Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman

by Alan Edward Nourse

  The fat man eyed her nervously. "What's in it for me?"

  "Maybe some food and a place to hang out, if you're worth it. And some medicine to keep bad things away. What's your name?"

  "Willie."

  "No, I mean your real name."

  "Dog Runs Quickly."

  "There, you see? So give me an address or phone number. I'll send for you if I need you."

  She left him scratching his head as she turned the van out of the alley, then wove through a series of back streets, caught a broader avenue going south and then turned into a concrete drive beside a ragtag-looking, gray-green, two-story building and stopped to activate the gate in a chain link fence. The fenced-in yard to the south of the building was filled with loading pallets and a totally demolished forklift; beyond the yard was a huge black building marked skinner iron works. Muffler City and a very dead-looking plumbing and heating wholesale place were just across the street.

  She backed into the loading dock of the gray-green building. Two sides were covered with faded aluminum sheeting, with the north and south elevations of both stories mostly painted-over windows. Several that were smashed had been boarded over with fresh-looking plywood—Good, Tom got that lower one closed up, finally. She killed the ignition, got out and walked up a ramp to a door on the loading platform. A faded sign on the door said international pharmacals, wholesale.

  They had spent the better part of three weeks searching four different cities before finally settling on this place, staying in the cheapest motels they could find and living on Egg McMuf-fins and gin while they searched. In St. Louis Sally had pulled the one trick she'd never pulled before on an editor: wired for a huge cash advance on the promise of a red-hot story, and then simply vanished into the sunset in her little Fiat with Tom Ship-man in the passenger seat beside her, still wondering dazedly what exactly he was doing there. Sally wondered half the time, too; aside from his obvious and undeniable expertise in chemistry, she had never encountered quite such a totally inept human being. Tom Shipman would lose every motel key she gave him, get lost walking around the block, agonize for twenty minutes over what kind of hamburger he should order and wear the same shirt for seven days end-running until Sally couldn't stand it anymore and said, "God, Tom, that thing will never wash; burn it and we'll buy you another one." By common agreement they headed vaguely north and west from St. Louis, mostly because east seemed to be where more trouble lay. They had stopped for a day in Lincoln, Nebraska, while she had rapped out the entire story of the Sealey drug switch and telephoned it to the paper (not the story they had sent her funds for, but enough to hold them, she figured—enough indeed) and then wired for (and waited interminably to receive) all the cash she could muster from her several bank accounts, together with the couple of thousand Tom had stashed away—but all that money was for capital, not spending, and they lived on dirty socks and fingernails as they groped their way westward looking for precisely the place they needed to set up their bizarre operation.

  Tom was, at least, quite clear and succinct about what it was, exactly, that they needed. The idea of trying to build the sheer physical plant for any kind of serious pharmaceutical manufacturing venture from the ground up was clearly insane. True, he had told Sally Grinstone that his "pneumomycin" drug could be made in a bathtub out of ordinary tetracycline, vinegar and a few other reagents, and in point of fact, it could be—but the claim was perhaps a bit of an oversimplification all the same; along with the quantities of his "pneumomycin" one might precipitate out of such a bathtub slurry, one might also find a number of other things one would rather not offer to unsuspecting patients. A simple chemical process that could be carried to completion on a kitchen stove was one thing; preparing and packaging a large quantity of a reasonably pure drug in a form suitable for human consumption was something else. An abandoned truck-tire warehouse wouldn't do as a site for manufacture and packaging. Even the most pristine of headquarters would require an impossibly long time and far, far, too much capital to start up even minimal production unless it offered certain basic rudiments of equipment and facilities. Tom recognized as starkly as Sally that time was both their enemy and their ally; if they were to do anything effective at all, they could take time to do it right without fear of interference, but they had to do it fast, in a matter of weeks, not months. Sometime next year would be altogether too late.

  In short, they needed some base of operations that was already plausibly equipped for production of some reasonably similar pharmaceutical product. "We can't build it from scratch, but we can convert, maybe very quickly," Tom said. "Anyplace with water baths and incubators and clean vats and working space and processing and packing equipment would do."

  "We could go to Rahway, New Jersey, and take over Merck and Company," Sally said dryly.

  "We don't need Merck and Company," Torn said. "Even Sealey labs was a little fly-by-night subcontracting outfit pressing aspirin tablets for Rexall until they hired some good research chemists and got Mancini running the business end. There are literally thousands of little plants of the sort that Sealey Labs used to be, cranking out vitamins or antihistamines or even tetracycline with enough quality control to sell their stuff cheap, at wholesale, to the big outfits that can charge a mint for their brand names. Hell, none of the big companies could make a dime producing their own standard tetracycline-type drugs after the patents ran out or the government got their thumbs in. They had to buy them very, very cheap from producers who could make them very, very cheap, here or abroad. Thousands of little plants scattered all over—and with the plague hitting the cities the way it is, lots of those places must be closed down by now, at least temporarily. We might even find warehouse lots of finished tetracycline sitting around waiting to be moved, with nobody to move it, if we're lucky. . . ."

  They weren't that lucky, but they were lucky enough, and they had Sally, to boot. All that Sally had needed was a place to start; rooting out information was her stock-in-trade. Some data came from ordinary library sources, some from business indexes, some from drug-company contacts that owed Sally favors, or leads that Tom could dredge up out of his memory. They spent days, weeks, fighting foiling telephone service and waiting endlessly for returned calls, nine-tenths of which never came. They focused their attention on the general area of the central and southern Midwest, partly because they were already there, partly because highway traffic was still functioning to some degree in that part of the country, and especially because most of the medium-sized cities, except for the Kansas City complex and the St. Louis area, which was suddenly reeling from its first wave of the fire storm, hadn't really been hit yet. They spent eighteen-hour days, first one place, then another, looking, telephoning, Sally's fantastic organizational mind tabulating and filing reams of data as they gathered it, Tom ruminating for hours and then coming up with ingenious suggestions that Sally soon learned to listen to because more often than not they were almost directly on target.

  And as they moved in on the problem, trying to bring their focus down to serious prospects, Tom did one other thing that even he didn't know he was any good at: bit by bit, clearly and simply, in veritable chemical baby talk, he told Sally how antibiotics were made, from the ground up—the nature of the compounds, where they came from originally, why and how they could work to destroy pathogenic bacteria and stop a wildfire infection in its tracks and how bacteria developed resistance, so that a good antibiotic presently became not so good and then rather poor and ultimately virtually useless against a certain species of organism. He explained to her how the search for new compounds went on, what particular scientific concepts had led him to his "pneumomycin" discovery to begin with, some of the truly weird problems he had encountered here and there in his research.

  Sally listened and Sally learned. She couldn't follow all the chemical terminology, precisely, but she had enough background to get the broad picture. She was startled—and appalled—to learn that Tom had already worked out the chemistry for some seven oth
er relatively simple tetracycline-con-version compounds in addition to the "pneumomycin" he had actually developed, every one of which he had some reason to believe might be biologically active against the mutated plague organism, but that Sealey had simply jerked the purse strings shut and told him to forget about them. ' 'Not economically feasible," they had told him. "Anybody in the world could jump our patents on these things without even turning over in bed. What we need is something complex, not something simple. . . ."

  Along with the chemistiy, Tom also outlined for Sally some of the realities and necessities involved in production, quality control, in vitro biological testing, in vivo testing and clinical trials of a drug such as his "pneumomycin" before one would ordinarily seek to make it available for general use—("Of course, we don't ordinarily have a wildfire plague slicing through the population, either," he pointed out, "and because in fact we do, and since this is a rump operation we're talking about, completely outside of any laws or regulations, those rules are going to be bent all out of shape, but it's good to know what the rules are, and why, all the same")—right down to such mundane practicalities as how you get all that loose powder stuffed into all those little capsules so that there is almost precisely 250 milligrams of antibiotic in each capsule without having to weigh each one, and what you do to control the unpleasant smell of the stuff, and what solubility qualities both the capsule and the contents have to have so that the drag doesn't just go in one end and out the other, and how long you can store the finished drug on a shelf before it begins spontaneously disintegrating and losing its potency—and through it all, in a remarkably short time, Sally Grinstone began to grasp at least in vague outline the sheer magnitude of the task they were setting out to accomplish and to recognize how, just conceivably, something might be done fast enough and efficiently enough to actually end up doing some good somewhere—

  In the end, the real gold mine was delivered to them almost intact by a young stockbroker in a Wall Street office who had had quite a steamy affair with Sally Grinstone not too many months before, and hadn't begun to forget it, there was a special Grinstone crease in his brain three inches deep, and he wasn't all that busy selling stocks these days anyway because the Market was closed more than it was open and it took him all day to get to work and all day to get back home again to his wife and kiddies, but he was a specialist in drug-industry stocks and had his finger on such information as precisely what companies were thriving these days and what companies weren't. "All we need is a plant with just the kinds of equipment and heat controls and outfittings that I've mentioned," Sally told him urgently. "It's got to be a basically operational plant, but shut down, at least temporarily, and we don't want to buy, we just want to lease it as is, and everything in it needs to be in working order, just like I told you—what's that, Pete?"

  "Sal, I said what in hell are you going to do with a chemical factory way out in central Kansas or someplace?"

  "My hair's getting dirty, Pete. I'm going to make shampoo."

  "You wouldn't pull my leg, would you, Sal?"

  "Not yours, Pete. Not if there was anything else to pull. ..."

  Long pause. "You're not planning some acid or coke operation that's liable to get me nailed to the wall like Nell's ass?"

  "Pete, baby, those days are truly over. This is for real. It's straight as an arrow, and it's urgent. Now, no more fun and games. Can you help me or can't you?"

  Pete said, "Get back to you," and presently he did. It took him about eight hours, but he brought the goods with him. "You've got about eight choices in Kansas, Nebraska and Texas," he said, "but the best deal all around for your specs is a place in south Wichita, an International Pharmacals plant that's been closed down since last spring. They're manufacturers and wholesalers, with their main plant and headquarters in Chicago. They were using the Wichita place for ampicillin and some kind of time-release antihistamine. Closed it down as marginal when the interest rates got back up there into the clouds last year. Yes, yes, they'll lease, I didn't talk bucks, but I told them you were pure and clean, and they might just listen to a minimal, very minimal, offer just to have somebody in there, considering what's happening to empty buildings in some of those cities these days. There's a man in Wichita you can contact. ..."

  Now, as Sally walked inside from the loading dock, the pervading stench of the place hit her like a physical blow, an acrid mixture of rotting mold, acid and old garbage. The first time they'd walked in, she'd thought she could never stand it, that awful smell, but soon, she discovered—just as Tom had promised—after a few minutes something happened to her olfactory nerve endings, they just rolled over on their backs or something, some patch of cortex in her brain got overloaded and cut out altogether and the smell was gone, or seemed to be, until the next time she walked outdoors and found out what good clean dust-filled Wichita air smelled like again. Now she saw Tom up on a walkway working on the pilot line he'd been setting up, and she hooted at him. "I'm back," she said.

  "Great. You get that carboy of acetic?"

  "I got half a dozen while I was there."

  He stopped halfway down the stairs. "God, Sally. I can only use one."

  "If you need one now, you're going to need five more later."

  "Yeah. I suppose so." He sounded gray, depressed, veiy tired. "Well, I'll haul them in after a bit."

  "How's it going up there?"

  He motioned her to come up. The area he'd coverted into a pilot line was completely enclosed in glass; she knew vaguely that the things inside included a precipitating pan, a centrifuge, vacuum drying oven, and an automatic belt. Up near the end, where Tom led her, she could see a brightly lighted vault with a large stainless-steel receiving pan. In the pan, just beginning to accumulate, was a steady sifting of a fluffy-looking pale green powder.

  She stared as if suddenly confronted with something she had insisted she believed in for months but never really had untii this veiy instant. She pointed toward the pan. "That's it?"

  "That's it. No fanfare. Just some green powder."

  She whirled, hugged him, nearly lifted him off his feet. "Tom, that's great. I can hardly believe it. I just can't believe it. ..."

  "I'm not so sure I can either," he said, gently disengaging her. "I just don't know."

  She realized then how very gray and tired he looked. "You must be half dead," she said. "You've been at this for three straight weeks, and you haven't been sleeping worth a curse. But now it's here."

  "I know." He turned away from the glass encasement.

  "Trouble is, I keep wondering, so what? Up to now, just getting it set up and getting a pilot line running has been doing something, without much time to think. But then this morning it hit me: this is ridiculous. What are we doing here?"

  "We're making some stuff that will kill plague bugs."

  He made a vague gesture. "I suppose. At least we think that's what this is—testing it is something else, that comes next. So it tests out, and we've got a few thousand milligrams. But so what? Have you read a paper lately, looked at the TV? You know what's happening in Chicago? Atlanta? All these other places? What are these few thousand milligrams going to do when the full wave hits St. Louis or Des Moines or Wichita? What's this little bit of fluff going to do? The answer is: not very much. We're really just fooling around."

  "If we can make this much, we can make a lot more."

  "Sure, but how much more? How fast? And then what can we do with it? This fire storm is moving too fast, out there— what kind of dent are we going to make in it? It's silly. It's worse than silly, it's a travesty. We're keeping ourselves busy spinning our wheels and that's about all."*-

  Sally stared through the plate glass at the accumulating tray of powder. Then she turned to Tom. "You really don't get it, do you?"-she said. "You just don't see the point at all. You get hit with the sheer enormity of the thing, all of a sudden, and you're just like everybody else: you stand there and wring your hands. You're stone blind, Tom. You don't see how great
that little bit of stuff is, sifting down into that pan right now."

  "What's so great about a stick in the wind?"

  "Well, let me ask you something. Is that stuff in that pan right now enough to keep you alive for one week when the plague gets here?"

  "That's about it."

  "So you call it a stick in the wind, but I say that's one person kept alive for one week. Okay, is there enough already there for me, too?"

  "I suppose."

  "Then that's two of us kept alive for one week. Maybe that doesn't matter a whole lot, but I say that's two better than none. If we make enough to protect two more, then that's four better than none. Christ, Tom, somebody's got to start somewhere, and I don't think too many people are starting anything anywhere. So what are you planning to do, just lie down and die? Quit and give up before we even get started? Sit down and fold your hands and wait for it to come eat us alive? Well, if that's your answer, I can't fight you, but let me tell you something. I never sat down and folded my hands in all my life, and I'm not starting now. The day / drop dead from this damned thing, I'm going to be fighting.

  She turned and started down the stairs, kicked a carton out of her way with a vicious swipe, stamped back to the living quarters they'd set up in the rear of the main factory and began smashing bottles.

  Tom followed her down, alarmed, when the bottle-smashing suddenly stopped. She had an old suitcase out on the bed and was tossing blouses and pantyhose into it. "Sally, listen, for God's sake! I didn't mean I was planning to quit, or anything like that. I know how much you've given up coming this far—"

  She whirled on him like a furious kewpie doll. "Listen, you dummy, I haven't given up one goddamned thing coming this far. It just dawned on me sometime back that you couldn't fight plague by writing newspaper stories, that's all. Anyway, I already tried that. I wrote that blast about Sealey and the drug-juggling, and look what it accomplished: not one damned thing. Oh, it took care of John Mancini and Hiram Lunch, all right—they got chopped down by machine-gun fire that day when a mob of angry people who read the story converged on the Sealey Plant in Indianapolis and burnt half of it to the ground. Sliced them right in half, I heard, so at least the story accomplished that. But for the long run, not much more. I thought that publicity blast would nail Sealey Labs to the door like a deer skin, just sink 'em in the sea. Well, it didn't, and the fire wasn't more than a fleabite to them. The Justice Department can't even decide whether to convene a grand juiy or not, and don't worry, they're not going to decide. Nobody that I can see is going to do anything about Sealey Labs, they're too bloody busy trying to figure out what to do about Chicago. And meanwhile, Sealey Labs is busy producing a lousy drug in trickle quantities for whatever the traffic will bear, which is quite a hell of a lot, from the last quotes I've heard, and most of the people that go blind or shaky from taking it aren't going to complain because there's nobody to complain to and they're just happy to be alive, and Sealey has got your drug locked up in their vault, or so they think, they sure are not making it, and it just makes me blind with fury to sit around and watch this. So I'm doing something, anything, I don't care what, as long as it's something. And I thought you were doing something too."