Dust to Dust

by James M. Thompson

  As unpleasant as the confrontation had been, the news that the rats had been previously injected with something had been exhilarating. It had answered all of her questions about why the NeurActivase had finally worked. She had barely been able to wait for Ramsey to leave that morning before she’d taken one of the blue rats out and run him through the maze.

  The improvement had continued, and it was clearly obvious that some sort of symbiotic enhancement existed between her serum and Ramsey’s. She had taken one of the precious six test rats and, after killing it in the usual manner, had taken a specimen from the animal’s brain. She had prepared a slide and, with trembling fingers, slid it into the microscope.

  She was prepared to be surprised, but not quite to such an extent. Not only was the specimen tissue packed with neural cells, but they were all healthy and young-looking. The amazing spectacle to her had been how young all of the tissue looked. It simply wasn’t consistent with that age of a rat. To verify her point, she had sacrificed a three-year-old control rat and taken a sample of brain tissue. The two tissue sections were almost comparable except for the much-increased neural cells in the five-year-old. Either the five-year-old rat had been mislabeled, or something was making the animal’s tissues seem younger and healthier, not to mention the improvement in intelligence that accompanied the other changes.

  And that something had to be whatever Ramsey had obviously perfected. Kat had sat back and put her hand to her forehead. Ramsey stood directly in her way, right in her path to greatness, blocking her progress. No, that was not right, she thought. It was not her greatness or her fame that was at stake . . . It was the millions of people who could be helped or cured with such a formula, if only Ramsey would cooperate.

  Now she sat, lost in thought, searching for a way through the Ramsey bulwark. Through the glass partition of her office, her eyes strayed to Kevin, who was still working on the computer. She sat up straighter, an idea beginning to form. Among her other accomplishments, Kat was a computer expert and was as much at home with them as any other equipment she used. It would be, she thought, the perfect way to cut Ramsey out of the picture.

  She couldn’t burglarize Ramsey’s office, but she might be able to break in to his files electronically. She got up, left her office, and went into the small bathroom contained in the lab. She smoothed her hair and then opened her compact and blotted on a little extra makeup. She looked into the mirror and practiced a smile.

  There was a silly young man down in the records room who appeared to her to get the stutters every time she came around. She might just be able to induce him to give her the phone number of the biochemist’s computer and let her take a peek into Ramsey’s personnel file. People habitually used some piece of personal baggage, such as their birth date or their middle name or their wife’s maiden name, as their access code or the password to their computer’s records. With Ramsey, she expected it to be something as unimaginative as his initials.

  If she could get the young man in the records room to let her get some of that sort of information, she had no doubt she could successfully hack Ramsey’s system. The files would probably be in code, but she was willing to bet that it would be a simple code, and cryptography had been one of her hobbies for years.

  The secret of Ramsey’s serum would involve chemistry, and she was no chemist, but she knew a number of people who were, including her lab assistant, Kevin. Ramsey had embarrassed her terribly, sneering at her and forcing her to tell the story of her failure. She expected it was already the gossip of the laboratory, especially after the unceremonious way Ramsey had ushered her out of his office.

  Well, she thought, time would tell just who would be embarrassed last.

  She glanced over at Kevin, still inputting data into the computer. She had to get him out of the office so she could work her wiles on the boy in the office. She glanced down at Angus in his bed next to her desk. Of course . . .

  “Kevin,” she called, motioning him over when he glanced up at her.

  “Yes, Doctor?” he said.

  “I need a huge favor.”

  He got up and walked over to stand in front of her desk. “Yes, ma’am?”

  “I’ve got some work to do down in the front office, and today is Angus’s day to go to the vet for his arthritis shot. Would it be too great of an inconvenience for you to run him over there for me? I’ve noticed he seems a lot more stiff than usual, and I’m afraid he may be in pain.”

  Kevin smiled and shook his head. He cared for Angus almost as much as Kat did. “No, ma’am. I’ll take him right over and see that he gets his shot. We can’t have him hurting, can we?”

  “Thank you, Kevin. Just tell Dr. Washburn to put it on my bill.”

  Kevin grabbed Angus’s leash from the desk and bent over to pick the dog up.

  “Ugh,” he grunted with a smile. “The old boy’s getting kinda heavy, too. I might just ask about putting him on a diet.”

  Kat grinned. “Too many cookies, I guess.”

  At the word cookie, Angus perked up his ears and barked.

  Kevin laughed and patted Angus’s head, then walked out the door.

  As soon as they’d left, Kat got up and followed them out into the hall. She was about to attempt to be charming, and she didn’t know if she remembered how.

  * * *

  Moments after Kat left her office, the door opened and a man entered. He moved directly to the cage where she kept her experimental rats. After observing them for a few minutes, he moved to the computer on her desk and turned it on.

  When it was booted up, he scrolled to the pages devoted to the results of her experiments. “Holy shit,” he exclaimed softly to himself when he saw the maze results she’d recorded for the newly injected rats.

  He quickly took a thumb drive from his pocket and inserted it in the USB slot of the computer, then copied her data onto it, shut the computer down, and left the room.

  CHAPTER 9

  When he left the laboratory, Burton planned to go to a fish market, but a wiser thought prevailed and he headed for Pier One, his favorite seafood restaurant. He was well-known there, and he went back into the kitchen and talked the chef into selling him a gallon of bouillabaisse, a large tossed salad, and two loaves of garlic bread already prepared, so that he could just warm them in the oven.

  Sheila had a large, lush apartment in the Twin Towers complex, a much-desired location that was close to the medical center and convenient to shops, grocery stores, fine restaurants, and theaters. There was, however, a corresponding higher rent to go with all that convenience. When he’d followed her to Houston from Dallas, Ramsey tried staying there with Sheila. However, less than a year after they’d moved into the place, Burton moved out, claiming that a man who only made fifty-six thousand dollars a year could not afford to live in a thirty-five-hundred-dollar-a-month apartment.

  He said, sarcastically, “Maybe a doctor making a quarter of a million dollars writing little words on a prescription pad can, but an honest scientist can’t.”

  Sheila wanted to know what that had to do with it, since their salaries were communal, but he’d answered that he was not a man to be subsidized by a woman, especially a woman bearing the title of MD.

  It had hurt her at first, but then, six months later he’d made some remark about having left, and she’d said innocently, “Oh, you moved out? When was that?”

  The apartment was on the tenth floor of the complex and had a sunken common room that was almost as big as his lab. It was a corner apartment, and the two sides of the combination living room and dining room were almost all glass, giving a sweeping view of the city.

  Since Sheila had picked out the apartment, he made constant references to what all that open glass did to her heating and cooling bills. Of course, he personally liked the feeling of openness that the huge glass walls gave and insisted on keeping the drapes pulled back to, as he said, “Teach you a lesson about the British Thermal Unit.”

  In the kitchen, he transferred
the bouillabaisse from the container they’d given him at the restaurant into one of Sheila’s large copper-bottomed pots. As per the chef’s instructions, he put the pot on the stove and turned it to very low. While the soup heated, he transferred the salad to a wooden bowl, covered it, and put it in the refrigerator. He unwrapped the bread, put it on a cookie sheet, and shoved it in the oven.

  He saw by the kitchen clock that it was a little after six, so he figured he had about another hour before Sheila could fight through the never-ending evening traffic and make her way home. He found two bottles of chardonnay in the wine closet and put them in the refrigerator to chill.

  When that was done, he took several clean pots and pans, along with a few useful-looking utensils, and put them in the sink, sprayed them with liquid soap, and then ran them full of water.

  He stepped back and surveyed his work. From all appearances, it looked as if a neat, careful cook had been at work in the kitchen, cleaning up behind himself as he went. He smiled with great satisfaction. So much for Sheila’s opinion of his neatness and culinary acumen.

  Finally, he gathered up every trace of the packages and containers he’d brought with him from Pier One and consigned them to oblivion down the central garbage chute that was also part of what you got for thirty-five hundred a month, a figure he considered obscene for a place in which she mostly just slept. Why, there had been years when he’d lived on less than that figure for twelve entire months.

  Finally satisfied that all was ready, he mixed himself a drink and settled down to wait for Sheila to get home. She’d play hell making fun of either his cooking or his cleanliness.

  * * *

  When Kevin and Angus got back from their visit to the vet, Kevin had a strange look on his face. When asked about it, he’d ducked his head and said he had to hurry and leave before the traffic got so bad that by the time he got home, it would be time to come back to the office

  Kat thanked him for taking Angus and gave him a peck on the cheek, which made him blush down to the roots of his hair. As he walked out the door, he turned serious again and said that the vet wanted to talk to Kat, but that she’d call her in the morning.

  Kat was puzzled, but as soon as she got Angus settled in his bed, she got back to the chase for Ramsey’s computer files. She’d been trying, without success, for two hours to access Ramsey’s computer and was getting frustrated.

  She had easily gotten the phone number of Ramsey’s computer and enough personal information from Ramsey’s personnel file to access a dozen computers. The young man in Personnel had been a pushover. The most difficulty she’d experienced with him had been disengaging herself from his presence by promising to go for a drink with him someday before hastening back to her laboratory.

  Finally, she was just about to give up and admit defeat. Some of the passwords she’d tried had elicited responses from Ramsey’s computer such as “SORRY, WRONG NUMBER,” or “WASHING MY HAIR,” or “OUT WITH STING,“ whatever that meant.

  Mostly, she’d just gotten a blank response and a blinking screen that meant nothing was happening between the two machines. She had written down a list of at least fifty possible passwords, and she began to slowly and patiently try them again, using every conceivable combination of the information she could think of.

  * * *

  It was about ten o’clock and they had finished dinner and were sitting on the couch before the window that led out onto the terrace. At least Sheila was on the couch. Burton was sitting on the floor at her feet, leaning back against her legs—one of his favorite positions, especially after a few glasses of Chivas had mellowed him out enough to forget that she was a dreaded MD.

  She was holding a glass of white wine in one hand and teasing his hair with the other. “Burton, I think you should take up a new occupation,” she said out of the blue.

  He half-looked around. “Yeah?”

  “Yes. That bouillabaisse is every bit as good as they have at Pier One. In fact, it tasted remarkably like what we had there just last week.”

  He looked a little uncomfortable and covered his discomfort by taking a large sip of his Chivas before answering, “Bouillabaisse is bouillabaisse. It all tastes alike. I told you, it’s nothing but fish soup. It’s child’s play.”

  Above his head, she smiled slightly. She had changed when she’d gotten home from the business-cut suits she wore at work to a loose, colorful silk lounging gown. Sheila Goodman was five years younger than Burton Ramsey, but in some ways, she felt very motherly toward him. She had loved him almost as soon as she’d penetrated the supposedly angry, swaggering, defiant personae he presented to the world and had seen the sensitive, good-humored, and dedicated man within. She figured she was the only person in the world he’d let see that deep inside him.

  Sheila had blondish hair, and her face was more pleasant than pretty. She was small, almost too small for Burton’s massive size, but she had a trim figure and prominent breasts and the kind of metabolism that didn’t run to fat. At times, Burton called her “Sheena of the Jungle,” because as calm and reserved as she appeared in public and in her business life, she underwent a wonderful loss of inhibition in bed.

  She was a warm, caring, forgiving person, and Burton Ramsey would have loved her if she’d been fat and ugly. He’d once told her so, but quickly, before there was any chance it might sound like he was paying her a compliment, he’d said, “But that doesn’t mean I want you to go all the way on this thing. You’ve nearly got the ugly down pat. No use adding fat to it.”

  But he hadn’t fooled her. She’d just smiled secretly to herself. She was secure with Burton, but she did wish he’d grow up a little faster.

  “No, I mean it. I think you should apply to Pier One as a consulting chef,” she repeated.

  He turned around and looked her full in the face, suspicious that she hadn’t fallen for his little trick. “What’s the matter with you? By God, this time you can’t possibly claim I left a mess. I did everything but put the big stuff in the dishwasher, and I would have done that if I’d known how.”

  “Oh no. It was fine.” She took a sip of wine. “In fact, some of the pots and pans looked like they hadn’t even been used.”

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Why, nothing, dear, except that you must have done such a good job of scrubbing them out.”

  He squinted his eyes and scowled at her. “I smell some sort of crack coming. Some snide remark.”

  “Oh no, dear.”

  He gave her another hard look. “A fine state of affairs this is. A man fixes his wife dinner after he’s worked hard all day, and his thanks is some sort of smirking attitude. A wife, by the way, who won’t even take her husband’s last name.”

  She sighed. “Now, Burton, you are going to keep telling that story until you begin to believe it. It was you who requested I go back to my maiden name. If I remember, you said you did not want your vaunted name attached to an MD. I did it reluctantly and only after you threw one of those fits you ought to have patented. Besides, I’ve never even had it legally changed.”

  “You really mind, don’t you? Tell you to do something and you do it halfway.”

  “I keep expecting you to come to your senses one of these days. Burton, you’ve been keeping up this MD nonsense so long it’s become a habit. People think you’re strange enough as it is. I know you were hurt, and I know how much you wanted to go to medical school. But if you continue with this fetish—”

  “Fetish!” He turned around and glared at her. “Damn it, Sheila, don’t call such a strong passion of mine a ‘fetish.’ ”

  “I was an MD when you married me.”

  “You’re different.”

  “Burton, you don’t feel that way anymore, and you know it. And for God’s sake, get rid of the silly, personalized license plate. That’s disgusting and undignified.”

  “FUMD?”

  “Yes.”

  He smiled slyly. “Nobody knows what that means.”

/>   “Oh right! Nobody under the age often. Especially around a medical center.”

  “Listen, my girl, I’m about to get rich, and then we’ll see just how often you climb up on your high horse of acceptable social beha—”

  “ ‘High horse’! When is anyone allowed to climb up on any kind of horse around you? Even a pony. If they try, you just take that big baseball bat of a tongue of yours and knock them off. Or wave one of those big bully fists around.”

  “Speaking of bullies . . . do you know Kaitlyn Williams, ex-neurosurgeon, presently at BioTech pretending to be a researcher?”

  “I’ve heard of her. Hers is a big name in medical circles. At least her family’s name is.” She looked at Burton and narrowed her eyes. “For God’s sake, don’t tell me you’ve managed to have a run-in with her? Burton, from what I hear, she’s shy and gentle and wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  He told her the whole story, beginning with Williams’s visit to his lab on Saturday morning to take a dozen of his rats, and ending with the final episode, in which he’d forced Williams to recount her disgrace.

  “Well, I can’t say she acted very professional, but you didn’t have to treat her like that. Damn it, Burton, why do you persist in acting so in opposition to your true character? Do you take some sort of perverse pleasure from it?”

  He scrunched up his shoulders as she rubbed his neck. “I used to think I hated that silly bitch. That smug, silver-spoon-in-the-mouth bitch. I’d pass her in the hall and she would drop her eyes, like she didn’t want to look at someone as lowly as I.”

  Sheila shook him a little. “Why do you call her a ‘silver-spoon-in-the-mouth bitch’?”

  He shrugged against her hands on his shoulders. “Well, you said her family was very prominent in medical circles, and they obviously paid her way through medical school . . .”

  “Oh no, you’ve got it all wrong, Burton. Her dad was a general practitioner and her mom was an internist. Back in the day, they opened a clinic in the Fifth Ward in Houston—probably the worst and most dangerous area of the city at that time. They treated everyone who came through their doors, regardless of ability to pay. They even lived above their clinic in a two-room apartment. Their memory is so revered because of what they did, not because they were wealthy or from the high society.”