April 23, 1961
Contract with Anzec Pharma signed. It's official: I'm going to a region called Kijuju in Africa. Next week I leave for the embassy to arrange the paperwork and sign a final confidentiality contract with the company. My job will be to collect a series of samples from a plant called Stairway of the Sun, along with four other PhD students, all English. Their names are Marvin, Helen, Aaron and Mikaela.
I am infinitely grateful to James Marcus, my benevolent thesis director, for offering me this assignment. He assured me that I would earn enough to pay my PhD tuition and that I could use the trip to develop new ideas for my thesis.
April 25, 1961
Marcus called me in the wee hours of the morning. I have been appointed head of the doctoral student team.
Not bad.
May 5, 1961
I met the rest of the team in the morning at a bar in Geneva. The four doctoral students work at Oxford as assistants to Edward Ashford. Their main motivation is not money, but that Ashford will bless them with a possible employment contract.
I'm in the same boat.
(Edward Ashford is an associate of Marcus and the one funding the expedition with one Spencer.
He is a multimillionaire Oxford University professor with a hundred fellows under him).
May 8, 1961
Heading for Africa.
I forgot my razor at the hotel.
May 15, 1961
The heat is dreadful. The controls are awful. The bugs are awful. Aaron's shitty mood is awful. My appearance in the mirror is awful. The cheap tequila that Helen snuck in is awful.
One hundred kilometers of driving and we still haven't gotten to wherever we're supposed to go.
The guide keeps talking in English, but I can't understand him. My brain cells are fried.
I'm going to die.
May 18, 1961
We arrived at our destination without casualties. We were met by a local interpreter at a booth located in the vicinity of the Ndipaya village. We were told that we would be welcome if we did not screw the locals and focused on getting what we needed. I asked about our accommodation and
specific instructions. We were told that our accommodations would be tents in the open and, as for instructions, to figure out for ourselves how to collect the samples. We were forbidden to go sightseeing in the village and to visit the swamp, where the Ndipaya had a kind of fort reserved for the warriors and the chieftain of the community. We unpacked the material and with the help of the guide and some soldiers we set up camp before noon. We had lunch and went to work.
The guide showed us the shortest route to the subway where some Stairway of the Sun buds were growing. We were barred from the Garden of the Sun, where the Ndipaya cultivated the plant.
We focused on our task. We dug up the roots of a group of flowers, a total of eight, and pulled them out of the ground into a box. Back at camp, we began researching how on earth we would transport them to England.
June 26, 1961
The plants we shipped to England arrived in shit. Dead. Useless. Marcus called me. I had done my job and that I would be paid shortly.
Stay tuned, he said.
August 2, 1961
Third call from Marcus. This time, a very important one. He told me that Edward Ashford and his son had been tinkering with the samples until they came across something totally unexpected: a retrovirus.
Marcus insisted that I keep an eye out; that if things went his way, he would get back to me.
I'm waiting.
August 31, 1961
Last call from Marcus. They need more samples. Anzec Pharma renews my contract. Ashford and Spencer are organizing a second expedition with specialized personnel.
Marcus trusts me.
I'm going back to Africa.
Brandon Bailey