Lee Child - The Hero

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THE JACK REACHER NOVELS

Killing Floor (1997)

Die Trying (1998)

Tripwire (1999)

Running Blind (US)/The Visitor (UK) (2000)

Echo Burning (2001)

Without Fail (2002)

Persuader (2003)

The Enemy (2004)

One Shot (2005)

The Hard Way (2006)

Bad Luck and Trouble (2007)

Nothing to Lose (2008)

Gone Tomorrow (2009)

61 Hours (Spring 2010)

Worth Dying For (Autumn 2010)

The Affair (2011)

A Wanted Man (2012)

Never Go Back (2013)

Personal (2014)

Make Me (2015)

Night School (2016)

The Midnight Line (2017)

Past Tense (2018)

Blue Moon (2019)

NON-FICTION

Jack Reachers Rules (2012)

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by TLS Books in 2019

Copyright Lee Child 2019

Cover illustration by Shutterstock

Lee Child asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Illustrations Ella Baron 2019

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008355784

Ebook Edition November 2019 ISBN: 9780008355791

Version: 2019-11-01

Lets start with opium. That venerable poppy grew wild and natural after the retreat of the last Ice Age, across a broad band of territory stretching from Asia Minor to the Mediterranean to North Africa. We know from the archaeological record that New Stone Age farmers were interested in it. A carefully curated stash of seeds, about seven thousand years old, was discovered near the Mediterranean Sea; seventeen other New Stone Age sites throughout what we now call Europe show evidence of opium use five or six thousand years ago; and the first deliberate cultivation of the poppy, as opposed to its casual collection, seems to have happened in Mesopotamia over five thousand years ago, organized by the local Sumerians, who called their crop hul gil, which translates as the joy plant.

I would love to know who tried it first. I would love to know who tried anything first. Who first dug up a strange root or random tuber and thought, hey, you know what maybe I should cook this and eat it? In particular, I would love to know how many died trying. Our species seems to be restless and curious to a degree that seems almost unhinged. Recent research concerning the Neanderthal people shows them to have been pretty much the opposite of what we have long assumed they were intelligent, bigger-brained, better animals than us, stronger, faster, healthier, more durable, better toolmakers, caring, compassionate, gentle, artistic and organized. But they seem to have been constitutionally timid. Their settlements migrated slowly, cautiously and sensibly. Often a new settlement would be within sight of a previous settlement. In particular travel over water seems never to have been attempted, unless the far shore was clearly visible. By contrast, our own ancestors, Homo sapiens, went anywhere and everywhere, many of them, we assume, to their doom. Not cautious or sensible at all. The consensus in what I suppose we could call psychological archaeology seems to be that Homo neanderthalensis was painfully rational, and Homo sapiens was batshit crazy.

Crazy enough, certainly, for one of them to notice the pretty red flower, to scratch its immature seed pod, to watch the sticky latex ooze out, and then to think, hey, you know what maybe I should collect this stuff and dry it, and then suck it or chew it or smoke it. I would like to meet that person. Certainly his or her inspiration was way more complicated than, for instance, finding a carrot and deciding to try a bite. Restless and curious indeed. (Although smoking is a misnomer the latex was not itself set on fire, but indirectly heated, and the active ingredients were inhaled as they gassed off. Vaping, five thousand years ago. Nothing new under the sun.) The effect, then as now, was of a deeply warm, hugely satisfying contentment, washing unstoppably over the user, leaving him or her laid out and passive for hours at a time, inert and endlessly contemplative. As a result, the opium poppys scientific name is Papaver somniferum, which is Latin for the poppy that carries you to sleep.

Of course the problem with an extract from a plant growing wild and natural or even farmed, given good years and bad was that dosage was fundamentally unpredictable. The sixteenth-century physician Gabriel Fallopius complained bitterly that opium tended to be either too weak or too strong, and if weak it didnt help, and if strong it was exceedingly dangerous. An overdose caused the victims breathing to slow down, and down, and down, until it stopped altogether. Not good. So began a quest to isolate the active ingredients, in order to deliver them in known and reliable doses.

Like most things to do with practical chemistry, not much happened until the nineteenth century, when, between 1804 and 1817, a German pharmacist named Friedrich Sertrner zeroed-in on a particular compound that made up about twelve per cent of the latex by weight. It seemed to be where the action was. The other eighty-eight per cent was window dressing. Sertrner got better at getting the good stuff out, but showed less finesse in his experimental methodology; his indiscriminate test doses nearly killed him and the three young boys he recruited to help. Restless and curious and almost unhinged. But in the end he lived to announce he had successfully isolated the compound, which would henceforth reliably deliver the wave of hugely satisfying contentment, and had the happy side effect of also being the most effective painkiller so far known in human history. Sertrner named his newly naked chemical after the Greek god of dreams. He called it