The Magic Bullet

by Harry Stein

  “Stress? Dr. Lukas’s problem was guts. She fucked up and she couldn’t face the music.”

  Logan was aghast. It had of course crossed his mind that the possibility of being scapegoated for Marino’s death was what had pushed Lukas over the edge—but he’d dismissed the thought. “I don’t think there’s much she could’ve done for him,” he replied, with a mildness even he recognized as repugnant.

  “You’re right, she was hardly the most creative doctor around here.”

  Before them, the horrific scene was nearing its conclusion; the body, placed on a gurney and swathed in sheets, was being strapped into place.

  “I don’t think that’s fair, sir. It’s a terrible loss. She was an excellent physician and a good person.”

  Unexpectedly, Stillman flashed a small, indulgent smile. “A terrible loss? Let’s not exaggerate, Logan. She wasn’t going anywhere.”

  Logan didn’t connect with Sabrina until that evening, nearly twelve hours later. This was by prearrangement; they’d decided to keep what had happened between them to themselves; dealing with one another on the ACF grounds, if at all, with strict professional detachment. It was a precaution born of intimate knowledge of the place—surely, someone would find a way to use it against them.

  But for a while, after this day’s ghastly events, it was as if the previous evening hadn’t happened at all.

  “It is late, no?” she demurred, when Logan called to ask if he could stop by.

  He hesitated—it was barely nine. “Well … I just wanted to talk. I’m sorry.”

  “Logan, listen to me. Please do not take what happened last night so seriously. We are colleagues, that’s fine. But I do not wish to be the person you call up late at night.”

  “No problem,” he replied dully. “Of course.” Huh? In the past, those had always been his lines. “Look, maybe we’ll talk some other time.”

  She sighed deeply. “But you are right, it has been a terrible day. All day long everyone talks about it, and no one really says anything.”

  At his pay phone, Logan felt a surge of hope. “That’s because no one knew how to react. No one’s been through anything like this before.”

  “No, I think it was something else. Everyone was sad—but were afraid to let the senior people see. Especially Larsen and Stillman.”

  Instantly, he knew she was right. “Well, screw ’em,” he replied, with sudden bravura, “we’re not gonna let that affect our project.”

  There was a long silence. “Tell me, Logan, how long will it take you to come here?”

  As soon as she closed the door behind him, she gave him a passionate kiss.

  He pulled back in surprise. “I guess I said something you wanted to hear.”

  She pointed to a chair. “First we must talk. The lovemaking is for after.”

  “You’re not an easy person to figure out, Sabrina, you know that?”

  Ignoring this, she took the seat opposite and leaned intently forward. “You knew her well, this Lukas?”

  “Not really. You?”

  “No. I don’t think she liked me very much.”

  “She did have that way about her, didn’t she?”

  “Tell me everything that happened. All the details.”

  He took a deep breath and did so.

  After taking it in, she sat expressionless for a full fifteen seconds. “You didn’t see a note?” she asked finally.

  He shook his head. “My guess is it was spontaneous. She was already in trouble with the brass—and with Marino about to die on her, it must’ve felt like a career killer. You know as much as I do about clinical depression.”

  “Do you know Rachel Meigs?”

  Rachel Meigs was another junior associate, a mousy, studious type out of San Francisco General. Logan shrugged. “She seems nice enough.”

  “You see, Logan, this is the problem with being a man. Rachel, she was best friends with Barbara Lukas. And today she talked to me—just because I am a woman.”

  “And …?”

  “She went into details. All the things they were doing to Lukas. How every day in some way they insulted her, belittled her. Just yesterday, Kratsas told her she was not good enough even to be a candy striper.”

  “I know, they were making her life a living hell.”

  “No, it is more than that. Why did they do this to her?”

  He shrugged. “Let’s face it, Lukas was no one’s idea of a charmboat. Call it chemistry. She rubbed them the wrong way.”

  She shook her head adamantly. “No, what you must see is the sickness at this place, Logan. It is pathological. Even more than I realized. What you said on the telephone …” She paused. “I love your passion for this work, it’s the same as mine. But if we go ahead—”

  “If?”

  “—we must understand how dangerous these people can be.”

  “Of course,” he said blithely. “Obviously.” He gave a consoling smile. “But just let’s not get paranoid about it.”

  “This is wrong, we must become paranoid. And you especially, Logan.”

  “Oh? Why’s that.”

  “Because you like to trust. And you care very much about pleasing people.”

  This was starting to get on his nerves. “There’s nothing wrong with that, Sabrina.”

  She rose to her feet and extended her hand. “Come.”

  Instantly, he was beside her. Drawing her toward him, he smiled. “All right, all right, I’ll be careful.”

  “This is not something to laugh about, Logan. Science you know well—but people, I think, hardly at all.”

  Their first sharp disagreement involved John Reston. Sabrina strongly resisted letting him in on their secret.

  On a purely pragmatic basis, Dan Logan recognized she had a point. He knew as well as she did that, at its current stage of development, the hypothesis might well strike even a sympathetic outsider as preposterous. It still required buttressing by solid supporting evidence, at least some of it of a clinical nature.

  But Sabrina’s objections to Reston had to do with more than just science. They reflected her own guarded and fiercely independent nature.

  “Why?” she demanded. “What is the use of having another person anyhow?”

  “Look, Sabrina, we have to be realistic—we can’t do this alone. If we’re going to have a shot at getting a protocol accepted, we’ll have to come at them with a team in place. Reston’s a terrific doc. And I trust him.”

  “I do not. There’s something about this man I have never liked.”

  “Who, then? We have to trust someone!”

  The argument exasperated Logan. This is why he preferred conflicts about pure science: in the end, those could usually be resolved by a clearheaded assessment of data. The ones about human beings were always so much messier.

  Yes, of course, in the best of all worlds, he, too, would prefer to lock others out—for personal as well as professional reasons. Already, between them, there existed the kind of mutual respect lovers can take years trying to achieve; and day by day, as they warily revealed themselves, it was being matched by genuine trust. Why tamper with that? Never had Logan dreamed he could find a woman like this: someone to whom he was not just wildly attracted, but whose passion for this extraordinarily specialized work equaled his own. Once, on hospital rounds, he actually found himself chuckling: he’d been trying to decide which thought got him more excited, of the sex he’d have that evening, or of the conversation that would follow.

  In fact, Logan even found himself growing attached to the cloak-and-dagger aspect of the relationship. If most days held far too few hours for all he needed to do—work, research, unwind with Sabrina—the distance they placed between themselves and the rest of the world only heightened their growing reliance on each other.

  Sometimes, lying beside her at night, it was almost possible to believe they could pull it off: that, as she argued, the possibilities of success might actually be enhanced if they kept the project to themselves. Certa
inly, they’d be able to exercise tighter control over the standard of work and the handling of data.

  But his pragmatic side told him otherwise. For all his regard for Sabrina’s scientific acumen, he had far less faith than she did in the power of her intuition about human beings. The simple truth was, her endless suspicion of others’ characters and motives—much as she insisted on seeing it as a virtue—could sink them before they even got started.

  His own view of his colleagues seemed to him not so much generous as realistic. Sure, some of them were jerks—petty, erratic, narcissistic, even cruel. That had been more than amply demonstrated. But in the end, who could doubt they all shared the same goal?

  It all came to a head one late night when Logan reported on the conversation he’d had that day with Steven Locke, the former ACF senior researcher whom he’d finally tracked down at Southwestern Medical School in Dallas. Admittedly, it had been a bit unsettling. In fact, at first Locke hadn’t wanted to talk at all.

  “Look,” he said, “I’m sorry, but nothing I say about the ACF’s going to do me any good.”

  “I just want to ask about a protocol. It was by a first-year associate named Ray Coopersmith?” He filled the silence that followed with a hasty “I’m a first-year associate myself. It piqued my interest.”

  “Coopersmith was bad news, okay? That’s all I have to say.”

  “Why? I don’t understand.”

  The other sighed. “He faked his data and he brought other people down with him. End of story. Look, I’ve got patient rounds to make.”

  Logan was momentarily speechless. “You don’t have any idea where I can find him, do you?”

  He laughed hoarsely. “Why in the world would I know a thing like that?” And a moment later he was off.

  But now, hours later, Logan felt he had the exchange in perspective. “Look,” he told Sabrina, “it was a bit of a scandal, it left some casualties. But that has zero to do with us.”

  “Maybe you are right,” she replied with unexpected mildness. “But this Coopersmith was also a first-year associate, no? This will give them another reason not to let us try a protocol.”

  “Look, it happened how long ago?” he asked reasonably. “Four years? Four and a half? Have you heard a single word about it since we’ve been at the ACF?”

  Still, before long, she was using it as further reason not to include Reston in the project.

  “This Reston, you must stop looking at him only with the eyes of a friend.”

  “I’m sorry, he is a friend. But I knew him as a scientist first—and that’s why I want him. He has skills we need.”

  “What skills? To be a wiseguy? Because that is mainly what I see.”

  “That’s not fair, Sabrina.”

  “What, then? What are these special skills?”

  Looking at her perched on the edge of his sofa in leggings and a clingy silk shirt, Logan momentarily had trouble concentrating. Once again, fleetingly, he wished this were an ordinary conversation with an esteemed colleague, free of all other factors.

  “You have a problem with my question, Logan?”

  “Look, Sabrina, please, let’s just stop kidding ourselves about what’s involved here. We’re talking about a mammoth undertaking: designing the protocol, putting together the right patient pool, tracking them, assembling and analyzing data. We’re novices, we haven’t even been here six months. This whole thing could fall apart for lack of enough competent hands and heads. It’s happened many, many times before. Who knows, that might’ve been that guy Coopersmith’s problem.”

  He wasn’t sure, but he thought he could sense Sabrina starting to waver. She indicated a six-inch stack of research on the adjoining table, some of the material they’d assembled to review. “Let’s get to work. I have only three hours before I must go back to the hospital.”

  Logan slipped an arm over her shoulder. “You’re even good at changing the subject.”

  She removed it. “Not now, we haven’t the time.”

  “Well … I guess I should get started on the introduction to the proposal.…”

  “Good.” She gave him a chaste kiss on the cheek. “You always say the just right things to a girl, Logan.”

  “Though writing has never exactly been my strong suit.”

  “At least it’s your own language. I’m sorry, I cannot be much of a help in this.”

  “You know”—he grinned—“Reston’s a helluva writer.…”

  “Compound J?” repeated Reston, three evenings later, in the trendy Georgetown restaurant to which Logan had unexpectedly invited him. “Compound J? For breast cancer?”

  Logan nodded uneasily. He had expected surprise but not incredulity. “Sabrina Como and I have been doing some research. We have what we think is a pretty sound theory.”

  “Sabrina?” He grinned. “Hey, good for you.”

  “She’s an incredible doctor.”

  “Right. I know. What some guys’ll say to get a woman into the sack.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “Ooooh, don’t tell me there actually is something going on with the bombshell.”

  “Look, that’s not what we’re here to talk about.”

  He shook his head. “Now, there’s a real miracle of modern medicine.”

  “We’re here to talk about Compound J.”

  Reston snorted. “Compound J is a bust. Every doctor at the ACF knows that. Hell, even the janitors know it!”

  “Maybe they’ve just been using it the wrong way. Against the wrong disease.”

  “I think we should order something.” Reston picked up the menu and flipped it open. “Jeez, this place isn’t cheap. Let’s not forget who’s buying.”

  “Look,” said Logan, “I understand your reaction. It’s a lot to digest.”

  He snorted. “I’d say it’s indigestible.”

  The truth was, Logan saw his friend as a kind of test; the objections he raised were precisely those he knew they would face trying to sell the idea within the ACF. It was simply common wisdom that Compound J’s anticancer properties were nonexistent.

  Given how the discussion had started, neither man pressed it. Only with the arrival of their food did it resume. “All right,” picked up Reston suddenly, “tell me what you have that makes any kind of dent in that evidence.”

  “Where is it written that cell lines are reliable models for what goes on in a living, breathing patient? There are hundreds of exceptions to that rule.”

  “It’s still the rule. Or do you plan to start rewriting those?”

  “Making a judgment based on cell line is like looking at an elephant’s toenail and thinking you see the whole elephant.”

  Reston looked up from his cassoulet. “Okay, I agree with that. So what?”

  “So if you discount the cell-line results, you can start to look again at this compound’s possibilities—with a more open mind.”

  “Fine. Let’s hear some evidence.”

  “Listen, I hardly even know where to start. Because I really think this stuff is a lot more interesting than anyone realizes. You just can’t think about it the way you think of other anticancer compounds.”

  “Evidence. I’m waiting.”

  Logan raised the Larry Tilley case. “If a drug seems to be that active against a healthy gland, you’ve got to at least wonder if it won’t be active against a diseased gland.”

  “That’s reasonable speculation—but why does that lead to cancer?”

  Logan told him about Sabrina’s finds in the archives.

  Again, Reston was dismissive. “You’re giving me stuff from the twenties and thirties?” He shook his head. “Man, that woman must have some hold on you!”

  Logan glared at him. “This isn’t a joke to me, John. No more sarcasm, okay?”

  Reston raised his hands in mock surrender. “Sorry. I thought you wanted an honest reaction.”

  Logan pulled a folded sheath of photocopied pages from his inside pocket and handed them across the tab
le. “Try telling me this is ancient history.”

  Examining the pages, Reston was immediately impressed by the origin of the document: The Journal of Molecular Biochemistry, one of the most highly regarded biomedical scientific publications in the world.

  “What’s this?”

  “You probably missed it. It’s a paper presented at one of the seminars they were always holding when we were third-year residents at Claremont. Look at page four.”

  Reston flipped ahead, noting that Logan had highlighted the key passages: the paper’s author, a Professor Engel of the University of Minnesota, was an expert on the proteins called growth factors, produced by all cells, normal and otherwise. What he had shown was that some tumors, especially those of the female breast, develop the ability to secrete growth factors into surrounding tissue where they interact with receptors on the surface of neighboring cancer cells—signaling these cells, in turn, to reproduce. Thus is created an endless circle of secretion and growth as the tumor grows unchecked.

  Yet, along the way, almost incidentally, Engel had noted a curious phenomenon: sometimes, inexplicably, drugs containing polynaphthalene sulfonic acids—like Compound J and its relatives—appeared to block the binding of the tumor growth factors to the tumor cells.

  “How’s that for evidence?” asked Logan. “If we can show this stuff screws up a cancer cell just a little bit more than it does normal surrounding cells, we have ourselves an anticancer drug.”

  Reston burst out laughing. “Logan, you’re crazy. You’re a fuckin’ megalo. Finding a drug that works among all the millions of compounds out there is like hitting the lottery on your first try. People a lot smarter than you or me work their entire lives and never get anywhere close to testing on human beings.” He shook his head. “You might as well suggest pouring hydrochloric acid into patients’ veins—you know for sure that’d kill their tumors.”

  “I’m not saying anyone’s going to hand us anything on a platter.” Logan paused. “Come on, John, you know as well as I do that this is enough evidence for a protocol. This thesis is entirely plausible. Cancer cells are like sharks—without forward movement they die. Interrupt the growth process and you kill the tumor!”