Adverse Reactions

Mallory sighed and rubbed her dry eyes.  She hated the fluorescent lights in these old lecture halls.  It had been a long day, giving lectures to four social anthropology classes - first year students who were really only at university because their parents wanted them there.  It was a struggle trying to speak above the constant chatter and giggling of these kids who seemed younger and younger every year.  Had she actually been like that in her first year of university?  Her parents would have said that she had never, ever been that young. It had been a long-standing joke of theirs  that when Mallory had been fourteen, she had acted like she was forty.  Mallory figured her parents had had a point;  she had always been a serious kid. Now, at twenty-seven, she was one of the youngest professors at the university . . . and still very serious.

But not as serious as Harold.

Mallory smiled. Harold Vincent Kaufmann, her boyfriend since high school, had been the only kid more serious than her - more driven.  It was lucky their interests were so different and that he was three years older than her or they would never have gotten along. They were both competitive when it came to scholastics, and it would have been all out war if they had been in the same year. Mallory chuckled to herself. She probably would have had to kill him.  Thank goodness  Harold had chosen sciences while she had focused on the arts and social sciences. Everyone had called them the ‘odd couple’ - primarily because Harold was so ‘different’, so socially inept - while Mallory was a bit more of a ‘people person’,  fascinated with psychosocial interactions.  To Mallory, Harold was odd, but cute - in a very ‘geeky’ sort of way - and Mallory loved Harold’s genius, his intensity, his ambition. 

Harold wanted to create the ‘perfect’ human - no flaws, no recessive genes, no genetic diseases.  He was a geneticist with special interest in biochemistry, immunology, and neurophysiology.  By fiddling with the human genome, he dreamed of one day  ridding the human race of many diseases that had plagued man for generations.  He also had visions of making humans smarter, better, faster, stronger.  There certainly was no limit to Harold’s imagination.

Harold was tall, thin, dark-haired, dark-eyed and handsome, even behind his black, thick-lensed glasses that he insisted on wearing because he liked the ‘nerdy’ look.  Mallory could live with his shyness and his inability to communicate with others.  He communicated fine with her - he was devoted to her - and that was all that mattered.

Her phone buzzed and she glanced at the screen.

It was a text from Harold.

‘Mal, where r u? Come now!’

‘I’m across campus, Harold. Have to go to my office. Drop some things off. Then I’ll come,’  Mallory texted back.

‘No. Now! Oh, all right. Just hurry!’

‘OK’  she texted back.

As Mallory stuffed her books, papers, and tablet into her briefcase, her brow wrinkled and her mouth twisted into a frown. Perhaps she should go straight to Harold’s lab.  He had never, in all the time she had known him, demanded she attend him immediately - with exclamation marks, no less.  Perhaps he was in trouble?  Could he have hurt himself?

‘Are you all right?’ she texted Harold, as she left the classroom.

She waited but got no reply.

Now Mallory was worried.  She walked briskly through the halls of the sociology building until she was outside, and then she broke into a quick jog, her bag bouncing on her back.  It was a good fifteen to twenty minute brisk walk across the university grounds from the sociology building to the biomedical building and Harold’s laboratory;  because she was a daily runner, Mallory could probably make it in five.  At least the weather was good - sunny, warm, a light spring breeze. She knew she looked more like one of the students than a professor, in her slim-fitting clothes and dark hair pulled back in a pony tail, racing across campus. She just hoped none of her students saw her.