Fatal Reaction

made.”
    “And get rich,” I interjected.
    “Definitely,” agreed Carl with a sly smile. “The trouble comes when you mix the two sorts. To industrial scientists, academics are glory-mad prima donnas. On the other hand, academic scientists think industrial scientists are whores.” Carl smiled at me serenely from across the mountains of papers that littered Danny’s desk.
    “Sounds like an interesting group,” I said, and wondered what the hell I had gotten myself into.
     
    The ZK-501 project council meeting was held in the first-floor lunchroom, which was the only place big enough to accommodate all the people working on the project. Carl walked me down the hall to show me the way. Then, as we helped ourselves to coffee from a heavy-duty industrial-size percolator at the back of the room, he discreetly pointed out the various investigators as they straggled in for the meeting.
    Watching the room slowly fill up, I was immediately struck by how young they all were—not to mention how scruffy looking. Rumpled and unshaven, the ZK-501 scientists looked for all the world like a ragtag bunch of graduate students rousted from the library at closing time. The younger scientists, true to their generation, looked like grunge-band refugees with Walkmen strapped to their belts and headphones slung around their necks. The older ones wore baggy corduroy pants that sagged in the seat and hand-knit sweaters of dirt-colored wool.
    The exception was a young woman with a cigarette dangling from one corner of her mouth, her hair dyed a purplish black, who was holding court in the front row. She wore ripped jeans, motorcycle boots, and a T-shirt with one of those ubiquitous yellow smiley faces on the front. The only thing different about hers was that it had a small round bullet hole drawn on its forehead.
    “Who’s the Hell’s Angel?” I inquired.
    “That’s Lou Remminger,” replied Carl.
    “That is Lou Remminger?” I demanded incredulously. Remminger was the chemist from Yale who was the lead investigator of the ZK-501 project. According to Stephen, she was to organic chemistry what Michael Jordan is to basketball—the kind of natural talent that turns up only once a generation.
    “They say that if she’s able to turn ZK-501 into a usable drug they’ll have to give her the Nobel prize,” Carl whispered, his lips curling into a small smile.
    “I wonder what she’ll wear to the award ceremony,” I replied faintly, envisioning an auditorium filled with scandalized Swedes.
    Carl touched my arm. “You see that man with the turtleneck sitting off by himself? That’s Michael Childress, the X-ray crystallographer.”
    “I’ve met him. Stephen and I took him out to dinner while Azor was recruiting him from Baxter.” I shuddered inwardly at the recollection of that night. With arrogance that bordered on boorishness, Childress had bullied the waiters, monopolized the conversation with tedious monologues about his many accomplishments, and pointedly addressed all his remarks to Stephen as if I’d been invited along to merely fill a seat.
    “Michael Childress is a world-class pain in the ass,” announced Carl with real venom. “He thinks he was put on earth for the express purpose of telling everyone else what they’re doing wrong.”
    “That must make him very popular,” I observed.
    “You notice no one will even sit near him.” Sure enough, there was a ring of empty seats around Childress like some kind of quarantine. “Do you see the woman sitting behind him with the headphones?” Carl continued. My eyes settled on a large, raw-boned woman with a cap of dark curls and a very intense expression on her pale face. Her hands twitched nervously across her lap and there were dark circles under her eyes.
    “That’s Michelle Goodwin,” the administrator explained. “She’s the second crystallographer on the project.”!
    “Why do you have two?” Crystallographers were a rare and much sought-after specialty. A proven one like Childress was the scientific equivalent of a franchise athlete. “We have her on loan for a year from Purdue. She was originally hired to work on the integrase project, but after it folded Stephen moved her over here.”
    “So how do she and Childress get along?” I asked, remembering what Carl had said back in Danny’s office about the rift between academic and industrial scientists.
    “She tries to stay out of his way. Actually it’s not that hard because he’s almost