The Magic Bullet (37 page)

His plan was to recount the history of the Compound J protocol as a straightforward chronological saga, explaining as best he could the factors—prior research, new data, and simple intuition—that led to certain key decisions. In this way, he’d let the suspense build. Only in the final quarter hour would he reveal the striking responses the drug had now elicited in four patients.

There was no way to guess how this would be greeted. He knew full well that everyone at the ACF had heard such claims before. Few in that audience would fail to understand that a handful of responses in a protocol setting do not automatically add up to a credible treatment approach, let alone a breakthrough. Still, the responses
had
been dramatic; and, more than that, the drug had apparently performed almost precisely as they’d predicted. At the very least, he felt he could make the case that Compound J was off to a flying start.

To make things easier on himself, Logan wrote out the entire speech on three-by-five cards. No sense risking an extemporaneous slip of the tongue, not with this crowd.

The process was a laborious one, consuming most of the weekend, and it was late Sunday afternoon when he laid aside what felt like a completed draft.

“What the hell,” he said aloud, heading into the kitchen for a beer. “It’s in the hands of the gods.”

Less than thirty-six hours later, he stood on the stage in the vast amphitheater, as a staff member named Follansbee offered a surprisingly breezy introduction.

“Ladies and gentleman,” he began, “today we have with us a young doctor from the Department of Medicine who, I understand, is going to address himself to the matter of whether old compounds can be taught new tricks.…”

But Logan, looking out over the crowd, heart pounding, hardly heard the words. Only perhaps a third of the plush red seats in the hall were occupied, but that meant at least
four hundred people. He recognized dozens of faces—but was most conscious of the three directly in front of him in the second row center: Raymond Larsen, Allen Atlas, and Gregory Stillman.

Shein, hands in pockets, stood in the back. Sabrina, in the first row over on the left, smiled at him, then quickly averted her eyes.
She’s almost as nervous as I am
, he thought. And, scanning the room:
At least Markell didn’t show
.

“And so,” wound up Follansbee, “I give you Dr. Daniel Logan.”

Logan stepped to the podium to a smattering of applause. The shakiness he felt in his knees instantly found its way to his voice, his thank-you for the introduction registering as tremulously as that of a high-school candidate for student office.

For the first several minutes, reading from his cards, he scarcely dared to look up at his audience. But gradually, the terror began to lift, and by the time he showed his first slide—a vintage photo of Paul Ehrlich, sitting amid mounds of journals—he’d found his rhythm.

As his confidence increased, he began looking out over his audience. They were gratifyingly attentive. He noticed that Sabrina now seemed entirely at ease, his best measure of how things were going. And—another good sign—Larsen looked ready to leap onstage and disembowel him!

Kenneth Markell entered the hall midway through the presentation, as Logan was discussing a slide showing the structure of the Compound J molecule. A short man, with a fringe of white surrounding a bald pate, he had the bearing of Caesar. He didn’t bother to take a seat, merely stood in back, arms folded, listening. Seth Shein, taking his place beside him, unconsciously assumed the same posture.

By the time Logan reached his climax, even the occasional bout of coughing in the hall had ceased. “I want to tell you about one of the patients on the protocol,” he said.

He nodded toward the projectionist, and the slide showing Marjorie Rhome’s initial X ray appeared on the
screen. “This was what we saw when this patient came onto the protocol.”

He briefly discussed her case before nodding to the projectionist again. “This is the same patient’s chest X ray after eight cycles of treatment with Compound J.”

Logan thought—or was it only his willful imagination?—that there was a murmur in the hall. He paused a moment. “That was only our first response. It has been followed by three others.”

For presentation purposes, these cases were less dramatic; he had no slides with which to illustrate them. In fact, the final response of which he spoke—Sharon Williams’s—might have been considered suspect. But if he’d lost any significant segment of the crowd, Logan, his earlier anxiety forgotten, didn’t notice.

When, moments later, he concluded the speech, it was to highly respectful applause.

Logan acknowledged this with a broad, unaffected smile. But when he glanced down at the second row, his apprehension returned with a rush. The three of them were sitting there, arms folded. And when Logan caught his eye, Stillman suddenly extended an arm, pointing.

Stillman mouthed the words so clearly, it was as if Logan could hear them: “Toxicity, asshole! What about toxicity?”

“W
ell, well, hail the conquering Logan!” greeted Shein, half an hour after the speech, when Logan reported to work at the lab. The several other junior associates within earshot grinned. Logan noted that Sabrina was not among them. “Thank you,” he said.

Shein threw an arm over his shoulder and led him to a quiet corner.

“I think you mighta done yourself some real good out there.”

“Really?” asked Logan. Still shaken by Stillman’s taunts, he was reluctant to believe the evidence of his own eyes and ears; had, in fact, started to think his failure to suggest a plausible approach to the toxicity problem might outweigh all the rest.

“Let’s put it this way, a few weeks ago, this thing was dead in the water, right? Now”—Shein paused—“well, let’s not exaggerate, it’s
alive
in the water. And swimming pretty good.”

“Thank you.”

“Let me clue you in on something, boychick. In this case, what I think means squat. I’m talkin’ about what Markell thought.”

“Markell?” he asked, with sudden excitement. “What’d he say?”

“I didn’t talk to him about it, I
watched
him.”

Logan didn’t know quite how to take this. “Ahh.”

“Listen, usually he walks out on these things.” He paused. “I think if you play it right, you might be able to get your own lab.”

Logan was thunderstruck. “Our own lab?”

“A small one. You made some skeptics into believers today.”

“Our own lab! I love it!”

“Don’t embarrass yourself, Logan, I said it was a
possibility
.” He pointed to the door. “I told Dr. Como to take the rest of the day off. You too. You’ve earned it.”

“Thank you, Dr. Shein.…”

“Seth.”

“Right.” Logan began heading for the door.

“Oh, Logan …”

He turned.

“There’s a message for you from that Indian kid down in animal land.”

“Actually,” he replied, smiling at Shein’s little joke, “he’s from Bangladesh.”

“Whatever. You’d better get down there.”

The pretense of amusement vanished as soon as he was out of the room.
No way
this guy would call unless it was serious.
Why the hell could nothing ever be simple around here? Why couldn’t he have one moment of unambiguous joy?

But what he found when he reached the animal holding facility exceded his worst expectations. Every rabbit that had been dosed with Compound J-lite lay dead in its cage!

Every one!

A moment later Sabrina walked in, also summoned by Hassan.

“My God!” she gasped.

Neither had to speak the word that hovered in the air:
toxicity
.

Logan moved slowly down the line of cages, trying to maintain a detatched bearing.

“When did this happen?” he asked Hassan, at a rickety desk across the room.

The other shrugged. “Oh, sir, I cannot say for certain. This is how I found them just this morning.”

Logan was reassured by Hassan’s nonchalance. “You don’t seem all that surprised.”

“Oh, sir, I’ve witnessed such things many times before. You know, these lab animals do not have a very long life expectancy.” He smiled, almost apologetically. “I am just sorry if it is a setback to your experiments.”

“Don’t worry,” he lied, “it’s not unexpected. Tell me, is anyone else from the Medical Branch aware of this?”

Hassan shrugged. “Oh, I cannot tell you, Dr. Logan.” He gestured around him. “There are people in and out of here all the time. Many people like yourself have business with these animals. How many of those would you like me to dispose of for you?”

“Let us give it a little thought.”

“Good, good.” He rose from the table and walked toward the door. “I must feed the pigs. If you need me I will be in there.”

Logan turned to Sabrina. “What now?” he said, in as neutral a tone as he could muster; as if this were not a disaster at all, merely another step in a normal process of scientific inquiry. “We could cut the dose and shoot up a new batch.”

But, of course, the implications of the question were now at least as political as scientific. On the one hand, to drop Compound J-lite would be to essentially write it off as a failure; and this after the drug had achieved such spectacular early results. But, too, given the evidence before them, it was likely that continuing to experiment with the new compound would only kill more rabbits. And if word of
that
started getting around, it could be a PR disaster—impacting on the Compound J trial itself.

Sabrina walked to Hassan’s desk and picked up the phone. “The first thing, we must see some reports on these animals.”

A few minutes later, Dr. Carrie Schneider, a friend of theirs in pathology, sauntered into the room.

“Whew,” she said, surveying the carnage, “I see what you mean. What’ve you been feeding those guys, arsenic?”

Logan shook his head. “I wish I could joke about it.”

“Sorry, just a little pathologist humor there.” She peered in at one of the cages. “How many of them you want done?”

“I don’t know. At least three or four, I guess.”

“Four,” said Sabrina.

“You want microscopic or gross?”

“Basically, we need to know what killed them. As soon as possible.”

She nodded. “I can get you some gross results by the end of the day. Just slit ‘em stem to stern and take a look. For the micro, you’ll have to wait awhile.”

“Okay.”

“Hey, Logan?”

The sudden change in her tone made him cast her a quizzical glance. “Yeah?”

“Sorry I missed you at the Grand Rounds. I hear you were damn good.”

They were at Sabrina’s late that afternoon when Logan called in for the report.

“I can’t be too precise here,” Carrie Schneider told him, “but you’ve definitely got a liver problem. That’s your cause of death—liver failure.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I don’t have any toxicology reports yet, of course. But I can tell you that all three of the livers I’ve looked at so far are mottled, congested, and grossly inflamed.”

He thanked her, and a moment later was off.

“Well,” he said, turning to Sabrina, “at least we’ve come up with a foolproof way of killing rabbits.”

She made no reply.

“Christ, that stuff is
potent
.” He paused. “I guess it’s pretty clear we’ve gotta shelve it.”

“Yes. Compound J
must
be the focus. How can there be a question, with the results we are getting?”

“Four out of fifteen.”

“It would be crazy to worry now about J-lite.”

He nodded. “But I just keep thinking about those first results on Compound J-lite. Every
one
of those little fuckers hopping around with a smile on its face!
Something
in that molecule works.” He paused. “Ah, well, I guess it was too much to hope for.”

The next week, as reaction to the Grand Rounds talk continued to filter in, it became clear that the young doctor’s star had never shone more brightly. A dozen senior and mid-level researchers who’d never before so much as acknowledged his existence made a point of introducing themselves, commenting enthusiastically on the talk, suggesting he stop by their offices so they might hear more.

“You just never know the talent they’ve got buried away in this place,” remarked one, a senior staff member named Frank Beckman, with a confidential wink. “Who’d have guessed we had one of Paul Ehrlich’s heirs right here at the ACF?”

Far more crucially, Seth Shein pronounced himself ready to back the idea of their getting their own lab.

“But won’t you miss working for me?” he kidded Logan, a proud father pushing a favored son from the nest. “Sure you can hack running your own operation?”

“You’re right, how could anything be as much fun as doing shit work for you?” he replied, suddenly feeling curiously like an equal. “Don’t worry, I think we’ll do all right.”

“You gonna take Reston?”

Surprised, Logan shook his head. “Why, you think we owe him?”

“Not if he’s a disruptive influence.”

“He is. It’s like I hardly know the guy anymore. And Dr. Como could never stand him.”

Shein snapped his fingers. “There’s your answer. The work is everything. If it affects that, cut the bastard loose.”

Some would take it as heartless, Logan knew. But he
also knew it was the truth. “I’m learning, Seth. I’ve had the master as a teacher.”

Shein laughed, delighted. “Don’t you forget that. If you hit it big, just keep remembering”—he slapped himself on the chest—“how to spell the name.”

T
here’d been so much good news lately that the morning the phone call came in, it took a while for its gravity to register.

“Dr. Logan?” said the male voice, at once familiar and unplaceable.

“Yes.”

“This is Phil Lester.” He waited for some sign of recognition. “I met you with Hannah Dietz?” he added, tentatively.

“Oh, yes, of course. What can I help you with?”

“I’m sorry to bother you, Doctor. Hannah asked me not to.”

“No problem, that’s what we’re here for.” Though, abruptly, his antennae were up: what was going on here? Hannah was one of their success stories! And why wasn’t
she
on the phone?