Fatal Reaction

besides being very foreign, the Japanese are very peculiar about things. Everything has to be done a certain way or they take terrible offense. After four years she said she finally began to appreciate what the country had to offer, but I think in the end she was relieved when Bert started having trouble with his angina and decided to return to the States.”
    “Then you can understand how important it is that everything go perfectly when they come and visit.”
    “You’re in for quite an education, young lady. You may have been to your share of parties and dinners, but I don’t think you have any idea of the amount of work that goes into planning one.”
    “I know, Mother,” I said, with my heart in my throat. “That’s why I need your help.”
    Try as I might, I could not remember ever having said those words to my mother before.
     

CHAPTER 12
     
    From my perch on the stool beside his lab bench, I watched Dave Borland pick up a thin strip of human spleen and drop it into a steel cylinder filled with roiling liquid nitrogen. After lunch with my mother, I had driven like a mad woman, dodging little old ladies and construction barrels, in order to get out to Azor in time for my one o’clock meeting with Stephen, only to find that his pharmacology meeting was running long. Borland had come across me pacing outside Stephen’s office and suggested roguishly that I come get into trouble with him.
    Rubbing his hands together, Borland explained that he was just starting to isolate another batch of ZKBR While I was eager to continue my ongoing education, I soon realized that Carl Woodruff had not been joking when he’d warned against visiting the protein lab before lunch. Indeed, it didn’t take me long to realize that after lunch wasn’t all that much better.
    “What we’re doing,” Borland informed me as he continued to drop pieces of human tissue into the nitrogen with his gloved hand, “is a lot like looking for a needle in a haystack.” Beside him at the bench his dour assistant cut the sallow spleen tissue into strips with a pair of surgical scissors before passing the strips to the protein chemist. “The problem is not just that we have to isolate one specific protein among the thousands of others in the crushed guts of the spleen cells, but we have to do it in such a way that doesn’t unfold that protein from its biochemically active shape.”
    Even though it was a Saturday, the scientists of the ZK-501 project worked as if it were any other day. Borland explained that he had been on a twenty-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week schedule for four months now—ever since the day he’d first set out to find a way to isolate the receptor protein.
    Physically Borland was a wild man, an unrepentant hippie with a walrus mustache and a greasy ponytail. According to Stephen he’d worked his way through graduate school tending bar in Boston’s notorious tenderloin district. Once you knew that about him, it was hard to picture him doing anything else.
    Now Borland’s hands were as raw as a boxer’s, chapped and cracked from the solvents used in the isolation process. He wore clogs because they were easier on his legs and he moved with the limping gait of an exhausted marathoner from the endless hours spent standing at the bench.
    The lab itself was as grisly as a butcher shop. The smell of raw meat mingled with acetone seemed to fill my lungs like a viscous fluid. Under the high-pitched whine of centrifuges I could pick out the pounding beat of Nine Inch Nails from the cassette player on Borland’s desk. On the wall in front of us someone had hung a dog-eared poster that read: Life is Chemistry—Chemistry is Life. Beneath it someone had scrawled, “life sucks.”
    “When I was in graduate school, this friend of mine and I used to steal frogs from the biology lab and give ’em a bath in this,” Borland said with a nod toward the container of liquid nitrogen. “After a quick dip they’d be frozen as brittle as glass. Then we’d tap them against something hard—”
    “And try to make the girls scream,” Lou Remminger interrupted in her Appalachian drawl as she came up behind us. She was dressed entirely in black except for a necklace that appeared to be made of safety pins.
    “I don’t know about that,” chuckled Borland, “but I bet I would have gotten your attention.”
    “Pig,” replied Remminger without malice. “Have you seen Michelle Goodwin anywhere? She borrowed some slides of mine