More bulletins from the cutting edge of biology...if you're new to this story, you'd better read the first four chapters or you won't know who's who and what's going on...sorry, but I'm new to this serial stuff...
Two weeks later, Sophie was a fully-fledged member of the research team. She turned out to have an extraordinary fund of arcane botanical knowledge, as well as a vast amount of reading in the folk-history of malevolent plants. She also quickly became Gail and my closest friend; all three of us had had the most intimate experiences with the trees, and this knowledge bonded us together. She spent most evenings having dinner with us, and we even made efforts to hook her up with some of the more eligible guys we knew, but she was always a bit disappointed in them. "They don't know," she would say, smiling at us wistfully over coffee, the day after a date. "They just don't know what we know." Once or twice, late at night, Gail and I had talked about inviting Sophie for a threesome – I did envy Gail for having had such intimate contact with Sophie, even if it had been enforced – but we never had the nerve to ask her. She had a poise and a natural reserve that deterred us.
What was strange was how easy it had been to get Sophie onto the staff. We could only assume that Alison, our Head of Department, had pulled strings; it seemed like only a day went by from Sophie being an obscure primary schoolteacher to her joining one of the most secret and highly-qualified research groups in the country. There was no question about her ability, just about how weirdly quickly the usual red tape seemed to have been cut.
As the days went by, though, research ground to a halt. The tree stopped attacking us, and we were no closer to solving the mysterious dissolution of Matthew. (Matthew's wealthy family were skirting around the college, sending threatening emails, and talking about legal action unless we could produce some proof of where he was.) We had placed the tiny Matthew seed into cold storage, until we worked out what to do with it. Gail wanted to plant it in the greenhouse, like a regular seed; Sophie wanted to grow it in more controlled conditions; I personally wanted to dissect it, but then I was never the most compassionate of us.
Then, one day, Alison called Gail, Sophie and I into her office.
It was a hot Friday afternoon. We sat opposite Alison, all three of us grubby from a morning's work, and waited for her to stop staring out of the window. Eventually she turned to us.
"It's the tree," she said flatly. "I'm worried that research isn't going anywhere."
"If we had more money –" Gail began.
"It's not money," said Alison impatiently. "You have exactly as much funding as won't start people whispering, and no more. I can't give you any more. This is potentially one of the major scientific discoveries of the new century. I wouldn't have put you in charge of it if I didn't think you could find something out about it. The reason I'm saying this is, there's a lot of interest in this project, and you aren't moving forward."
"What sort of interest?" asked Sophie, frowning slightly. Her glasses, broken during her assault by the tree, were still held together with tape.
"You don't need to know that. The point is that I'm not totally happy with the way you're going about this. I have invested considerable time and effort in protecting you, and so far you've produced very little in the way of hard evidence about what this thing wants, and why it does what it does."
"It wants to fuck people," said Gail quietly. "It's able to sexually assault people, and as long as they're reasonably psychically healthy in the first place, they don't experience it as trauma but as acutely intense and satisfying. Trouble is, the side-effects are acute attacks of vomiting and diarrhoea, and when this waste is voided on the ground, new organisms propagate themselves. Surely it's obvious that it needs human DNA to reproduce."
"That doesn't explain what happened between Andy and Matthew," said Alison. I blushed. She had clearly watched the tape of Matthew fucking me.
"This is not an easy subject to test, Alison!" said Gail, getting angry. "Anyone who goes near it tends to get fucked in every available orifice! We can't exactly advertise for test subjects! So far, it's concentrated on Andy and Sophie and me, and we've been able to handle it. But what about Tricia? And Stephen? They're okay now, but they're still seeing counsellors. What about Matthew, for fuck's sake?"
Alison looked at Gail coldly.
"Gail, there's no call for raised voices. I'm merely pointing out that your team has been working on this thing for two months, and so far you haven't even
begun
to formulate a hypothesis about
why
it uses humans this way, as a medium for its seed. I have to say, I feel very disappointed."
"Maybe," said Sophie very quietly, "you would feel a little bit different about it, if it had happened to you."
Alison looked at her, and a faint smile passed over her face.
"It's funny you should say that, Sophie. I've noticed that every person it has assaulted has been either male, or a pre-menopausal female."
Sophie's eyes narrowed behind her glasses.
"And?" she asked.
"So what I propose," Alison went on confidently, "is that I take over from Gail, as head of the research team. I passed menopause three years ago. I am, technically at least, no longer fertile. I would be very surprised if it made any attempt on me. I think I have the necessary distance, both mentally and biologically, to approach this thing and discover some hard facts."
We were all silent. I had a sudden, evil brainwave.
"I think you might be right, Alison," I said, matter-of-factly. Gail rounded on me, and was about to speak, but I gave her the briefest glance and she stopped, watching me keenly. I went on: "It could well be that, because we've had the extraordinary experiences we've had, we lack a certain, as you say, distance. I really think it might be the best thing for the project if you have a go at this thing yourself."
Alison smiled warmly. "I'm glad you see it that way. Gail, how are you about this?"
Gail looked at me, then at Sophie, then back at me, and I caught a faint twinkle of complicity in her eyes. Sophie had the ghost of a smile on her face.
"Maybe Andy is right," Gail admitted, with a superb imitation of somebody giving in to superior reasoning. "Maybe it's better if you try. I think maybe we are too close to the whole thing."
Alison beamed at us, and the meeting was over.
So it was that the four of us gathered, later that day, in the special prep room that had been set up next to the greenhouse. The empty biohazard suits hung on the walls, baggy, all-over bodysuits of thick white plastic, sealed with a strong zipper against the outside world, with a built-in oxygen supply. Gail, Sophie and I arrived first, and we kicked off our shoes and socks, preparatory to putting the suits on. Then, Alison breezed in.
"There'll be a slightly different procedure today," she said, and handed us each a metal tin. "Owing to the nature of this specimen, I've ordered special protection against any kind of pollen-like emission it gives off. Clothes off, please, and cover yourselves in this, then put on the suits. No other clothing." And she took off her jacket and hung it on the door of a locker.
We boggled at each other. "What is this stuff, Alison?" asked Gail. Alison was sitting on a bench, pulling her socks off. She smiled at Gail.
"Just a little something I've been working on. I think it should act as an effective prophylactic. Come on, we're wasting time."
