Their first sharp disagreement involved John Reston. Sabrina strongly resisted letting him in on their secret.
On a purely pragmatic basis, Dan Logan recognized she had a point. He knew as well as she did that, at its current stage of development, the hypothesis might well strike even a sympathetic outsider as preposterous. It still required buttressing by solid supporting evidence, at least some of it of a clinical nature.
But Sabrina’s objections to Reston had to do with more than just science. They reflected her own guarded and fiercely independent nature.
“Why?” she demanded. “What is the use of having another person anyhow?”
“Look, Sabrina, we have to be realistic—we can’t do this alone. If we’re going to have a shot at getting a protocol accepted, we’ll have to come at them with a team in place. Reston’s a terrific doc. And I trust him.”
“I do not. There’s something about this man I have never liked.”
“Who, then? We have to trust someone!”
The argument exasperated Logan. This is why he preferred conflicts about pure science: in the end, those could usually be resolved by a clearheaded assessment of data. The ones about human beings were always so much messier.
Yes, of course, in the best of all worlds, he, too, would prefer to lock others out—for personal as well as professional reasons. Already, between them, there existed the kind of mutual respect lovers can take years trying to achieve; and day by day, as they warily revealed themselves, it was being matched by genuine trust. Why tamper with that? Never had Logan dreamed he could find a woman like this: someone to whom he was not just wildly attracted, but whose passion for this extraordinarily specialized work equaled his own. Once, on hospital rounds, he actually found himself chuckling: he’d been trying to decide which thought got him more excited, of the sex he’d have that evening, or of the conversation that would follow.
In fact, Logan even found himself growing attached to the cloak-and-dagger aspect of the relationship. If most days held far too few hours for all he needed to do—work, research, unwind with Sabrina—the distance they placed between themselves and the rest of the world only heightened their growing reliance on each other.
Sometimes, lying beside her at night, it was almost possible to believe they could pull it off: that, as she argued, the possibilities of success might actually be enhanced if they kept the project to themselves. Certainly, they’d be able to exercise tighter control over the standard of work and the handling of data.
But his pragmatic side told him otherwise. For all his regard for Sabrina’s scientific acumen, he had far less faith than she did in the power of her intuition about human beings. The simple truth was, her endless suspicion of others’ characters and motives—much as she insisted on seeing it as a virtue—could sink them before they even got started.
His own view of his colleagues seemed to him not so much generous as realistic. Sure, some of them were jerks—petty, erratic, narcissistic, even cruel. That had been more than amply demonstrated. But in the end, who could doubt they all shared the same goal?
It all came to a head one late night when Logan reported on the conversation he’d had that day with Steven Locke, the former ACF senior researcher whom he’d finally tracked down at Southwestern Medical School in Dallas. Admittedly, it had been a bit unsettling. In fact, at first Locke hadn’t wanted to talk at all.
“Look,” he said, “I’m sorry, but nothing I say about the ACF’s going to do me any good.”
“I just want to ask about a protocol. It was by a first-year associate named Ray Coopersmith?” He filled the silence that followed with a hasty “I’m a first-year associate myself. It piqued my interest.”
“Coopersmith was bad news, okay? That’s all I have to say.”
“Why? I don’t understand.”
The other sighed. “He faked his data and he brought other people down with him. End of story. Look, I’ve got patient rounds to make.”
Logan was momentarily speechless. “You don’t have any idea where I can find him, do you?”
He laughed hoarsely. “Why in the world would I know a thing like that?” And a moment later he was off.
But now, hours later, Logan felt he had the exchange in perspective. “Look,” he told Sabrina, “it was a bit of a scandal, it left some casualties. But that has zero to do with us.”
“Maybe you are right,” she replied with unexpected mildness. “But this Coopersmith was also a first-year associate, no? This will give them another reason not to let us try a protocol.”
“Look, it happened how long ago?” he asked reasonably. “Four years? Four and a half? Have you heard a single word about it since we’ve been at the ACF?”
Still, before long, she was using it as further reason not to include Reston in the project.
“This Reston, you must stop looking at him only with the eyes of a friend.”
“I’m sorry, he is a friend. But I knew him as a scientist first—and that’s why I want him. He has skills we need.”
“What skills? To be a wiseguy? Because that is mainly what I see.”
“That’s not fair, Sabrina.”
“What, then? What are these special skills?”
Looking at her perched on the edge of his sofa in leggings and a clingy silk shirt, Logan momentarily had trouble concentrating. Once again, fleetingly, he wished this were an ordinary conversation with an esteemed colleague, free of all other factors.
“You have a problem with my question, Logan?”
“Look, Sabrina, please, let’s just stop kidding ourselves about what’s involved here. We’re talking about a mammoth undertaking: designing the protocol, putting together the right patient pool, tracking them, assembling and analyzing data. We’re novices, we haven’t even been here six months. This whole thing could fall apart for lack of enough competent hands and heads. It’s happened many, many times before. Who knows, that might’ve been that guy Coopersmith’s problem.”
He wasn’t sure, but he thought he could sense Sabrina starting to waver. She indicated a six-inch stack of research on the adjoining table, some of the material they’d assembled to review. “Let’s get to work. I have only three hours before I must go back to the hospital.”
Logan slipped an arm over her shoulder. “You’re even good at changing the subject.”
She removed it. “Not now, we haven’t the time.”
“Well … I guess I should get started on the introduction to the proposal.…”
“Good.” She gave him a chaste kiss on the cheek. “You always say the just right things to a girl, Logan.”
“Though writing has never exactly been my strong suit.”
“At least it’s your own language. I’m sorry, I cannot be much of a help in this.”
“You know”—he grinned—“Reston’s a helluva writer.…”
“Compound J?” repeated Reston, three evenings later, in the trendy Georgetown restaurant to which Logan had unexpectedly invited him. “Compound J? For breast cancer?”
Logan nodded uneasily. He had expected surprise but not incredulity. “Sabrina Como and I have been doing some research. We have what we think is a pretty sound theory.”
“Sabrina?” He grinned. “Hey, good for you.”
“She’s an incredible doctor.”
“Right. I know. What some guys’ll say to get a woman into the sack.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Ooooh, don’t tell me there actually is something going on with the bombshell.”
“Look, that’s not what we’re here to talk about.”
He shook his head. “Now, there’s a real miracle of modern medicine.”
“We’re here to talk about Compound J.”
Reston snorted. “Compound J is a bust. Every doctor at the ACF knows that. Hell, even the janitors know it!”
“Maybe they’ve just been using it the wrong way. Against the wrong disease.”
“I think we should order something.” Reston picked up the menu and flipped it open. “Jeez, this place isn’t cheap. Let’s not forget who’s buying.”
“Look,” said Logan, “I understand your reaction. It’s a lot to digest.”
He snorted. “I’d say it’s indigestible.”
The truth was, Logan saw his friend as a kind of test; the objections he raised were precisely those he knew they would face trying to sell the idea within the ACF. It was simply common wisdom that Compound J’s anticancer properties were nonexistent.
Given how the discussion had started, neither man pressed it. Only with the arrival of their food did it resume. “All right,” picked up Reston suddenly, “tell me what you have that makes any kind of dent in that evidence.”
“Where is it written that cell lines are reliable models for what goes on in a living, breathing patient? There are hundreds of exceptions to that rule.”
“It’s still the rule. Or do you plan to start rewriting those?”
“Making a judgment based on cell line is like looking at an elephant’s toenail and thinking you see the whole elephant.”
Reston looked up from his cassoulet. “Okay, I agree with that. So what?”
“So if you discount the cell-line results, you can start to look again at this compound’s possibilities—with a more open mind.”
“Fine. Let’s hear some evidence.”
“Listen, I hardly even know where to start. Because I really think this stuff is a lot more interesting than anyone realizes. You just can’t think about it the way you think of other anticancer compounds.”
“Evidence. I’m waiting.”
Logan raised the Larry Tilley case. “If a drug seems to be that active against a healthy gland, you’ve got to at least wonder if it won’t be active against a diseased gland.”
“That’s reasonable speculation—but why does that lead to cancer?”
Logan told him about Sabrina’s finds in the archives.
Again, Reston was dismissive. “You’re giving me stuff from the twenties and thirties?” He shook his head. “Man, that woman must have some hold on you!”
Logan glared at him. “This isn’t a joke to me, John. No more sarcasm, okay?”
Reston raised his hands in mock surrender. “Sorry. I thought you wanted an honest reaction.”
Logan pulled a folded sheath of photocopied pages from his inside pocket and handed them across the table. “Try telling me this is ancient history.”
Examining the pages, Reston was immediately impressed by the origin of the document: The Journal of Molecular Biochemistry, one of the most highly regarded biomedical scientific publications in the world.
“What’s this?”
“You probably missed it. It’s a paper presented at one of the seminars they were always holding when we were third-year residents at Claremont. Look at page four.”
Reston flipped ahead, noting that Logan had highlighted the key passages: the paper’s author, a Professor Engel of the University of Minnesota, was an expert on the proteins called growth factors, produced by all cells, normal and otherwise. What he had shown was that some tumors, especially those of the female breast, develop the ability to secrete growth factors into surrounding tissue where they interact with receptors on the surface of neighboring cancer cells—signaling these cells, in turn, to reproduce. Thus is created an endless circle of secretion and growth as the tumor grows unchecked.
Yet, along the way, almost incidentally, Engel had noted a curious phenomenon: sometimes, inexplicably, drugs containing polynaphthalene sulfonic acids—like Compound J and its relatives—appeared to block the binding of the tumor growth factors to the tumor cells.
“How’s that for evidence?” asked Logan. “If we can show this stuff screws up a cancer cell just a little bit more than it does normal surrounding cells, we have ourselves an anticancer drug.”
Reston burst out laughing. “Logan, you’re crazy. You’re a fuckin’ megalo. Finding a drug that works among all the millions of compounds out there is like hitting the lottery on your first try. People a lot smarter than you or me work their entire lives and never get anywhere close to testing on human beings.” He shook his head. “You might as well suggest pouring hydrochloric acid into patients’ veins—you know for sure that’d kill their tumors.”
“I’m not saying anyone’s going to hand us anything on a platter.” Logan paused. “Come on, John, you know as well as I do that this is enough evidence for a protocol. This thesis is entirely plausible. Cancer cells are like sharks—without forward movement they die. Interrupt the growth process and you kill the tumor!”
Reston fell silent. “Who else knows about this?”
“Only you, me, and Sabrina.”
He nodded. “Tell me something—what does your friend Sabrina think of me?”
A miserable liar, Logan feigned nonchalance. “What do you mean?”
“She thinks I’m an asshole, right?”
“I don’t think so. She knows I’m talking to you about this.”
“Because if I’ve got one talent, it’s reading the looks I get from good-looking women. And this one shoots lasers.”
“Trust me, that’s not true.” He took a sip of water. “Anyway, what difference does it make? You’re not going to spend your life with her.”
“Right, you are.”
Despite himself, Logan smiled.
Reston put his hands behind his head and leaned back, staring at the ceiling. “Jesus H. Christ, I thought this was just gonna be a pleasant dinner.”
“Sorry.”
He leaned forward again, and spoke softly. “You’re gonna get massacred on this, Logan. Breast cancer belongs to Stillman! He’s about to launch his trial.”
Logan was more aware of it than his friend could ever know. Nor, at this point, did he have the heart to bring up what he’d learned of Coopersmith. “So”—he managed with what felt like a cocky grin—“we’ll go head to head with him. For the good of humanity.”
“If this thing is going to have any chance at all, you’re going to have to get one of the other top guys behind it.”
“I know that.”
“And by a process of elimination …”
“There’s only Shein.”
The implications were clear to both. For all his spirited nonconformity, indeed, largely because of it, Shein wielded far less power at the ACF than most of the others.
Logan leaned forward. “So you with us, or what?”
Reston shook his head with resignation. “Ah, what the hell. I guess we’ve gotta give it a try, right?” He paused. “I’m gonna order another bottle of wine and get drunk. You’d better start thinking of how you’re gonna suck up to Shein.”
As it happened, Shein made things easy for him. Two days later, at the end of another long workday, the senior man called Logan into his office and closed the door.
“You speak German, don’t you, Logan?” Noting the other’s confusion, he added, “I checked out your resume. How well?”
“Enough to get by.”
“Getting by doesn’t impress me. Getting by I can do with my Yiddish.”
“Actually, I’ve been working on it a lot lately.”
Shein nodded. “I know. I see you’ve taken a lot of material out of the archives.”
Logan just stared: was there anything this guy didn’t know? “May I ask what this is about?”
“ ‘May I ask what this is about?’ ” echoed Shein, mockingly. “What is this, a church social? Sure you can. I’m going to the Tenth International Chemotherapy Conference next month in Germany. Frankfurt. And I’m gonna want a junior associate to come along for the ride. There’s a lot of panel discussions and poster presentations, and I’m gonna need another set of eyes and ears.” He nodded at Logan. “Yours.”
“Seriously?”
“Write it down, December fifteenth through the eighteenth. Or you worried that’ll fuck up your Christmas shopping?”
Logan shook his head no.
“It’ll give us a chance to get to know each other a little better, maybe talk about things that have nothing to do with this place. Chess. Women. Barbecue.”
Only now did Logan let himself get excited. “That’s wonderful, Dr. Shein. Really, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Shein dismissed this with a wave of his hand. “My pleasure, I’m sure.”
“Say, Logan,” hissed Shein, eyeing a tall blonde in an elegantly tailored suit, “get a load of that.”
They were standing by the carousel at the airport in Frankfurt, waiting for their luggage. The woman, seemingly harried and slightly severe, the very definition of the no-nonsense executive, was distinctly not Logan’s type. He nodded. “I noticed her on the plane. She was in first class.”
Shein cast her a look that would have been inappropriate even in a bordello. “Wouldn’t you just love to do her? Boy, that’d make you feel young again.”
“Dr. Shein, I am young.”
Ignoring this, Shein turned back toward the carousel. “Trust me, Logan, we’re going to enjoy ourselves here. If the goddamn luggage ever comes.”
Already, after only eight hours together, Logan was starting to have second thoughts about this entire venture. If part of the point was to get to better know his superior, he suddenly found himself knowing more about him than he’d ever wanted to. Even before the flight had left the ground at Dulles, the change had begun. “Okay, Logan, now you’re gonna see my fun side.”
“I think of you as a fun guy already,” said Logan, in what seemed to be the spirit of the moment.
“Naah,” came the reply, “wait’ll you see. I live for these trips.”
Over the next several hours as the plane moved over the North Atlantic, most of the other passengers dozed in the darkened cabin. But the flight attendants kept Shein supplied with a steady supply of Bloody Marys and the tales of his exploits on the road came one after the other. Dead tired but wide awake, Logan could scarcely believe what he was hearing: the research assistant Shein met at the conference in Rome; the English physician with whom he’d found himself deeply smitten in Tokyo; the sultry prostitute with whom he’d spent most of his waking hours in Rio.
There was, to be sure, a large element of braggadocio in this. More than once, Shein caught his colleague’s eye and broke into a broad grin. “That surprise you, Logan?”
But, too, listening, Logan could hardly miss the desperation behind it; the sense that this man, so widely admired and envied, had a void in the center of his life that could not be filled. Even in his own telling, not all of the trysts had gone well. After the first night, he’d been unable to perform with the English doctor. It turned out that a woman who’d been excessively friendly at a meeting in Seattle just wanted to use him for her own professional ends. The Brazilian prostitute took him to the hovel where she lived on the outskirts of the city and, showing him her two young children, exacted a promise that he’d send her cash from the States. He did so for more than a year.
Late in the flight, as Logan finally began to doze, he was aware of Shein’s elbow gently nudging him back toward consciousness.
“Dr. Shein?” he asked. “Is there something you want?”
“I’ll bet you think I’m an asshole, don’t you?” came the soft reply.
Logan hesitated. “No, you’re not. Just human.”
“Don’t kiss my ass, Logan, you don’t know a damn thing about it. Alice—when I think of all she’s done for me. Working at some goddamn bookkeeping job to help me through med school, dealing with my moods. I don’t even know why she puts up with me.”
Momentarily, Logan felt not only sorry but slightly embarrassed for the guy. It seemed someone with Shein’s brains and experience should have a less mundane lament, something more interesting.
But, never one to disappoint, an instant later Shein forgot all about self-pity. In its place there came controlled rage. “The bastards’d use it against me, of course. I know that!” he hissed.
Logan did not have to ask who he was talking about. The ACF was probably one of the last remaining institutions in America where a charge of infidelity might still do someone’s career serious harm; a circumstance born of its reliance on the whims of powerful politicians, some of whom continued to make a public fetish of personal morality. Thus it was that, at least on the campus itself, the kind of casual sexual adventurism so common elsewhere was all but unknown.
“As if they don’t do it themselves, the cocksuckers,” Shein added suddenly. “Every chance they get. Every damn one of ’em!”
Logan silently checked his watch, not yet set ahead: twelve forty-eight. Already early morning Frankfurt time. In little more than an hour they’d be on the ground. “Dr. Shein, maybe we should try to get some sleep.”
“Well, maybe not Larsen. He’s too stupid to figure out how to get away with it.”
There was no way Logan was going to get any sleep now, of course. His head was spinning. Suddenly he felt himself to be less a colleague—a very junior colleague, at that—than a chaperone. Hell, a keeper. This guy was more unstable than he’d ever suspected. A few hours before, Logan had viewed this trip as an immense opportunity, his primary concern choosing the right moment for the delicate task of trying to enlist Shein’s support for their trial of Compound J. Now he had to worry about the esteemed scientist embarrassing the ACF; and, hardly incidentally, taking him down with him.
For an instant, by the carousel, Logan was afraid Shein might have in mind following the blond businesswoman. But when their luggage finally arrived, he allowed himself to be led toward the taxi stand, and half an hour later they were checking in at the Hotel International.
Before the younger man’s eyes, Shein now underwent another metamorphosis. Relaxed and bright eyed, he stood in the large, tastefully appointed lobby, greeting colleagues from around the world; seeming to effortlessly recall not just their names but minute details of the research in which each was involved.
Dead on his feet, wanting nothing more than to collapse on something soft, Logan quietly excused himself and went to his room. In less than five minutes he was out.
When his eyes at last fluttered open, he was momentarily disoriented. The numbers on the digital clock in the TV read 3:08. Sunlight streamed in from the window opposite. Midafternoon. Groggily, he picked up the phone and asked for Shein’s room. No answer.
“But there is a message for you, Dr. Logan,” said the voice in heavily accented English. “Shall I have it fetched to your room?”
The note was in Shein’s slapdash hand, the one he used when writing prescriptions: Papa’s gone a-hunting. Don’t wait up.
Sitting alone at dinner that night in the hotel restaurant, Logan once again reassured himself there was no reason for concern. The three-day conference would not officially open until the morning. Shein was not due to speak until the following evening. Surely by morning …
But Shein was not at breakfast the next day; nor, Logan discovered, had he even picked up his credentials at the front desk. Attending the conference’s opening ceremony on his own, watching from the back of the vast auditorium as the elderly head of the Joachim Brysch Stiftung der Deutschen Krebshilfe welcomed the delegates, he could not shake a sense of dread. What should he do? Summon someone back at the ACF? But who—and what would be the consequences of that? Alert the Frankfurt police? That might prove even more disastrous. Seth Shein was among the world’s most eminent cancer researchers. Who knew, maybe he was just contentedly camped out in the city’s red light district.
In the end, Logan decided to do nothing at all. This seemed not just the best choice for him personally but as close as he could come to following the instructions Shein himself had left in his note. Besides, he also had an obligation to pay attention to the conference itself. In Shein’s absence, wasn’t it more vital than ever that he serve as the senior man’s eyes and ears?
Nor was this just a convenient rationale. The work being discussed and evaluated here was of immense importance. Never before, not even at the ACF, had Logan seen so much talent in one place: preeminent cancer specialists from almost every research institution of any significance in the world. Sitting in the auditorium, leafing through the program schedule, he was actually able to briefly put his problem out of mind. This was like being an eight-year-old at Disney World, with a free pass to every ride. Lectures on everything from common basal-cell carcinoma to oligodendroglioma of the brain, workshops running the gamut from garden-variety chemotherapies to cutting-edge research. So many cancers, so little time.
Then, again, the sheer variety of choices only made his own easier: he’d focus on malignancies of the breast.
On the second page, his eye fixed upon a talk to be held immediately after this ceremony in a lecture hall a floor above: “Prognostic Factors in Early Stage Breast Cancer.” The listed speaker was Sergio Ferrati of Milan’s Instituto Nazionale di Tumori, a name Logan had been liberally dropping since he first came across it during his second year at Claremont. Obliged to speak in English, the international language of science, Dr. Ferrati proved nearly impenetrable, but Logan didn’t care. The treat was seeing him at all. So what if his notes were useless, Reston would bust a gut with envy!
After a break for lunch at the cafeteria, Logan headed straight for “Novel Chemotherapeutic Agents for Advanced Breast Cancer” by Arthur McGee of Houston’s M. D. Anderson Cancer Center; then, as a change of pace, dropped by for the last third of a seminar on “Cell Cycle Progression in Malignant Breast MCF-7 Cells.”
By the time the question and answer segment ended, it was nearly five o’clock. Shein was scheduled to speak at eight, immediately after dinner. The sense of impending disaster returned with a rush. Where could the guy be? What was wrong with him? Throughout the day, Logan had exchanged scarcely a word with anyone on the premises. This he didn’t mind; young and without a big-time reputation in a gathering of some of the most ambitious souls on earth, he was grateful to be able to distance himself from the ego-driven scene. But now he felt not so much apart as deeply, harrowingly alone.
The formal sessions concluded for the day, intent on somehow keeping his mind off his problem, Logan made his way down to the large room off the lobby given over to “poster sessions.”
The atmosphere here was reminiscent of nothing so much as a high school science fair, confidence commingling with just a touch of desperation. Lining the aisles, edge to edge, were easels, each about six feet high and four feet long. This room was open to even the most modestly credentialed, from ambitious postgraduate students, to young researchers of recognized promise, to older midlevel academics hoping against hope to stay in the game. Anyone with data to display or even a product to hawk was welcome; he or she had merely to scrawl a shorthand description of his wares on a poster, paste on a bit of supporting data, and stand there, awaiting interested customers.
Though poster sessions were the low-rent neighborhood of every such convention—senior scientists tending to wander through only in protective packs, like socialites slumming in Harlem for soul food—Logan had heard that they often featured innovative work. Now he slowly made his way past the exhibits: “The Role of p53 in Retinoblastoma” by Edinoff and Bender of New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center; “Mutated H-ras Sequences in Pancreatic Cancer” by a researcher from Madrid; “K-Balb Cells Efficiently Internalize Antisense Oligonucleotides” by … no affiliation was listed. But the young woman whose work it apparently was stood at the ready.
More out of politeness than genuine interest, Logan paused, reading her poster.
“Affiliation?” she suddenly spoke up.
“Pardon?” said Logan, startled.
“What is your affiliation, please?” She had some vaguely mid-European accent. Maybe Czech.
“The American Cancer Foundation.”
Her eyes brightened. “Excellent. This will interest you, then.” And, without awaiting a reply, she launched into her presentation. “You see, what we are trying to establish is that antisense oligonucleotide constructs can be used in these cells to sequence-specifically inhibit gene expression. This could be a whole new way of treating patients.”
Forget it, thought Logan, it’ll never work. “Actually,” he said, “my specialty is breast cancer.”
“Oh.” Glumly, she nodded to her right. “Over there.”
The next aisle was entirely devoted to breast research, no fewer than fifteen displays.
As he began strolling down it, one exhibit immediately seized his interest “Inhibitors of Growth Factor Binding to MCF-7 Breast Cancer Cells.”
Logan stopped short. Even as he tried to feign nonchalance, he was aware of his heart starting to pound. This was precisely the claim he intended to make for Compound J! Had someone else already done his research? Had they been scooped?
He and the man beside the poster, identified as Willem Van Meter, Ph.D., of the University of Antwerp, looked one another over. Obviously unimpressed, Van Meter resumed scanning the crowd for more likely prospects.
Logan moved in closer. A cursory glance at the accompanying display cards confirmed his fear that this was indeed real science, not quackery. He began reading the cards one by one, weighing the hypotheses, critiquing the experimental technique, trying to decide whether the thesis could hold water in its entirety.
Glumly, he concluded it might.
“Interesting work,” he ventured, with studied neutrality.
Van Meter looked at him—“Thank you”—then turned his attention back to the room.
“It reminds me of the study done by Professor Engel at the University of Minnesota.”
“Yes, I am aware of that.”
Logan waited for some elaboration. When none came, it struck him that the other knew nothing at all of the study in question.
But Van Meter became considerably more animated a moment later when an older, far more distinguished scientist happened by: Dr. Vickers of the Royal Marsden Hospital in London.
“So what have we here?” asked Vickers.
“It’s a red-colored polycarboxylate polymer,” the other readily explained. “We think it’s quite interesting.”
“Ah, a polymer, is it …?”
“We are trying to establish activity in metastatic breast cancer.…”
“But,” repeated Vickers, fixing on the key detail, “you say it’s a polymer …?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What a shame. All these fascinating results, and no one will ever treat a patient with it.”
A polymer, which is composed of linked repeating units with the number of units differing from molecule to molecule, has by definition erratic behavior. Nor, because it is produced by a chemical reaction that ends unpredictably, can uniformity ever be achieved. In the same batch will be found molecules varying dramatically in size and weight, some active, some inactive, some perhaps even toxic.
“No,” conceded Van Meter. “What we have is far too … ill defined for practical use.”
“I should say so. The American FDA will never approve the stuff! They tend to be such sticklers about knowing what you put into patients.” The Englishman laughed. “Well, I suppose you’ll at least have your bit of fun with it.”
“Naturally, for the moment, I’m concerned only with the principle,” returned Van Meter defensively. “Down the road, we will certainly need better compounds, but for now …”
But Logan had already heard more than he needed to know. Nodding pleasantly, he turned and resumed moving up the aisle.
“Where the hell you been?”
Logan would know that voice anywhere—and never had he been so glad to hear it. He had to resist the impulse to take Shein in his arms.
Though red eyed, unshaven, and still wearing the same clothes in which he’d arrived, Shein appeared just fine.
“I’ve just been attending the conference, Dr. Shein.” He paused. “I was worried about you.”
“About me? Didn’t you get my note?” Suddenly he leaned in close. “I gotta get changed for my damn speech. Come up with me, I’ll tell you everything.”
Shein was fairly bursting with the news.
“Remember the woman at the airport?” he blurted out suddenly, as they rode up in the elevator.
Logan glanced uneasily at the only other passenger, a bellboy with a food cart. “The blonde?” he replied softly.
“She has a name, for Chrissakes. Christina. Logan, your problem’s you got no respect for women.”
The door opened and Logan gratefully stepped out. “You were with her? How’d you find her?”
Shein smiled with pride. “You’re not as smart as you look—I read her luggage tag. Turned out she’s a translator, can you believe that? Talks better than you and me put together.”
As they headed down the corridor, Logan glanced at his watch. The speech was in less than twenty-five minutes.
“Only one hitch—she won’t sleep with me!”
Though some sort of response seemed called for, Logan was at a loss as to what it might be. “That’s too bad,” he ventured.
“Wants me to have an AIDS test. Me? Can you believe that?”
Fifteen minutes later, standing in his underwear before the sink, face covered with foam, Shein was still on the subject. “I try to explain to her the statistical probabilities, right? A guy my age, my background, number of sexual partners. But it’s like talking to the Berlin Wall!” He laughed. “That’s what I call her, my little Berlin Wall. She loves it.”
“Dr. Shein, I’m getting a little concerned about the time.” That, and the fact that his colleague evidently hadn’t given his talk so much as a moment’s thought.
“I tell you, Logan,” he said, shaking his head ruefully, “this really hits home how much goddamn ignorance and hysteria there is out there about this disease!”
Not that Logan need to have worried. Shein was brilliant. Speaking without notes on the granulocyte colony stimulating factor—a genetically engineered protein that enables bone marrow to quickly regenerate, thus rendering tolerable extremely high doses of chemotherapy—he kept the overflow audience in the main auditorium mesmerized. In the question-and-answer session that followed, completely in his element, he described his own research experience with the compound in ways almost unheard of at such gatherings; discussing not only the technical aspects, but his interactions with patients and their families; along the way getting laughs from this gathering of senior scientists that would have delighted a veteran Borscht Belt comic.
“That was amazing,” enthused Logan, greeting him at the podium afterward. “I don’t know how you do it.”
But to his surprise, Shein looked almost crestfallen. “Christ, it’s too easy. From these people you think you’d get a little more skepticism.”
Logan just stared at him.
“C’mon, Logan, you know it as well as me—it’s all bullshit. The survival rate for metastatic breast cancer hasn’t changed in twenty years. And all the goddamn colony stimulating factors on the planet aren’t gonna raise it one bit.”