42

Fiddle-de-dee, fiddle-de-dee, the fly has married the bumblebee, Sally Grinstone thought, stretching luxuriantly in the darkness. Well, not hardly married, exactly, she reflected, that would be far beyond the call of duty, but close enough, close enough. She shifted in bed in the dark room, feeling immensely pleased with herself as she heard Tom Shipman snoring softly beside her, just a few inches north of her left ear. Said the bee, said she, I’ll live under your wing, and you’ll never know that I carry a sting …

So far it had worked out beyond her fondest dreams. She had followed him from the hotel dining room, leaving exact change on the table, sans tip, and stuffing a half-eaten steak into her handbag as he got up to depart with the sour-faced men and the old crone who had accompanied him in. The best Sally had hoped for that evening was a look at the terrain, with the outside chance of a bar pickup later, she’d fully expected to have to sit through some of the next day’s scientific sessions in order to catch his eye and nail his toe to the floor — but then, quite unexpectedly, the opportunity had presented and Sally Grinstone was nothing if not resourceful. Outside the dining room he had fallen behind the others to step into the newsstand off the lobby. Sally had followed, perusing the magazines side by side with him and selecting a copy of Good Housekeeping with just the slightest protrusion of her tongue. Then, as he turned away from the cash register, she collided with him, hard, tripping and collapsing at his feet with a little scream and dumping her handbag on the floor three feet away.

Profuse apologies, solicitude, assurances that she wasn’t injured as he helped her to her feet, started brushing off the seductive dress, stopped rather abruptly and helped her retrieve the handbag instead, with sudden appreciative attention to her and the seductive dress and the convention name badge. “You’re sure you’re all right?”

“Oh, it’s nothing, really, I’m just so clumsy — ”

“No, I should look where I’m going.” Pause. “Sally Newcombe from San Diego,” he added, reading the name badge. “American Cyanamid — what kind of work do you do?”

Sally smiled as only Sally could smile. “Electrochemical analysis,” she said, hoping this might be a blind spot for an organic chemist. “Trace metals, mostly, zinc, rhodium, platinum — you know.”

He didn’t, particularly, but seemed willing to overlook the fact. “Your party just get in tonight?”

“I just got in,” Sally said with a rueful smile, “and I’m my party, I’m afraid.” She looked helpless and bewildered as only Sally could. “I’m just very new at these meetings, you see, I don’t know a soul in the place.”

“That’s easy to handle.” Shipman introduced himself. “Now you know one soul. You’re all checked in and everything? Registered — yes, of course. Well, you’ve started off right. I owe you something, after knocking you down. A drink maybe? There’s a lounge across the lobby with a pretty good band. What say?”

“Sounds lovely,” Sally said, “but first I should really, um … ”

“So should I.” Tom glanced over his shoulder. “In fact, I’ve got some bodyguards to shake off, they’re afraid I might give away state secrets. Why not meet me over there in twenty minutes?”

He was actually quite a bit longer than that, and Sally was beginning to think she’d lost him when he finally reappeared and joined her at the table she’d selected toward the rear of the lounge. “Sorry to hold you up,” he said. “They really did want to hear me snoring.”

“Who did?”

“My bodyguards.”

Sally laughed. “I thought you were joking.”

“No joking about it,” Tom said soberly.

“Those must be some state secrets you’re packing around.”

He grimaced. “Sealey is a drug company, and drug companies steal from each other. First job I ever had, the first thing they wanted to teach me was how to steal from the next company’s lab. You never know who’s safe.”

“Even electrochemical analysts?”

He grinned. “For you, I’ll take my chances.”

The band came on and they finished a drink and had another, and listened to the music, and talked about a dozen different things. At close quarters he seemed far younger, and more attractive, and more responsive than her initial impression had conveyed; he had a boyish grin and an openness of appreciation and a certain sense of candor about him that struck her as immensely refreshing. For a forty-two-year-old entrenched lifelong bachelor, Sally decided, he was one hell of a lot smoother than she had anticipated — but there was nothing remotely furtive about his attention. She didn’t have to do a damned thing but lean toward him now and then while he was talking over the band and he was all there, willing but not crowding her. With an inquiring tilt of his head he led her to the dance floor and made the transition from the conversational to the physical with a quiet assertiveness. She could, of course, have walked away, although she had no intention whatever of doing so. What startled her was that she truly didn’t want to.

Back at their table he ordered some nibblies and they talked with more intimacy and less testing. Most of the talk, she found, revolved around her and her background, and she had to tiptoe, wishing she had improvised more detail. When she led him, he talked a bit about himself, too, steering rather clear of matters of work and employment, but three or four times there was a reference to Sealey and his connections there, each reference sharply edged with bitterness.

Finally Sally bit the bullet. “Tom — were those really bodyguards you were having dinner with?”

“Three of them were.” He sat closer, placed an arm on her shoulders. “If they knew that I was not quietly holed up in my room right now, they would be down here in three minutes flat, sitting at the next table over there and conveying to me ever-so-subtly that if I didn’t get up and walk out of here very quickly, they would soon carry me out, kicking and screaming if necessary.”

“You mean they’re not really chemists?”

“No, my dear, whatever they may be, they most certainly are not really chemists.”

“But why?”

“I make antibiotics. Or at least I did. I was pretty good at it, and I’ve got an awful lot of useful information in my head. Not that anybody around Sealey Labs is letting me use it right now.”

“I take it you’re having a fight with Sealey.”

“Wouldn’t you fight if you came to work one morning and found a padlock on your lab door? I’ve been engaged in a major research and development program there. It’s been an exciting scene, and unlike most R&D programs, this one has paid off in answers. Without exaggerating too much, I made one of the most important antibiotic breakthroughs of the last twenty years in that lab, a breakthrough that could save a whole lot of lives right now, today, if they’d follow through on it. And then, as soon as I had it nailed down to the floor, they slammed a padlock on my door and put me out to pasture. No reasons, no explanations. Now, how would you feel, in my shoes?”

Sally turned her head and kissed him gently. “I think I’d feel lousy. And mad. I’ve never heard of such a thing. But can’t you just quit? Go somewhere else?”

“I’m locked into an ironclad contract.”

“I always thought contracts could be broken.”

“Sealey Labs has some — odd — business connections. I don’t think I’d be around very long if I just quit and went somewhere else.”

“Oh, Tom. You must have gotten onto something very important.” She looked at him sharply. “You aren’t involved with that new 3147 drug I was hearing about on the TV?”

Tom hesitated. “You might say I’m involved. But why talk about that? Let’s talk about you. Tell me what it’s like in San Diego.”

He flagged the waitress for more drinks and they leaned back together to listen to the band, returned to dance very close, on the tiny dance floor, then back to their table, necking playfully at first, then more firmly and seriously, Tom’s urgency growing steadily, her own response not in the least feigned until finally she touched his thigh and looked at him with eyebrows raised, and they rose and went out of the lounge together.

They went to the elevators arm in arm and without discussion he guided her to his room. He was an ardent, hungry lover, perhaps not overly skilled, but Sally made up for that in spades. Ultimately, when he had fallen asleep in her arms, she gently disengaged herself and lay flat on her back in the darkened room reasonably sated, thinking very clearly — it was a time when she always thought most clearly — and began sifting away at the pieces of the puzzle, picking at them and picking at them in her mind. And suddenly then, in the clearest simplicity, she saw what the picture had to be, hideous as it was.

Jesus, she thought.

It took quite a lot to make Sally Grinstone feel sick, but suddenly she found herself feeling sick. She tried to twist it around, add it up differently, but there wasn’t any way. The pieces fit too well. They fit everything that had happened in Colorado, and everything she’d heard about Savannah too. It wasn’t a question of what had happened, anymore. It was merely a question of why.

She looked over at Tom Shipman, his profile clear in the dim city sky glow from the window. Christ. So here she was. So now what? For a moment she felt an overwhelming urge to bolt — get up and slap on her dress and grab her handbag and get out of there, but she fought it down and just lay there shivering in the dark. No good to bolt, not until you know the why of it all, straight from the horse’s mouth. But how, exactly, do you swing that, from here? He might be as bad as his bodyguards, Sal. He might just kill you, if he saw a threat. But then again, he might not. They’ve hurt him badly. He’s naïve, hungry for understanding, angry, and they’ve got him right by the ego. Maybe if you hit him with it right between the eyes, he might open up. It might just work. She sighed, rubbed her forehead with a hand. You ‘re going to have to gamble, that’s all. You ‘re not going to win if you don’t take the risk …

After a while she got up, went into the john, leaving the door ajar. She ran some water and bathed her face. Flushed the toilet a couple of times. Dropped the toilet seat with a whack. It was three A.M.

Back in the room she groped in the dark for the ice bucket, found ice cubes still floating, with the bottle of McNaughton’s sitting on the dresser. She made herself a drink, ice and lots of whiskey and nothing else, clinking the ice cubes vigorously. Then she sat on her side of the bed, lit a smoke and sipped the drink, making small irregular visceral noises as she swallowed. Swished the bed clothes. Shifted position and then sipped again, more noisily.

After a while it got through and he stirred. “Mm?”

“Nothing, sweet. I just can’t sleep.”

He moved closer, wakening. She bent over and kissed him, first gently, then voluptuously, let him nuzzle a very handy breast. When she was certain arousal had begun she reached down to aid him, and then took over completely. With her own body available to his hands and lips, she began doing things that made him catch his breath and kept on doing them until he was totally ready for relief, and then even longer until, when she finally relented and yielded he was urgent as a wild man.

Then, when he had fallen back, still enfolding her in his arms, she said, “Tommy?”

“Mmm?”

“I’m scared.”

He raised his head. “Of me?”

“For you, and what’s going to happen.”

“What do you think is going to happen?”

“Something bad, if you don’t do something.” She turned in his arms. “You were lying to me about the Sealey thing. It’s something much worse than you said. You said they’d padlocked your lab on you, and that was true, but then you said the drug you’d developed was 3147, and that wasn’t true — ”

Tom sat bolt upright, peering at her. “What are you talking about? What do you care about that?”

“I care a lot about it. It wasn’t true, was it?”

The man snapped the bedside lamp on, stared down at her accusingly. “Who are you, anyway? Why are you asking me this?”

“Tommy, I can’t tell you, but I’ve got to know the truth. It’s terribly important.”

“Why?” Tom Shipman was still staring at her. “You’re no lab tech from Cyanamid, you’re one of those damned weasels that — ” He broke off, looked around him frantically, as if he expected the door to burst open any minute.

Sally caught his eyes and held them. “Tom, listen to me. I promise you I am not an industrial spy. I can’t tell you who I am right now, but believe me, all this wasn’t any act tonight, and I am one hundred percent on your side. You’ve just got to trust me a minute and tell me some things I have to know. Those Sealey people have torn you to pieces — ”

“That’s true, but just the same — ”

“And you’d like to put them where they belong.”

“You bet I would, but — ”

“Then just answer some things yes or no, nobody can blame you for that. You said Sealey padlocked your lab after you’d made a major antibiotic breakthrough — right?”

“That’s right.”

“That breakthrough was a totally new drug.”

“That’s right.”

“But it wasn’t 3147.”

The man hesitated, then shook his head. “No.”

“You’d developed 3147 months ago, hadn’t you?”

“Two years ago.”

“And they’d already done a lot of preliminary testing on it, hadn’t they?”

“Yes.”

“They knew it was active against plague?”

“Moderately active. Nothing to write home about, but it had some antiplague activity. But why are you asking all these — ”

“Shush. Just answer me. They also knew 3147 was toxic.”

“Not for certain, at least in humans. They’d never run clinical tests. But they were pretty sure.”

“And then you came up with a totally new drug, your breakthrough drug, and it was a different story.”

“Yes. God, yes.”

“What was so different about it?”

Suddenly the bitterness and outrage exploded in Tom Shipman’s face and voice. “It was a beautiful drug, a simply beautiful drug. It had everything that 3147 didn’t have. 3147 was a mess in a dozen ways — hard to make, only moderately effective, toxic as hell, unstable on the shelf. The new one was an absolute beauty. It hit plague like a sledgehammer, it was easy to produce in quantity, it was utterly shelf-stable, even under field conditions, and you could eat it like popcorn without any side effects at all — ”

“And that was the drug they sent to Fort Collins for testing, wasn’t it?”

“That was the drug. Not much of it, just a little bit, for testing. And it proved out just as good as we thought it would on the new plague bug.”

“But that wasn’t the drug they sent down to Canon City, was it?”

“No. They sent 3147 to Canon City.”

“But they didn’t tell anybody it was a different drug,” Sally said. “They told them it was the same drug they’d tested in Fort Collins.”

“That’s — right.”

“And meanwhile they locked up your good breakthrough drug behind padlocks and put you out to pasture with bodyguards on you.”

Tom nodded.

“Buy why?”

Tom Shipman crossed the room and poured whiskey in a glass, drank half of it neat. “Because they were in business,” he said in a strangled voice, “and they couldn’t make a nickel on my new drug. It was too bloody simple for them to be able to box it in. It was based on ordinary tetracycline, the cheapest, most plentiful, easiest-to-make antibiotic in the world. All I had to do was use simple reagents to break one little radical off the basic tetracycline molecule and add two acid radicals in the right places. Anybody with a little tetracycline and some vinegar and a crock-pot could make my new drug in his own kitchen — anybody at all. You could cover it with patents until the cows came home, but any little minor-league drug house in the world with any wit could jump the patent, and mass-produce the stuff for half a cent a dose. Which meant it wasn’t worth a dime to Sealey Labs, Inc.”

“All the same, it could stop plague,” Sally said.

“Oh, yes — like nothing else on earth. But for free?” Tom made a face and poured more whiskey. “Now, 3147 was a different story. It wasn’t half the drug, it might cripple people who took it, but it had one big advantage: it was complex and expensive to make. Any drug houses big enough to gear up for it and jump the patents wouldn’t dare because it would be easy to spot them and sue them for their skins — and Sealey could charge a king’s ransom for it if the demand was high enough. And Sealey sniffed plague in the wind and saw a multi-billion-dollar windfall to be made on 3147 if they could just work things right and bury my new drug deep enough.” He looked bitterly at Sally.

“And they deliberately, consciously pulled this fraud in full knowledge that we were in the midst of a murderous plague epidemic? Tom, that’s monstrous!”

“Well, they didn’t actually know that when they made the decision. Some Sealey Labs people — Mancini and Lunch — were out in person in Colorado while the drugs were being tested. They didn’t recognize what the plague was going to do, way back then. They thought it was a little, limited spread of a few cases, there in Canon City, and that 3147 would cover the ground and then be available for other little flare-ups they thought might occur. Mancini decided on the switch in drugs then and there, that early. It was still a monstrous decision, but it didn’t seem quite as monstrous then as it does now. And at first, this thing in Savannah was just taken for another small outbreak, and they got in deeper. And then, by the time we knew what this plague was going to do, they were trapped on the ice floe moving out to sea with no way to get back to the mainland without litigation and penalties that would destroy them. By then they were trapped and couldn’t — or wouldn’t — change a thing. So there, Miss Whoever-You-Are, you’ve got the whole story.”

Sally Grinstone made herself a drink and, for the first time in her adult memory, didn’t like the taste of it. What was more, for the first time in her reporting career she had a story wrapped up tight and somehow didn’t feel like heading for the nearest telephone at a dead run. Instead, they sat there, two people as different as two people could be, Insatiable Sally from Philadelphia and an angry little chemist from Indianapolis, sipping drinks in silence, neither one moving to do or say anything. After a long, long time Sally said, “They can’t get away with it.”

“You just sit back and watch them,” Tom said.

“I mean they can’t be allowed to. This plague — have you been following the news? It isn’t going to go away.”

“I know.”

“It’s tearing Savannah to pieces right now. It’s going to move on and tear a lot of other places to pieces too, if it isn’t stopped.”

“Yes.”

“It’s going to kill people, thousands, maybe millions, before it’s over, if your drug stays buried in that vault back there.”

“Yes.”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

“What can I do? If you’re even haffway right about the plague, I’m not going to be around for very long. They can’t afford to have me talking. They’d kill me right now if they walked in and found you here. I’ve never doubted it would come to that, sooner or later.”

“You mean you’re just sitting here waiting for them to shoot you?”

“I don’t see that I have much choice.”

Sally swung on him fiercely. “Of course you’ve got a choice — as long as you’re still breathing. My God, Tom, you’re practically a National Resource — you’ve got to stay around! Don’t you see that?” She paced up and down, so agitated she could hardly speak. “Look, you idiot — what would happen if you just walked out of this place right now? Took a cab to the airport and flew someplace, anyplace, as long as it wasn’t Indianapolis? What would happen if you went someplace where you couldn’t be found, and got hold of some tetracycline and some vinegar and a crock-pot and went to work on your own? And then while you’re safe and secure where nobody can find you and producing your simple little drug like mad, I’ll personally be blasting the bejesus out of Sealey Labs, spreading the whole rotten story from one end of the country to the other. I can do it, believe mc! That’s my business. Don’t think for a minute I can’t. You want a choice, what’s wrong with that, for openers?”

He smiled wearily. “And what do I do for money?” he said. “I’ve got forty dollars in my wallet. They’ve got my credit cards in a vault — ”

“So you stop in the first city you come to and report them stolen and get new ones — except you don’t waste the time. I’ve got some money, I’ve got a million credit cards. I’ll go with you, help you find a place to work. Help do the legwork. Scrounge up the vinegar. Find some way to get the stuff distributed when you get it made. I can be a pretty good organizer when I want to be, I’ve got all kinds of resources to draw on — ”

“And why are you getting into all this?”

“Maybe because I’ve got a hunch we’re all going to need Tom Shipman very badly before too long,” Sally Grinstone said. “Maybe just a crass, selfish desire on my part to stay very close to that crock-pot and the stuff coming out of it.” She sipped her drink again, and then turned to him, her green eyes the most serious he yet had seen them. “Tom, honey, don’t you understand? I have a very bad feeling about what’s on the move, outside here. I hear hoofbeats in the distance, getting closer. We don’t need to worry about what Sealey might do. I think if we don’t do something and do it now, very soon the two of us are going to be dead, dead, dead, right along with a whole lot of other people, regardless of what Sealey might do.”

“But what you’re suggesting — ” Tom spread his hands. “It’s crazy. Like howling at the wind.”

“It’s something,” Sally said. “That could be better than nothing.”

Tom shook his head, walked to the window, and stared out in silence at the dark street. Sally watched him for a while. “Well?” she said finally.

He shook his head again. “It’s crazy.”

“Well, God damn it, you can stay here and get shot if you want to,” Sally said angrily, “but I’m not going to. I’m a reporter, and I’ve got a story to report.” She started dressing, retrieved her bag from the floor, paused to rake at her hair with a comb and dab at her face in the mirror. As she started for the door, Tom stirred, turned toward her. “Sally?”

“That’s the name. Watch for the byline.”

“You were really — serious — about the — vinegar and the crock-pot?”

“All the way.”

“You know if they caught us, they’d kill both of us.”

“First they’d have to find us.”

Tom Shipman was silent for a long moment. Then he took a breath like a sigh. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s pack and go.”