Shipman was born in Shaker Heights, Ohio, son of an affluent neurosurgeon, his mother a debutante daughter of a family entrenched in the high-office politics of the state. Tom had been a small, sickly boy who learned early on to capitalize on his very sharp mind. Taken out of public school in fifth grade, when other boys began picking him apart and smashing his glasses as a routine prank, he found private school more protective, but still young Tom showed no great ability to select or hold good friends; his buddies were invariably the ones who depended on him for test answers but ignored him at other times. A sullen, unhappy child who soon learned to be arrogant of his knowledge because a very sharp mind was the one thing he had going for him.

  From early years on there was paternal pressure to guide him into medicine, but young Tom detested the vaguenesses of biology, the apparent pointlessness of zoology, the uncertainties of physiology. Math was his forte when he left home for Andover Academy, with chemistry running a close second. Then, when he first encountered organic, that bewildering nightmare of carbon chemistry that left so many of his classmates far behind, he knew he had found his real métier. Quite aside from possessing a phenomenally acute memory, he had that type of mind that could conceive of organic molecules in living, three-dimensional depth and color, not merely as flat, inaccurate formulas on paper. With a near-perfect grade average behind him, he went into the Westinghouse Science Scholarship competition in his senior year with a crafty system of computer simulation for determining the spatial and rotational qualities of complex multiringed organic compounds, a system quite impressive for its uniqueness and imagination, and won first prize hands down, together with a full four-year scholarship in chemistry and an early acceptance at Yale.

  During his undergraduate years he spent most of his time in an honors program doing what amounted to advanced graduate work in organic chemistry. Job offers started turning up from his sophomore year on, and much of his work began finding publication in the major chemical and engineering journals. After completing his Master’s work he went straight on to doctoral work at Princeton, simply pursuing the avenues of research he had already set out for himself, before finally, armed with a Ph.D. at the age of twenty-three, he accepted a position at Merck, Sharpe and Dohme in their research and development laboratories, tackling the many divergent problems of synthesizing new drugs designed to have high potential as antibiotics active against infection but with very little evidence of toxicity that might spoil them for human use. It was work right up Tom Shipman’s alley, playing games with theoretical molecules, taking them through endless permutations of various basic forms, altering them subtly again and again in the computer and in the lab, tabulating alterations in their activities, convinced that if he could find what it was in a molecule that altered its ability to destroy bacteria, he would have found the Rosetta stone to the endless search for really new antibiotics that consumed so much time and effort with such very spare results in those days.

  Tailored to him or not, the job at Merck didn’t last more than two years. Merck’s R&D scene was, in good part, a team effort, whole squadrons of people tackling a given problem, and Tom Shipman was not a team person. He fretted about the wasted time and indifferent concern he discerned in the crew around him. You couldn’t solve problems, in his view, by standing around telling jokes during endless coffee breaks and flirting endlessly with the cute little lab assistants and getting out of there at the stroke of five — and you couldn’t solve problems sitting at your own lab bench with all that going on around you, either. Very soon Tom got permission to start his workday at five, when the others were leaving, bringing his dinner in a lunch box, and working on in silence and solitude until two or three in the morning. This didn’t increase his popularity with his team, who regarded him as some new kind of nut and resented the volume of work that consistently poured off his desk; perversely, it even made his supervisors frown. Of course they liked his results well enough, and recognized his value, but when it came to promotion evaluations and such, reports of his superiors were filled with remarks such as “Does not relate well to laboratory staff,” “Tends to be secretive” and “Doesn’t fit in with cooperative ventures.” And although small merit raises materialized from time to time, there was no talk of promotion.

  Probably worse, from Tom Shipman’s viewpoint, the company was an enormous, impersonal pharmaceutical organization with many other sharp and ambitious chemists on the payroll and Tom found himself a small frog in a large pond. Company policy did not lend itself to personal recognition of individual scientists, and although many papers originated on Tom Shipman’s lab bench and made their way off his desk through the convoluted channels that led to eventual journal publication, his name rarely headed the list of authors on those papers and often never appeared at all. Others higher on the team would review the papers, edit a few sentences, alter a few remarks in the summary statements and then slap on their names as co-authors. Patents were the same: by the time the company lawyers got through with prospective patent applications, everybody’s name would be involved, with his somewhere down at the bottom of the list, frequently misspelled. And thus it was that when some people from Sealey Labs, a much smaller firm engaged almost exclusively in antibiotic research, came around on a raiding party and offered Tom Shipman full autonomy in his own lab and full credit for his own papers and patents and twenty-five percent more salary than he was already making, he kissed the Merck matrix good-bye without a single pang.

  It was from Sealey that the prodigious stream of Tom’s papers that Merritt had referred to had come. It figured, Sally thought. The big outfits could afford to take a prospective winner, bury him in some obscure basement somewhere and then skim the cream off his work. A smaller outfit couldn’t do that, and didn’t want to. Sealey needed their man’s name on those papers in bold prominence. Indeed, the more Sally Grinstone had rooted into it, the more it seemed that Sealey had needed — and had hoped to get — a very great deal from Tom Shipman. In Sally’s mind now, the big question was: What, precisely, had they gotten?

  By two o’clock the next afternoon, discouraged and half starving, Sally went out for a steak, still wracking her brains over that question. She had a picture of the man, all right, and she thought she saw a possible approach or two, but the picture seemed to end at Sealey’s doors. She’d met people like this before: the brilliant, hopelessly immersed scientific workaholic who never did anything or thought about anything beyond his work (except that they always seemed to break from time to time, in some sort of a pattern — sex, booze, gambling, something). But it was what he had done at Sealey that she had to have, and she just didn’t have it. The published papers offered hints, told her the general area of his work, but not the details. It was what he had done that hadn’t been published that she needed.

  She sat and devoured one steak and ordered another, raking her memory for possible contacts. There was no one at Sealey she could go near for information, not one soul — Sally put down her fork. Wait a minute. There was Jan Livewright, of course. Jan had detailed for Sealey for a while, promoted drugs to the doctors, back while Sally and she had been … Last she’d heard, Jan had moved on to Abbott Labs, but the detailers were a pretty thick crowd. Sally munched slowly on her steak. She hated like hell to foreclose on that particular mortgage, but she was beginning to feel desperate …

  Back at the motel, with the kind of eerie, prescient scent of blood in her nostrils that had become so familiar to Sally over the years that she had come to expect it, she struck gold. Jan Livewright didn’t have any current knowledge of things going on at Sealey, but a guy she was dating had a friend who had worked there as a lab assistant in one of the labs until they’d abruptly fired him a week or so ago, for no apparent cause, and the friend was pissed. Jan would contact him, a chap named Bob King, and if Sal didn’t hear to the contrary in thirty minutes, she could call him.

  Sally prowled the room, gulped gin and orange juice, and at the stroke of the appointed minute she called. Yes, the man said, he’d heard from Jan. Yes, he’d been working for Sealey, and if he could just find some way to gig those bastards, he’d give his right arm for the chance …

  “I don’t want to gig anybody,” Sally said. “All I want is some information. When did they lay you off?”

  “Three weeks ago, when they closed down Tom Shipman’s lab.”

  “Closed — did you say closed down?”

  “That’s right. One day I was there and the next day the lab was locked up tight and I was sent down to wash bottles in the production department. A week of that and they gave me the boot. Overstaffed, they said. Pick up your check.”

  “You’re sure it was Shipman’s lab?”

  “I ought to know,” the man said. “I was working there.”

  “But why close it down?”

  Bob King didn’t know. He’d thought Dr. Shipman was on the track of something very hot indeed, a new antibiotic. A real barn burner — at least everybody from the R&D people to the sales staff seemed to be excited about it, and all of a sudden, whoppo, they cut if off. Shipman himself? The man laughed. “You think I was pissed, you should have seen him. He was fit to be tied. Went around like a madman, banging on doors and screaming at people. They put him on some other project, a real dead-ender, some chemotherapeutic they’d had on the shelf for ten years because they couldn’t get the glitches out of it, and I swear he was ready to kill somebody. But as for why they cut it off — I just plain don’t know. Whatever the reason, they sure moved fast … ”

  Sally rang off and sat back, fairly quivering. It looked like the key, all right — but the key to what? She knew then she wouldn’t get it from other people. Shipman himself was going to have to tell her, and it sounded like he might be ready to spill if only she could find a way to hit him. But how? Slowly, carefully, she went back over the heaps of notes she’d been making. Not much personal data here, not much to get hold of. Long work hours, lots of reading of chemical literature when he got home to his nice little three-room apartment in Indianapolis. Listened to lots of music, opera and classics, but didn’t even own a TV set. Took most of his meals out, same little restaurant near his apartment, probably had the same dinner every night — she snorted. There had to be an approach — what could she do? Go take a job at Sealey and work it from there? Never, that would take far too much time and she knew now she had to move fast. What’s more, if it was really something hot, the bastards might just shoot her. Go plant herself at his table at the restaurant? She’d just get thrown out. Follow him and see if he ever hit a bar? Time, time, time — even assuming he ever did hit a bar, which maybe he never did. Take the apartment next to his and scream for help? Oh, hell, Sally, come on —

  The phone rang suddenly, and it was Roger Merritt at the American Chemical Society. “How’s your digging coming along?”

  “Twenty feet under and still going,” Sally said sourly. “By now I know more about the guy than he does — but I can’t find a fast way to touch him. I’d have to set something up for months, and I haven’t got months.”

  “Have you got three days?”

  “I might have — if I can convince a couple of editors that I’m going to bring them Sealey Labs on a platter.”

  “If you’ve got three days, I know how you can nail him. It just dawned on me ten minutes ago. There’s an American Chemical Society regional meeting at the Chase Park Plaza in St. Louis starting tomorrow, two thousand chemists turning up there. Our registration file says Tom Shipman is going with a few others from Sealey.”

  Sally sat bolt upright. “Is he giving a paper?”

  “Now that’s a funny thing: he’s not on the program. He almost always gives two or three papers at one of these confabs, but not a thing this time. The point is — I did a little confidential digging, and it seems that Shipman loosens up quite a bit at these big Chemical Society affairs. He hits the cocktail parties, and one source says he usually ends up very cozy with some unattached female before the conference is over. He never seems to follow up, it’s just fun and games while the party’s going, but you might find an opening there. I thought you’d like to know.”

  “Like to know! Roger, you’re a one hundred percent doll. When this is all over, I’m coming down there and make you as happy as you’ve made me. Now I’ve got to ring off and get packing. Do you know his room number? Good. And Roger — get me a press registration, but have them give me an ordinary member’s ID card, okay? See you later, dummy.”

  For a long moment she sat back and marveled — her prescient nose had been right. The rough part was over, and now she was on her own ground. Fun and games while the party’s going, she thought, and tipped her glass in an imaginary toast.

  Fun and games, indeed.

  39

  In Brookdale, Connecticut, on the day after the Ice House fire, Jack Dillman sat in a silent house in the cool of his upstairs studio and carefully airbrushed in the finishing touches on the dust-jacket layout he was just completing. He sat back, cocked his head and tilted the light over his shoulder onto the drawing board, started to add a final stroke, then shook his head and set the airbrush aside.

  For a long time he looked at the artwork spread out before him. Then neatly, almost ceremonially, he began closing the paint pots and ink bottles, setting them back in their places, carefully cleaning the brushes and pen nibs before storing them away. It was almost five in the afternoon, and not a sound from down below all day. “Shopping” again, Jack thought sourly. And later every time. Doesn’t the bastard’s wife ever walk in on them? Or where do they go? Not that it mattered that much. With good old Hal Parker, one bed was as good as another.

  Jack walked downstairs, made himself a drink, extra long and extra strong. A job wrapped up calls for a celebration, he thought. The house was very still and still smelled of Pine-Sol from yesterday’s cleaning lady. An antiseptic smell, more like a clinic than a home. He drifted from room to room uneasily — she wasn’t usually so damned late. As always, the thoughts drifted to his mind: Bad traffic: suppose there was an accident? Maybe she didn’t even carry her purse — who would they call? He shrugged the thought aside, disgusted with himself for worrying. Finally he sat down in front of the Eye and flipped on the TV news.

  Savannah, again, top of the evening. God was he sick of hearing about Savannah — why in hell didn’t the Health Service get cracking and do something down there, for God’s sake, instead of all this sackcloth-and-ashes stuff? Surely there was something they could do —

  The screen caught his attention, a helicopter news clip — what the hell? Big fire, huge building going up, and rioting. The camera zoomed in on riot police behind portable shields, facing off a huge mob of angry black people — he watched, shaking his head. Then, after a while they went to something else, and he snapped off the set.

  Thank God he wasn’t down there. Riots and looting and nobody doing anything to help. But suppose it was here. If you were down there, you’d get out, sure, but here? Get out to where? He thought of some other film clips he’d seen last week, sick people sitting alone in empty houses down there, and long lines of garbage trucks heading out toward the swamps …

  People alone in empty houses. Suddenly the thought was not very nice, not nice at all, and he stirred, glanced out the front windows toward the driveway. Something like that happen here, you wouldn’t want to be alone. But suppose she’d decided she wasn’t coming back? Suddenly, faced with a possible reality, he felt a chill, bone deep, and sweat broke out on his forehead.

  Another drink helped, but not too much. He was well into his third when she finally turned into the driveway.

  40

  For Carlos Quintana the first real hint of a breakthrough came four days after the Ice House fire. He had checked in early at the pro tern CDC headquarters, an old restored office building on Lafayette Street, to pore over the morning public-health reports — new cases reported, deaths, hospital reports, statistical data, the same old ever-worsening story that was grinding him into the ground day by day — when somebody called out, “Hey, Carlos, front and center! Your boss is here …”

  It was Ted Bettendorf in the flesh, looking tall and gaunt and gray and tired, with a cardboard parcel tucked under his arm and a cadaverous smile on his face. He looked around at the crowd of people milling in the room, manning telephones and desks, and then at Carlos buried under piles of papers and reports and readouts and raised his eyebrows. “You’re looking a little ragged,” he said mildly.

  Carlos leaped up and swept papers off a chair onto the floor so Ted could sit down. “I’m feeling ragged. Hoo, boy, you might say so! Ragged isn’t the word.”

  “What are you up to?”

  “Same thing I was up to yesterday morning, and the morning before that, only it’s a little worse every day. We’re just now getting more firm casualty figures on that Ice House debacle — ”

  “Well, set that aside for a minute,” Ted said. “I got you a present and decided I’d hand-deliver it.” He handed the parcel to Carlos.

  “What’s this?”

  “The new preventive vaccine. By special courier from Lilly’s stockpile. I thought you’d be pleased to see it.”

  “You mean the new vaccine we can use to immunize people to this mutant organism so they don’t get infected?”

  “That’s right. It’s made from the mutated strain of plague organisms, right from Monique’s original cultures. I’ve been twisting arms for all I was worth, arid it takes forever to make — they only have tiny quantities of it finished — but Lilly’s control people are finally satisfied that what they have tests out safe enough, at least for emergency use. The injections are painful, but the antibody titer against the bug is measurable in as little as a week. The bug is antigenic as hell — which means that people will have some immune protection from the bug within four or five days after receiving the vaccine.”