The Muller Vaccine

By Shaun Wilson

It feels like the end of the world when a history professor loses his wife, his home and his career and the book he wrote to escape it all flops. But shady government and corporate agents are suddenly very interested in his apparently not-so-fanciful book. A sect hosting an anonymous conspiracy website, becoming much too popular, and remorseless agents from other governments join a race to develop a vaccine crucial to human survival and, not coincidentally, to gather the power and profit it bestows. There will be no time for critical testing before the vaccine is released and it turns out to have some very unfortunate side effects.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Aug 31, 2021
• ISBN: 9781398422902

Book preview

About the Author

Shaun Wilson has worked in foundries around Australia while forming several bands to perform and record his original songs and has also had several exhibitions of his visual art. He now resides near Newcastle, where he continues to work in industry and the arts including writing fiction and stage plays.

Copyright Information ©

Shaun Wilson (2021)

The right of Shaun Wilson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398422896 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398422902 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published (2021)

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd

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The two young men struggling up twenty-three flights of stairs to Lionel Birchmore’s humble office looked more like boxers than publisher’s agents, so they should have been fitter. They dressed and acted smart and serious, but they were not well-briefed and were repeatedly stumped by the old literary agent they expected would be a pushover, a quick job before lunch.

When they entered and stood at ease like two thugs guarding an alley, Birchmore leaned on the armrests of his chair to raise his elbows as a gesture of getting up and muttered an apology about the dysfunctional elevator, as he did to all visitors. The agents said they were interested in buying the rights to a book series by one of his clients, Stuart Macshane. They also wanted to commission the writer to tell his personal story and the background to the series for a cult readership Birchmore was surprised to hear about.

‘So who is this guy?’ they asked, ‘This writer, Macshane?’

‘He’s nobody,’ yawned the old paperback lion. ‘Stuart Macshane is a pseudonym for someone even I don’t know. His true identity will turn out to be a nobody. All fiction writers are boring people. How do you think they find the time?’

Birchmore said he got sent a draft from a friend of Macshane and Sword of Saturn Inc., fantasy publishers, picked it up. Macshane emailed to say thanks and said he hoped it would pay off his mortgage—he even stated the sum. The short run first edition was half-remaindered and critically ignored—the writer got less than a monthly house payment, minus agent’s fee.

The brawny young reps from a confidential interested publisher betrayed no interest in literature or knowledge of the current market. They were frauds—the motive was a mystery but they were offering real money; a rare enough thing at this end of the business. They bought up all the remaindered copies of the previous edition—to be shredded, so the market will identify only with the new version, they said. They wanted to meet the writer but Lionel could not help them, except to email the offer to Macshane’s friend.

When the writer failed to reply to Birchmore’s email, the agents returned offering an improbable advance for the story behind the story. It was exactly the writer’s mortgage sum Birchmore had mentioned, as if they did not know how much to offer. But they did not add the agent’s fee, which Birchmore promptly extracted. It was an oversight one would expect of any bureaucratic agency, private or government, but not from a real publisher.

‘Did you read the book, George?’

‘Oh, yeah. Sat up all night. Couldn’t put it down, all six volumes.’

‘So, you didn’t?’

‘I flipped through it. Not flippantly. It’s just some crappy pulp, Alex. What the hell am I supposed to make of it?’

‘Nothing. So, thank you.’

‘Thank me for what?’

‘We wanted to know if anyone who was interested would be alerted to the sensitive content and from your response, the answer is negative.’

‘Shall I poke a stick anyway?’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Has something to do with the early development of nuclear physics and/or biogenetics.’

‘Damn.’

‘Alex, every fucking airport brick has something to do with that. It’s your standard thriller plot—James Bond versus Frankenstein. There must be hundreds of non-fiction books much more sensitive than pulp no one read. My agents have to do the suppressing and it would help if they knew what. Or I knew so I could tell them I did.’

‘It would help if you gave them a working idea of the publishing business so they could at least fake it convincingly.’

‘We did not have the time or the allocated budget for specific training.’

‘And the old literary agent suspected something.’

‘Maybe he thought the boys were from Internal Revenue. What else could he suspect? Anyway, the second time the agents got full co-operation.’

‘They had money.’

‘It walks and talks.’

‘Except, we still have no idea who the writer is. His agent hasn’t a clue; no leads. Is that what you call full co-operation?’

‘Maybe he’s covering but I don’t think so. He is trying to flush the writer out. He doesn’t care who we are because we have money and we aren’t breaking his fingers.’

‘Our problem is—what does the writer know? He is someone who can put together a puzzle. He might be a detective or researcher of some sort. Why is he so determined to remain anonymous?’

‘Embarrassment?’

‘We show up with the pot of gold and still no sign. His agent said he run off with the money, but hopefully to work on his story about the story.’

‘Gone underground, I say. Knows too much, knows he knows too much and has figured out that we are not real publishers. We want our money back.’

‘That’s one way to look at it, George.’

Three years previously, on a snowbound mountain near the axis of east west and north on the Continent, the man whom would later choose the name Stuart Macshane idled at a lookout and admired the profile of his research assistant, Verona, as she surveyed the magnificent vista.

‘It’s the end of the world,’ he offered by way of conversation. ‘The pointy end.’

She nodded and smiled absently. If it was literally the end of the world today, she would go out after a smashing one night stand with a ski instructor and the professor would just go out. Her fiancé back home had expressed suspicions about the middle-aged, married, black antiquities professor she spent so much time with. Her being the only other noticeably coloured person on the campus somehow seemed incriminating and here they were on a fabulous junket a world away.

‘The book is about the end of the world, I suppose.’ He had almost said our book but that would seem too familiar.

‘The End: From the Beginning…slowly and painfully,’ she commented. ‘Sorry,’ she added as he gripped her shoulder to show his gratitude for her dedicated effort and she leaned in for him to embrace her. After all, it was very cold on the lookout over the Alps.

The professor had based his book on an obscure old magazine serial. The research started as a deliberately pointless distraction from everything that mattered, when everything started falling apart—his job as lecturer to less and less students, his marriage to his previous research intern. Her actual field of study was biochemistry; as a single mother of two, she just needed some money but they had struck a personal affinity. He intrigued her, she’d said, because he was different. She’d meant his chivalrous manner or maybe she really meant his race, but hitching an attractive blonde seemed like social improvement for him, even if many privately did not approve. His support seemed to have helped her achieve more in her own studies, so much so that she gained influential attention and ultimately, surprisingly, had risen to become a leading researcher at a privatised lab on campus. She didn’t need him anymore to put it very simply. The increasing bitter spats on any trivial matter had just been her way of making the break. The distracting hobby research became more obsessive from this time. He had come to believe that some of the characters from the dubious serial might have existed and some events may have some basis in fact. The names were obviously changed but Verona had found records of real persons in the right place at the right time to qualify as the serial characters.

Over the opposing range from the lookout, on an inaccessible ledge, there was an unusually statuesque formation of ice, which they had viewed through binoculars from beside the autobahn at the only point where the cliff face became visible. The professor would charter a helicopter to get a better look if his funding was that extravagant. He believed that the unique ice formation might encase a sort of robot that supposedly accompanied scientist clockmakers in the 1930s on their escape from fascists, who were forcing them to help develop an atomic weapon. It was the end of the story never reached by three generations of serial writers and the professor made liberal use of the university’s time and resources to pursue it. With his gorgeous volunteer assistant he was supposedly searching for Celtic pottery fragments in all the great romantic tourist destinations on the continent.

Verona snuggled under the arm of the professor as they stared out across the monumental peaks. Was she thinking, he wondered, about her jolly good fuck with some stranger last night?

‘I’m sorry, my mind was far away. What were you saying?’ she yawned.

‘Just thinking about the end of the world, when we used to expect it. The Cold War. Every morning, when I was young, you’d wake up from a nightmare and peek out the window to check if the world was still there.’

‘I am too young for that. But I guess it wasn’t meant to happen.’

‘The risk has only proliferated. It’s completely absurd that so many people stopped worrying as much.’

‘Sounds like you need to get out and have some fun, professor.’

Verona’s advice felt embarrassing, for it reminded them both of her misbehaviour of the night before, which might be considered serious or frivolous depending on one’s view of infidelity. The strapping ski instructor, however, had proved to be the most providential of all the people they had spoken to regarding the old story, having taken it on himself to get locals to divulge more than they would to the visitors. The insinuation that Verona might have prostituted herself for the professor’s silly hobby would be ridiculous yet still it played guiltily on his mind. She extracted herself from under his arm.

That one minute on the lookout would be their only physical contact in the month they travelled like a couple, but the professor’s wife would claim, as grounds for a generous divorce pay-out, that they were conducting an affair. He had already been expelled to the doghouse above his garage with a commanding but impotent view of the back of his house and what the occupants got up to, for the lights were always on and the curtains never fully drawn at night. The two teenagers, a male and a female, must have known the stepfather they never really accepted could see something of their casual sex, drugs and sloth and either they cared so little what he thought or they were trying to drive him away.

He remained in the doghouse to rate as an occupier and if he pays out his original mortgage, he will secure the house as a prior asset before the divorce settlement reaches court. His wife seemed intent on getting the house just to spite him. She earned more money than he and the private consortium sponsoring her confidential research have probably offered her a better house. They gave her manned surveillance too, which they omitted to mention. When she finally realised someone was following her, she accused her estranged husband of having her tailed to discredit her in the settlement, as she had done to him.

He had signed a guarantee that he would never ask about or share with anyone what his wife might be working on, not that he had any real knowledge of it. In his doghouse, though probably bitter and twisted, he remained conveniently under surveillance. The generous private sponsorship his wife enjoyed became so generous and private no other researchers or students were allowed to use the facility any more. It could not have been just her admirable picture in the prospectus that pulled the money—she was a blonde with brains and she was onto something. Her career in future-making science rocketed past his career in antiquities. The whole humanities department was being steadily evacuated to make way for the expansion of the private biochemistry lab.

Keeping his book project a secret from her, in embarrassment or as pathetic revenge, ultimately cost his marriage because she thought he’d spent all that time screwing his assistant. His department had been reviewed and the accounts did not adequately explain time and expenditure. The university threatened to sue him for using the entire department travel budget for a romantic tryst on the continent. He lost Verona, who felt embarrassed by the scandal and by her own secret tryst, an affair she continued via the web. When his lawyers saw the surveillance photos of her, they commiserated with him for being innocent. His wife’s accusation collapsed in court when they revealed six novels researched, written and published by the accused when he had supposedly been too busy having an affair. All the men present enjoyed the wife’s utter shock on learning she has been deceived by her husband for years, in a manner beneath indictment.

The books had inadvertently cost his marriage, but they leveraged the settlement and nearly rescued his house. That is when his agent’s second email arrived with notice that an advance from the mysterious new publisher was in the Stuart Macshane account, matching his mortgage minus agent’s fee. If not for the agent’s take, he could have paid off his house and evicted his ex-wife, her spoiled brats, and the annoying security surveillance.

He remained in the doghouse until one night when the stepdaughter brought home three young men for a romp, which they were apparently videoing for one of the millions of internet sites a girl her age should not see let alone produce. As his only view across the darkened yard, the action in the illuminated window was impossible to ignore. He could see just enough to imagine the worst and wondered if this might be the hateful girl’s lowest-ditch attempt to scare him away. He felt horrified enough to avert his eyes and in so doing he noticed the silhouette of a security agent crouched in the low branches of a tree beside the house, videoing the amateur porn through another window that would afford a much better view.

The ex-stepfather’s response was to creep down by the plum tree and pelt ripe fruit at the interloper with the sort of pitch that won him an athletic scholarship so long ago. The agent dropped from the tree with a yelp. He stupidly looked to see where the missile came from and the next one blinded him. He stumbled away to crawl over the low front fence, heading for the SUV with tinted windows that was always parked somewhere in the street.

The romp had been disturbed by the noises outside and a young man emerged to investigate just as the guilty agent reached