The Select (34 page)

As the scraping steps continued to
move away from the entry doors, Quinn edged back and around,
gradually circling closer to the front of the lab, using the sliver
of light leaking between the doors as a beacon to guide her. A few
more minutes and she'd be able to make a break for those
doors.

The lab went silent. The whispered
scraping from the intruder's shoes died and Quinn froze, hovering
in the darkness, afraid to move, afraid even to breathe for fear of
giving herself away.

Shoes in hand, she dropped into a
crouch, listening

Where was he? Why had he stopped? Had
he found the area around Dorothy deserted and was deciding which
way to go next? Or had he taken off his own shoes and was at this
instant slipping toward her?

Suddenly a flashlight beam lanced
through the darkness, ranging back and forth above the tables,
coming her way, moving closer. It was gliding down the aisle on the
far side of the table she was crouched behind, approaching, coming
even, then passing by. Quinn was about to exhale with relief when
the intruder suddenly roared in triumph and swung the light around,
shining it directly in her face.

There was no holding back this time.
Quinn cried out in terror as she recoiled from the glare and
instinctively batted at the light. Her shoes were still in her hand
and they connected, sending the flashlight flying. It landed with a
crash and a tinkle of broken glass and abruptly the An Lab was dark
again. As she rose, a clutching hand brushed her arm; she yanked
the sheet off the nearest corpse, tossing it at the intruder,
tangling him in it. He stumbled and went to his knees. She slid the
half-dissected corpse off its table and pulled it on top of
him.

As he cried out in shock and loathing,
Quinn turned and ran for the doors, her socks slipping on the
floor. She heard scrabbling footsteps behind her and lunged for the
light-sliver, felt her palms slam against the doors, sending them
swinging open into the light, but she wasn't home free, she knew.
The building was empty and she was as vulnerable as ever, so she
kept running, careening around the corner—

—
and colliding into
someone, someone male and heavy, someone with two strong hands that
gripped her shoulders and pulled her upright, someone with white
hair and round, rimless glasses—

"Dr. Emerson!"

"Quinn!" he said. "What on
earth—?"

She was so relieved she wanted to cry.
She clung to him.

"In the anatomy lab!" she said,
gasping for air. "Someone in there! After me! Had a
light!"

He disengaged her arms. "After you?
Are you sure?"

"Yes!"

"Here? On campus? This is
intolerable!"

He started down the hall, toward the
lab, but Quinn pulled him back. She was afraid for him.

"No, don't. He might still be there.
Let's get out of here."

"Very well," said. "You come to my
office. We'll call campus security from there and have them check
it out." He took her arm and led her toward the front doors. "By
the way, what on earth are you doing here at this hour?"

"I was supposed to meet
Tim—"

"Oh, yes. Mr. Brown. Your cadaver
mate. A little last-minute cramming before the
practical?"

Quinn didn't know how much to tell Dr.
Emerson. She didn't want him thinking Tim had gone crazy. As they
stepped out into the chill air, she slipped back into her shoes and
ducked his question by asking one of her own.

"I know why I'm here at this hour,"
she said. "But why are you? You don't have a practical
tomorrow."

"I don't sleep well. Haven't since my
wife died. Maybe I don't need as much sleep as I used
to."

Quinn had heard he was a widower, but
this was the first time he'd mentioned it.

He tapped the frayed notebook
protruding from the side pocket of his coat. "I came to retrieve
this from Lecture B. Then I was going over to Science for a
while."

"More work on 9574?" Quinn
said.

He nodded. "I suppose. But I'll gladly
postpone that." He pointed toward the Administration building
across the pond. "We'll stop in my office, we'll call security,
I'll make us some tea, and you'll tell me exactly what happened
tonight."

Quinn nodded in the darkness. She'd
like that. She felt safe with Dr. Emerson.

But where was Tim?

*

Tim watched Dr. Alston pace back and
forth before him.

"You've heard my lectures, Mr. Brown,"
he said. "You're a bright young man. I trust I don't have to go
into too much detail about the grim future of medical care and the
delivery of medical services during the span of your productive
years."

"I don't care about any of that," Tim
said. "I want to know about Quinn."

"Forget her for now. You must listen
to me and—"

Tim glared up at him. "How can I
listen to you when she might be in trouble? Get real,
Alston."

"Oh?" he said with arched eyebrows.
"It's 'Alston' now, is it?" He turned to Verran and sighed. "Louis,
see if you can learn the status of the Cleary girl."

Verran said, "I'll signal Kurt to call
in."

He went to another console and tapped
in a code, then they all waited in silence, a sweaty, anxious
silence for Tim—until a bell rang. Verran flipped a switch and
muttered into the mike on his headset. Then he turned to Dr.
Alston.

Tim's heart leaped at his first
words.

"She got away," he said. "Kurt almost
had her but your buddy, Dr. Emerson, happened by at the wrong
moment and so Kurt had to let her go."

"Walter?" Alston said. "He has a
talent for saying and doing the wrong thing at the wrong time.
What's he doing here at this hour?"

"I dunno," Verran said with a shrug.
"Maybe—"

The phone by his elbow jangled. He
picked up on the second ring.

"Campus Security...Yes, sir. In the
anatomy lab you say?...Yes, sir. We'll get right on it."

He grinned at Alston. "Speak of the
devil. That was your friend Emerson on the phone, telling me that a
'Miss Cleary' reported being chased through the anatomy lab by an
unknown intruder. He says the girl is staying with him—drinking
tea, he said—until we've checked the matter out."

"At least we know where she is." He
turned to Tim. "Satisfied?"

"How do I know any of it's
true?"

Alston smirked. "Look at where you are
and look at where I am. I don't have to lie to you, Mr.
Brown."

"Okay, okay," Tim said. Quinn trusted
Dr. Emerson. If he was looking after her, she was probably all
right. "What do you want from me?"

"Your attention. Listen to me with an
open mind and then we'll see what you think when I'm
finished."

"I already know what I
think."

"But you're intelligent enough to be
influenced by logic, and logic is what I'm going to give
you."

"How about unstrapping me from this
chair?"

"All in good time. First, you listen."
He began to pace again. "I'm going to tell you everything. But in
order for you to fully grasp the import of what I have to say,
you'll have to have some background."

"That's usually helpful."

"When Mr. Kleederman set up his
Foundation—years before you were conceived, Mr. Brown—he peopled
its board not only with a former senator, but with an international
array of high government officials and other influential men in
industry and labor who shared his cause, his vision. Kleederman
Pharmaceuticals was already well established in the U.S. by that
time, but even then he saw the writing on the wall: the new drug
approval process was going to thicken into a stagnant quamire
unless intelligent changes were made. But he knew those changes
would never be made, so he embarked upon a course to find a better
way to bring new pharmaceuticals to the sick of the world despite
the interference of their own governments."

"And perhaps in the
process," Tim said, "move Johann Kleederman from the ranks of mere
multimillionaire to multi
billion
aire?"

"I don't believe he is
driven by money. I doubt that he and all his heirs can spend even
the
interest
on
his fortune. No, he truly has a vision. Disease is a scourge upon
mankind. The tools to defeat it merely wait to be discovered. Yet
petty bureaucrats entangle new compounds in endless miles of red
tape, delaying their use for years. Mr. Kleederman finds that
unconscionable, and so do I."

"Everybody seems to have a bitch about
the FDA, but what's that got to—"

"The bedrock of the Kleederman vision
is Kleederman Pharmaceuticals. From there he branched out into
medical care, building nursing homes, buying up failing hospitals
within easy reach of major cities and converting them to medical
centers which have become paradigms of compassionate, top-quality
care. Those medical centers have always operated under the rule of
providing that top-quality care to everyone, regardless of ability
to pay. That's why they're always located near urban centers—to
allow access to the neediest cases from the inner cities. Mr.
Kleederman gathered the medical centers, the nursing homes, and the
pharamceutical company under the conglomerate umbrella of
Kleederman Medical Industries. KMI funds the Kleederman Foundation,
which in turn funds the Ingraham College of Medicine."

"Fine," Tim said. Alston hadn't told
him a damn thing he didn't already know. "But none of that explains
the bugs, or the contraptions in our headboards."

"Tell me, Mr. Brown: Do you have any
idea what it currently costs to bring a new drug to market in the
United States?"

"That doesn't answer my
question."

"Do you know?"

Tim didn't, so he picked a number out
of the air. "Fifty million."

"Oh, if only that were so!" Alston
said, laughing. "Actually, the figure is closer to a quarter of a
billion—231 million dollars, to be exact."

Tim blinked at the staggering figure.
"Okay, I'm impressed, but you've got 17 years under patent to get
your money back."

"Not true. We have nowhere near 17
years. It takes 12 years, from synthesis to FDA approval, to bring
a new drug to market...twelve years before you can recoup dollar
one on a new drug. But the patent clock begins running as soon as
the compound is registered, so you try to hold off registering a
compound as long as you can. But still it frequently takes a full
seven years from registration to final approval. That leaves you
only ten years with exclusive rights to sell a product you
developed from scratch."

"I haven't seen the pharmaceutical
companies standing in line to file for bankruptcy."

"With the price regulation
the president's talking about, you may. But profits aren't the
point. At least not the whole point. I'm speaking of an enormous
waste of resources. And a tremendous human cost as beneficial drugs
sit unrecognized while their useless brothers go through exhaustive
animal trials only to be discarded because they are ineffective in
humans; and even when the useful compounds are identified, they sit
on the shelf, beyond the reach of the people they could help, while
their paperwork drags through the quagmire of the approval process.
For every 10,000 investigational compounds, only
ten—
ten!—
make it
past rodent and primate studies. That's an enormous loss in and of
itself. But then consider that of the ten surviving compounds, only
one makes it through human studies and gets to market. A one in ten
thousand success rate, Mr. Brown. A ninety-nine point ninety-nine
percent failure rate. What's your gambler's opinion of those odds,
Mr. Brown?"

"Sort of like dropping a marble off
the edge of the Grand Canyon and trying to hit a particular ant on
the bottom."

"Precisely. And people wonder why new
drugs cost so much. That lone surviving compound has only ten years
to make up all the negative costs of the 9,999 compounds that
didn't make it, plus show enough profit to convince the
stockholders that this research and development merry-go-round is
worthwhile. But without R&D, there'd be no new drugs at
all."

"Isn't the answer obvious?" Tim said "Lengthen
the patent life for new drugs."

Alston's smile was sour. "A few lucky
compounds do get an extension, but it's a form of noblesse oblige,
rather than a legal right. The pharmaceutical companies have spent
decades lobbying for more time...to no avail."

"Then get the FDA to speed the
approval process."

"We're already paying for extra staff
at the FDA—to keep the line moving, as it were. Any futher
suggestions?"

Tim thought a moment, bringing his
economics courses into play. "Only one other way I can see: narrow
the field."

"Meaning?"

"Find a way of weeding out the useless
compounds earlier in the process. That will cut your front-end
expenses."