Dust to Dust

by James M. Thompson

  Kat tried to put the best face on it she could. She had no intention of being intimidated by someone so young she still had traces of acne. “Well, yes. I ran short, you see, and I was in the midst of a very important test. Dr. Ramsey’s was the only door open, so I thought I’d just borrow a few of his extra rats.”

  “I don’t think Dr. Ramsey would want you to do that. Do you have his permission?”

  Kat didn’t want to lie to the girl, but she also hated to admit that she had carelessly let her own supply of rats run short. “I’m Dr. Kaitlyn . . .” she trailed off, unwilling to say her last name. She made a vague gesture down the hall. “My lab is just around the corner. Believe me, it will be all right. I simply didn’t expect to be working today, and we didn’t get my consignment of lab animals yesterday.”

  “I don’t know . . . Dr. Ramsey . . . Dr. Ramsey can get awfully angry sometimes.”

  She was aware that the young lab assistant’s eyes had strayed from her face to the name tag on the front of her lab coat. Her hand started up instinctively to cover it, and then she dropped it defiantly. She thought, The hell with it. I’m not afraid of Burton Ramsey. She said, “Look, miss, what’s your name? You’re Dr. Ramsey’s lab assistant?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m Dottie.”

  I’ll just bet you are, Kat thought, by the look of you. “Look, Dottie, there is nothing to worry about. Dr. Ramsey will never even know the rats have been taken. I’ll get a consignment Monday morning and my lab assistant will return his cage with new rats of the same strain first thing.” She lowered her voice and said, “I’ll bet Dr. Ramsey is not the kind who’s the first one in, is he?”

  Dottie softened a little, shaking her head. “Well, no. In fact, he won’t even be in on Monday. But you understand, Doctor, it’ll be my tail if he finds out about this without you telling him.”

  Kat smiled. “Well, we wouldn’t want anything like that to happen, now, would we?”

  The girl made a tittering sound, but she said, as if on a sudden thought, “You didn’t get any test animals, did you?”

  “Of course not!” Kat exclaimed with conviction. “I know old Burton’s work like my own.” She lifted the cage as if to demonstrate. “This is brand-new stock. Untouched.”

  Dottie sighed. “Well, I hope you can tell. He never tells me, and he doesn’t mark them. He’s got his own system, which he hasn’t shared with me.”

  “I know it like my own. Have no fear, Dottie. I wouldn’t get you in any trouble with my old friend.”

  “Oh . . .” Dottie peered at her through her myopic lenses. “I don’t recall seeing you around the lab.”

  “I’m in and out . . . In and out. But Burton and I usually talk away from here.” She put her finger to her lips. “Can’t be too careful.”

  She walked away from the girl with absolutely no feelings of shame whatsoever about her lies. She did, however, feel a slight pride in her acting ability. Who knew she could wing it like that?

  Old Ramsey would never miss his rats, and, of course, hers was the greater need. She was working on a miracle serum. She doubted if Ramsey was working on anything nearly as important as her NeurActivase.

  As she entered her lab with the cage of purloined rats, she said, aloud, “After all, I’m the one person in the world who can make the smartest rats who ever lived . . . even if they only live a few days!”

  Before what she thought of as her crash, she had been known as a woman of an exquisitely dry sense of humor and a fairly cheerful person overall.

  But all that was in the past. That was before, when she had had brilliance and talent and confidence. You couldn’t be witty and dryly humorous when you were so damn depressed you thought of every day as a mountain that had to be climbed without knowing why.

  She put on a lab glove, opened the door of an empty cage, and methodically transferred six of the rats she’d gotten from Ramsey inside to comprise a control group. Then she shut the door and carried the cage with the remaining half-dozen rats over to her lab workbench. Without looking, she reached out and selected a bottle of color and began daubing the fur of her test rats. It was a blue dye, but she really didn’t care. Failure came in all colors.

  After that, Kat opened the refrigerator door and took out the bottle of fresh serum she’d concocted Friday night. It was basically the same as all the others and would undoubtedly give the same unsuccessful results, so she decided to double the amount of DHEA, using four milliliters instead of two. While she laid out six thirty-two-gauge disposable syringes, she put the vial of serum into a vibrator to make sure it was thoroughly mixed. Then, quickly and deftly, she inoculated the rats one after another.

  When the last was done, she shut the cage door and began making notations in her code of just what she’d done. It would go on the cage and then later be transferred to her computer. For all that it mattered, she thought sadly. She wondered when the progress committee was going to demand that she show some results or move on. That would be a fine rejection—being let out of a penny-ante researcher’s job in disgrace just like when she’d been discharged from the navy for not being able to do her job as a neurosurgeon.

  * * *

  The rebirth of her hope began Sunday evening, when Kat wandered back to the lab for lack of something better to do. Just out of curiosity, she decided to run the Ramsey group of test rats through the maze. She was surprised to see that they averaged test times almost 10 percent better than the control animals, which was excellent for five-year-old rats. But she knew that they’d just been inoculated with NeurActivase for something like thirty hours and that very soon the cellular decay would begin and the rats would grow less and less intelligent.

  On Monday, she ignored the rats and just sat and reread her notes, trying once again to see where she had gone wrong. The next day, sometime Tuesday afternoon, she ran three of the rats through the maze and found that their times had been reduced by almost a minute. That surprised her, since the interval since the injection was now over seventy-two hours, a time frame that should have allowed the deterioration of the neural cells to begin to affect the rats’ times.

  She forced herself to remain calm, not to get her hopes too high as she had once before, only to have them dashed. She even refused herself the pleasure of making notes and keeping data on the rats’ progress. She just kept telling himself, over and over, that this was nothing new. Most likely the expected neural degeneration simply was delayed because of the age of the rats, although that didn’t make much sense. The older rats should have been affected earlier, not later, by the neural degeneration.

  She was at the lab by dawn on Wednesday morning. In spite of the warnings she kept giving herself to remain calm, she was so nervous that she could barely handle the rats without dropping them. Finally, with a wildly beating heart, she tested one of “Ramsey’s rats,” as she had begun to call them to herself. The rat sped through the maze in three minutes and fifty-eight seconds, almost 50 percent faster than the control animals.

  She slowly picked up the rat, returned it to the cage, and selected another for a trial run. The results of that one and the remaining four were all similar.

  Trying to keep her mind from racing, she went into her office and sat down. Little by little she began to analyze what she knew. A little better than four days had passed since the rats had been injected. They were not getting less intelligent; they were getting smarter, if time through the maze was a product of intelligence. In all of her other experiments, intelligence deterioration had been well advanced by the fourth day. Something was different this time. She tried to quell her excitement, to think in patterned squares of analytical calmness.

  There were only two variables from her previous experiments. One, the rats were two years older than any other test animals she’d used, and two, she’d dramatically increased the amount of DHEA she’d used because the hormone precursor was known to markedly increase the amount of testosterone in the bloodstream.

  She couldn’t believe t
he advanced age of the rats would have had a favorable effect. In fact, the opposite should have been true. And she was hard-pressed to believe that increased DHEA could have brought about such a miraculous change, since it hadn’t worked with her previous injected rats, which had all died. But in the light of all the evidence, she had to believe it was the higher dose of the DHEA that had made the difference. She could think of nothing else that had changed.

  Suddenly, she got up from her desk and walked over to the rat cage. She studied the rats inside for a moment. She shook her head. They certainly didn’t look like five-year-old rats . . . in fact, they looked like much younger rats, at least as young as her own rats were. And they not only looked younger, they were acting younger, too—playfully running around the cage and mating as if they had all the energy in the world.

  CHAPTER 6

  A pounding, driving headache pulled Burton Ramsey from the depths of slumber. He came reluctantly awake and ran a dry tongue over gritty teeth. As he smacked his lips, he thought, Jesus, my mouth tastes like something crawled in it and died. He brought his arm up before his face and squinted, trying to read the dial of his Timex. Wednesday, 9:45 a.m.

  He placed his fingertips to his temple and rubbed, trying to ease the knife-like pain in his skull, and rolled over, falling heavily to the floor off the sofa in his living room. Confused, he wondered briefly what he was doing fully dressed and sleeping on his sofa instead of in his bed in the next room.

  Memory came slowly, in bits and pieces. Tuesday night he had gone to Bennigan’s restaurant on the Southwest Freeway for supper. After eating a chili burger and fries, he had retired to the bar. A group of secretaries, taking advantage of the happy hour special—two-for-one drinks—had invited him to join them. Once he’d concluded that none of them had much more than a high school education, he joined them and drank until well past midnight, bored by hours of meaningless conversation. He despised yuppie, professional women, believing them to be uppity, ball-busting harridans.

  Being drunk, but not stupid, he had driven very carefully to his apartment, navigating the evening Houston traffic with as much care as his besotted brain would allow. One more DWI and his license would be history.

  He shook his head, figuring his sofa was as far as he’d been able to make it before he passed out with all of his clothes still on.

  With trembling hands, he put a K-Cup of French Roast Bold coffee into his Keurig coffee machine, thanking God he’d splurged and bought the damn thing, ’cause he knew in his present state he’d never have been able to make a drinkable brew in his old Mr. Coffee machine. He prayed caffeine would clear his mind and stop the damn pounding in his head.

  When the contraption finally hissed and spurted, signaling it was finished filling his cup, he picked up his coffee and downed a handful of Excedrin with his first swallow, hoping they would stay down until the coffee dissolved them.

  Three K-Cups later, he thought he might survive his night of frivolity. He threw off all of his clothes into a pile and stumbled into his bathroom to take a shower and brush the vile tastes out of his mouth, feeling almost, but not quite, human again.

  It was almost noon on Wednesday before Ramsey pulled into his parking space in the lot behind the Institute. He was hungover and in a foul mood, which was his usual demeanor until his first drink in the afternoon.

  He had no more than turned off his ignition key, when one glance at the white sign that designated the space as his parking slot sent him off into a fusillade of cursing. The sign said simply, DR. BURTON RAMSEY. But the sight of it caused him to cry out loud, “That dumb son of a bitch! How many times do I have to tell the cretinous bastard that I am a Ph.D. and not some M-fucking-D doctor! I’m a scientist, not some overpaid prescription peddler!” He was referring to the assistant director who was in charge of housekeeping.

  On several occasions, Burton Ramsey had made it quite clear to the man that he wanted any written material that was either directed to him or about him to bear the legend, BURTON RAMSEY, PH.D., and he was not under any circumstances to be referred to either vocally or in writing as “Doctor” or “Dr.”

  The assistant director had promised him faithfully that he would have the sign changed. But he had been promising that for the better than four years Ramsey had been at BioTech. Ramsey would have torn the sign down long ago, but it was set in concrete. Besides, he intended on seeing the little worm of an administrator do it himself.

  It was well known to anyone who knew Burton Ramsey that he did not like MDs, and that included that part of his estranged wife from whom he was technically separated. He would never tell anyone why he felt that way or how he proposed to support the hypothesis that MDs were a hindrance rather than a help to medicine. His standard answer to any such question was, “It’s none of your business. Understand?”

  Most people seldom bothered to ask, and those who actually knew him hoped the subject never came up in their presence.

  He got out of the car and slammed the door. It was late May, and the air was warm and muggy, typical spring weather in Houston. Ramsey liked to say that Houston had only two seasons: summer and almost summer. Today, Ramsey had on a light-colored linen sports coat that was rumpled and slightly stained. His dark slacks were neat and pressed, because the last time he’d visited his wife she’d done his laundry for him, insisting on ironing his pants and several of his dress shirts.

  Today he was wearing the slacks and one of the clean shirts, though, of course, he wouldn’t wear a tie. He also refused to put on any socks, claiming his scuffed loafers felt more comfortable to his bare feet. He also secretly enjoyed the looks of dismay his attire engendered in the scrubbed, polished, and pressed yuppies he passed in the halls of the lab.

  He gave the sign a malicious look as he passed it, but he didn’t aim a kick at it. That was a losing proposition, even when he didn’t have a hangover—and on this morning, he had one of epic proportions. He’d tried to show the secretaries at Bennigan’s he could outdrink them, an obviously losing proposition as he’d gotten drunker than a skunk.

  After his shower this morning, he’d gone to his tried-and-true hangover remedy of three fingers of vodka, four more Excedrin, half a glass of orange juice, and one raw egg, blended well and drunk straight down. After that, he had found a steak in his freezer, defrosted it in the microwave—a dehumanizing piece of technology that he would ordinarily never use to cook food for himself—and then broiled it in the oven along with some onion and tomato slices. He ate the lot, along with four more eggs and a glass of eggnog sweetened with twelve-year-old scotch.

  While he was eating, his thoughts strayed. He reflected that his estranged wife, Sheila, was a good woman even if she was an MD, and an endocrinologist at that. She wasn’t perfect, but then God had not chosen to create such a thing as a perfect woman. If Sheila had been perfect, she’d have renounced the prescription pad and been content to work the rest of her life as his lab assistant.

  She was one of the few who knew why he hated MDs. And though she found his reasoning a trifle excessive, she’d accepted it, just as she’d accepted many of his ways because she loved him. She’d once told him that, even though they were separated, she had no fear of losing him. “Any other woman except me would very quickly cut your throat after you fell asleep. God knows I’ve been tempted plenty of times.”

  He went through the staff entrance to the lab and strolled down the hall, making it a point to nod or speak to only the service employees of the laboratory, then he pushed open the door to his own space. As he walked in, he could see that his assistant, Dottie, was busy at the sink washing something. It was a good sight. He had little enough to keep the girl busy; he never entrusted her with any of the more secretive details of his work, even though she was working on her master’s in biology at the University of Houston.

  He actually didn’t need an assistant, but she was handy in her own way. Basically, he delighted in forcing through raises for her every six months or so. By the ho
ur, she was probably making more money than he was. It gave him a perverse sort of pleasure to screw the medical establishment and run the lab in any way he could.

  He suddenly sensed that something was amiss. He looked straight toward the cages of rats and saw that one was missing. “Dottie, where in the hell is cage twelve?” he growled.

  She was slow in turning her head. “Sir?”

  His voice rose. “Sir, my fat ass! Where in the hell is that lot twelve, you ninny? That lot I finished with before I left.”

  Dottie’s eyes rolled wildly in their sockets, looking anywhere but at Ramsey.

  “Damn it, look at me! Where is cage twelve?”

  “Uh . . . a friend of yours borrowed it, sir.”

  Ramsey’s eyes narrowed. He knew that was a damn lie. He didn’t have any friends.

  He took a deep breath when he saw tears start to form in Dottie’s eyes. Best to go easy on the lass, he thought, or she’ll have a stroke.

  “That’s okay, Dottie,” he said, forcing his features into the semblance of a smile.

  He took a seat at his desk and opened the drawer to pull out a bottle of Chivas Regal, figuring he was going to need it before he got to the bottom of this.

  He poured two fingers into his coffee cup, took a deep draught, and then he asked, in as reasonable of a voice as he could manage, “Now, why don’t you tell me all about what happened to my rats?”

  CHAPTER 7

  Burton Ramsey only knew two things about Dr. Kaitlyn Williams. The first was that she’d done her residency in neurosurgery, and then, for some inexplicable reason, had opted to give it all up and slog away in laboratory research. He knew not the whys or wherefores, only having picked up as much as he had from overheard conversations in the cafeteria and the administration offices. The second thing he knew was that Williams was a moderately attractive female, even if she was an MD. The net result of his knowledge was enough to cause Ramsey to feel a mild contempt for Williams’s supposed choice of research over doing good as a doctor—and a monumental sense of jealousy that the woman had attained the station of not only an MD but became a neurosurgeon.