Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman

by Alan Edward Nourse

  To anyone but Sally Grinstone it might have seemed an impossible task that had faced her after she'd left Monique and Frank: to track down an obscure research chemist employed by a very large, very paranoid drug company in Indianapolis, identify him, somehow contact him in neutral territory, get acquainted with him, get him alone, and then, by hook or by crook, get him to talk about his work under circumstances that were such that the mere mention of the word reporter would make him slam shut like the Giant Clam of the Antilles upon encountering a bit of grit. And to accomplish all this fast—in three days, maybe four at the most. A formidable task indeed, for anyone else, but as it happened, Sally Grinstone was no slouch at her job. She had half a lifetime's worth of very firm connections in all kinds of unlikely places, connections she had diligently nurtured over the years. She knew what sort of questions had to be asked to spring what kind of information free; she knew the whole netherworld of muckraking like the back of her hand, understood the intricate politics of Finding Things Out, and she was not afraid of the telephone.

  No, the task had not seemed impossible to her, certainly not at the beginning. Difficult, maybe, with some hellish time pressure, but that was nothing new. On her way back to her motel room after talking to Monique, Sally had stopped at a liquor store and bought half a gallon of cheap gin, three quarts of fake orange juice and two bags of ice. Back in her room she pulled the curtains tight, drew a soft chair up to the telephone and broke out a writing board, pen and legal pad. She stripped herself naked, wrapped an ice-cooled towel around her head, poured herself a long, stiff gin, and did something funny to the telephone wire. Then, with the phone jammed against her ear and the pad on her knee, she got to work.

  She had telephoned and slept and scribbled notes, intermittently, all that night and all the next day. Many of her sources were night owls by choice and inclination. Many others happened to work all night, and many who didn't were willing to work for her all night anytime she whistled. After a dozen tries she finally connected with one of the latter a little after 1:00 a.m.—4:00 a.m. in Washington, D.C. "Merritt? Sally here. Been out on the town, I'll bet."

  "Yeah, you might say; what's up?"

  "Maybe a hot one, maybe not. I'm going to need some things mooee pronto. Can you call me back from your office?"

  "Sure, Sal, gimme thirty minutes. What sort of things?" Sally told him. "Tom Shipman, huh? Shipman-^sounds familiar. Antibiotics? Well, he's bound to be a member, so I should be able to flag him for you quick enough. Jingle the office in forty-five minutes."

  When she did, Merritt said, "Hey, you got a busy boy hooked here. He's got a string of publications as long as your arm."

  Sally snorted. "Some of these guys publish their birth certificates just to pad out the list."

  "Well, this all looks like solid stuff. A long list of patents, too—all assigned to the company, of course."

  "Okay, concentrate on the publications in the last three years," Sally said. "What's the main thrust?"

  "Antibiotics almost exclusively, some of them new cell poisons for cancer—you know, chemotherapeutic agents. Almost all of them far too toxic. Hey, here's a weird one. He was fiddling around with an adriamycin derivative—that's one of the good ones—and he got a molecule that looked absolutely great against breast CA, but the drug carried this wild shocking purple color. He fed it to cancerous rats and they got well, but they turned bright purple and stayed purple. Patient acceptance nil. So he figured it had to be the optical properties of an acetyl group, the molecule sort of wrinkled up instead of wrinkling down like he thought it would, so he finally figured a way to get the acetyl group turned over at the same attachment, and that got rid of the color just fine. Got rid of the anticancer activity too. That one's back on the drawing boards."

  "What about the antibiotics for infection?"

  "Well, let's see." Long pause. "Most of them here are some new tetracycline derivatives he's been playing around with—God almighty, all kinds of them! He did three or four good review papers in that area about three years ago, plus a whole slew of technical reports—"

  "Go pull them for me, will you? The major ones."

  "Sure, I'll throw them in the mail before I leave."

  "Don't mail them, Merritt. Read them to me."

  "You mean right now, over the horn? God, Sal, who's paying this phone bill?"

  "Ma Bell, dummy. Now go get 'em."

  He got them, and read them, and Sally listened intently, picking them up on a pocket recorder held right near the earpiece while Merritt read. When he finally finished she blew him a kiss and sent him back to bed. "Oh, Merritt, listen. Put your head to work, will you? I may have to hit this guy, and he mustn't know it's press or it won't work. If you can think of anything, or find out anything that might help, let me know fast. How's his sex life? Will he sell? How deep does Sealey have him hooked? Absolutely any angle that might help, I need it, okay?"

  "I'll work on it," Merritt said, and rang off. Good old Merritt, he would work on it, too, he had some funny sources and he'd never failed her yet, especially not since she'd saved him his ass and his eighty-grand job with one well-placed national news story, back at a time when he was caught in a real nut-crusher and needed some solid help.

  On through the night and into the dawn, dialing, talking, replenishing her gin and orange juice, hour upon hour of the sort of intense, total concentration you had to use on a thing like this, and gradually the barest profile of the quarry began to fill out into a lifelike picture.

  Thomas Eugene Shipman, age forty-two, Caucasian male, never married, a lifelong perennial bachelor. Five feet nine inches tall, 159 pounds. Male pattern baldness appearing at age twenty-three, now moderately advanced. Severe astigmatism, required thick corrective lenses; tried contacts but found they made him look like he had Graves' disease so he retired^ them and went back to the heavy hom-rims. Occupation: organic chemist (Ph.D.) with special interest in pharmaceuticals and an enviable reputation in antibiotic research and development.

  Shipman was born in Shaker Heights, Ohio, son of an affluent neurosurgeon, his mother a debutante daughter of a family entrenched in the high-office politics of the state. Tom had been a small, sickly boy who learned early on to capitalize on his very sharp mind. Taken out of public school in fifth grade, when other boys began picking him apart and smashing his glasses as a routine prank, he found private school more protective, but still young Tom showed no great ability to select or hold good friends; his buddies were invariably the ones who depended on him for test answers but ignored him at other times. A sullen, unhappy child who soon learned to be arrogant of his knowledge because a very sharp mind was the one thing he had going for him.

  From early years on there was paternal pressure to guide him into medicine, but young Tom detested the vaguenesses of biology, the apparent pointlessness of zoology, the uncertainties of physiology . Math was his forte when he left home for Andover Academy, with chemistry running a close second. Then, when he first encountered organic, that bewildering nightmare of carbon chemistry that left so many of his classmates far behind, he knew he had found his real metier. Quite aside from possessing a phenomenally acute memory, he had that type of mind that could conceive of organic molecules in living, three-dimensional depth and color, not merely as flat, inaccurate formulas on paper. With a near-perfect grade average behind him, he went into the Westinghouse Science Scholarship competition in his senior year with a crafty system of computer simulation for determining the spatial and rotational qualities of complex multiringed organic compounds, a system quite impressive for its uniqueness and imagination, and won first prize hands down, together with a full four-year scholarship in chemistry and an early acceptance at Yale.

  During his undergraduate years he spent most of his time in an honors program doing what amounted to advanced graduate work in organic chemistry. Job offers started turning up from his sophomore year on, and much of his work began finding publication in the major chemical and engineering j
ournals. After completing his Master's work he went straight on to doctoral work at Princeton, simply pursuing the avenues of research he had already set out for himself, before finally, armed with a Ph.D. at the age of twenty-three, he accepted a position at Merck, Sharpe and Dohme in their research and development laboratories, tackling the many divergent problems of synthesizing new drugs designed to have high potential as antibiotics active against infection but with very little evidence of toxicity that might spoil them for human use. It was work right up Tom Shipman's alley, playing games with theoretical molecules, taking them through endless permutations of various basic forms, altering them subtly again and again in the computer and in the lab, tabulating alterations in their activities, convinced that if he could find what it was in a molecule that altered its ability to destroy bacteria, he would have found the Rosette stone to the endless search for really new antibiotics that consumed so much time and effort with such very spare results in those days.

  Tailored to him or not, the job at Merck didn't last more than two years. Merck's R&D scene was, in good part, a team effort, whole squadrons of people tackling a given problem, and

  Tom Shipman was not a team person. He fretted about the wasted time and indifferent concern he discerned in the crew around him. You couldn't solve problems, in his view, by standing around telling jokes during endless coffee breaks and flirting endlessly with the cute little lab assistants and getting out of there at the stroke of five—and you couldn't solve problems sitting at your own lab bench with all that going on around you, either. Veiy soon Tom got permission to start his workday at five, when the others were leaving, bringing his dinner in a lunch box, and working on in silence and solitude until two or three in the morning. This didn't increase his popularity with his team, who regarded him as some new kind of nut and resented the volume of work that consistently poured off his desk; perversely, it even made his supervisors frown. Of course they liked his results well enough, and recognized his value, but when it came to promotion evaluations and such, reports of his superiors were filled with remarks such as "Does not relate well to laboratory staff," "Tends to be secretive" and "Doesn't fit in with cooperative ventures." And although small merit raises materialized from time to time, there was no talk of promotion.

  Probably worse, from Tom Shipman's viewpoint, the company was an enormous, impersonal pharmaceutical organization with many other sharp and ambitious chemists on the payroll and Tom found himself a small frog in a large pond. Company policy did not lend itself to personal recognition of individual scientists, and although many papers originated on Tom Shipman's lab bench and made their way off his desk through the convoluted channels that led to eventual journal publication, his name rarely headed the list of authors on those papers and often never appeared at all. Others higher on the team would review the papers, edit a few sentences, alter a few remarks in the summary statements and then slap on their names as co-authors. Patents were the same: by the time the company lawyers got through with prospective patent applications, everybody's name would be involved, with his somewhere down at the bottom of the list, frequently misspelled. And thus it was that when some people from Sealey Labs, a much smaller firm engaged almost exclusively in antibiotic research, came around on a raiding party and offered Tom Ship-man full autonomy in his own lab and full credit for his own papers and patents and twenty-five percent more salary than he was already making, he kissed the Merck matrix good-bye without a single pang.

  It was from Sealey that the prodigious stream of Tom's papers that Merritt had referred to had come. It figured, Sally thought. The big outfits could afford to take a prospective winner, buiy him in some obscure basement somewhere and then skim the cream off his work. A smaller outfit couldn't do that, and didn't want to. Sealey needed their man's name on those papers in bold prominence. Indeed, the more Sally Grinstone had rooted into it, the more it seemed that Sealey had needed—and had hoped to get—a very great deal from Tom Shipman. In Sally's mind now, the big question was: What, precisely, had they gotten ?

  By two o'clock the next afternoon, discouraged and half starving, Sally went out for a steak, still wracking her brains over that question. She had a picture of the man, all right, and she thought she saw a possible approach or two, but the picture seemed to end at Sealey's doors. She'd met people like this before: the brilliant, hopelessly immersed scientific workaholic who never did anything or thought about anything beyond his work (except that they always seemed to break from time to time, in some sort of a pattern—sex, booze, gambling, something). But it was what he had done at Sealey that she had to have, and she just didn't have it. The published papers offered hints, told her the general area of his work, but not the details. It was what he had done that hadn't been published that she needed.

  She sat and devoured one steak and ordered another, raking her memory for possible contacts. There was no one at Sealey she could go near for information, not one soul—Sally put down her fork. Wait a minute. There was Jan Livewright, of course. Jan had detailed for Sealey for a while, promoted drugs to the doctors, back while Sally and she had been . . . Last she'd heard, Jan had moved on to Abbott Labs, but the detailers were a pretty thick crowd. Sally munched slowly on her steak. She hated like hell to foreclose on that particular mortgage, but she was beginning to feel desperate. . . .

  Back at the motel, with the kind of eerie, prescient scent of blood in her nostrils that had become so familiar to Sally over the years that she had come to expect it, she struck gold. Jan Livewright didn't have any current knowledge of things going on at Sealey, but a guy she was dating had a friend who had worked there as a lab assistant in one of the labs until they'd abruptly fired him a week or so ago, for no apparent cause, and the friend was pissed. Jan would contact him, a chap named Bob King, and if Sal didn't hear to the contrary in thirty minutes, she could call him.

  Sally prowled the room, gulped gin and orange juice, and at the stroke of the appointed minute she called. Yes, the man said, he'd heard from Jan. Yes, he'd been working for Sealey, and if he could just find some way to gig those bastards, he'd give his right arm for the chance. . . .

  "I don't want to gig anybody," Sally said. "All I want is some information. When did they lay you off?"

  "Three weeks ago, when they closed down Tom Shipman's lab."

  "Closed—did you say closed down?

  "That's right. One day I was there and the next day the lab was locked up tight and I was sent down to wash bottles in the production department. A week of that and they gave me the boot. Overstaffed, they said. Pick up your check."

  "You're sure it was Shipman's lab?"

  "I ought to know," the man said. "I was working there."

  "But why close it down?"

  Bob King didn't know. He'd thought Dr. Shipman was on the track of something very hot indeed, a new antibiotic. A real barn burner—at least eveiybody from the R&D people to the sales staff seemed to be excited about it, and all of a sudden, whoppo, they cut if off. Shipman himself? The man laughed. "You think / was pissed, you should have seen him. He was fit to be tied. Went around like a madman, banging on doors and screaming at people. They put him on some other project, a real dead-ender, some chemotherapeutic they'd had on the shelf for ten years because they couldn't get the glitches out of it, and I swear he was ready to kill somebody. But as for why they cut it off—I just plain don't know. Whatever the reason, they sure moved fast ..."

  Sally rang off and sat back, fairly quivering. It looked like

  the key, all right—but the key to what? She knew then she wouldn't get it from other people. Shipman himself was going to have to tell her, and it sounded like he might be ready to spill if only she could find a way to hit him. But how? Slowly, carefully, she went back over the heaps of notes she'd been making. Not much personal data here, not much to get hold of. Long work hours, lots of reading of chemical literature when he got home to his nice little three-room apartment in Indianapolis. Listened to lots of music, opera and
classics, but didn't even own a TV set. Took most of his meals out, same little restaurant near his apartment, probably had the same dinner every night— she snorted. There had to be an approach—what could she do? Go take a job at Sealey and work it from there? Never, that would take far too much time and she knew now she had to move fast. What's more, if it was really something hot, the bastards might just shoot her. Go plant herself at his table at the restaurant? She'd just get thrown out. Follow him and see if he ever hit a bar? Time, time, time—even assuming he ever did hit a bar, which maybe he never did. Take the apartment next to his and scream for help? Oh, hell, Sally, come on—

  The phone rang suddenly, and it was Roger Merritt at the American Chemical Society. "How's your digging coming along?"

  "Twenty feet under and still going," Sally said sourly. "By now I know more about the guy than he does—but I can't find a fast way to touch him. I'd have to set something up for months, and I haven't got months."

  "Have you got three days?"

  "I might have—if I can convince a couple of editors that I'm going to bring them Sealey Labs on a platter."

  "If you've got three days, I know how you can nail him. It . just dawned on me ten minutes ago. There's an American Chemical Society regional meeting at the Chase Park Plaza in St. Louis starting tomorrow, two thousand chemists turning up there. Our registration file says Tom Shipman is going with a few others from Sealey."