‘There can’t be any doubt: we’re virtually the left and right hand, each having to know what the other’s doing and how we can each realistically decide how to complement the other, towards a successful development.’ He’d gone straight from Cambridge University into the rarefied atmosphere of pure medical research, Parnell reminded himself. But he wasn’t in any rarefied atmosphere any longer. He was in the real, hard-headed commercial world now. How difficult would the adjustment be?

***

‘Hi!’

Parnell looked up from Science Today, beside his unseen, stabbed-at lunch, to the dark-haired girl smiling down upon him. ‘Hi.’

‘This seat taken?’

‘Help yourself.’ He stood politely, taking her tray as she unloaded the sandwich and a pickle, the same choice he’d made. He saw there were several alternative empty tables throughout the commissary.

‘My name’s Rebecca.’

‘I know,’ said Parnell. The ID tag hanging from her neck chain matched the nameplate on her white laboratory coat, both reading ‘Rebecca Lang.’

‘And I know that you’re Richard Parnell,’ she said, reading his identification.

‘Name badges, one of the great American innovations,’ acknowledged Parnell. He closed the journal.

‘You don’t have to do that – stop reading, I mean.’

‘Of course I do.’ He sliced his sandwich, salt beef on rye, more easily to eat.

‘Now I feel uncomfortable.’ She bit into her sandwich without cutting it.

‘No, you don’t.’

She smiled again, her teeth a tribute to attentive dentistry and teenage torture. Confident that she didn’t need any more facial help, Rebecca wore only a light lipstick, pale pink like her nail colouring. ‘All right, so I don’t. Want to know a secret?’

‘Sure.’ Parnell heard his own word and thought it sounded American. An early resolution was that he wouldn’t let himself relapse into any idiom. It was one of several preconceptions.