Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman (31 page)

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 Ship-man'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. Af-tera 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 halfway 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 countiy 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 veiy 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,
veiy 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?"

"AH 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."

43

On the evening of the night that Savannah died, Jack Cheney and Carlos Quintana had met for a late working dinner in the little Chinese restaurant on Lafayette Street, just about the only public eating house that still remained functioning in the Old City, and since they were the sole patrons in the place that evening, the chef had brought out an endless succession of Cantonese delicacies for them to sample, one by one, steaming and fragrant, and generously pushed together two adjacent tables for them on which to spread out their charts and city maps and reports and papers and other paraphernalia. Since neither of them had eaten more than half-sandwiches at any time during the past three days, they were both famished by the time they arrived, and devoured the food as fast as it came out of the kitchen, and talked with their mouths full and dripped soy sauce all over their charts and maps, but this didn't really matter. They hardly knew they were eating, much less dripping soy sauce, and the maps and charts didn't make much sense anyway.