synopsis

Cambridge based research scientist Dr Campbell Fletcher wants to make vastly improved pain relieving medication by exploiting a little-researched aspect of subatomic physics. Multinational pharmaceutical company Derwent & Graham wants to stop him. D&G have applied for patents to make better antibiotics and anti-viral treatments in a similar way, and in the cutthroat world of big pharma crushing parallel research is second nature.

Fletcher doesn’t have the resources for a conventional legal dispute. But he has a slender lead which suggests that decades earlier Nobel Prizewinner Francis Crick suggested a similar concept to Australian Nobel laureate McFarlane Burnet. Burnet seems to have dismissed the idea, but if Fletcher can show that Crick’s idea was sufficiently detailed D&G’s patent applications might be proved invalid, thus clearing the way for Fletcher’s work.

Fletcher enlists some friends in Australia to follow it up from Burnet’s end. Soon he wants to call it off when thuggery starts to be deployed against his staff. But Dr Anna Rischelli grew up in Melbourne’s crime ridden outer west, and she and her sister Tina are used to dealing with that kind of problem. They and another friend, commercial lawyer James Bentley, finish their search in Melbourne, then head to Cambridge to complete the investigation.

Tina has thought of James only as a friend, and is surprised to find herself jealous when James displays an attraction to Fletcher’s next door neighbor in college, historian Claudia Naismith. Worse, although various interlopers get foiled, the search appears to be fruitless.

But a chance recollection about famous author Joseph Conrad causes James to reconsider Burnet’s apparently dismissive comment to Crick about the works of science fiction icon Isaac Asimov. The search resumes.

And when Tina observes Claudia approaching James to summon him to an urgent meeting in Fletcher’s college rooms, things come to a head.