The Delta Factor

by Thomas Locke

  “Exactly!” Cofield exploded, and slammed his fist on the table. “And it’s nothing but you Washington bureaucrats sitting on your hands that’s keeping us from getting our drug out there in the market!”

  Cliff caught sight of Deborah’s desperate look out of the corner of his eye. It was enough to check his immediate reaction. Instead he stood and said quietly, “I will check on this Monday.”

  “We can’t ask for more than that, now, can we?” Whitehurst rose with him and Deborah, while Cofield remained seated. “Great to see you again, Cliff. Anything you need, you just have old Debs give me a call. And hey, have a great weekend, you hear?”

  When the door was shut behind them, Deborah leaned her back on the wall and closed her eyes with a sigh.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I think so. Give me a minute.”

  “Can I get you something? A glass of water, maybe?”

  She shook her head and pushed herself erect. “I want to show you my lab. With all the strangeness in the air around here, I don’t know if I’ll have another chance.”

  “What are you saying, Debs?”

  “I don’t know what they’re up to,” she replied. “They’ve sort of shut me out of things. But something’s not right. They’re making plans in there.”

  “To do what?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what scares me.”

  He looked around the empty outer office. “Where’s Blair?”

  “Running for cover, if she’s smart. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  “Hang on a second,” Cliff said. He grabbed a pen and pad from the desk and wrote a swift note, suggesting plans for that evening. “Okay, let’s go.”

  * * *

  Entrance to the laboratory complex was completely automated. They took a second tunnel, this one lined with the clutter that to his mind had always meant scientists at work. Machines neatly stowed away beneath plastic dust covers. Computer printouts strung from girder to girder, decorated with caustic comments only a techie could understand. Opposing blackboards filled with violently scrawled mathematical arguments, punctuated with exclamation points and swirls and lightning bolts and a pause where the group left for beer. Cliff considered the hall a perfect example of what he called the First Law of Scientists—give them lab space the size of Arkansas, and within a week they would be spilling over the edges.

  “I’m afraid my own lab arrangements aren’t very impressive,” Deborah said as they walked. “The only reason the suits let me chase down this lead in the first place was because I was on the way out. They got all oozy with fake sympathy when I told them about MS, but you could see the little adding machines at work behind their eyes. They took me off the research team I was heading and herded me into this little cubicle, a way station until their consciences would let them fire me. So I came up with this idea, and they did their bean-counting routine and decided since the numbers I was talking about were relatively tiny, they’d let me go out and play.”

  “For a while,” Cliff said grimly.

  “I figure I had maybe a year to come up with something,” Deborah agreed. “Which in this business is nothing. I was just laying the groundwork, sort of going over the first trials, when I struck gold.”

  One at a time, they passed through yet another set of inch-thick glass doors and entered a miniature copy of the front enclosure—carpeted floors, walls, and ceilings, with another metal pillar at its center. Cliff passed his card through the slit running down one side, then set his right hand on the black surface. A scanner zittered, then a recessed screen lit and gave him the same sentence to read he had said at the entrance. A ping, and the doors in front of him slid open.

  When Deborah joined him on the other side, Cliff asked, “Whose idea was the security arrangement, anyway?”

  “Dr. Strangelove,” she replied. “Otherwise known as Harvey Cofield.”

  Deborah led him through a series of interconnecting halls whose glass walls displayed labs, each more spectacular than the last. Up a set of stairs, a pause to observe a lab that resembled command control center at NASA, more stairs, and at the crown of the lab globe was yet another door. As Deborah tapped a code into the electronic lock, Cliff asked, “What happens if you don’t feel like scaling Mount Everest?”

  “Oh, there’s an elevator. But taking the stairs is a reminder to be thankful for the good days.” She pushed open the door. “Welcome to my lair, said the spider to the fly.”

  Cliff entered a miniature chaos.

  The only reason the cramped quarters did not feel as claustrophobic as a coffin was that every tiny room had a spectacular view of the surrounding countryside. There were five chambers in all, each separated by a wall of half fiberboard, half glass. “This was supposed to be files,” Deborah said. “They got moved to the Tombs, and I was given their space. It was the bean counters’ way of putting me as far as possible from the action without setting my lab in the parking lot.”

  The room they had entered contained four computer terminals, two tables piled to the roof with printouts, and a crawl space barely wide enough for Cliff to pass through sideways. The farthest terminal was occupied by a young man wearing tabi socks, Japanese house slippers, the bottom half of a very weary tux, and a surfer’s T-shirt proclaiming the mysteries of tube riding.

  “This is Kenny,” Deborah said.

  “Hi.”

  “Nice outfit,” Cliff said.

  “Kenny likes to dress up for work,” Deborah explained.

  “It’s the only way I know of keeping the suits at bay,” Kenny explained. “Otherwise I might catch the bean counter’s disease, start staying up late worrying about numbers on a balance sheet.”

  “Kenny Gryffin manages my team of semi-housebroken computer techies,” Deborah said.

  “Yeah, even take them out on a leash a couple of times a day.”

  “The others put up with him because he’s twice as fast as they are at the keyboard. They call him The Great Kensteennie.”

  “I have a degree in anthropology,” Kenny announced proudly. “It makes me uniquely qualified to run a computer team for a drug firm.”

  “Any prevalent problems or issues?” Deborah asked Kenny. “Or can I take my guest on through with his limbs still intact?”

  “Just mostly stuff of a general nature.” Fingers tapped a computer keyboard at a speed faster than a drumroll. “This new data collation program is really user surly.”

  “Oh my,” Deborah said, her face grave.

  “Yeah. The search routine is prehistoric. Installation hassles, compatibility problems, and the worst thing of all, it’s a real bear to uninstall.”

  “Horrors,” Deborah agreed. “How can you sleep nights?”

  “Hey, who sleeps? I just plug myself in for an hour and rejuice.” He pointed at a screen that had begun scrolling through graphs. “Watch and you’ll see for yourself.”

  “I leave all such problems in your capable hands,” Deborah assured him. She grasped Cliff by the arm. “Come along, Junior.”

  When they were into the next room he asked, “What was that all about?”

  “Rule one of surviving in a modern lab,” Deborah replied. “Never worry about what your computer techies say. Just toss in a bucket of new gadgets and software magazines every other day or so and keep their cages clean.”

  A miniature hall led them by a glass-enclosed jungle. “This is where we grow our test plants,” she explained.

  “It looks like they’re about ready to take over,” Cliff said. The plants were almost as tall as he was and jammed up hard to the glass.

  “We amp up their growth patterns by using flicker lighting at night.” Deborah frowned through the pane as though seeing the shrubs for the first time. “Maybe I better tell Cochise to give them a trim.”

  “Tell who?”

  “In here, Junior. And be nice.”

  The next chamber was the lab, and occupying it was the biggest human Cliff had ever seen. The man was bent o
ver a microscope. As they approached the man unfolded, then unfolded some more.

  “Cliff, I’d like you to meet Cochise, my number one lab techie.”

  “Cochise,” Cliff said, taking in a pair of hands like baseball mitts, with fingers the size of salamis. “Big man, big name.”

  The face creased into a ponderous smile. “One of those things I picked up along the way. Don’t ask me how.”

  “Nicknames aren’t meant to make sense,” Cliff agreed. “Do they use you to keep order?”

  The gut spilling over his fifty-inch waist resembled a buffalo about to give birth to a beer keg. “These techies don’t have a muscle between ’em. Any of them get smart, Dr. Debs just gives them the toss herself.”

  Deborah said quietly, “I would like you two to be friends.”

  “Don’t see why not,” Cliff said agreeably. “We probably don’t have a thing in common.”

  “Except Debs,” Cochise said.

  “Doggone right,” Cliff allowed. “What’s that line about the love of a good woman?”

  “Don’t ask me,” Cochise rumbled. His eyes were dark and fathomless, his face folded down like a slumbering bulldog. “Wasn’t much of either where I came from.”

  “Either what?” Deborah asked.

  “Love or good women,” Cliff translated, and decided he liked the big man.

  “Cochise follows my instructions to the letter,” Deborah informed him. “You’ll have to spend some time around techies to learn how rare that is.”

  “Most techies are ready to give God advice about creation,” Cochise agreed.

  “His notes are meticulous,” Deborah went on, “and he handles lab glass like a pro.” She reached up and punched his arm. It was like attacking a tree limb. “With credentials like that, it gets easier to put up with that beautiful face.”

  “Heard a lot about you,” Cochise said. “Good to have you around. Looks like storm clouds are gathering.”

  Deborah turned solemn. “Is this some kind of mystical Indian thing?”

  Cochise gave his head a ponderous shake. “Gossip.”

  “Come on, Junior,” Deborah said. “You can brace yourself with a jolt of lab coffee.”

  Cliff followed her into an office the size of a walk-in closet. As in the other rooms, the outer window curved up and over his head, revealing green fields and a cloud-speckled sky. He looked back through the glass half-wall and asked, “What’s going on, Debs?”

  “Oh, Cochise is preparing more doses. The root has to be ground, then pressed in that masher there. Then the juice is run through a series of increasingly tiny filters before we autoclave it and prepare test samples.”

  “I meant,” Cliff replied, “what is going on with Pharmacon.”

  “I wish I knew,” she said gravely. “I’ve effectively been sealed out of the decision-making process. And when I told them about Tom—you remember Tom, the old guy at the veterans hospital?”

  “Of course.”

  “When I told them about the foreigner in the slick car bribing him, they sort of swallowed the information.” She rubbed tired eyes. “They won’t say what steps they’re taking. Everything has suddenly become very hush-hush, at least as far as I’m concerned. And then yesterday they asked if I had clinical data on the original European drug. Which of course I did. Thousands and thousands of pages. They carted that off, and since then, nothing.”

  Cliff mulled that one over. “I don’t understand.”

  “Me neither.”

  “You changed the molecular structure, isn’t that what you told me?”

  “For each of the compounds,” she affirmed.

  “Then why . . .” He shook his head. “I’m missing something.”

  “You and me both.”

  “So why did you ask me to agree with everything Whitehurst said? I gotta tell you, Debs, I was about a half step from exploding.”

  “I saw.” She tried hard for a smile. “After the subcommittee hearing, the chairman of Pharmacon spent three seconds telling me I did a pretty fair job, then half an hour grilling me about you.”

  “Me?”

  “Don’t look so shocked. The FDA happens to figure very large in Pharmacon’s future. As coordinator for the drug’s approval process, you’re man of the hour.” The smile slipped away. “But since then, every time your name has come up, there’s been these ominous rumblings. Nothing specific, but a lot of thunder over the horizon.”

  “Thunder comes with the job,” Cliff said. “I’m used to it.”

  “Maybe you are,” she replied. “But I’ve had the distinct impression that they were just waiting for a reason to forbid me to see you.”

  “They couldn’t do that.”

  “They could make it a lot tougher for us to get together, and quite frankly I need you too much just now to want to worry about sneaking around behind Pharmacon’s back.” She sighed. “That’s not all. Yesterday I was supposed to go out and check the plants for harvesting—we’re almost out of the last batch, and we don’t have enough in our little greenhouse to use with an expanded trial. I called Hank’s farm, and his wife said I couldn’t come.”

  “They were probably busy with something else. Everybody has bad days.” He drug up a smile of his own. “Even you, Debs.”

  “It didn’t sound that way. When I pressed her, she said something about the breeze, then hung up on me.”

  Cliff had a sudden image of the farmer’s raised face. “Maybe he was testing the wind that day, like I said.”

  “Yeah, okay, but why?” She lifted her purse and car keys from her desk. “Would you mind driving out there with me now?”

  * * *

  “In our scientific world, unsolved problems are the great equalizers,” Deborah said as she drove toward the farm. “They reduce us all to ground zero. Only after the answer begins to emerge does the three-headed destroyer arise: greed, egoism, and ambition. Those three have done in more scientists than any disease on earth.”

  “Any other disease,” Cliff countered.

  Deborah rewarded him with a grateful look. “It’s good to have you here, Junior. More than words can say.”

  Deborah turned onto the gritty side road and slammed on the brakes. She pressed her face to the front windshield and muttered, “What in the world?”

  Across the road from Hank Aaron Jones’s property lay the swathe of burned-out rubble. Beyond that stretched broad flowered fields as bright as a golden sea. And through the fields ran people. Hundreds and hundreds of shouting, dancing, laughing, singing people.

  The neighbor’s farmhouse was completely lost behind a great stretch of canvas and metal. Indian teepees. Fancy camping tents painted every color under the sun. Tall, medieval-shaped pavilions. Banners decorated with cryptic runes. Campers and buses sporting psychedelic murals of smiling rainbows and flower children and aliens floating toward earth on crystal spaceships.

  The people dancing through the blooming rapeweed wore clothes as loose and flowing as their hair. Crowds gathered on great sweeps of bright blankets, lolling in the sun or reaching toward the sky and swaying to music provided by pipes and guitars and congas. At various points through the field, other groups whirled to music from boom boxes—everything from acid rock to new age. The cacophony washed over their jeep along with the constant ring of laughter. Wild, lilting laughter.

  “It looks like a sixties rock festival, minus the bands,” Cliff declared. “A real blast from the past.”

  “This day is definitely getting out of hand,” Deborah said, and put the car into gear.

  There was no sign of movement at the Jones farm. She pulled into the swept front yard, turned off the motor, and said, “That’s funny.”

  “What is?”

  She pointed to the black ash-strewn soil bordering the farmhouse. “Why would they burn down their rose bushes?” Deborah hesitated, looking up at the silent house, then walked up and knocked on the door.

  A stringy woman walked onto the front stoop, pushed open the scr
een, said, “Miss Debs.”

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Jones,” Deborah said politely. “I was wondering if I could have a word with your husband.”

  “No you can’t,” she said, and crossed her arms across her chest. “He’s laid up. Real sick.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. I hope it’s nothing serious.”

  She had the dried-up look of a woman reared on a hard life. “He’ll get over it, God willing.”

  “I just spoke with him yesterday. He sounded fine to me.”

  “Everything was fine as fine could be,” Mrs. Jones replied, her voice as taut as the veins in her neck, “until he had to go over and talk to that blasted neighbor of ours. I told him he oughtta wait and buy the land when this trouble’s died down. But no, he’s got to do it his time, his way. That man of mine’s got a head as hard as the rock of Gibraltar.”

  The noise from across the road drifted on the still hot air. “What is going on over there?”

  “Trouble,” the woman spat. “That neighbor of ours belongs in hell.”

  Deborah looked down at the ashes that scarred the otherwise neat yard. “I’m sorry about your roses. Did they become diseased?”

  “You could say that. Cursed by an evil wind.” The woman’s eyes blazed. “Y’all will just have to see to yourselves today. I got my hands full, with a sick man and all. Just see you’re off the land ‘fore the sun sets and the wind picks up again.”

  When the door had slammed shut, Deborah turned wide eyes toward Cliff, who intoned, “Stranger and stranger.”

  Together they dug up root samples from three echin plants spaced well apart. The hot air was trapped by the bushes, now taller than a man. By the time they were finished, both were drenched in sweat.

  Cliff carried the tools back to the barn, then joined Deborah in the jeep. “I could sure use something wet and cold.”

  “You and me both,” she agreed, turning the air conditioner on full and starting down the long drive.

  “Any idea what she was talking about up there?”