Pam entered the lab with a sense of resolve. As long as the experiments work, everything’ll be fine. Nobody’s going to think twice about tenure once we have a drug. It wasn’t quite eight thirty, but everyone was already at work. A good crew.

Vicky, Pam’s technician and lab manager, was working at the lab bench directly opposite the door. Her bench, one of six in the lab, was covered with the paraphernalia of doing science: bottles of chemicals, automatic pipettes, racks of test tubes, boxes of pipette tips, and a centrifuge. Vicky was wearing a lab coat, face mask, and purple latex gloves while she prepared cell cultures from mouse brains. Pam knew her daily routine. Earlier this morning, she’d sacrificed twenty mice and dissected out their brains, collecting the brains in a beaker she kept cold in an ice bucket. Now she was gently grinding the brains with a mortar and pestle to break them up into single cells. Once that was done, she’d transfer the cells to small plastic Petri dishes, generating the brain cultures that everyone in the lab used to do their experiments.

Pam never ceased to be amazed that it was possible to study brain cells in plastic dishes in an incubator, even though she’d worked on this since she was a postdoc. In a dish, a brain that could develop Alzheimer’s disease.

“Hi Vicky, how’re you doing?”

“All good,” Vicky said. “This batch of cultures is almost finished and I’m going to put together the weekly supplies order soon. But I did want to talk to you about that. The way George and Holly are going with the screening, and with Francisco and Janet starting their projects, I think we need to increase our orders for mice and cell culture supplies, maybe by fifty percent or so. And you know how much those things cost. Can we afford it?”

Pam wasn’t sure how, but she wasn’t going to let anything get in the way of lab work. She gave Vicky a reassuring smile. “We’ll have to, I don’t want to slow down our experiments. Especially, not the drug screening operation. Go ahead and order what you need. I’ll find a way to balance the budget.”

“Okay, will do,” Vicky said.

“By the way, how’s Stevie doing?” Pam asked. Vicky’s eight-year-old son had sprained his knee skiing a week ago. He was in a cast, which was driving both him and Vicky nuts.

Vicky gave an exaggerated sigh. “He’ll be fine, if I don’t kill him first! What a pain in the butt that kid can be. Sometimes I think he enjoys sitting on the couch and ordering me around: do this, get that. But we’ll survive, thanks for asking.”

Pam gave her a reassuring pat on the back and started over to where the newest additions to her lab, Francisco and Janet, were deep in conversation at Janet’s desk. As Pam approached, she saw three textbooks spread out in front of them. As second-year graduate students, they were taking courses in addition to getting started on their thesis research, so they must be studying for an upcoming exam. She could still remember the pressure of coursework when she was a graduate student, itching to spend time in the lab rather than in the classroom. But they had to make courses their priority right now, so she stopped to give them a few words of encouragement before going over to where George, her senior postdoctoral fellow, was working at one of the biosafety hoods on the opposite side of the lab.

The hood was a six-foot-long cabinet with a glass sash separating George from the brain cell cultures he manipulated inside it. Only his arms extended under the sash and into the interior of the hood, which was sterilized by ultraviolet light each night. Like Vicky, he was wearing a lab coat and gloves to make sure the sterile cultures were protected from the bacteria on his skin.

“Morning, George,” Pam said. “How’s it going?”

George looked up with the calm, pleasant expression he seemed to always have. “Plugging along, setting up to test another hundred and eighty compounds right now.” He indicated the culture dishes in front of him. “We don’t have a winner yet, but don’t worry, we will. Now that you’ve got Holly helping me, we’re moving right along. And I’m feeling like a hit’s just around the corner.” He gave her a thumbs-up sign and a grin.

Pam squeezed his shoulder. She appreciated his steady confidence. It seemed to bolster everyone in the lab, including herself.

“I’m betting on you, too,” she said. “Let’s keep our fingers crossed, maybe it’s one of these you’re about to test.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Pam noticed Holly, her other postdoc, at the back bench in the lab. Holly was focused on a dish of cells she was examining under the microscope, eyes wide and a big grin on her face.

“What’s up, Holly?” Pam called over to her. “Got something interesting?”

Holly looked up with a start, the smile vanishing. “No, I just realized I’m going to be late for the dentist.” She got up, put the culture dish back in the incubator next to Pam and George, and headed for the door. “Sorry I can’t talk now, but there’s nothing new anyway.”

• • •

When the elevator door opened on the ground floor, Holly made a quick right turn and scurried into the Starbucks off the Langmere lobby. There was no dental appointment. She just needed to get away to think.

As she’d hoped, the coffee shop was almost empty at this hour, with only four tables occupied. Two of her fellow postdocs sitting at one of them waved her over, but she held up her iPad to indicate she had to work. She ordered her usual caramel macchiato and took a booth by herself in the back corner, facing the wall.

What she’d seen under the microscope was the discovery of a lifetime. One of the compounds in her last experiment blocked Alzheimer’s plaque formation and kept the brain cells looking normal and healthy. She’d found the drug they were after!

Her first instinct had been to shout out her triumph, bring Pam and George over to the microscope to see what she had. But she had her own agenda. Knowledge was power, so she kept her mouth shut and got out of the lab to plan her next move instead.

What was I thinking? she asked herself for the umpteenth time. When I joined the project, I agreed that George would be first author on whatever papers we wrote.

What a stupid mistake.

Sure, it had seemed okay back when Pam first asked her. George had already done the hard part by developing the assay, so helping him screen candidate drugs looked like a good way to get a piece of the action.

But now she had discovered the winning compound, and being second wasn’t good enough.

Any paper about a treatment for Alzheimer’s would be a high profile publication in a leading journal, a paper that would catapult the first author to a faculty position at a top institution. Being second would be nice, but not nearly as big a deal.

She took a sip of her caramel macchiato, the sweet, strong taste reminding her of how she’d already been screwed like this once before. Brad Williams had introduced her to the drink when they were graduate students. They’d worked closely together on parallel projects and their experiments turned out to be a big success. They planned to publish two papers, with Brad first author on one and herself first on the other. But then their advisor, Ross Levin, decided that it was better to publish everything together. Just one big paper, with Brad as first author. And Brad threw her under the bus and agreed!

The betrayal was a major setback. When they applied for postdocs, Brad got into one of the best labs in the field. But the top labs all turned her down and she’d been forced to settle for working with Pam, who was just starting her own lab and wasn’t even tenured yet. Definitely second rate.

It’s not going to happen again. No more being a team player and sharing results. Maneuvering George to the sidelines and taking over the project was a better option. She’d get it all wrapped up on her own and only then present it to Pam as a complete story all set to publish.

Leaving Pam no choice other than making her first author.

• • •

Holly got back to the lab to find Vicky and George huddled together at his desk, beneath the pictures of his wife and kid tacked up on the corkboard. George called her over as soon as she came through the door.

“Hey Holly, do you have a minute? Vicky and I are trying to plan out what we need for next week’s experiments.”

Good timing, Holly thought. She knew what she needed. May as well get things going.

“Sure, now’s fine for me to talk,” she said.

“So did you have any luck with the compounds you screened last week?” George asked.

Holly kept her expression neutral. “No, not even a hint of activity. You?”

George shook his head. “No, nothing. So I figure I’ll just continue as usual and screen another 540 next week. Are you going to do the same?”

“Actually, I’ve been thinking about stepping up the pace. I think I can handle a bit more, say nine hundred a week. At least for the next few weeks.”

“You really think you can test that many?” George asked. “We’ve already been going as fast as I can manage.”

“I can push a little harder,” Holly said. “After all, I don’t have a family to worry about. It just means that I’ll set up a new screen of 180 compounds each day of the week instead of just Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, like we’ve been doing. I know it’ll be a ton of work, but I can do it.”

Turning to Vicky, she asked, “Can you get me enough brain cultures?”

“I guess,” Vicky said. “It’ll be a lot of work for me too, but I know Pam wants this to move as fast as possible. So if you’re up to testing that many compounds, I’ll manage. I’ll just wait to catch up on sleep when you’re finished!”

Holly laughed. “Thanks, Vicky. I appreciate the extra effort. And Pam will too.”

George shook his head. “The two of you are quite a pair. I’m afraid I’m already going as fast as I can. I’ll just stay with my regular pace for now.”

“Okay,” Holly said. “Then I’ll test compounds 40501 through 41400 next week, right?”

George made a note and nodded. “And I’ll continue in the sixty thousand series, 64505 through 65044.”

Holly got up. “I’m going to get to work and start prepping my samples. Vicky, thanks again for the extra push.”

The fools. She’d get all the cultures she needed, without either of them having a clue as to what she’d really be doing. Now just one more thing to take care of.

The freezer contained the set of candidate drugs from the chemical library. They were organized in trays of a thousand compounds each. Holly took the two trays containing compounds anonymously labeled 40001 through 42000 back to her lab bench.

It took almost three hours to prepare samples of the nine hundred drugs she’d told George she was going to test. Nothing but a waste of time, except she wanted him to see her samples all set up when he went into the freezer to get his own compounds. She’d throw them out next week when her supposed experiments were done.

Then she turned to the important thing. Compound 40492. The winning drug. She breathed a sigh of relief when she saw there was plenty left to do everything she had planned. No need to risk tipping her hand by going back to the chemical library for more.

She transferred about half of the remaining sample of 40492 to a separate tube, which she labeled with just her initials, HS. Then she returned the chemical library trays to their proper place and put her nine hundred prepped samples on the shelf where she and George stored the compounds they were in the process of testing. He’d find them later.

Making sure nobody was watching, she put the tube labeled HS in a back corner of her personal freezer box. Her private stock. With the extra cultures she’d ordered from Vicky, she’d have a complete characterization of 40492 done in a few weeks.

And none of them would know what was going on until she was ready to spring the full story on Pam.