CHAPTER 5
Kat and Angus got to the lab early the next morning, having left her apartment at six o’clock to beat the morning Houston traffic, which was bad even on a Saturday. She took Angus for his morning walk, gave him a Greenie, and got him situated in his bed next to her desk.
After fixing her coffee, she sat at her desk, opened her computer to her NeurActivase files, and went doggedly back to work. She reread the files, going back to the very beginning of her research, and began to make notes on a legal pad on her desk: She could make neural cells appear and she could make them bond and she could make them divide . . . She just couldn’t keep them alive very long.
The thought of her failure made her sweat at the thought of what her position might be if she’d gone public with her seeming discovery. This second great failure in her life, as bad as it was, would have been even more intolerable if it had been public knowledge.
She began to work on fixing the formula, plugging away in a sort of haze, praying for another miracle, but not having much hope that one was going to present itself.
Since it was Saturday, the whole building was quiet except for the distant whir of a janitor waxing the halls. None of the other researchers worked on Saturdays or Sundays. Not unless they had something cooking that had to be constantly tended. No one whom she knew of, outside of herself, deliberately worked on the weekends.
She did so because she had nowhere else to go, not because she thought by working every moment of every day that she’d find the magic solution. She’d given up on that long before. It was just that she was more at home in the lab than she was in the Spartan apartment she slept in and sometimes ate in. She had no real friends and only a few acquaintances.
Sometimes, when the loneliness was upon her, she would try out one of the many nightclubs in the downtown area, hoping that being in the presence of so many other people might ease the pain of having no one of her own. This invariably ended badly, the ritualized mating dance of the males who approached her trying to pick her up causing her to be more amused than flattered at their adolescent behavior.
What few overtures she’d had from the other researchers at the lab she’d rebuffed in as pleasant a manner as possible, but still letting them know she wasn’t interested in socializing at work.
At one time, while still a resident, she had been somewhat serious about a young man who had worked with her in the navy. He’d been a general surgeon, so they had their work in common, and for a while she thought the relationship might lead somewhere serious. But after her decision to quit neurosurgery, he’d simply disappeared from her life. They’d had no contact since her discharge from the navy.
Her parents were both retired doctors, living in Boston. They were still close, and she visited them at least twice a year, but they were active in the arts and theater community of Boston and tried their best not to interfere in her life, such as it was. Since her discharge from the navy, she’d discouraged contact with friends from her past life, and she intended to keep it that way. She did not inherently dislike people. She simply did not like to see her own failure reflected in their faces. She knew in her heart, of course, that was nonsense, but she didn’t care. She wanted to be alone, and her reasons were her own.
At least that was what she would have said if anyone had asked her. The real reason she wanted minimal human contact was that she was embarrassed and ashamed of herself. People meant questions, and questions meant answers. And she didn’t have any answers, much less the desire to re-create her pain in conversation.
Kat sat thinking, for some time. Finally, she got up and walked over to the rat cages. She walked delicately, shyly, almost as if she was afraid someone would hear her. She was a slim, auburn-haired woman of little better than average height. Her face was fine-boned and even-featured, with a light dusting of freckles across her nose and cheeks. She was not quite beautiful, though she should have been. There was a sadness about her face that wasn’t physical. It came from the bitterness and disappointment deep in her eyes and the thin set of her lips, almost as if she was drawing them in at the beginning of a snarl. You looked at her face, and there was no light shining from within.
Kat had set out to do great things in medicine and it was not going to happen, even when all signs had said she must. Some people were born with the equipment to be concert pianists, some home-run hitters, some great surgeons. Now she was like the home-run hitter whom the pitchers had discovered couldn’t hit an outside curveball. She had a flaw, and she just could not grow to accept that fact. In her world, perfection did not allow for a flaw.
She stood in front of the cages, staring at her rats. Some of the cages were empty, all of the rats having died. She had come to inject a new batch of rats and to try once again to find the flaw in her formula. It was a hopeless gesture, and she knew it. It was basically the same old serum that would produce the same old results, but she couldn’t give up the dream. Perhaps if she adjusted the dosage of DHEA . . .
She looked down the line of cages, looking for the new rats she’d told Kevin to order. There were no virgin specimens. There were still a few control animals, but they were of varying genetic strains, leftovers from her brief period of trying anything just so long as it might lead to a neuron glue to heal spinal or central nervous system injuries.
She felt oddly irritated, as if she were being held up in some great experiment due to a lack of working material. She said, aloud, “Damn that Kevin!” The rats she’d told him to order were not in place, and she was thoroughly irritated. Come Monday, she told herself, she intended to give the young man a thorough dressing-down . . . though she knew she wouldn’t really do it. A word or even a hint of displeasure from her would crush him, and she was much too kind to do that.
Still, she thought, a place of science was no theater for the blind or the forgetful or the haphazard, and damn it, she wanted to inject those rats right now, this very day. She had prepared a new batch of serum before leaving the lab the night before, and she wanted to use it, if for no other reason than to draw another carping memo from Captain “Sunshine” about her rat carnage.
She had little hope of finding any of the other labs open on a Saturday, but she wandered out into the hall and went along, trying knobs or knocking on doors. No one was there, and she was about to give up when she noticed a door ajar just a few yards farther down the hall. She stopped short when she got to it and saw that the lab belonged to Burton Ramsey, Ph.D.
She didn’t know Ramsey very well. Having heard he was a man who despised MDs, she’d tried to keep her distance. She didn’t know what kind of research Ramsey was doing, but she knew most of the projects at BioTech used experimental animals of one sort or another. With luck, he’d have a few cages of extra rats in his lab and she could “borrow” some so that her day wouldn’t be completely wasted.
From her few sightings of him in the halls or cafeteria, Kat thought Ramsey looked nothing like she thought a scientist should. He was a big man, over six feet, with heavy shoulders and large hands. Where Kat’s fingers were long and tapering and her nails still perfectly kept, Ramsey’s fingers looked as if they’d be more at home curled into a fist.
Kat, even in defeat, kept herself well-groomed. Her hair was always combed and sprayed, or fixed into a French braid to keep it out of her way in the lab, and she always applied a light touch of makeup to cover her freckles, which reminded her of a young schoolgirl.
Ramsey, on the other hand, just didn’t seem to care. His clothes usually looked like they’d been trampled underfoot first and then put on, and his hair was unruly and he had a balding spot just at the crown of his head. He had a thick sandy mustache that drooped around his mouth, and Kat had never seen him in a tie, and sometimes not even in socks.
Kat did not know how old the man was, but she guessed somewhere in his mid-forties. They had met only once, some months back when Kat had gone through the line in the cafeteria and found the only chair available was across a table from Ramsey. She’d politely asked him if she could join him. Instead of nodding his approval, he’d huffed and puffed and mumbled something about a body not being able to eat in peace, then he’d taken his tray and stomped out the door toward his lab. With a face burning with embarrassment, Kat had sat and eaten her lunch alone.
Kat eased the door open enough to peek inside Ramsey’s laboratory. The lab, like all of them on the sixth floor, was basically one long room some twenty feet by forty feet, with an office cubicle walled off in one corner, another area for the laboratory functions, and another for the computer modules. It was easy, in one glance, to see that the place was empty. She assumed the cleaning crew had finished in the room and simply not shut the door, which, she thought, was a hell of a way to run a medical laboratory where highly prized work was being done. An industrial spy could have a field day with such security measures. She stepped quickly into the laboratory, leaving the door at exactly the same angle of openness as she had found it.
Kat knew she was technically in violation of both ethics and laboratory security, but she didn’t think Ramsey would mind. The man gave no indication that he took his work that seriously, and, in fact, she rarely saw him at work at all. She’d certainly never seen him around on a weekend.
Once inside she glanced around quickly. At the end of the room was a workbench with several microscopes on it and a microtome and other normal lab paraphernalia. She wondered briefly what Ramsey was working on and was almost tempted to go over to the worktable and have a look. But caution overcame her. There was a limit to the liberties she was willing to take, even with a man she barely knew.
The cages were against a side wall. There were twelve of them, triple-stacked. She walked over and slowly looked down the line, glancing at the laboratory rats inside. To her surprise, none of the rats was marked. Each cage of twelve rats bore a label giving the strain and age of the rats. To each was also attached a small tag with some handwritten figures on it.
Kat went to the last cage to her right, the top cage. She looked at the label and saw that the rats were a GR-4 strain, the same ones she used in her lab. That meant they were very high on the genetic purity scale, having been bred and rebred to collect one set of genetic characteristics; in effect, the rats were like multiple identical twins.
She also saw by the tag that they were mixed males and females, which made no difference to her. She grunted, thinking wryly that her serum was indiscriminate: It killed regardless of gender. But she was surprised to see that the rats were five years old. That was a very old age for experimental animals, since white rats only lived about seven years. But then, she supposed Ramsey might be working in geriatrics, though she had a hard time envisioning a man as active and vital as Ramsey being interested in the welfare of delicate little old ladies.
There was a small tag on the cage. She took it in her hand and looked at it. It appeared to be a date, two days past. She assumed it was a notation of when the rats had been received, since lab data concerning treatment certainly wouldn’t be handled in such a haphazard manner. If that was the case, and the date was the arrival of the rats, it was almost a certainty that they had not been used in any other experiment and were, therefore, uncontaminated.
Kat actually wanted twenty-four rats, but she didn’t think she dare take more than the twelve in the cage. She had noted that the cages were numbered from one through twelve, with the one in her hand being number twelve. She attached no significance to that fact. She put her hand on the handle of the wire cage and hefted it for weight. It wasn’t that heavy, and she thought she could probably carry another, giving her the twenty-four rats she needed: twelve for injection and twelve for control. But it was best not to risk too much. These first twelve would serve her purposes for the time being, and she could still use the few rats she had left over as controls if she had to.
She looked around, and summoning up her courage, she lifted the cage off the one below and turned and went quickly across the room and out the door. As she turned to start back toward her own lab, she saw a young woman in a white lab coat hurrying toward her.
She instantly felt guilty, caught. She would have put the cage behind her, but it was about three feet square and almost two feet high. As the girl neared Kat could see that she was a rather dumpy article, in her mid-twenties. She was wearing glasses that gave her face an anxious, pinched look. She hurried up to Kat, looking first at the cage. “Are those Dr. Ramsey’s rats?”
Kat tried to put the best face on it she could. She had no intention of being intimidated by someone so young she still had traces of acne. “Well, yes. I ran short, you see, and I was in the midst of a very important test. Dr. Ramsey’s was the only door open, so I thought I’d just borrow a few of his extra rats.”
“I don’t think Dr. Ramsey would want you to do that. Do you have his permission?”
Kat didn’t want to lie to the girl, but she also hated to admit that she had carelessly let her own supply of rats run short. “I’m Dr. Kaitlyn . . .” she trailed off, unwilling to say her last name. She made a vague gesture down the hall. “My lab is just around the corner. Believe me, it will be all right. I simply didn’t expect to be working today, and we didn’t get my consignment of lab animals yesterday.”
“I don’t know . . . Dr. Ramsey . . . Dr. Ramsey can get awfully angry sometimes.”
She was aware that the young lab assistant’s eyes had strayed from her face to the name tag on the front of her lab coat. Her hand started up instinctively to cover it, and then she dropped it defiantly. She thought, The hell with it. I’m not afraid of Burton Ramsey. She said, “Look, miss, what’s your name? You’re Dr. Ramsey’s lab assistant?”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m Dottie.”
I’ll just bet you are, Kat thought, by the look of you. “Look, Dottie, there is nothing to worry about. Dr. Ramsey will never even know the rats have been taken. I’ll get a consignment Monday morning and my lab assistant will return his cage with new rats of the same strain first thing.” She lowered her voice and said, “I’ll bet Dr. Ramsey is not the kind who’s the first one in, is he?”
Dottie softened a little, shaking her head. “Well, no. In fact, he won’t even be in on Monday. But you understand, Doctor, it’ll be my tail if he finds out about this without you telling him.”
Kat smiled. “Well, we wouldn’t want anything like that to happen, now, would we?”
The girl made a tittering sound, but she said, as if on a sudden thought, “You didn’t get any test animals, did you?”
“Of course not!” Kat exclaimed with conviction. “I know old Burton’s work like my own.” She lifted the cage as if to demonstrate. “This is brand-new stock. Untouched.”
Dottie sighed. “Well, I hope you can tell. He never tells me, and he doesn’t mark them. He’s got his own system, which he hasn’t shared with me.”
“I know it like my own. Have no fear, Dottie. I wouldn’t get you in any trouble with my old friend.”
“Oh . . .” Dottie peered at her through her myopic lenses. “I don’t recall seeing you around the lab.”
“I’m in and out . . . In and out. But Burton and I usually talk away from here.” She put her finger to her lips. “Can’t be too careful.”
She walked away from the girl with absolutely no feelings of shame whatsoever about her lies. She did, however, feel a slight pride in her acting ability. Who knew she could wing it like that?
Old Ramsey would never miss his rats, and, of course, hers was the greater need. She was working on a miracle serum. She doubted if Ramsey was working on anything nearly as important as her NeurActivase.
As she entered her lab with the cage of purloined rats, she said, aloud, “After all, I’m the one person in the world who can make the smartest rats who ever lived . . . even if they only live a few days!”
Before what she thought of as her crash, she had been known as a woman of an exquisitely dry sense of humor and a fairly cheerful person overall.
But all that was in the past. That was before, when she had had brilliance and talent and confidence. You couldn’t be witty and dryly humorous when you were so damn depressed you thought of every day as a mountain that had to be climbed without knowing why.
She put on a lab glove, opened the door of an empty cage, and methodically transferred six of the rats she’d gotten from Ramsey inside to comprise a control group. Then she shut the door and carried the cage with the remaining half-dozen rats over to her lab workbench. Without looking, she reached out and selected a bottle of color and began daubing the fur of her test rats. It was a blue dye, but she really didn’t care. Failure came in all colors.
After that, Kat opened the refrigerator door and took out the bottle of fresh serum she’d concocted Friday night. It was basically the same as all the others and would undoubtedly give the same unsuccessful results, so she decided to double the amount of DHEA, using four milliliters instead of two. While she laid out six thirty-two-gauge disposable syringes, she put the vial of serum into a vibrator to make sure it was thoroughly mixed. Then, quickly and deftly, she inoculated the rats one after another.
When the last was done, she shut the cage door and began making notations in her code of just what she’d done. It would go on the cage and then later be transferred to her computer. For all that it mattered, she thought sadly. She wondered when the progress committee was going to demand that she show some results or move on. That would be a fine rejection—being let out of a penny-ante researcher’s job in disgrace just like when she’d been discharged from the navy for not being able to do her job as a neurosurgeon.
* * *
The rebirth of her hope began Sunday evening, when Kat wandered back to the lab for lack of something better to do. Just out of curiosity, she decided to run the Ramsey group of test rats through the maze. She was surprised to see that they averaged test times almost 10 percent better than the control animals, which was excellent for five-year-old rats. But she knew that they’d just been inoculated with NeurActivase for something like thirty hours and that very soon the cellular decay would begin and the rats would grow less and less intelligent.
On Monday, she ignored the rats and just sat and reread her notes, trying once again to see where she had gone wrong. The next day, sometime Tuesday afternoon, she ran three of the rats through the maze and found that their times had been reduced by almost a minute. That surprised her, since the interval since the injection was now over seventy-two hours, a time frame that should have allowed the deterioration of the neural cells to begin to affect the rats’ times.
She forced herself to remain calm, not to get her hopes too high as she had once before, only to have them dashed. She even refused herself the pleasure of making notes and keeping data on the rats’ progress. She just kept telling himself, over and over, that this was nothing new. Most likely the expected neural degeneration simply was delayed because of the age of the rats, although that didn’t make much sense. The older rats should have been affected earlier, not later, by the neural degeneration.
She was at the lab by dawn on Wednesday morning. In spite of the warnings she kept giving herself to remain calm, she was so nervous that she could barely handle the rats without dropping them. Finally, with a wildly beating heart, she tested one of “Ramsey’s rats,” as she had begun to call them to herself. The rat sped through the maze in three minutes and fifty-eight seconds, almost 50 percent faster than the control animals.
She slowly picked up the rat, returned it to the cage, and selected another for a trial run. The results of that one and the remaining four were all similar.
Trying to keep her mind from racing, she went into her office and sat down. Little by little she began to analyze what she knew. A little better than four days had passed since the rats had been injected. They were not getting less intelligent; they were getting smarter, if time through the maze was a product of intelligence. In all of her other experiments, intelligence deterioration had been well advanced by the fourth day. Something was different this time. She tried to quell her excitement, to think in patterned squares of analytical calmness.
There were only two variables from her previous experiments. One, the rats were two years older than any other test animals she’d used, and two, she’d dramatically increased the amount of DHEA she’d used because the hormone precursor was known to markedly increase the amount of testosterone in the bloodstream.
She couldn’t believe the advanced age of the rats would have had a favorable effect. In fact, the opposite should have been true. And she was hard-pressed to believe that increased DHEA could have brought about such a miraculous change, since it hadn’t worked with her previous injected rats, which had all died. But in the light of all the evidence, she had to believe it was the higher dose of the DHEA that had made the difference. She could think of nothing else that had changed.
Suddenly, she got up from her desk and walked over to the rat cage. She studied the rats inside for a moment. She shook her head. They certainly didn’t look like five-year-old rats . . . in fact, they looked like much younger rats, at least as young as her own rats were. And they not only looked younger, they were acting younger, too—playfully running around the cage and mating as if they had all the energy in the world.