Staring at the page, bone tired, Reston suddenly began to laugh. Across the room, Logan and Sabrina simultaneously looked up from the pages they’d been reading.

“I don’t know about you guys,” explained Reston, “but I’ve read this damn proposal so many times, it doesn’t even register anymore. It might as well be in ancient Greek.”

“We are all tired, Reston,” snapped Sabrina. “That’s no reason to stop working.”

“I mean,” added Reston, ignoring this, “I just read providing a meaningful cure as procuring a meaningful whore. I didn’t think we’d put in anything so interesting.”

“I’ll bet that would catch their interest,” said Logan.

“Especially Shein’s,” agreed his friend.

Logan laughed; he’d naturally passed on every detail of his remarkable conversations with the senior man.

“This is nothing to joke about,” said Sabrina sharply. “I do not think Shein wants a protocol to laugh at. Or the review committee either.”

Once again, Logan found himself caught short: What was going on with her? Why these sudden lapses into humorlessness? And the constant low-level hostility toward Reston?

It had begun the very day he returned from Germany. That evening, over dinner, Sabrina told him of their seemingly irreconcilable differences on the issue of patient eligibility.

“This is a big conflict,” she put it. “I know you like Reston, but I really do not think we can let this man work with us.”

Logan, too, recognized the argument as a source of serious concern. Yet he found that when it came down to it, Reston proved eminently—even uncharacteristically—reasonable. True, he forcefully made his case at their first joint meeting after the holidays, producing statistics on the success rates of similar protocols over the years to buttress the arguments he’d made to Sabrina. But once it became clear he was not going to win, he made no attempt to drag out the battle.

“So,” Logan asked, “I take it you still want to be part of this? Even though we can’t guarantee success?”

“Hey, what else have I got going? I mean, it’s not as if I didn’t expect it. If this thing’s gonna work, I guess we’ll all have to get used to majority rule”—he smirked—“even when the majority’s wrong.” And, opening up his briefcase, he produced a split of champagne. “I think a toast’s in order.” He looked meaningfully at Sabrina. “Something along the lines of ‘All for one and one for all!’ ”

In the weeks since, the scientific disagreements among the three of them had been minimal. Yet Sabrina’s attitude toward Reston seemed unchanged. Nor did Logan find himself able to discuss it with her. The couple of times he tried, she flatly refused to acknowledge there was even a problem.

“Look,” Logan said now, “we’re all nervous about Shein’s reaction to the draft. Why don’t we try and relax?”

“Bet I’m not as nervous as you,” offered Reston. “Shein expects nothing of me.”

“Thanks a lot,” said Logan, conceding the point. “It’s so great to know you’re always there with a reassuring word.”

In fact, since he was the one who’d recruited Shein as senior advisor to the project—and the senior man so obviously saw him as a comer—Logan had infinitely more at risk than his colleagues. So far, Shein had kept his distance, choosing to let the three junior associates work out the draft of the protocol proposal on their own. It was a courtesy that was also a challenge: only now, having studied it, would he let them know whether he’d give them his full backing.

“Well,” said Logan, sighing, “we’ll know in”—he glanced at his watch—“anytime. How do you like that, the son of a bitch is late!”

“Me, I am not worried,” reassured Sabrina. “It is good work.”

Sighing, Logan flipped his copy of the protocol proposal shut; at fifty-five pages, plus reprints of six articles and other supporting data, it had the solid feel of a corporate annual report.

That was part of the point, of course. Even with Shein’s support, the task before them would be daunting: to impress upon a skeptical review board that, though young and woefully inexperienced, they were dedicated and resourceful researchers, working on something with genuine promise. Yet—this is what made the balancing act so exceptionally complex—neither could they risk appearing unrealistic about their goals, or more than modestly hopeful about their chances for success.

In fact, starting with the title, “A Phase Two Clinical Trial of Compound J in Metastatic Breast Cancer,” they’d lent the proposal a tone of calculated blandness; as if it had been written by a trio of old, knowing souls, certain only that the world almost never surrenders its secrets.

Too, they’d paid unusual attention to the Informed Consent Document that made up the proposal’s concluding section. Since Compound J had no clinical history as an anticancer agent, they could only speculate on how patients treated with it in such a trial might react. But this they made a point of doing at considerable length, listing possible toxicities that other researchers might have readily discounted.

They’d given the same care to almost every aspect of the proposed trial. The toughest decisions after the one on patient eligibility had been essentially technical. They involved the dosing schedule and—since Compound J cannot be absorbed if taken orally—the choice of which intravenous delivery system would prove more effective: a continuous drip or more concentrated doses in sporadic bursts, via a large slug known as a bolus.

After several long evenings of largely fruitless back and forth, they’d opted for the drip. After all, like so much else, such a choice finally involves little more than guesswork. Were cancer cells more likely to be worn down by a steady level of medication in the bloodstream? Or would they be destroyed only if overwhelmed by toxins—a course that obviously could also place healthy cells at greater risk?

In the end, it was this possibility that determined their decision. The drip was clearly the more conservative choice; and, determined to come off as responsible, they decided, after hours of discussion, that made it the sounder one.

“Sorry,” offered Shein, when he finally turned up at Logan’s apartment, forty minutes late, “a guy from Health and Human Services came by my office and I couldn’t get rid of him.”

“That’s okay, Dr. Shein.”

“Those bureaucratic bastards never rest. Now they want summaries of every damn clinical trial going on at the ACF. Can you believe that? It’s not like they’d even understand what they were reading!”

Logan nodded, impatient. “Right.” How long did Shein plan to string them along?

“Well, glad to see you’re all here.” Shein laughed. “I love this cloak-and-dagger stuff. I trust you were all careful you weren’t followed.”

“May I take your coat, Dr. Shein?” asked Logan.

“It’s Seth, Logan. How many times you gonna make me tell you that?”

Logan naturally took this as an encouraging sign. He smiled. “Sorry. May I take your coat, Seth?”

“No, Alice expects me home—I gotta spend a little time with her, too, for Chrissakes. What I have to say won’t take long.”

It felt like a blow to the solar plexus, but Logan showed nothing.

“Not a bad place,” observed Shein, glancing around the room.

“Thank you.”

“So—what?—you furnish it totally through the Salvation Army or did you step up to Goodwill?”

“Actually, Dr. Shein—excuse me, Seth—I went to Ikea.”

“What’s wrong with you, Logan, losing your sense of humor?”

“He does that a lot,” piped up Reston. “Not one of his better traits.”

“I think,” said Sabrina evenly, “that we all are concerned to hear what you think of the proposal.”

Shein beamed her way. “See that. At least one person here’s got the balls to say it straight out.” Unbuttoning his coat, he tossed it on an empty chair. From the inside pocket of his rumpled tweed jacket he removed a folded copy of the protocol proposal. It appeared to have been well read. “You got something to drink in this place?”

“Please, Dr. Shein.”

Shein cast Logan a baleful glance. “Okay. It’s good. It’s very good.”

Logan could breathe again. He waited an instant. “You really think so?”

Shein looked from Reston to Sabrina, the pleasure—or was it just relief?—apparent on both faces. “Wait a minute. Not that I don’t got some serious criticism.”

And an instant later, as if rankled at having even briefly delivered unambiguous pleasure, he was into it: “I don’t like the drip. You gotta go with the bolus.”

“We of course gave that a lot of thought,” ventured Logan. “Why would you say—”

“Because taking risks is supposed to be your business,” he was cut off impatiently. “Not stupid risks, for Chrissakes, but, yeah, appropriate ones! Otherwise what kind of impact are you gonna make?”

“Very little,” said Reston, softly.

“Don’t just gimme the answer I wanna hear, Reston. Tell me something I don’t already know. Under the best of circumstances, what kinda toxicity you gonna get with this drug?”

Reston visibly reddened. “A lot.”

“Damn right. The stuff made your friend Tilley’s goddamn adrenal glands fall out! So why’re you pussyfooting around? The cancer’s gonna eventually kill ’em anyhow—why not hit the cancer cells hard and get out?”

“We were trying to minimize damage,” offered Logan. “We’d like to end up with a living patient.”

“Screw that. You do a trial like this, you face that there might be fatalities. Because basically what you’re doing is poisoning people within an inch of their lives. You can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs.”

There was a long silence in the room.

It was Sabrina who broke it. “Dr. Shein, we are talking about the therapeutic window, no? The dose that will be toxic to cancer cells but not toxic for healthy cells.”

He nodded. “You got it.”

“And this is a tiny, tiny margin … even for the best drugs.”

“The trick is finding it. That’s what separates great cancer docs from the chaff—the willingness to go right to the edge and not flinch. It’s a helluva lot easier saying it than doing it.”

Shein studied his listeners. Sabrina clearly had a handle on this; she’d go his way. So would Reston, if only to stay on his good side. But Logan seemed unconvinced.

“Listen,” he added, directing his words Logan’s way, “it’s not like I don’t understand the impulse. You give a patient an intravenous drip with a subtoxic dose and she’ll love you to pieces. She’ll tell everybody, ‘My doctor’s a genius, he’s giving me chemotherapy and there are almost no side effects!’ ” He paused meaningfully. “But you know what you’re doing? You’re killing that patient with kindness.”

He paused, as serious as Logan had ever seen him. “Your job is to come up with a treatment! Do that and—never mind if you’re a saint or an asshole—you’ll never have to worry about being popular again.”

Logan could not argue with any of it. The fact was, hearing the man lay it out so starkly, his respect for him only increased: the guy had not only a high-tech, microchip-driven brain but, just as vitally, old-fashioned brass balls to go with it.

Still, he hesitated—because he was also aware of something else. No matter how well intentioned Shein’s advice was, and no matter how ultimately sound, the senior man was in a no-lose position. Logan and the Compound J team could not proceed without his blessing. And yet, if things went wrong, he would not be the one to take the fall.

“How about the adrenal problem?” pressed Logan. “With the dosage you’re suggesting, every patient in this trial could have her adrenal glands”—he hesitated—“fall out. Like Tilley’s.”

Shein shrugged. “You’ll prophylax them with hydrocortisone. That’ll neutralize the toxic effects of the drug—provide the same hormone in pill form normally produced by the gland.”

Logan considered this. “But that could be just the beginning. I mean, that’s what we were trying to get at with our Informed Consent provision. Who knows how many other problems you’re going to have to fix along the way?” He paused. “Well, I guess those are bridges that have to get crossed.”

Shein smiled: he knew he had him. “Fortunately, you’ll have me to help devise solutions.”

“We can count on that?”

“Absolutely.” He stood up and reached for his coat. “By the way, when you rewrite the proposal, I want you to tone down that goddamn Informed Consent provision. You don’t have to go out of your way to imagine every possible side effect.”

“We just wanted to be candid. And responsible.”

“Listen, what you had there scared the hell outta me. The committee knows all that anyway.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“Don’t forget, Logan, we’re all on the same side here.”