Dust to Dust

by James M. Thompson

  As he walked down the hall toward Williams’s office, he was doing his best to work up a good sense of anger, but it just wouldn’t come. He was too pleased. He had an MD, albeit a fairly innocuous MD as MDs went, in his sights. She was caught dead to rights, and he intended to enjoy every moment of it. Williams only thought she had been kidded before!

  He opened the door to Williams’s laboratory, not bothering with the formality of knocking. As he entered, he immediately saw that Williams was at the far end of the lab, at a workbench bending over a microscope. A young man in a lab coat was at the rat cages. He turned immediately as Ramsey entered, his eyes moving up and down and focusing for a moment on Ramsey’s sockless shoes.

  The young assistant’s eyebrows knit together in an unconscious frown. “Can I help you, sir?”

  Ramsey ignored him and kept walking toward Williams. “Hey, Doc!” Ramsey said loudly.

  Kat turned her head slowly, looking annoyed about being interrupted, as if she couldn’t imagine anyone coming into her laboratory uninvited. Then she saw that it was Ramsey and her heart sank. She stood up and turned to face the scientist, her face burning.

  Kat wanted to flinch back, but she forced herself to look past Ramsey. “Kevin, would you be so kind as to take Angus for a walk in the park?”

  Kevin looked from her to Ramsey, his eyebrows raised. “Are you sure, Dr. Williams?” he asked, a frown on his face. He didn’t trust this guy to be alone with Kat, especially not with the wild look the man had in his eyes. In fact, Kevin thought he ought to just kick his ass.

  “Yes, please, Kevin. Dr. Ramsey and I have something to discuss that is better left just between us.”

  Kevin just shook his head as he went to pick up Angus and carry him out the door of the lab. He’d be damned if he’d ever understand women.

  Ramsey couldn’t believe the doctor was being so pleasant to her assistant. You’d never catch him saying “please” to anyone who worked for him.

  “Doc,” he said in an avuncular tone, “down in Texas, where I come from, we call it ‘rustling’ when some other cowpoke makes off with our livestock.” He put his hands on his hips. “Now, I don’t know what y’all call it up there in Yankee-land where you trained, but I’ll bet Captain Sunshine won’t take kindly to the rats BioTech paid for being shuffled all over the goddamn building.”

  Kat’s face flamed red again and she had just the slightest quiver in her voice. “I didn’t ‘steal’ your rats. I merely ‘borrowed’ them. For some reason, my consignment was held up last week, and I didn’t discover it until the weekend, when it was too late to order any more. I’ve been intending to send my assistant down to your lab with a dozen rats for the last couple of days. It’s just that I’ve been so—”

  Ramsey grinned at Williams’s obvious discomfort, then interrupted. “Listen, Doctor, I don’t want your rats. I want the rats you took from my laboratory.” He looked over his shoulder to see whether anyone else was listening. “Truth of the matter is that those were my test animals, and I’m close to the end of my project. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to those particular rats.“

  Kat licked her lips with a quick flick of her tongue. She was starting to sweat, to feel faint, and to feel real fear for the first time in her life. The implications of what Ramsey had just said hadn’t quite sunk in yet, but she knew she could not give six of the rats back to Ramsey, the six that she’d injected with her serum. They had become the most precious possessions in her life.

  Now she cursed herself for being so forgetful and excited and involved in her project that she’d forgotten to have Kevin get twelve other rats and put them in Ramsey’s cage and have them returned to Ramsey’s lab. If she had, then perhaps none of this would be happening. But one thing was for sure, she was not going to give those rats back to Ramsey or anyone else. Not for anything.

  She thought furiously and suddenly the lie came easily. “I can’t give you your rats back. They . . . they died.”

  “What?” Ramsey said incredulously. “What do you mean, they died?”

  Kat blinked rapidly. “My lab assistant made a mistake. He got a step out of phase in an experiment I’ve been working on. That’s why I sent him away just now.... I didn’t want him to be embarrassed.”

  Ramsey looked at her in amazement. “Well, I always said MDs were lousy researchers, but I had no idea you couldn’t even keep your rats alive.” He shook his head, “Of course, on the other hand, better you should kill rats than people.”

  He looked over at Williams with eyebrows arched and lips curled into a sneer. “That have anything to do with why you gave up neurosurgery?”

  Kat had backed up against her workbench. Her mind was racing, and she barely heard what Ramsey was saying as she tried to figure some way out of the mess she had gotten herself into. She straightened up and started to move away from the workbench. “Look, Ramsey, I was wrong to take your rats. I’m sorry. I apologize . . .” Suddenly she remembered what Ramsey had said about the rats being test animals. Her head began whirling with this news from Ramsey—that the rats she’d used had been injected with Ramsey’s formula. Kat held up her hand. “Wait! Dr. Ramsey, wait a minute!”

  Startled by Williams’s sudden transformation, Ramsey stared back at her. “Wait for what, Doctor?”

  “What were they injected with? Please!” She took two steps toward Ramsey, who was already moving toward the door.

  Ramsey frowned at the question, then turned and pulled the door open as he started to leave. He looked back over his shoulder. “What were they injected with? Doc, stealing my rats is one thing, but don’t even think about stealing my discovery. What were they injected with, indeed!“ Then he passed out into the hall and shut the door behind him.

  In the lab, Kat was staring after him, her mind racing, trying to comprehend all of the possibilities of what she had just learned. Though she had consistently displayed a lack of interest in anything to do with her colleagues at the lab, she couldn’t help but know that Burton Ramsey, in spite of his personality, his lackadaisical ways, and his too-casual attire, was one of the most respected researchers in the field of blood chemistry in the country.

  In fact, it was only because of that very talent and brilliance that Burton Ramsey was able to keep on working at leading laboratories in spite of the fact that the administrators, especially the medical administrators, hated the image he portrayed.

  The knowledge made Dr. Kaitlyn Williams almost insane to know what Ramsey had injected the rats with. Because, whatever it was, it was most certainly going to change Kat’s life, and it might just change the lives of a great many other people, as well. She was going to have to somehow discover what Ramsey was working on, though she had no doubt that it might be so difficult as to be almost impossible. Researchers were more likely to give away their firstborn children than to give up the secrets of their research.

  * * *

  For his part, Dr. Burton Ramsey was well pleased with his morning’s work. He was still whistling cheerfully as he turned into his lab. Dottie looked up from cleaning out a cage. There was a touch of fear in her eyes. Dr. Ramsey might seem happy, but that could change with just one wrong word. “Is everything all right, Dr. Ramsey?”

  Burton Ramsey went to his workbench and perched on a stool. “Couldn’t be better, Dottie, my girl. Been enjoying my favorite recreation, stomping a worm.”

  “Dr. Williams?”

  “Seen any other worms around here, girl?”

  “Is she going to return your rats?”

  Ramsey picked up a piece of paper and looked at it. “Woman says they died. In her care, I wouldn’t be surprised. She could kill an acre of green onions just with her delicate perfume.” He suddenly laughed. “Dottie, I was very mean to Dr. Williams. Of course, Dr. Williams most assuredly deserved it.”

  “I take it those were new animals and that it didn’t matter that she took them.”

  He looked at her and shook his head. “No, they were test animals. A late
experiment.”

  She had a little hurt in her voice. “Well, Dr. Ramsey, if you’d ever tell me your system, I would know control from test animals and I could have stopped her.”

  Ramsey yawned. “Doesn’t matter anymore, Dottie. Go down and get yourself a cup of coffee and bring me back a glass of ice water.” He shook his head and grinned at himself when he had to stop himself from adding “please.” Too much time around that damn Dr. Williams, he guessed.

  He reached down, opened the drawer, and took out his bottle of Chivas Regal. “I think I’ve earned a little drink. I tell you, Dottie, this business of bearding rich females in their own dens is dangerous. Frightening. Scary. What that woman has could be infectious, and don’t you forget it. Don’t ever let her cough on you, Dottie. God knows what you’d catch.”

  She blushed. “Do you want anything else from the cafeteria, Dr. Ramsey?” She eyed the bottle of scotch, “Something to eat, maybe?”

  He shook his head. “No, just something to dilute this vile whiskey with. Wouldn’t want it to get around that I was a hard drinker. Soon as you do that, Dottie, you can take the rest of the day off.”

  She looked disappointed. When Dr. Ramsey was in a good mood, he could be a great deal of fun to be around, though she didn’t understand half of his brand of humor. “Don’t you have some notes you want programmed into the computer?”

  “No, not today. I’ve got a hangover that is demanding most of my attention, so you won’t be allowed to play with your electronic brain today.” He said the last dryly, because he not only did not know how to operate a computer, he resolutely refused to have anything to do with what he called “man’s last friend.“

  As a result, Dottie did all his computer work, which, basically, was about all the work he had for her to do. She programmed from notes that he gave her, about three-fourths of which were either bogus or misleading.

  Burton Ramsey had always been known as a daring and innovative researcher, but he had surprised even himself with the breakthroughs he had made in his own private research. He already held several minor patents in blood chemistry procedures and formulations, and his present work would neatly dovetail into that, allowing him to claim that his discovery of the antiaging serum was simply the result of old work completed before his arrival at BioTech and, therefore, belonged to him alone.

  So he let Dottie feed her “electronic toy” useless information so the progress committee could access it and act like they knew what they were seeing. His data sounded good and looked good, and it might even improve dialysis machines and allow patients to go longer between treatments, but he intended to put dialysis machines out of business. The only question in his mind was who was going to pay him a hell of a lot of money for what he knew.

  His contract with the lab was up in one month, and he’d already notified the directors that he had no intentions of renewing. He’d talked mysteriously of doing some humanitarian work in Mexico or maybe taking off a few years and sailing around the world. He said he was tired of seeing his genius go unrewarded by an ungrateful populace. He tried not to smile when he said such things.

  Dottie brought him his ice water, and he drank off half and then refilled the glass with the twelve-year-old scotch.

  “Well, if those rats were test animals, aren’t you very upset with Dr. Williams?”

  He took a sip of his scotch and looked gravely at the girl. “Dottie, I’ll let you be the judge. Should I call her out on the matter? Call her out and shoot her down like the dirty dog she is?”

  Dottie was never quite sure when he was kidding and when he wasn’t. She thought that Dr. Burton Ramsey was easily the strangest man she’d ever met. She’d been astounded to find out he didn’t like computers. She couldn’t imagine anyone in this day and age who not only didn’t appreciate computers, but who thought them absolutely unnecessary.

  When she’d asked him why he hated computers, he’d said, “Because they have no soul, Dottie, no soul. They are not man’s servant; they are his crutch for the real computer that God gave him.” He’d tapped his head. “Think about that . . . in fact, think about anything—just think. You’ll be amazed at the results.”

  He wasn’t really upset about the test animals Williams had taken, because their injection had been redundant. His final breakthrough, a way to bind his formula to the blood’s normal proteins so that it worked indefinitely and never needed to be reinjected, had come some months previously.

  Since then, he’d merely been marking time while waiting for his contract to run out. He’d used the time to establish ties with Dr. Garza in Monterrey, where he planned to claim a great deal of his earlier work had been done, under the protection of the less-stringent Mexican patent laws.

  As any tenth-grade science student knew, the blood system was the garbage collector of the body. All of the body’s cells gave off waste products as natural by-products of their functioning. These by-products were toxins, and most scientists believed that it was a buildup of these toxins over time that caused the body to age. It had been theorized that if these toxins could be eliminated, it would drastically slow down the aging process. But, as it happened, the bloodstream was a great garbage collector, but it was less adept at destroying the toxins it had collected. That was the function of the kidneys, which were not 100 percent efficient at their best and they tended to get less efficient with age.

  Over time, the small percentage of toxins not destroyed by the kidneys were deposited in other areas of the body, causing the debilitating effects known as aging. Basically that was the purpose of a dialysis machine, to assist or replace the kidneys by filtering out the toxins and waste from the bloodstream. Unfortunately, the effect was only temporary and the toxins built back up almost as quickly as they were removed.

  That was what made Dr. Burton Ramsey’s discovery so valuable. It went to work instantly and kept on working. Furthermore, it worked directly in the bloodstream and was independent of the functioning of the kidneys. His research had astounded even him, and he was a hard man to astound. He was certain that he was seeing signs in some of his research animals that his serum was not only stopping but actually reversing the aging process.

  He wished he had the time and the inclination to pursue the matter through the years of research it would entail to try to get the serum to work on the brain, but he knew he couldn’t hide the basic discovery that long. What he had right in his own private packet of notes was going to make him rich, and that was good enough for him.

  The progress committee could look at his computer data all they wanted to. The real stuff was in a blue spiral notebook that was starting to get a little frayed and dog-eared from constant use. Well, someday he’d have it bound in gold.

  Dottie didn’t want to go, but he finally insisted she leave. He’d told her to go out and get laid, that watching rats all day was a poor way for an attractive girl to spend her days.

  She’d said, with a sigh, “I guess I could go home and study. I can always study.”

  “Hell of an attitude. I used to have that very same attitude.”

  “What happened to it?”

  He drained the last of the scotch out of his glass. “I left school and entered the real world. In the real world, you don’t dare duck your head long enough to study. Some son of a bitch will stab you in the back.” He got up off the stool and ran a little water over the ice remaining in his glass before sweetening it with more scotch.

  Dottie hung up her smock. “Well, if there’s nothing else?”

  He shook his head. “Take off.”

  An hour later, he was still sitting on the workbench stool drinking scotch. It was always a source of amazement to him that Dottie had never figured out his system for separating his test animals from his control rats. And she’d seen him at work thousands of times and never made the connection. The control animals went in the odd-numbered cages, the test rats in the even ones. That, he thought, was what came of depending on computers. You quit observing; you quit thi
nking.

  He heard the crowd in the hall hurrying to the cafeteria for lunch. He decided he wasn’t hungry, but if he thought there was a chance to blow some more smoke in Dr. Williams’s face, he could be induced to put in an appearance.

  He had another drink of scotch and was just thinking of leaving when there came a knock on his door. “Come in.” He was proud that he slurred his words only a little.

  Most likely it was some flitter tit from administration down to take his pulse. He knew it wasn’t a friend because he didn’t have any, and Sheila never knocked so it wasn’t her. The door didn’t move, so he called louder, “Come in, goddamnit, if you’re going to.”

  The door opened and Kaitlyn Williams stood there, wringing her hands.

  Ramsey just stared, dumbfounded. He cocked his head and shook it as if to clear his vision, then looked into his glass as if the answer might lie there.

  Kat cleared her throat. “I want to see you, Dr. Ramsey.”

  Ramsey was almost genial. “Have you come to apologize for murdering my rats, Doctor?” He took another drink of his scotch. “If you have, you’re wasting your time. I really wasn’t emotionally attached to the little bastards—it just pissed me off that you took them without bothering to ask my permission first.”

  Kat held up her hand. “Look, Burton, I honestly meant to replace the rats, and I had no way of knowing they were experimental rats. Dottie and I thought they were control animals.”

  Ramsey leaned forward and stared. “Surely you jest. The point is, you took them without permission, not that they were experimental animals. Why didn’t you just ask me if you needed them so bad?”

  Kat entered the room as if she were walking on eggshells. “Because it was the weekend and you were out of town. I didn’t want to have to put off my experiment for two days until you got back.”

  Ramsey looked at his freshly empty glass, and mumbled, “Yeah, I was out of town, all right.” Then he looked up at Williams with a sly look in his eye. “But what was so all-fired important about your experiment that it couldn’t wait a couple of days? You on to something big, Williams?”