Parasite Eve Read Online Free Page B

younger research students was around.
Maybe they had gone out to eat a little earlier than usual.
        He poured some instant coffee
into a mug and sat down at his desk before opening his address book to scribble
in some additional plans. As he was doing so, the telephone rang. It wasn’t an
internal call. The low electronic tremolo indicated an outside caller.
Shinohara stood up and walked over to the phone, cup in hand. He then took a
sip of his coffee, picked up the receiver, and answered.
        “Hello, Surgery Department.”
        “This is Nagashima... from
the School of Pharmaceutical—”
        “What? Is that you,
Nagashima?”
        A smile came to Shinohara’s
face as he nodded to the voice on the other end. Shinohara’s relationship with
Toshiaki began when he took the same pharmaceuticals seminar to complete his
Ph.D. Simply passing the state exams didn’t mean a medical school graduate
could get a Ph.D. He had to remain at the dispensary for a standard period,
writing articles and passing tests. In those days, the 29- year-old Shinohara
placed the utmost priority in getting his Ph.D. Drowning under the extra work
requested of him by his seniors, he managed to continue cultivating cells.
Shinohara’s dissertation topic was cancer gene [9] production in liver cells. To study this, he collected
cells from extracted rat livers, carried out primary cultures, then took
healthy liver cells and added cancer-inducing drugs to observe the formation of
proteins. The focus was almost banal, but back then the particular protein
byproduct had yet to be researched extensively and was good for a doctoral
thesis. The associate professor of Toshiaki’s seminar had developed a detector
for the protein.
        Toshiaki himself was still a
graduate student then. Cancer cells had not been his area, but he carried out
daily primary cultures on rat liver cells, excelling greatly in the skills
involved. Shinohara learned these techniques well from him, staying on for two
years as a research student before returning to the medical department to
obtain his doctorate a year later. He continued his friendship with Toshiaki,
with whom he occasionally went out drinking. Despite being separated a little
by age, they enjoyed each other’s company as equals.
                As Shinohara pressed
the receiver to his ear, he downed a mouthful of coffee. Boy, not tonight, he
thought amusedly at first; yet right away he realized that something was not
quite right. A voice was groaning across the wires. Shinohara furrowed his
brow, wondering if some lines had come crossed, and tried pushing down on the
cradle a few times. Something was wrong. Toshiaki hadn’t spoken a word since
announcing himself. White steam rose from Shinohara’s coffee cup, engraving
helical spirals into the air. Unable to endure the silence any longer,
Shinohara opened his mouth to say something, when a low voice came from the
receiver’s depths.
        “Kiyomi is dead.”
        Shinohara shivered. He looked
unconsciously around the empty room. The fluorescent light flickered, then
regained radiance, casting its usual shadows on the floor, each particle of
light falling like rain.
        “What?”
        Shinohara surprised himself
with the volume of his voice. Two minute globules of his saliva traced arcs in
the air before descending out of sight.
        “But Kiyomi lives.”
        “Hey, back up...”
        “Extract Kiyomi’s liver cells
for me. I’m not a doctor, so I’d never be able to handle it. But I can count on
you, right?”
        “Kiyomi? What happened to
her?”
        “I’m coming there right now.
You’ll do this for me?”
        “What are you talking about?
Where are you right now?”
        “I’ll be there soon.”
        And with that the line went
dead.
        Shinohara stood in place for
a while, grasping the receiver tightly. Frozen in bewilderment, he was unable
to make heads or tails of