Patient gravida, she wrote, left study 7-8-83.
She wondered briefly what “gravida” meant. She seemed to be writing that word a lot lately.
21.
Write “See Supplement B” alongside product heading. Delete the first paragraph of the WARNINGS section and replace with the following:
Warning: The prolonged administration of Simulene often leads to the development of a positive antinuclear antibody (ANA) test. If a positive ANA titer develops, the benefit/risk ratio related to continued Simulene therapy should be assessed.
22.
There was a liquid sadness in Angel Hernandez’s eyes. Filomena looked down at her little feet with their bright red toenails. She was withdrawn again. Recently, during her monthly examinations, she had been livelier, more conversational, and Winkelstein had noticed she’d been losing weight steadily and picking up body and skin tone as if she were exercising regularly.
“I’m afraid I’ve bad news,” Winkelstein said. He spoke to the husband; he was the only one who seemed to be taking an interest. “Mrs. Hernandez is pregnant. Five, six weeks.”
“Doc,” he said. “How can that happen?”
The usual way, of course, Winkelstein thought, but didn’t say it. Things were going sadly awry with the Tynadette patients and The Baum Company study groups. Of the eighteen women who overlapped in the two studies, Mrs. Hernandez was the seventh to have become pregnant. In each case, menopause had been well advanced, and pregnancy was not to be suspected.
Which of the drugs was causing it? Winkelstein wondered. Now he didn’t have his twenty-five usable case studies for either drug. He was seriously considering cutting his losses and withdrawing from both programs.
“Any treatment Mrs. Hernandez requires will continue to be without charge, Mr. Hernandez,” Winkelstein said. “I think it would be best if we can arrange an abortion sometime soon.”
“Dr. Winkelstein, we’re Catholics,” said Filomena Hernandez. It was the first time she’d spoken; the hoarse wail was forced up from deep inside her. Winkelstein steepled his fingertips and spoke quickly.
“Mrs. Hernandez is over fifty,” he said. “She’s overweight, and her last pregnancies had complications. I think it could be dangerous for her to bring a pregnancy to term, and in the case of danger to the mother, the church will sanction the termination of the pregnancy. I can give you the name of a priest who will speak to you about it, if you like. I don’t think the church will give us any objections.”
As long, Winkelstein thought, as she talks to a priest from my neighborhood. Bigoted old priests who got stuck in poor parishes might well be another matter. In these things, as in everything else, much depended on whom you knew.
There was no hope in Angel Hernandez’s solemn eyes; he had clearly resigned himself to Winkelstein, the church, and fate. “Do what you can, Doc,” he said.
23.
Jeanie McGovern pulled on her cigarette and frowned at the collection of Form 1639 Drug Experimental Reports filed by Dr. Winkelstein. They were badly typed and featured a lot of correction fluid, but their impact was clear. Of the thirty women in the Tynadette study, all of whom had confirmed menopause, seven had become pregnant. There was something strange going on here; she’d been working on and off for Trilling for some time now, and there’d never been a case like this before. There was something about it she couldn’t put her finger on.
She picked up the telephone and buzzed Trilling’s number. He was a long time picking up.
“I’ve been reviewing the Tynadette file,” she said. “I think I’ve found something strange.” His pause before acknowledging was a long one, and she used the time to stub out her cigarette.
“Yes,” he said finally. There was a halfhearted question in his tone.
“Seven women out of thirty have become pregnant,” Jeanie said. “After using a drug supposed to relieve vaginal atrophy following menopause.”
There was another thoughtful pause. “I suppose I’d better see the profiles,” he said.
She gathered the forms from her desk, put them back in the folder, and entered his office. Trilling was staring with an uninterested expression at the office building opposite his window. Outside, the forty-story glass cube across the street was reflecting the frantic lights of a blocked fire engine. There was no sound: high in the Tempel Building, they were insulated from the siren.
“Do you suppose,” Jeanie said, “that Tynadette could be used as a fertility drug?”
Trilling pursed his lip, his eyes never wavering from the window. “Tempel has fertility drugs already,” he said. The red reflection slowly flashed away, the traffic flow suddenly unclogged. “I don’t understand this. I suppose I should call Winkelstein and see if he had them on any other kind of medication. Maybe he misinterpreted the profile.”
“I should think,” Jeanie said, “that Tempel would want to discover the cause of this. Something that makes menopausal women fertile could be useful. This might help a new line of research.”
Trilling gave her an irritated glance. “What this is is a pain,” he said suddenly. He straightened in his chair and reached for the telephone. “What it is is a messed-up study and letters from the FDA and great big WARNING boxes in the PDR.” And having unpleasant conversations that interfere with a man’s optimism, he almost added.
“Let me know what you find out,” Jeanie said. “I’m interested.”
Trilling gave a savage nod, and she knew she was dismissed. She wanted to ask him to discover how many of the other women in the study were suddenly fertile, but he gave her another annoyed look as he began flipping through his Rolodex. He had put on a doctor-knows-best face, and she knew it wasn’t the time.
Later, she thought. It would give her time to think about it, and the papers would cross her desk anyway.
24.
Should it become necessary to terminate the project prior to completion, the following financial arrangement is hereby agreed upon: Investigator receives payment pro-rated according to completed case reports:
$1,200 for each completed evaluable case.
$300 for each completed nonevaluable.
25.
Jeanie had taken class, and the whirlpool and sauna at a health club afterward—one of her friends had given her a guest pass—had left her with a pleasant, warm feeling oozing over her limbs. She hadn’t met any hustlers or crazy people on the way home, and that was cause for celebration, too. She thought it would be nice to crawl into bed and drink a few margaritas while reading the new Crumley; but she couldn’t afford margarita fixings and so decided to settle for killing half the bottle of California red that was sitting in the refrigerator.
She unlocked her apartment building street door and saw, slumped in the doorway, the present girlfriend of Joe Voss, the Vidiot who lived upstairs. Her name, Jeanie thought, was Angela. She looked up at Jeanie. “The club where I dance fired me ‘cause I got all skinned up in a fight. And now he’s thrown me out.” She pointed with her bruised chin upstairs. “He’s taking back his wife ‘cause she got her old job back. Well, maybe she’ll get beat up again and I can come back.”
Well. One pleasant, dreamy mood smashed to hell. Jeanie made some consoling remarks about men in general and then climbed the two flights of stairs to get to her apartment. She opened the three locks on her door, pushed it open, and saw a ruin.
Part of the ceiling had caved in, and something vast and white had fallen onto her bathtub and broken the welds that held it together, shattering it. There was foul-smelling water all over the place, and her belongings, including a lot of books she had piled up on the floor, were slowly soaking the stuff up.
Anger blew through her like Krakatau saying hello to the record books. She leaped across her small kitchen to the refrigerator, behind which she’d hidden her gun, and reached back to seize the weapon. She didn’t wear the holster in the summertime, or to class ever; and she had been afraid the gun would have been stolen. It was her only remaining valuab
le possession.
Then, still shaking with fury, she surveyed the damage. The damned rotten ceiling had collapsed, dropping the bathtub that belonged to the junkie upstairs onto her own. Fortunately the bathtub, like hers, was not directly connected to any plumbing except the drain, which had torn out, dripping some awful slime down her walls. No heavy water damage, anyway.
Rotten floors made rotten ceilings, and it all made for a rotten life. The hell with this city, anyway. But what was making that awful smell? She moved closer to the bathtub and peered inside it. Three skulls, still dripping flesh and hair, grinned back at her.
There was the sound of a footstep behind her, and she turned and fired.
The skinny junkie from upstairs had just come out of her bathroom, where he’d evidently been washing another skull. He looked dazed, hardly able to keep his eyes open. He carried the dripping skull in his hand.
Screaming, Jeanie unzipped him with four neatly spaced shots between larynx and sternum. In the sudden silence broken only by the sound of her brass rolling on the floor, Jeanie thought with surprising clarity. She’d tell the police that he had stolen her gun, that he’d threatened her with it and grabbed for her, and she’d wrestled the gun away from him and fired. He sure as hell would have grabbed her sooner or later, anyway.
She went to the phone, dialed 911, and told the cops to come. There were a dozen neighbors clustered in her doorway, including Joe Voss and his once and future lover, both staring at the mess with dull junkie eyes. Jeanie tried and failed to chase them away. That was a comforting thing about poor neighborhoods, she thought: everything was everyone else’s business. In a newly gentrified neighborhood, her fellow tenants would probably have made sure their doors were locked and then put pillows over their ears.
She went into her bedroom alcove and lay down, drawing up her booted feet on the bed, and waited. She wondered what a ranch girl from Montana was doing in this crazy place anyway, and she thought hard about the long valleys filled with sagebrush scrub and the timbered highlands that gave a view of the wine-dark Rockies all far away. Tears stung her eyes. Damn, she thought, how can people live like this?
The first cop stepped into the apartment, treading cautiously as if walking on ice. She looked up from her pillow and answered her own question. “Gotta dance,” she said. The policeman gave no indication he thought her remark was odd.
26.
It took a couple of days for Trilling to get used to the idea of a killer working in his office. He’d seen Bennie toes-up on the eleven o’clock news, with a bloody sheet over him, all in mute hideous color, and a morbid closeup of a cardboard box full of skulls. The tabloids had been featuring vast headlines, all screaming adjectives, about the East Side Addict Grave Robber, and Trilling had been forced to stare at them as they were upheld by other passengers on the long commute to Hempstead. It was all nightmarish.
Jeanie had been out for several days following the incident, though, and by the time she got back, Trilling had got used to the idea. He took some Pandrocene for a kind of calm gravity and ordered an extravagant bouquet of flowers for her desk. He wanted to be on hand when she arrived. She seemed a little pale, and he gave her a paternal hug.
“I’d rather not talk about it,” she said.
He nodded. “Of course you don’t,” he said. He began fumbling in his pocket for one of his pill bottles. Perhaps she’d like a capsule or two.
Jeanie looked at her desk and saw the flowers. “Oh,” she said. “They’re pretty, aren’t they?”
Trilling nodded and tried to smile in an encouraging way. “Thank you,” said Jeanie, and sat down at her desk.
Well, Trilling thought. Things back to normal so quickly. Repressing the impulse to dust off his hands, he gave everyone in the office a sunny smile and returned to his desk.
Jeanie went straight to work, trying to ignore the solemn, inadvertent, stares of her fellow workers as they walked past her alcove. She really didn’t want to talk about it. It seemed that talk was all she’d done for days.
She’d spent the first night in jail, until her phone calls had got through to a lawyer she had once worked for. He’d come down and got her out, but that wasn’t the end of it.
There was a very good chance she’d end up charged with murder. She had listened in amazement as her lawyer explained the facts.
“You were supposed to find out his intentions, Jeanie,” he’d said. “You were supposed to ask him what he was doing in your apartment. If he was there to rob you, you should have let him. If he was there to rape you, you were justified in holding him at gunpoint or subduing him, but never shooting to kill. Only if he had expressed his intention to murder you were you justified in killing him. And even then the precedents aren’t unanimous.”
“But he had a gun,” Jeanie had told him. “And a skull.”
“Doesn’t make any difference,” the attorney said. “You’ve been watching too many Charles Bronson movies. Bronson never gets booked for murder, but that’s just Hollywood. Here in reality, things are different.”
And so the police investigation was continuing. Her friends and the personnel at the gun club were being interviewed by detectives. Even if no charges were eventually laid—and that was up to the district attorney, not the cops—there would be depositions to be given and appearances to be made, and for all of that she’d need a lawyer who was charging her five hundred an hour. Reporters from the tabloids were staking out her apartment in hopes she’d let something slip, and on top of everything, someone had broken into her apartment when she was in jail and cleaned everything out.
Even if she wanted to leave the city, she couldn’t: the police had told her to stay in their jurisdiction, and besides, she couldn’t afford to move. She’d had to return to Tempel, if only to pay her bills.
How can people live this way? she thought.
Late the next day, Jeanie was on the Dictaphone and realized that the letter she was typing canceled the Tynadette study. She took her foot off the pedal, pulled off her earphones, and lit a cigarette, trying to understand what was gnawing at her mind. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t come.
Hell, she decided. I’ve got my own problems.
She put her foot down on the pedal and began to type.
27.
Kimberlee Winkelstein typed her father’s name and office address across the Tempel Request for Check form. Program terminated, she typed, 9-12-84. She had to go to the correction fluid and retype the correct year. She’d had a little too much vodka during the break.
It was the second program termination in a week. The first had been The Baum Company study. Her father had been upset about it, but he’d now received approval to test new medications for both companies, different medications that were supposed to do the same thing without the side effects that had snarled up the programs. So he’d get his money anyway.
She’d forgotten her Walkman today, and glanced up in annoyance at the sounds of the children jumping up and down on the waiting room seats. Old people and young mothers and children, all sick with something. She wished she could cover up the noise with her bootleg cassette of the Headlickers. They were beginning to replace the Vidiots in her affections.
28.
PARANOID DISORDERS (Definitions for basis of treatment):
1. Paranoia
2. Shared paranoia (folie à deux)
3. Acute paranoid disorder
4. Atypical paranoid disorder
29.
Angel Hernandez sipped on his fourth beer of the afternoon and watched the television without interest as it showed an Argentine soap opera. Filomena moved slowly about the living room, picking up the children’s toys. Since the abortion she’d been a lot less lively, and in the past few days, she’d been complaining that her arthritis was coming back. She came to the sports section of yesterday’s Post and held it up mutely.
“I picked my horses,” he said. “You can throw it away. How about a kiss?”
She gave a faint smile
and bent over him for a peck. She seemed out of breath with the exertion, and in the instant before she straightened, he noticed sadly that her hair was coming in white again.
JAMES TIPTREE, JR.
The Only Neat Thing To Do
By now, probably everyone knows that the mysterious figure, James Tiptree, Jr.—for many years isolate and closemouthed enough to qualify as the B. Traven of science fiction—is really a pseudonym of Dr. Alice Sheldon, a semiretired experimental psychologist who also writes under the name Raccoona Sheldon. As Tiptree, Dr. Sheldon won two Nebulas and two Hugo awards (she also won a Nebula Award as Raccoona Sheldon) and established a reputation as one of the very best short story writers in SF. She has published seven books as Tiptree: the collections Ten Thousand Light Years From Home, Warmworlds and Otherwise, Star Songs of an Old Primate, and Out of the Everywhere, and a novel Up the Walls of the World. Her most recent books are Brightness Falls From the Air, a new novel, and Byte Beautiful, a new collection. Upcoming are two new collections, Tales of the Quintana Roo, from Arkham House, and The Starry Rift, from Tor.
In the exciting, bittersweet story that follows, she takes us adventuring in deep space with a reckless young girl who runs into a bit more adventure than even she had bargained for …
THE ONLY NEAT THING TO DO
James Tiptree, Jr.
Heroes of space! Explorers of the starfields!
Reader, here is your problem:
Given one kid, yellow-head, snub-nose-freckles, green-eyes-that-stare-at-you-level, rich-brat, girl-type, fifteen-year-old. And all she’s dreamed of, since she was old enough to push a hologram button, are heroes of the First Contacts, explorers of far stars, the great names of Humanity’s budding Star Age. She can name you the crew of every Discovery Mission; she can sketch you a pretty accurate map of Federation Space and number the Frontier Bases; she can tell you who first contacted every one of the fifty-odd races known; and she knows by heart the last words of Han Lu Han when, himself no more than sixteen, he ran through alien flame-weapons to drag his captain and pilot to safety on Lyrae 91-Beta. She does a little math, too; it’s easy for her. And she haunts the spaceport and makes friends with everybody who’ll talk to her, and begs rides, and knows the controls of fourteen models of craft. She’s a late bloomer, which means the nubbins on her little chest could almost pass for a boy’s; and love, great Love, to her is just something pointless that adults do, despite her physical instruction. But she can get into her junior space suit in seventy seconds flat, including safety hooks.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection Page 46
