Dust to Dust

by James M. Thompson

  * * *

  As before, the liquid NeurActivase entered a dozen rats’ bloodstreams, but it was now a mixture of six distinct chemical entities. Once again, the compounds separated and began their work: Thyrotropin-releasing hormone, GM-1 Ganglioside, Imuran, and the fetal rat brain slurry all worked exactly as before.

  Then, the DHEA began converting cholesterol in fat cells into massive amounts of testosterone, an anabolic steroid that caused tissue cells to divide and grow and replace injured or dying cells more rapidly than before.

  At first there was no visible change in the rats, but soon, literally within an hour, elderly rats began to stand straighter, move more rapidly, eat voraciously, and mate with adolescent abandon.

  * * *

  Kat returned from her supper and was exhilarated when she saw the rats she’d injected just a couple of hours before acting much more vigorous and youthful than the control rats. They were running around their cage, mating and playing like very young rats instead of the middle-aged ones they were.

  She decided to go to the women’s dressing room, take a quick shower, change into the sweats she kept there, and settle down on the couch in her lab. Maybe now she could finally get some sleep, after she took Angus for his evening stroll, of course.

  * * *

  While Kat was in the dressing room showering and taking off her makeup, a slow but steady change began in her test rats. First they stopped mating and eating, and then, as suddenly as it had appeared, their vigorous movements began to slow and they began to twitch and move spastically around the cage. It was like they had suddenly aged fifty rat years in the space of an hour.

  When Kat arrived back in the lab, she took one look at the injected rats, and it felt as if she’d been punched in the gut.

  The new injection with DHEA added had all been in vain. The test rats were already deteriorating past the baseline of the control rats and showed every sign of continued decline. With a sickening despair, she watched another dream slowly disappear. There seemed to be nothing more she could do.

  Kat watched helplessly as first their mental, and then their motor skills continued to fail. Soon, one by one, they all died with symptoms very like those of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

  Her only consolation, albeit a small one, was that she had been secretive about her early success. She had even underplayed the importance of the rats’ new growth of brain cells and their ever-increasing facility in the maze from Kevin, though to be honest, she knew he suspected what a great achievement this had been.

  And Kat had certainly made no mention of it to the progress committee, who, so far as she’d told them, still thought she was working on her “neuron glue” without much success.

  That evening, as her last test animal died, lying in its own waste products, she cried in frustration. She stumbled to her car and put Angus in his bed in the backseat. Her mind was numb with the enormity of her defeat as she drove to the freeway and headed south, toward Memorial Park. Once there, she drove along the small stream that ran through the park in the gathering darkness, her thoughts a chaotic mixture of rage and self-pity.

  Finally, she stopped at a small pullout in the deserted park, took off her shoes, and walked along the water’s edge, thinking melodramatically about wading out and disappearing beneath the moonlit surface. This made her chuckle at herself and improved her mood, as the stream was probably less than two feet deep. Instead, she lay back on the cool grass, hands behind her head, and looked up at the stars.

  She thought how most men, and in her case women, truly did lead lives of quiet desperation, never rising to the full potential of their dreams or aspirations. She thought how ironic it was that she, Kaitlyn Williams, had been given not one, but two chances at the golden ring—and how she had fumbled both of them. She lay there on the grass, her eyes full of starlight, and her mind on her past.

  * * *

  After a while, Kat noticed the stars were blurred by the tears in her eyes. She sat up and angrily rubbed her eyes until they burned. Damn it, girl, you’re not going to lie here feeling sorry for yourself, she thought. She stood and made her way back to her car.

  She opened the rear door and watched Angus dozing in his bed on the backseat. With a deep sigh, she reached over and took his face in her hands. She leaned into the car and nuzzled him, face-to-face. “We’re gonna get through this, big boy,” she whispered. “We just have to work harder, that’s all.”

  Angus moaned in pleasure at her touch, as if agreeing with her.

  On the drive back to her apartment, she resolved to work her way through her own maze and get the prize at the end. You discovered a miracle serum, she thought with determination. Now you just have to iron out a few bugs and make it work like it should.

  With this new goal in mind, she finally slept like a baby for the first time since she’d discovered the rats’ new abilities.

  * * *

  Just after midnight, a key was inserted in the door to Kat’s lab. A shadowy figure moved silently over to the rats’ cages and began to examine the animals one by one. Finally, seeing that there were only unmarked control rats in the cages, the figure moved over to the medical waste bin.

  The lid to the bin was removed, revealing a pile of dead rats, all with blue marks on their backs.

  The figure sighed and slumped, replacing the top to the bin, and then left the room as silently as it had entered.

  CHAPTER 5

  Kat and Angus got to the lab early the next morning, having left her apartment at six o’clock to beat the morning Houston traffic, which was bad even on a Saturday. She took Angus for his morning walk, gave him a Greenie, and got him situated in his bed next to her desk.

  After fixing her coffee, she sat at her desk, opened her computer to her NeurActivase files, and went doggedly back to work. She reread the files, going back to the very beginning of her research, and began to make notes on a legal pad on her desk: She could make neural cells appear and she could make them bond and she could make them divide . . . She just couldn’t keep them alive very long.

  The thought of her failure made her sweat at the thought of what her position might be if she’d gone public with her seeming discovery. This second great failure in her life, as bad as it was, would have been even more intolerable if it had been public knowledge.

  She began to work on fixing the formula, plugging away in a sort of haze, praying for another miracle, but not having much hope that one was going to present itself.

  Since it was Saturday, the whole building was quiet except for the distant whir of a janitor waxing the halls. None of the other researchers worked on Saturdays or Sundays. Not unless they had something cooking that had to be constantly tended. No one whom she knew of, outside of herself, deliberately worked on the weekends.

  She did so because she had nowhere else to go, not because she thought by working every moment of every day that she’d find the magic solution. She’d given up on that long before. It was just that she was more at home in the lab than she was in the Spartan apartment she slept in and sometimes ate in. She had no real friends and only a few acquaintances.

  Sometimes, when the loneliness was upon her, she would try out one of the many nightclubs in the downtown area, hoping that being in the presence of so many other people might ease the pain of having no one of her own. This invariably ended badly, the ritualized mating dance of the males who approached her trying to pick her up causing her to be more amused than flattered at their adolescent behavior.

  What few overtures she’d had from the other researchers at the lab she’d rebuffed in as pleasant a manner as possible, but still letting them know she wasn’t interested in socializing at work.

  At one time, while still a resident, she had been somewhat serious about a young man who had worked with her in the navy. He’d been a general surgeon, so they had their work in common, and for a while she thought the relationship might lead somewhere serious. But after her decision to quit
neurosurgery, he’d simply disappeared from her life. They’d had no contact since her discharge from the navy.

  Her parents were both retired doctors, living in Boston. They were still close, and she visited them at least twice a year, but they were active in the arts and theater community of Boston and tried their best not to interfere in her life, such as it was. Since her discharge from the navy, she’d discouraged contact with friends from her past life, and she intended to keep it that way. She did not inherently dislike people. She simply did not like to see her own failure reflected in their faces. She knew in her heart, of course, that was nonsense, but she didn’t care. She wanted to be alone, and her reasons were her own.

  At least that was what she would have said if anyone had asked her. The real reason she wanted minimal human contact was that she was embarrassed and ashamed of herself. People meant questions, and questions meant answers. And she didn’t have any answers, much less the desire to re-create her pain in conversation.

  Kat sat thinking, for some time. Finally, she got up and walked over to the rat cages. She walked delicately, shyly, almost as if she was afraid someone would hear her. She was a slim, auburn-haired woman of little better than average height. Her face was fine-boned and even-featured, with a light dusting of freckles across her nose and cheeks. She was not quite beautiful, though she should have been. There was a sadness about her face that wasn’t physical. It came from the bitterness and disappointment deep in her eyes and the thin set of her lips, almost as if she was drawing them in at the beginning of a snarl. You looked at her face, and there was no light shining from within.

  Kat had set out to do great things in medicine and it was not going to happen, even when all signs had said she must. Some people were born with the equipment to be concert pianists, some home-run hitters, some great surgeons. Now she was like the home-run hitter whom the pitchers had discovered couldn’t hit an outside curveball. She had a flaw, and she just could not grow to accept that fact. In her world, perfection did not allow for a flaw.

  She stood in front of the cages, staring at her rats. Some of the cages were empty, all of the rats having died. She had come to inject a new batch of rats and to try once again to find the flaw in her formula. It was a hopeless gesture, and she knew it. It was basically the same old serum that would produce the same old results, but she couldn’t give up the dream. Perhaps if she adjusted the dosage of DHEA . . .

  She looked down the line of cages, looking for the new rats she’d told Kevin to order. There were no virgin specimens. There were still a few control animals, but they were of varying genetic strains, leftovers from her brief period of trying anything just so long as it might lead to a neuron glue to heal spinal or central nervous system injuries.

  She felt oddly irritated, as if she were being held up in some great experiment due to a lack of working material. She said, aloud, “Damn that Kevin!” The rats she’d told him to order were not in place, and she was thoroughly irritated. Come Monday, she told herself, she intended to give the young man a thorough dressing-down . . . though she knew she wouldn’t really do it. A word or even a hint of displeasure from her would crush him, and she was much too kind to do that.

  Still, she thought, a place of science was no theater for the blind or the forgetful or the haphazard, and damn it, she wanted to inject those rats right now, this very day. She had prepared a new batch of serum before leaving the lab the night before, and she wanted to use it, if for no other reason than to draw another carping memo from Captain “Sunshine” about her rat carnage.

  She had little hope of finding any of the other labs open on a Saturday, but she wandered out into the hall and went along, trying knobs or knocking on doors. No one was there, and she was about to give up when she noticed a door ajar just a few yards farther down the hall. She stopped short when she got to it and saw that the lab belonged to Burton Ramsey, Ph.D.

  She didn’t know Ramsey very well. Having heard he was a man who despised MDs, she’d tried to keep her distance. She didn’t know what kind of research Ramsey was doing, but she knew most of the projects at BioTech used experimental animals of one sort or another. With luck, he’d have a few cages of extra rats in his lab and she could “borrow” some so that her day wouldn’t be completely wasted.

  From her few sightings of him in the halls or cafeteria, Kat thought Ramsey looked nothing like she thought a scientist should. He was a big man, over six feet, with heavy shoulders and large hands. Where Kat’s fingers were long and tapering and her nails still perfectly kept, Ramsey’s fingers looked as if they’d be more at home curled into a fist.

  Kat, even in defeat, kept herself well-groomed. Her hair was always combed and sprayed, or fixed into a French braid to keep it out of her way in the lab, and she always applied a light touch of makeup to cover her freckles, which reminded her of a young schoolgirl.

  Ramsey, on the other hand, just didn’t seem to care. His clothes usually looked like they’d been trampled underfoot first and then put on, and his hair was unruly and he had a balding spot just at the crown of his head. He had a thick sandy mustache that drooped around his mouth, and Kat had never seen him in a tie, and sometimes not even in socks.

  Kat did not know how old the man was, but she guessed somewhere in his mid-forties. They had met only once, some months back when Kat had gone through the line in the cafeteria and found the only chair available was across a table from Ramsey. She’d politely asked him if she could join him. Instead of nodding his approval, he’d huffed and puffed and mumbled something about a body not being able to eat in peace, then he’d taken his tray and stomped out the door toward his lab. With a face burning with embarrassment, Kat had sat and eaten her lunch alone.

  Kat eased the door open enough to peek inside Ramsey’s laboratory. The lab, like all of them on the sixth floor, was basically one long room some twenty feet by forty feet, with an office cubicle walled off in one corner, another area for the laboratory functions, and another for the computer modules. It was easy, in one glance, to see that the place was empty. She assumed the cleaning crew had finished in the room and simply not shut the door, which, she thought, was a hell of a way to run a medical laboratory where highly prized work was being done. An industrial spy could have a field day with such security measures. She stepped quickly into the laboratory, leaving the door at exactly the same angle of openness as she had found it.

  Kat knew she was technically in violation of both ethics and laboratory security, but she didn’t think Ramsey would mind. The man gave no indication that he took his work that seriously, and, in fact, she rarely saw him at work at all. She’d certainly never seen him around on a weekend.

  Once inside she glanced around quickly. At the end of the room was a workbench with several microscopes on it and a microtome and other normal lab paraphernalia. She wondered briefly what Ramsey was working on and was almost tempted to go over to the worktable and have a look. But caution overcame her. There was a limit to the liberties she was willing to take, even with a man she barely knew.

  The cages were against a side wall. There were twelve of them, triple-stacked. She walked over and slowly looked down the line, glancing at the laboratory rats inside. To her surprise, none of the rats was marked. Each cage of twelve rats bore a label giving the strain and age of the rats. To each was also attached a small tag with some handwritten figures on it.

  Kat went to the last cage to her right, the top cage. She looked at the label and saw that the rats were a GR-4 strain, the same ones she used in her lab. That meant they were very high on the genetic purity scale, having been bred and rebred to collect one set of genetic characteristics; in effect, the rats were like multiple identical twins.

  She also saw by the tag that they were mixed males and females, which made no difference to her. She grunted, thinking wryly that her serum was indiscriminate: It killed regardless of gender. But she was surprised to see that the rats were five years old. That was a very old age for experimental anim
als, since white rats only lived about seven years. But then, she supposed Ramsey might be working in geriatrics, though she had a hard time envisioning a man as active and vital as Ramsey being interested in the welfare of delicate little old ladies.

  There was a small tag on the cage. She took it in her hand and looked at it. It appeared to be a date, two days past. She assumed it was a notation of when the rats had been received, since lab data concerning treatment certainly wouldn’t be handled in such a haphazard manner. If that was the case, and the date was the arrival of the rats, it was almost a certainty that they had not been used in any other experiment and were, therefore, uncontaminated.

  Kat actually wanted twenty-four rats, but she didn’t think she dare take more than the twelve in the cage. She had noted that the cages were numbered from one through twelve, with the one in her hand being number twelve. She attached no significance to that fact. She put her hand on the handle of the wire cage and hefted it for weight. It wasn’t that heavy, and she thought she could probably carry another, giving her the twenty-four rats she needed: twelve for injection and twelve for control. But it was best not to risk too much. These first twelve would serve her purposes for the time being, and she could still use the few rats she had left over as controls if she had to.

  She looked around, and summoning up her courage, she lifted the cage off the one below and turned and went quickly across the room and out the door. As she turned to start back toward her own lab, she saw a young woman in a white lab coat hurrying toward her.

  She instantly felt guilty, caught. She would have put the cage behind her, but it was about three feet square and almost two feet high. As the girl neared Kat could see that she was a rather dumpy article, in her mid-twenties. She was wearing glasses that gave her face an anxious, pinched look. She hurried up to Kat, looking first at the cage. “Are those Dr. Ramsey’s rats?”