The Delta Factor (2 page)

Mildred Jones came back out on her porch, drawn by the strangest sound. Yes, there it was again.

She pushed through the screen door, and realized the tractor had stopped halfway through the fields. The motor was no longer running.

She called out, “Hank?”

She watched her husband clamber down from the tractor, his gait unsteady. Then she heard the sound again. He was laughing.

“Hank Aaron Jones,” she yelled shrilly. “If you are fooling around with me, I'm going to give you what for!”

Her husband replied by falling down and disappearing amidst the wavering plants.

“Hank!” Mildred scrambled across the yard and down the path as fast as her legs would carry her. In her panic, she failed to notice Jude Taylor's truck parked at the end of their drive.

The big man watched her race toward her husband. He waited until she had half-walked, half-carried Hank back into the house before driving slowly away.

1

Dr. Deborah Givens stepped from her specially fitted Jeep Cherokee, opened the back door, and pulled out her collapsible wheelchair. She was feeling all right at the moment, but there had been little warning twinges that morning, so she decided to use the chair and harbor what strength she had. But because she was nervous, and excited, and in a hurry, the wheelchair refused to unfold. It looked like it was going to be one of those days.

“Here, Debs, let me do that.” A grizzled survivor of Iwo Jima shuffled up and bent over with a stifled groan.

“Thanks, Tom.” She stepped back and leaned on the jeep. “I swear that thing has a mind of its own.”

“All machinery does. That's the first thing they teach us in gunnery school. You scientists oughtta know that by now.”

She watched him clamp the latches into place. “Good of you to help.”

“Shoot. This is the only chance I get to push anybody round anymore.” He held the handles while she eased herself down. “Bad day?”

“On a scale of one to ten,” she replied, “I'd give it a minus five.”

Tom wheezed a chuckle. “Know just how you feel, gal. The old pins just give out, and it don't matter that you still feel twenty upstairs.”

“Twenty wasn't such a good year,” Deborah said. “I'd prefer sixteen.”

Tom wheeled her up the side entrance ramp. “You folks're about done around here, aren't you?”

Normally Deborah hated to have her chair pushed by anyone, even a hospital orderly. But Tom was different. No matter how early she arrived, he was always sitting on the front porch. He would rush down the stairs before she cut the motor. If she was walking that day, he shuffled alongside her. If she reached for the chair, Tom's age-spotted hands were usually there first. He had sort of adopted her on the first day, and Deborah had long since accepted that helping her gave definition to his lonely days. She answered, “It's a little hard to say.”

“Reason I ask,” Tom went on. “That young feller and the Injun, they were cooped up in there all night.”

The faint tingle of excitement jangling her nerves since the early morning telephone call strengthened. “That a fact?”

“Wouldn't say it if it weren't. Took 'em a cup of coffee when the cafeteria opened. Both of 'em looked like they was sorta running on reserve. But excited just the same.”

They pushed through the entrance. The halls were already filling with patients, mostly old, mostly men. The only feature Dr. Deborah Givens had in common with these patients was her wheelchair. That and the clinical trials which had brought her here twenty-two days ago.

It was a typical veterans hospital, a rundown building in a grim inner-city Norfolk neighborhood. The cheerless architecture was worsened by coils of razor-wire crowning the chain link fence. The interior was no better. Walls were plastered with government-issue green paint. The patients wore identical striped bathrobes, which left them looking like prisoners. The air conditioning was a feeble, smelly joke. Old-fashioned metal-frame beds lined long wards like weary soldiers on parade. Sounds echoed back from miles and years away.

The majority of patients were old and male and poor and lonely. Many bore the scars of a rough life. Almost half of those Deborah had selected for her clinical study were cachectic—overly thin, anemic, sunken eyes and cheeks—signs that often indicated long-term alcohol abuse.

Yet despite it all, they possessed a burning gleam of patriotic pride and rock-hard dignity, the result of having fought wars for a country they loved. The fact that the country had long since forgotten the battles was accepted along with all of life's other injustices.

After twenty-two days of working with the patients at the Norfolk Veterans Hospital, Deborah Givens thought them to be some of the finest men on earth.

Tom stopped at the lab entrance, walked around, and pushed open the doors. “Promise you'll come back when you find a cure for old age?”

“You'll be the first to know,” she assured him, and wheeled herself inside.

She found her two best men, as she called them, so deep in concentration that they did not notice her arrival.

There was no chance of anyone's ever getting the pair mixed up. Kenny Griffyn was a techie, a nerd's nerd, all bony angles and bottle-bottom glasses and speech that was lifted from a computer magazine. Cochise was an entirely different matter. He stood six feet ten inches tall, had hands the size of breakfast skillets, and outweighed Kenny by at least two hundred pounds.

Cochise was a Carolina east-coast Indian, which meant that not even he knew the name of the Native American tribe from which he sprang. He bore the lines and grimness of a hard life, even though he was only twenty-nine years old. Deborah knew his real name was John Windover only because she had seen it when registering his social security number. He had been dubbed Cochise in some long-forgotten bar, he had explained with the blank-faced take-it-or-leave-it attitude he used whenever talking about himself, and had never seen any reason to change back. Deborah thought him the find of the century, the best lab assistant she had ever worked with. The fact that the remainder of the Pharmacon staff found him tremendously frightening disturbed her not at all.

She wheeled up beside the pair and demanded, “So what is so all-fired urgent that it couldn't wait two days?”

As usual, when anyone else was there and willing to take on the burden of speaking, Cochise remained mute. “We have some good news,” Kenny announced. The techie's eyes were glazed as marbles, a clear signal of no sleep, excitement, and continuous infusions of coffee that had been cooking all night. “Very,
very
good news.”

Deborah responded as she usually did when others threatened to go off the deep end. She retreated into skepticism. “You want to quantify that?”

“How high do you feel like flying?” Kenny Griffyn demanded, refusing to give in this time. “Interplanetary orbit? Beyond Jupiter? We're talking major news here.”

Deborah glanced at Cochise. The massive, fatigue-smudged features were blank as ever. “I'm already sitting down,” she replied. “So hit me.”

“Okay, the control group.” Continuous sheets of computer graphics were unfolded and slapped down on the cluttered desk before her.

Deborah studied them and declared, “No change.”

“Zip. Across the board.” Kenny began stabbing a finger at individual patients, identified only by numbers. “Stable, stable, uh-oh, here's a bad one. Another stable. Roller-coaster downslide on this one. Stable, stable, stable, look here, free fall from twenty thousand feet. No parachute, either.”

“These are people we're talking about,” Deborah reminded him sharply. “People in pain. Sick people.”

“Right. Exactly.” The techie tossed the control data aside. He was taut as an electric power cable. “Now check this out.” A second graph was accordioned out with a flourish.

Deborah bent over the tables, squinted her eyes, felt her own nerves start humming. She leaned back, took a couple of deep breaths, rubbed her eyes, then checked the figures a second time. “You've made a mistake.”

“Uh-uh. No way.”

“You goofed.”

“This is the third time we've run the figures. Want to see the others? Carbon copies.”

She looked at him, her heart rate zinging up to maximum velocity. “No patient showed a decline in condition? Not one?”

“Not one. And three remissions. Three. Count 'em.” He grabbed two handfuls of his hair and tried to pull it out by the roots. “Want to tell me the odds of that happening? In twenty-two days?”

“Three remissions?”

“Take a look out the window. We got two meningitis patients out there with less than a week to live dealing blackjack.”

“They've cleaned half the night shift outta next week's pay,” Cochise rumbled, speaking for the first time since her arrival that morning. As always, his voice sounded like a bear growling from the back end of a very deep cave.

“I was right, wasn't I?” the techie insisted. “Major.”

“I've got—” Deborah broke off as a strange pucka-pucka- pucka sound droned through the window, growing louder by the second. She wheeled herself over, searched the sky, then demanded, “Did either of you order the company helicopter?”

“Me?” Kenny's eyes widened. “Since when did I rate perks like that?”

The lab door opened for the duty nurse, who announced, “Dr. Cofield just called.”

Kenny and Cochise chimed in with groans.

“The message was for you, Dr. Givens. He says there's an emergency. He needs you to leave immediately for Edenton.”

“Thank you,” Deborah said, folding up the printouts. “Tell the pilot I'll be right there.”

“Just like I said, we're talking major league here,” Kenny told her as she started for the door. “So big the word's getting out by osmosis.”

“One of you will have to drive my car back,” Deborah told them. “I hereby order you to keep four wheels on the road at all times.”

Deborah wheeled herself outside, then allowed the pilot to push her chair up to the chopper's passenger door and help her alight. She kept her countenance composed throughout. It was only when they were airborne that she leaned back in her seat and gave in to the one luxury she had refused herself for seven long years.

Hope.

Tom shuffled out the veterans hospital's doors and made his slow way down the drive. The guard at the main entrance, almost as old as Tom, gave him a friendly wave. Tom did not return it because he did not see it. His eyes remained fixed upon the road at his feet.

The car was parked right where it had been the last time. It was one of those foreign jobs, low to the ground and built without any corners. The windows were almost as dark as the black paint job. Tom steeled himself and kept going.

The window powered down as he approached. “Well?”

“First things first.” Tom stuck out his hand.

“Tell me,” the man inside the car insisted.

“Look, bud. I don't like doing this one bit. The only thing that's keeping me standing here ‘stead of running for the cops is I'm broke as a sharecropper in a ten-year drought. So if you want what I got, hand it over.”

A longish pause, then an envelope slid through the window. “What do you have?”

“They found it,” Tom replied, tearing open the envelope and ruffling the bills.

“Found what?”

“Whatever it is they been looking for,” Tom snapped. “You're bound to know that much, or you wouldn't be wasting time around a dump like this.”

“You're sure?”

“Sure as sure can be. Them lab fellers was holed up in there all night. Took 'em coffee at dawn, and they was all but dancing round their computer. Then Dr. Debs arrives in a roar of dust and takes off twenty minutes later by copter.” Tom nodded in solid certainty. “Yep, whatever it is they was after, they got it.”

As the window powered back up, the man inside said, “We never met.”

“Been through two wars and more'n seventy years,” Tom crabbed at the departing car. “Never met a foreigner I'd care to remember a second longer'n I had to. And that includes you, mister.”

Deborah Givens hated going into what the scientists and techies called the Tombs. The Pharmacon executive office suites were connected to the labs by a plushly carpeted, domed hallway whose air conditioning sucked up every sound as soon as it was emitted. Deborah's colleagues insisted the effect was intentional.

The scientists were always nervous around the bean counters, which led to adolescent jokes and overloud laughter. The execs loathed levity almost as much as they did the scientists' casual dress code. The execs could not insist that their lab rats wear ties and shirts with collars, but they could try for what they called “proper decorum” and the lab rats described as a mental vacuum. The techies said the bean counters couldn't gain respect through scientific knowledge since they didn't have any. So the suits demanded deference by making the lab rats grovel for every research dime and by dragging them down to the Tombs from time to time.

Rare was the senior bean counter who ever made his way into the labs. Conferences were limited to the Tombs, or as some techies called it, the Tower of Money. Summonses were issued via junior bean counters who could not be arm-twisted while in alien territory to opening up the corporate wallet.

One of the few positive sides to her illness, as far as Deborah was concerned, was that her visits to the Tombs had grown few and far between. As the illness progressed, she had been released from duties as chief researcher on one of the firm's major projects. The execs had been understandably terrified of investing sizable chunks of corporate dough in a project their top scientist might be unable to finish.

Deborah had allowed herself to be replaced, but for a price. In return for going peacefully, she had forced the bean counters to grant her lab space and funding. She had decided to check out a possibility that Deborah called intriguing and the bean counters considered far beyond left field.