Pharmaco System: Pills of Progress A Professor's Redemption

Chapter 6: Elizabeth's Return

The knock was a shot in the quietness of the flat.

Richard started, his heart thudding for an instant before resuming a frantic, jumpy rhythm. No one knocked on his door. The mail was deposited in the entry hall; the landlord used brusque, typed messages that were slid under the door. This room had been an hermitage, an exile of sorts, for over a year, where only the conflicts he waged with himself and the silent, profound dialogue with the radiating Interface were heard.

Knock, knock, but this time more urgently. Rain beat on the window in a frantic beat to the interruption.

He crept, all his senses on high alert. The System was dormant, laptop closed, but its existence stretched as a thriller too big for the walls of the room, a colossal truth wedged only into the narrow walls by a fraction. He peered through the fisheye lens, his distorted vision revealing to him a figure surrounded by the dim, watery light of the corridor.

His breath was caught.

It was Elizabeth Ben.

She was dripping, her black hair plastered to her forehead and neck, water droplets clinging to the lenses of her glasses. She huddled her arms around herself for warmth, her black coat drenched in wetness. In the other, she held a brown paper bag spotted with rain, out of which protruded the neck of a bottle of wine—a peace offering, or perhaps an offering to a ghost.

A flood of contradictory emotions washed over him—guilt, love, an angry need to protect her, and a profound weariness. She was a living remnant from his old life, a reminder of what he used to be. To see her was to stare at a Polaroid of a sunroom from the inside of a very deep, very black well.

He considered not answering. He could remain in the shadows, waiting for her out. She would assume he was dead, or worse, and get over him eventually. It was the intelligent choice, the choice of a man who had already lost everything.

But then she rapped on the door again, softly, hesitantly, and he heard her say, "Professor Clark? Please…"

The desperation in her voice caught him off guard. Reluctantly, he flipped the deadbolt and opened the door a crack.

The view of her, restored beyond the twisted prism, was a jolt to his body. She had developed over the two years since he'd last seen her, the plumpness of the student given way to the austere lines of a young woman. But her eyes, behind rain-streaked glasses, remained unchanged—clever, concerned, and beset by a deep, abiding anxiety as she looked him up and down.

"Professor…\" she gasped, her gaze sweeping over him, and the rest of the sentence vanished into her throat.

He saw what she saw. The last time she had laid eyes on him, he had been formally expelled from the university, a thin, trembling man, his face the colour of parchment, his eyes burning with a feverish mixture of defiance and despair. He was a man in the final, rapid stages of collapse.

Now he stood before her still gaunt, still in ragged attire, but the consumptive pallor was gone, replaced by healthy color. The tremble was erased from his hands as they gripped the door. His stance, while cautious, was not bent under pain. It was too great, too complete. It was impossible.

"Elizabeth," he said, his voice raw from disuse. "This is. surprising."

"I. I heard you were. I was scared," she stammered, still throwing glances around his face, hoping to see the ghost of sickness that she knew she would see there. Her eyes then passed beyond him, into the flat, and changed from fear to stunned amazement.

The room had been a chaotic concerto of his collapse and his strange resuscitation. Piles of discarded books competed for space with beakers and Bunsen burners. The stale air now was filled with the strange, metallic-herbal scent of his Syntheses. The three rats, sensing a new occupant, ran in their cages. It was not the home of a dying man; it was the workshop of a recluse, a genius, or a madman.

"What's wrong with you?" she finally spoke, her voice barely a whisper.

Richard's face tightened. He turned his head aside, looking at a stack of chemical journals. "Science happened," he growled, the words a bitter, condensed biography.

He stepped back, the unspoken welcome. She entered slowly, as if into a holy or unholy place, her shoes leaving wet impressions on the floorboards. She placed the bottle of wine on a cleared space of a table littered with scribbled notes.

"I phoned. Attempted to write," she said softly. "After the hearing. you vanished."

"Nothing more to say," he replied in a monotonous voice. He occupied himself with filling water in a kettle, needing something to divert himself from her sharp gaze. "The university's position was clarified."

"I didn't," she said with a flash of passion. "I never believed they were lying. Everyone in the department knew you were framed. They were only too terrified to confess."

Her loyalty was balm and branding. It defrosted part of him that he had thought long since frozen, but it also reminded him of the cost of his ideals. He had been a warning, and she in concert had likely had her own struggles.

While he was steeping the tea, he felt her eyes upon him, cataloging the changes. The ease of the water's pour, the unyielding grip on the mugs, the unlabored motion of his chest rising and falling. He was a paradox—a man surviving in squalor, radiating well-being.

They sat at the small, cluttered table, the steam from their mugs rising between them. The initial shock began to settle into a fragile, awkward quiet.

“I’m at St. Jude’s now,” she said finally, cradling her mug. “The hospital. Started my internship in the palliative care wing.”

He nodded slowly. “A difficult placement.”

“It’s… harrowing,” she admitted, her gaze dropping to the dark surface of her tea. "We're just… custodians of the inevitable. We have protocols for pain, for comfort, but not for hope. There's a woman in there, Mrs. Davison. Pancreatic cancer. It's… systemic. She has maybe a month. Two, if we can be hard on the chemo. She's got two small kids." Elizabeth's voice was a little choked. "And all we can do is make her comfortable as she dies.". We have stacks of journals, libraries of data, and it’s all just… useless. It feels like we’re rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.”

Her words, spoken with the raw honesty of someone who faced the abyss daily, pierced the armour of his isolation. They were no longer abstract ethical dilemmas. They had a name: Mrs. Davison. They had faces: two young children.

He saw it all unfold in his mind’s eye. The SCAN plots the vicious, malignant cells. The SYNTHESIZE protocol builds a molecule which would not only destroy the cancer, but command it to cease, to self-destruct, to reconstitute the healthy tissue it had consumed. He could do it. He was certain he could. The data from the rats were not just encouraging; they were prophesying. He could transform the desolation of that hospital ward into a miracle.

Elizabeth looked up at him, and her fast, analytical mind, the very one he had once used to nurture, now concentrated on him. "Professor… you look… well. Well, really. The last time I saw you…" She left the implied question hanging, heavy as lead, before her eyes moved back to the makeshift lab, the hasty notes full of equations both familiar and alien.

The blaze of her warmth, her kindness, her unshakable belief in him, was igniting a flame he had tried to extinguish. The cautious, frightened hermit was being confronted by the determined, visionary scientist he once was. She was an entrance back into the world.

"Perhaps…" he rasped, his voice hoarse. He swallowed. "Perhaps some gifts are not meant to be kept hidden in the dark."

He wouldn't tell her more. He couldn't. But the words remained between them, an enigmatic admission. Elizabeth didn't ask him questions. She only looked at him, her expression a delicate mixture of bewilderment, hope, and increasing comprehension. She had come to ask about a dying mentor and found a man charged with an unearthly, intense power, with the tools of a science she no longer knew.

Outside, the storm redoubled its effort, wind shrieking about the edges of the building, rain battering the window like a thousand maddened fingers drumming, demanding to enter. It was the precise replica of the storm raging within him—the fear of being exposed wrestling with the blinding, unavoidable knowledge that had begun to bloom in his heart.

The prudent thing was to let her depart, to close the door and withdraw to his solitary experiments. But looking at Elizabeth Ben, his one-time protégée, now a war-tired soldier on the front lines of a war medicine was losing, he knew that path was no longer available. Her knock had not been on the door; it had been on the shell of his conscience. And from the cracks, a terrible, beautiful light was beginning to seep out.

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