The Delta Factor (17 page)

“We amp up their growth patterns by using flicker lighting at night.” Deborah frowned through the pane as though seeing the shrubs for the first time. “Maybe I better tell Cochise to give them a trim.”

“Tell who?”

“In here, Junior. And be nice.”

The next chamber was the lab, and occupying it was the biggest human Cliff had ever seen. The man was bent over a microscope. As they approached the man unfolded, then unfolded some more.

“Cliff, I'd like you to meet Cochise, my number one lab techie.”

“Cochise,” Cliff said, taking in a pair of hands like baseball mitts, with fingers the size of salamis. “Big man, big name.”

The face creased into a ponderous smile. “One of those things I picked up along the way. Don't ask me how.”

“Nicknames aren't meant to make sense,” Cliff agreed. “Do they use you to keep order?”

The gut spilling over his fifty-inch waist resembled a buffalo about to give birth to a beer keg. “These techies don't have a muscle between 'em. Any of them get smart, Dr. Debs just gives them the toss herself.”

Deborah said quietly, “I would like you two to be friends.”

“Don't see why not,” Cliff said agreeably. “We probably don't have a thing in common.”

“Except Debs,” Cochise said.

“Doggone right,” Cliff allowed. “What's that line about the love of a good woman?”

“Don't ask me,” Cochise rumbled. His eyes were dark and fathomless, his face folded down like a slumbering bulldog. “Wasn't much of either where I came from.”

“Either what?” Deborah asked.

“Love or good women,” Cliff translated, and decided he liked the big man.

“Cochise follows my instructions to the letter,” Deborah informed him. “You'll have to spend some time around techies to learn how rare that is.”

“Most techies are ready to give God advice about creation,” Cochise agreed.

“His notes are meticulous,” Deborah went on, “and he handles lab glass like a pro.” She reached up and punched his arm. It was like attacking a tree limb. “With credentials like that, it gets easier to put up with that beautiful face.”

“Heard a lot about you,” Cochise said. “Good to have you around. Looks like storm clouds are gathering.”

Deborah turned solemn. “Is this some kind of mystical Indian thing?”

Cochise gave his head a ponderous shake. “Gossip.”

“Come on, Junior,” Deborah said. “You can brace yourself with a jolt of lab coffee.”

Cliff followed her into an office the size of a walk-in closet. As in the other rooms, the outer window curved up and over his head, revealing green fields and a cloud-speckled sky. He looked back through the glass half-wall and asked, “What's going on, Debs?”

“Oh, Cochise is preparing more doses. The root has to be ground, then pressed in that masher there. Then the juice is run through a series of increasingly tiny filters before we autoclave it and prepare test samples.”

“I meant,” Cliff replied, “what is going on with Pharmacon.”

“I wish I knew,” she said gravely. “I've effectively been sealed out of the decision-making process. And when I told them about Tom—you remember Tom, the old guy at the veterans hospital?”

“Of course.”

“When I told them about the foreigner in the slick car bribing him, they sort of swallowed the information.” She rubbed tired eyes. “They won't say what steps they're taking. Everything has suddenly become very hush-hush, at least as far as I'm concerned. And then yesterday they asked if I had clinical data on the original European drug. Which of course I did. Thousands and thousands of pages. They carted that off, and since then, nothing.”

Cliff mulled that one over. “I don't understand.”

“Me neither.”

“You changed the molecular structure, isn't that what you told me?”

“For each of the compounds,” she affirmed.

“Then why . . .” He shook his head. “I'm missing something.”

“You and me both.”

“So why did you ask me to agree with everything Whitehurst said? I gotta tell you, Debs, I was about a half step from exploding.”

“I saw.” She tried hard for a smile. “After the subcommittee hearing, the chairman of Pharmacon spent three seconds telling me I did a pretty fair job, then half an hour grilling me about you.”

“Me?”

“Don't look so shocked. The FDA happens to figure very large in Pharmacon's future. As coordinator for the drug's approval process, you're man of the hour.” The smile slipped away. “But since then, every time your name has come up, there's been these ominous rumblings. Nothing specific, but a lot of thunder over the horizon.”

“Thunder comes with the job,” Cliff said. “I'm used to it.”

“Maybe you are,” she replied. “But I've had the distinct impression that they were just waiting for a reason to forbid me to see you.”

“They couldn't do that.”

“They could make it a lot tougher for us to get together, and quite frankly I need you too much just now to want to worry about sneaking around behind Pharmacon's back.” She sighed. “That's not all. Yesterday I was supposed to go out and check the plants for harvesting—we're almost out of the last batch, and we don't have enough in our little greenhouse to use with an expanded trial. I called Hank's farm, and his wife said I couldn't come.”

“They were probably busy with something else. Everybody has bad days.” He drug up a smile of his own. “Even you, Debs.”

“It didn't sound that way. When I pressed her, she said something about the breeze, then hung up on me.”

Cliff had a sudden image of the farmer's raised face. “Maybe he
was
testing the wind that day, like I said.”

“Yeah, okay, but why?” She lifted her purse and car keys from her desk. “Would you mind driving out there with me now?”

“In our scientific world, unsolved problems are the great equalizers,” Deborah said as she drove toward the farm. “They reduce us all to ground zero. Only after the answer begins to emerge does the three-headed destroyer arise: greed, egoism, and ambition. Those three have done in more scientists than any disease on earth.”

“Any other disease,” Cliff countered.

Deborah rewarded him with a grateful look. “It's good to have you here, Junior. More than words can say.”

Deborah turned onto the gritty side road and slammed on the brakes. She pressed her face to the front windshield and muttered, “What in the world?”

Across the road from Hank Aaron Jones's property lay the swathe of burned-out rubble. Beyond that stretched broad flowered fields as bright as a golden sea. And through the fields ran people. Hundreds and hundreds of shouting, dancing, laughing, singing people.

The neighbor's farmhouse was completely lost behind a great stretch of canvas and metal. Indian teepees. Fancy camping tents painted every color under the sun. Tall, medieval-shaped pavilions. Banners decorated with cryptic runes. Campers and buses sporting psychedelic murals of smiling rainbows and flower children and aliens floating toward earth on crystal spaceships.

The people dancing through the blooming rapeweed wore clothes as loose and flowing as their hair. Crowds gathered on great sweeps of bright blankets, lolling in the sun or reaching toward the sky and swaying to music provided by pipes and guitars and congas. At various points through the field, other groups whirled to music from boom boxes—everything from acid rock to new age. The cacophony washed over their jeep along with the constant ring of laughter. Wild, lilting laughter.

“It looks like a sixties rock festival, minus the bands,” Cliff declared. “A real blast from the past.”

“This day is definitely getting out of hand,” Deborah said, and put the car into gear.

There was no sign of movement at the Jones farm. She pulled into the swept front yard, turned off the motor, and said, “That's funny.”

“What is?”

She pointed to the black ash-strewn soil bordering the farmhouse. “Why would they burn down their rose bushes?” Deborah hesitated, looking up at the silent house, then walked up and knocked on the door.

A stringy woman walked onto the front stoop, pushed open the screen, said, “Miss Debs.”

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Jones,” Deborah said politely. “I was wondering if I could have a word with your husband.”

“No you can't,” she said, and crossed her arms across her chest. “He's laid up. Real sick.”

“I'm sorry to hear that. I hope it's nothing serious.”

She had the dried-up look of a woman reared on a hard life. “He'll get over it, God willing.”

“I just spoke with him yesterday. He sounded fine to me.”

“Everything was fine as fine could be,” Mrs. Jones replied, her voice as taut as the veins in her neck, “until he had to go over and talk to that blasted neighbor of ours. I told him he oughtta wait and buy the land when this trouble's died down. But no, he's got to do it his time, his way. That man of mine's got a head as hard as the rock of Gibraltar.”

The noise from across the road drifted on the still hot air. “What is going on over there?”

“Trouble,” the woman spat. “That neighbor of ours belongs in hell.”

Deborah looked down at the ashes that scarred the otherwise neat yard. “I'm sorry about your roses. Did they become diseased?”

“You could say that. Cursed by an evil wind.” The woman's eyes blazed. “Y'all will just have to see to yourselves today. I got my hands full, with a sick man and all. Just see you're off the land ‘fore the sun sets and the wind picks up again.”

When the door had slammed shut, Deborah turned wide eyes toward Cliff, who intoned, “Stranger and stranger.”

Together they dug up root samples from three echin plants spaced well apart. The hot air was trapped by the bushes, now taller than a man. By the time they were finished, both were drenched in sweat.

Cliff carried the tools back to the barn, then joined Deborah in the jeep. “I could sure use something wet and cold.”

“You and me both,” she agreed, turning the air conditioner on full and starting down the long drive.

“Any idea what she was talking about up there?”

“I'm all out of ideas, Junior,” Deborah replied, turning onto the farm road. “But that doesn't stop my mind from reaching.”

They had scarcely driven a hundred feet before a shout called to them from the fields. Deborah halted at the sight of a young woman with flowing blonde tresses and a loose-fitting dress bounding across the scarred, burned-out stretch toward them. She was waving and laughing and calling, and she carried several stalks of blooming rapeweed.

Deborah rolled down her window as the woman approached. “Can I help you?”

“No,” the girl half laughed, half sang. “Can I help
you?
” With that she thrust the rapeweed stalks into Deborah's surprised hand, then spun around and raced back. Laughter rang in her wake.

Deborah looked at the golden blooms in her hand, then at Cliff. “Has the whole world gone crazy today?”

Cliff took the flowers from her hand. “Let's go home, Debs. Like you said, I'm all out of ideas.”

Deborah drove up to the intersection with the county road and stopped. A sudden sense of lightheadedness hit her. Although it was not her usual warning sign, she reacted automatically. She pressed harder on the brakes, slid the car into park, and turned off the motor. A waking nightmare of hers had been to be struck by an abrupt attack when driving at high speed. She opened her mouth to ask Cliff to drive, when a sudden movement at the corner of her vision caused her to look up.

The stop sign had grown two arms and a pair of eyes and a grand smile, and it was waving her forward.

Beside her, Cliff let out a strangled cough. But she was suddenly too busy to pay any attention, for out of a clear blue sky it had begun to rain blossoms. Beautiful, delicate, golden, rapeweed blossoms.

Then the road turned to a living ribbon, a river of rainbow colors, and Deborah found herself suddenly swept away.

10

The following evening Cliff drove away from Deborah's feeling tired, jittery, frustrated, and horrifically hungover.

The night before, he and Deborah had remained trapped in the jeep for hours. The hallucinations had not relinquished their grip until long after night had fallen.

Deborah had come to first. When Cliff had finally focused on reality, she was wrapping the rapeweed blossoms in a plastic sample bag.

A flickering orange glow reflected in the windshield caused Cliff to turn around. Behind him, the rapeweed fields were bordered by numerous bonfires. Shadow figures danced weaving circles around the flames. Through his closed window came the shrill sound of fluting pipes.

He turned back when Deborah switched on the car's interior light and inspected the rapeweed stalks through the plastic shield. “What happened?”

Her brow was furrowed in tight concentration. “Do you want the layman's explanation or the scientific one?”

“Layman's. My mind's not quite up to speed.”

“I think we've just had a glimpse of the psychedelic world view,” she replied.

He sighed his acceptance. “And the scientific?”

“I don't know,” she said flatly. “I wish I did.”

Shrill laughter and wordless screams turned him back around. “It looks like a scene straight from my worst nightmare,” he said.

“Not mine,” Deborah replied, starting the car.

Cliff kept his attention fastened on the scene behind them. “What could be worse than this?”

Deborah drove them onto the main road. “To watch it spread.”

Their visit to the sheriff's office had proven utterly futile. The only two patrol cars had been tied up with a bar-room brawl and a domestic disturbance, and the duty officer had not been ready to wake the sheriff over something like this. Deborah had then demanded where the nearest Highway Patrol office was located.