Free First Horseman, The by Clem Chambers

understand the problem.’
    ‘I can only make the tiniest amounts.’ He stared at Jim as if it was his fault. ‘It must seem perverse, particularly to your generation, but little has changed in chemistry in the last two or three decades. In computing, progress has been exponential, but in chemistry and medicine, it has been linear. A computer chip in the nineteen seventies may have had just a thousand transistors but now it has two billion. Meanwhile chemistry cannot make a molecule of ten thousand atoms, let alone a million.’
    Cardini’s eyes bulged, apparently with fury.
    ‘When compared to the progress in electronics, chemists are working in the dark ages. We cannot even imagine creating proteins of any real complexity, let alone anything as complex as a simple cell. The best we can do is to modify existing life and have it do the biochemistry for us. The basic chemicals we call drugs are the simplest of compounds, perhaps a dozen or two elements glued together. Anything complex must be extracted from life itself, be it plant or animal. There is no real capacity to make anything but the simplest pharmaceuticals from scratch. We are little better than the primitives that stewed plants and drank the decoction thereof.’
    ‘How do you make it?’
    ‘We take human blood and distil it.’
    ‘How much blood does it take to make the treatment you gave me?’
    ‘About thirty tons.’
    ‘Thirty tons of human blood?’ said Jim, nearly falling off the edge of his chair. ‘How the hell do you get it all?’
    ‘We take what we can from blood banks across the country as its age passes its mandated storage limit. We have access to about a thousand tons a year. Happily we do the medical profession a service in disposing of it for them but the supply is nowhere near enough for my work. Extraction from human blood is not the answer. To advance we must synthesise the drug, and we have not yet done that. Or, rather, I have not yet implemented it on anything but a minute scale.’
    ‘A thousand tons of human blood,’ said Jim. ‘How do you process it all? That’s twenty tons a week.’
    ‘There is a facility outside the city dedicated to it.’
    ‘Can I see it?’
    ‘Jim,’ said Cardini, sternly, ‘I must bring you back to my earlier point. We need to synthesise the compound. Extracting it from life is simply not a feasible long-term solution.’
    ‘What about blood from abattoirs? Cows and chickens, that kind of thing.’
    ‘Five million dollars would be the price for such a medicine. Five million for a single dose.’
    Jim put a finger to his cheek. ‘It cost five million dollars to fix my eye?’
    ‘That was not a full dose,’ said Cardini, ‘but that is not the point. There is not enough biomass to produce the compound at scale in this manner. It is a drug beyond the reach of all but kings.’
    ‘I shouldn’t think kings get many black eyes,’ muttered Jim, who was now deep in thought.
    ‘Were you listening, Jim?’ said Cardini, somewhat plaintively.
    ‘Yes,’ said Jim, eyes glazed. ‘You need to find a way to synthesise it.’ He shook himself. ‘Have I missed something?’ He looked into Cardini’s face and saw the Wikipedia picture: a dark-haired middle-aged man with scary black eyes. ‘You’re eighty-one, aren’t you?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘And you look fiftyish.’
    ‘So I’m told.’
    ‘And that’s because you take your drug?’
    Cardini lifted his head a little and peered down his nose at Jim. ‘Yes.’
    ‘And you’re emptying our blood banks to make enough for yourself.’
    ‘In effect,’ Cardini held up the finger of his right hand, ‘but not quite.’
    ‘Not quite?’
    ‘Jim,’ said Cardini, ‘the cost of this project is truly great and I have a patron who funds it. I help him in return. I have small amounts of serum surplus to requirements. It accrues, but is scant. I need further funding to take the next step.’
    ‘You could get that anywhere, surely.’
    ‘The world is