Read The Dying of the Light (Book 3): Beginning for Free Online

to give her a good explanation. It was about damned time. She knew he was working hard, but she was important too, dammit!
    Sabrina walked over to her snoring husband, his head thrown back and arms on the arm rests. She noted the empty and overturned coffee cup on his desk and shook her head. Even with all the caffeine he drank—fake though it was—the human body could only take so much.
    She tapped him on the shoulder, and when he didn’t wake, she shook him—not rough, but not gentle either. He didn’t respond to gentle wake-up calls.
    “—the cross linker and—” Jim cut off as he awoke and looked around, bleary eyed. “What the… Sabrina, what are you doing here?” He scrabbled for the coffee cup and frowned when he discovered it empty.
    “It’s five o’clock in the morning, Jim. You and your work wife fell asleep again.” She smiled and tossed her head in Mary’s direction.
    Jim started to object, then saw she was smiling and smiled back. “I think we did it,” he said without fanfare or celebration, tinged with a bit of weariness and, for a wonder, hope.
    Sabrina’s eyes widened. “You did it? Really?” She clapped her hands with excitement. Everyone else had been waiting nearly ten years for Jim to prove himself worthy of the rescue trip to McMurdo, even if no one had said it. And no one had wanted it more than she and Jim.
    Her clap woke Mary on the other side of the room, who looked up with wild hair and alarm at the loud noise. “Wha? D’you drop something again, Jim?” Mary rubbed her eyes and yawned, then smiled as she saw Sabrina. “Coffee?”
    Sabrina laughed. “No, I forgot this morning. I’m sorry. And I’m sorry for waking you. Jim just told me the good news!”
    Mary frowned. “News?”
    “I think you were asleep when the results came in, and I sacked out as soon as my ass hit the chair over here,” Jim responded with a yawn and a stretch as he stood up. “The last batch of results came in. I think we’re ready for trials.”
    “Go over it with me, just so I make sure I understand when someone asks me what my brilliant husband has come up with,” Sabrina said, as she took her husband’s hands and gave them a squeeze. “And remember, keep it simple. Not a geneticist.”
    “So you know, in general, how an antibody works, right?” When Sabrina nodded, Jim continued, “Good. Well, with our bastard of a proteinaceous infectious particle—”
    “Prion,” Sabrina interjected.
    “Yeah, prion. We couldn’t find any naturally occurring antibodies for it, which isn’t surprising, since someone would have shown up with them sooner or later if we, as a species, had developed them. David Blake’s mutation notwithstanding, we don’t have any antibodies for this, so we had to create one.” Jim sketched out a rough diagram on a nearby whiteboard.
    “And that’s the problem,” Mary said as she walked over and continued the drawing where Jim had left off. “Not just creating the antibody, but making sure it attaches to the right part of the prion and is bound tightly enough to prevent the ‘bad protein’ from causing other proteins to reshape themselves. It’s got to attach to the abnormally folded areas of the prion and keep it from affecting the others.”
    “Exactly,” Jim said with a nod.
    “And you’ve done it?” Sabrina asked.
    “Jim might have jumped the gun a bit.” Mary frowned. “There’s a lot of work, and more important, a lot of trials to be done before we can be sure of anything.”
    “How will it work, assuming all that happens?”
    “Most likely an injection,” Jim said. “Once when it’s finalized, and then a booster every once in a while for the rest of our lives. It could be every five, every ten, or who knows what. We can monitor antibody levels over time and adjust as needed.”
    “That’s fantastic news!” Sabrina said.
    “Hold your horses,” Mary countered. “It’s not that simple. We’ve still got to do those trials, then