Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman (25 page)

36

"You say she's coming
here?"
Frank Barrington said when he arrived in Fort Collins about six o'clock that evening and Monique told him what she had planned.

"No, not here," Monique said, looking around the small furnished apartment. "We're going to meet her for a drink at Barnaby's. It shouldn't take very long, I hope, and then we can shake her loose and come back here for some nice chops for dinner." She hesitated. "I probably shouldn't have bothered you at all," she said. "It just seemed so odd to have her calling, just after that grim little note from Carlos about the mess in Savannah and the fight they're having with Sealey about that medicine. And you know more about Canon City than I do; all I did was run the tests up here and report what happened—"

Frank put a finger on her lips. "Stop apologizing. It's only eighty miles up here from Golden. I can drive that anytime, and I'm getting bored with this weekend visitation crap, anyway."

She smiled. "Bored with me?"

' 'Bored with being eighty miles away. I'm either going to get myself assigned up here or start commuting." He kissed her. "This woman that called . . . You say she's some kind of detective?"

"She's an investigative reporter, which is something else. She writes for the Philadelphia
Inquirer.
She called from Denver at seven-thirty this morning and she's turning up at Barnaby's in thirty minutes."

"So what does she want with
you?"

Monique shrugged. "I'm not quite sure. Said she was checking some things about the Colorado outbreak, but she got very vague about just what." She saw Frank's cloudy expression and smiled. "Don't worry, sweet. We'll meet her and have a nice drink and play it close to the vest, and everything will be all right. I've dealt with these people before."

"If she acts like that TV woman," Frank said, "I'll break her arm."

As it turned out, Sally Grinstone was not quite the horsey, aggressive female newsperson Frank had been visualizing. Aside from a pair of veiy sharp and penetrating eyes, Sally Grinstone looked for all the world like an overchubby, slightly untidy teen-age kewpie sitting there in the booth at Barnaby's, sipping some colorless drink and chainsmoking cigarettes, her breasts quivering a little with every movement, her hair done up carelessly in an incredible double ponytail. Hardly anything
threatening
about her, Monique thought, except for the air of slightly spurious innocence. No tape recorder on the table, either, Monique noticed. "You're not taping this?" she said as she and Frank slid in across the table.

"No need to," Sally said. "This is just background, a couple of points to clear up. Doesn't even need to be on the record, if you'd rather not." She spread her hands. "I'm not even sure what I'm looking for, just yet—maybe you can tell me. You're Monique Janrette?"

"Jenrette," Monique said.

"That's right. I've seen quite a number of your papers," Sally said, and Monique had the sudden odd feeling that maybe this girl actually
had.
"Look, I'm here because some things have me puzzled and I hope maybe you can help me clear them up. You've heard about Sealey Lab's decision on their new antibiotic?"

"I've heard they're dragging their feet about supplying it," Monique said cautiously.

"They've pulled it out of production altogether, as of five
p.m
. yesterday," Sally said. "It was on all the wire services. They're calling back all outstanding supplies, including supplies for all experimental protocols." She leaned across the table. "Now what do you think of that?"

"I think it's very strange," Monique said. "If it's true."

"It's more than just strange," Sally said. "It's an outrage.

Consider the timing. We've got a city like Savannah in terrible trouble right now, with Sealey 3147 the only drug in sight that might keep Savannah from turning into the disaster of the century—and now we find that Sealey is suddenly pulling out. We also know that Sealey has that drug boarded up with patents that nobody can break, so if Sealey doesn't make it, nobody does. Now what does that sound like to you, as a microbiologist with the CDC, at a time like this? Off the record, of course."

Monique sighed. "I don't like it, if that's what you mean-but maybe they have no choice. The drug hits this plague all right, but it also turns up side effects. If they're afraid of the liability—"

"Liability, hell," Sally Grinstone said scornfully.

"Well, what do you think they're after?"

Sally raised her thumb and forefinger and rubbed them together. "Scratch," she said. "Money. Nothing else. Money like you wouldn't believe. I smell blackmail like the stockyards breeze, a squeeze play that's going to make the oil sheiks look like two-bit shills at a carney." She gave Monique a cold look. "Add it up for yourself. When you've got something that a whole lot of people have to have in a hurry—or die—you don't just give it away, not if your name is Sealey. You squeeze it for everything it's worth. You lock it up and wait to see how many are
really
going to die before you set the price, that's all."

Monique took a deep breath. "Well, that's an interesting allegation," she said. "But why are you coming to me? You're certainly not going to
print
all that."

"No, I'd be crucified upside down. But maybe there's something here I
can
print. Something I can't quite get my hands on yet." Sally fixed her large eyes on Monique. "You're familiar with this drug. You ran tests on it before they used it down in Canon City, didn't you?"

"That's right." Monique exchanged glances with Frank. "We tested it here in the lab. Sealey provided a small supply through CDC in Atlanta. We didn't have much time—we already knew the regular antibiotics were not going to work well against the new organism, and we were getting desperate—but we did some very intensive testing."

"And you found it was good. Very good. I saw you on a late news clip on TV when your first results were in."

"The drug was absolutely great," Monique said. "We are getting up to ninety-seven percent kill of the organism with very low concentrations of the drug. I can hardly remember a new drug that looked so extremely good so early. Those tests suggested the stuff would stop infection cold in infected animals, assuming we could get high blood levels fast enough."

"Did that look like a problem?"

"No," Monique said, "but sometimes you just can't. Sometimes a drug is metabolized into something totally inactive just as fast as you stick it into a living system—or sometimes it's cleared so fast by the kidneys or liver that you never get an effective blood level. But when we used this on sick animals, it was just as active there as it was on the culture plates. The only animals we lost on it were the ones that were absolutely terminal before we started the drug. We were really excited— remember how excited we were, Frank? We thought we really had something to nail it to the wall."

"And no sign of side effects?" Sally said.

"No evidence whatever. When the earth-mold antibiotics are toxic, they usually show it in certain characteristic ways in rats or guinea pigs, and there wasn't any sign of trouble. Let me tell you: we were sure enough that it was clean, we had eveiybody in the lab up here taking therapeutic doses for over a week, more than twenty-five people, and we found no signs of toxicity. So finally we had enough left to send down to Carlos for field testing, and he used it in some desperation cases, people who were unquestionably going to die, and it stopped it, with no side effects. So we got FDA clearance to move with it on an emergency basis, and Sealey shipped us a good supply on an experimental protocol. Believe me, they weren't dragging their feet then—they were as excited as we were! They had Mancini, their production man, crawling all over the place. They even sent out that little chemist who developed the drug—what was his name, Frank? Tom Shipman? Funny little guy with hornrimmed glasses—they sent him out to document our testing procedures so they could save time on their end. So we wrapped it all up in ribbons and they moved the drug into Canon City, and Carlos got started with it."

"And then it all fell apart," Sally Grinstone said.

"Well—" Monique muddled her drink. "I wouldn't say
that,
exactly. It worked, in the field, but—Frank, you were down there at the time. What the hell
did
happen?"

Frank scratched his chin. "It's hard to say, at this point," he said finally. "The drug worked, all right. It just didn't work anything like we thought it would, from Monique's reports from Fort Collins. It helped—it really
did
stop the plague—it just didn't do the job the way we'd hoped it would. You have to understand the pressure we were under. At first Carlos thought it was the dosage, and he jacked that up, but it didn't increase the effectiveness much. And then the late side effects began sneaking up on us, and they were pretty subtle, at first, and we didn't notice them until the outbreak was nearly over, but then all of a sudden they were very much there."

Sally sat chewing her thumb. "And how do you explain this?" she asked Monique. "A red-hot drug suddenly turning sour in a crisis?"

"I can't explain it," Monique said, "except that it sometimes happens. A new drug looks really special in early testing but then doesn't prove out when under extensive use, isn't as effective as it should be, or turns up some scaiy side effects, or something. It happens all the time."

"But
this
much difference?"

"Well—sometimes.''

"In something as straightforward as bacteriocidal effects?"

"Sometimes." Monique spread her hands. "Remember the pressure. When it's some new drug you're trying out on multiple sclerosis or something like that, and it turns out to be a flop, you're naturally unhappy about it, but it's about what you anticipated—nobody really expected a bam-bumer anyway, and those patients are very sadly accustomed to trying new drugs that don't work. But when you're dealing with a deadly thing like plague, and everybody's desperate, the failure of a promising new drug—even a half-failure, like this one—really hurts. Maybe all we're talking about is psychological. We expected miracles and we didn't get them."

"Hm." Sally Grinstone looked at Monique with those penetrating eyes. "Well, maybe. Anyway, I've tied you up for long enough already, and I've obviously got to dig deeper. Thanks for your time and your help. Believe it or not, I hope you're right, and they make the drug, and it stops things." She got up from the booth and tucked her bag strap over her shoulder. "By the way, what did you say that Sealey chemist's name was? Shipman? Yes, that was it. Tom Shipman."

37

From the time the bodies began to appear in the streets, a pall of silence fell over the city of Savannah. People, once indifferent, now were terrified, and they moved in off the streets. The wealthy fled to upper stories of their restored mansions and peered out the windows from behind heavy curtains and barred doors. Middle-class breadwinners crept out of their homes reluctantly, if at all, to go to work, until the businesses that employed them closed down. And housewives clung to their children in the depths of their neat little homes, hardly even daring to touch the telephone when it rang for fear it would bring bad tidings.

In the tenement flats it was worst of all. Dank little overcrowded rooms, the walls filled with fly nests, doors and windows slammed shut in the terrible heat, with only fans blowing over chunks of ice from the public Ice House for cooling. Day followed steaming hot day in grim succession as the sick and dying slowly but steadily increased in number.

For Carlos Quintana it was a time of agonizing frustration. It seemed that the larger his team of plague fighters became, the more totally at cross-purposes the battle seemed to be running. And as commander of the battle, Carlos found himself bogging down deeper and deeper trying to control the uncontrollable. None of the rules he long had known, believed in and practiced had any chance of working because none of them could be effectively applied.

Ted Bettendorf was an anchor in the storm—lean, gray, cadaverous, utterly unflappable, he was there on the phone to Carlos hourly if needed, night or day, listening, consulting, suggesting, in addition to the hours he spent on the phone to everywhere else. "God, you wouldn't believe the heat we're getting from Europe, from Russia, from Singapore, for God's sake," he groaned to Carlos one night. "You couldn't know, you don't want to know. From Mexico—Jesus! You'd think we created this. One odd thing, though: suddenly Russia has let up on the accusations. They've gone a solid week without broadcasting any of that biological warfare crap."

"Did they have agents in Savannah?"

"Where didn't they have agents? Don't ask me, I don't know. All I know is that they certainly have plague, and at first it was all our fault, and now suddenly they've stopped screaming that we deliberately started it. Maybe they're just too busy fighting it to scream. Now, about those disposable syringes . . ."

At one point Ted went to Savannah for almost a week, moving about the city with Carlos and Jack Cheney, checking out the Big Hospital set up in the Performing Arts Pavillion, suggesting this approach, pondering that problem. The night he left he told Carlos: "I can't help you much, my friend. I'm still working on the drug supply and the vaccine, you know that. The situation here—well, you're as much on top of it as anybody could be."