Wilhelm Zimmerman rocked slowly in his desk chair. It creaked under his weight. He was a fat, bald, unkempt man in a wrinkled gray suit that looked as if he had been sleeping in it for a week.
The woman sitting in front of his desk looked distraught. She was well into her seventies, lifeless white hair hanging straight, skin wrinkled and brittle-looking, obviously her blood circulation was poor. Too bad, thought Zimmerman, she must have been something of a beauty once.
“I don’t want to die,” she said, her voice cracking.
“Neither do I,” said Zimmerman softly. “No one does. And yet…’ He shrugged elaborately.
“I’ve heard… some of my friends have told me… that it is possible to reverse the effects of aging.” She looked at him piercingly, her diamond-hard blue eyes belying the hesitancy in her voice.
Zimmerman rested his hands on his considerable paunch. She wants to live. So do I.
“Madam, what your friends have told is unkind. There are no miracles.”
“But… I thought that your work here at the university,” she said. “What is it called? Nano-something or other.”
“My research is on nanotechnology, yes,” he replied. “But procedures on human subjects is absolutely forbidden. The laws are very strict. We are not allowed to deal with human patients.”
“Oh!”
“In fact,” Zimmerman said, “for the past several years we have worked only on non-medical aspects of nanotechnology. The animal rights movement has made even animal experiments too difficult to continue.”
The elderly lady took a tissue from her tiny purse and dabbed at the corners of her eyes.
Pointing a chubby finger at the graphs on his office wall, Zimmerman said with some distaste, “As you can see, Madam, our most recent work has been on new manufacturing processes for solar panels and long-range electrical distribution lines.”
“Oh my,” said the elderly lady, “I haven’t the faintest idea of what that means.”
“For an organization called OPEC,” Zimmerman explained, frowning. “To generate electricity in the desert and send it here to Europe.”
The woman’s eyes went crafty. “But isn’t it true that you also do therapeutic work — but you’re not allowed to let people know about it?”
Zimmerman shook his head hard enough to make his cheeks waddle. “No!” he said firmly. “That would be against the law. The university would not stand for it and neither would the authorities.”
“But I was told—”
“Madam, you were misinformed. I am sorry, but do I look like the kind of man who would risk his career and his good name by breaking the law?”
Dubiously, she replied, “I suppose not.”
For another half hour she tried to get Zimmerman to admit that he could use nanotherapy to help her. When at last she gave up and left, Zimmerman called a friend from the forensic medical department who came to his office, grinning, and lifted several excellent fingerprints from the armrests of the chair on which she had sat.
It took more than a week for Zimmerman’s connections in the Swiss national police to get the information to him. The elderly woman was the mother of a bureaucrat in Berne who was in charge of monitoring all nanotherapy work in the nation.
“An agent provocateur,” Zimmerman said to himself. “Next they will close down all nanotechnology work, even research, the way they’ve done in the United States.”
He wished there was somewhere in the world where he could continue his work in peace.