatiendy. How many other people knew, she wondered. Had Danny heard yet?

“That is not exactly—well, I suppose, from your point of view—The fact is, Miss Jennings, that Marius has—er—been instrumental in obtaining posts for several postgraduate students who, for one reason and another, have had their studies disrupted, and it seems—er—”

“He hands out research grants?” Hell, she thought, and I acted as though—

“No, not exacdy. He has connections with some firm or other that carries out a certain amount of research —on pharmaceuticals, I believe.”

Sandy said, “Oh.”

Pharmaceuticals research meant tests on animals—rats, mice, rabbits, even monkeys. No, thanks.

“I could be wrong about that. It might be worth your while to see if he can help you at all.”

It might, of course. Pharmaceutical labs were likely to have the sort of equipment she needed—