Fatal Reaction

used her unflappable intelligence here. I was also glad my mother had agreed to take over the planning of the actual visit. I didn’t care how much it ended up costing me in draperies and antiques. Looking at the monumental size of the other tasks that lay ahead of me I didn’t see how I could have possibly managed otherwise.
    And still I wondered whether all the effort was for nothing. When I listened to it, there was a small voice in my head that rattled off the hundred ways the deal could go wrong. If Mikos announced that they’d solved the structure first, Takisawa could get cold feet and back out, just as Okuda had with the integrase inhibitor. The Japanese, who possessed a horror of litigation, might recoil when they learned of the Serezine suits which Azor was obliged to carry on its balance sheet as a liability. Or, as we’d feared all along, their interest could just dry up and blow away as soon as we revealed to them that Danny was gone.
    I didn’t know enough about the science to understand the full extent of the reversals that were possible, but what little I did know chilled me. Even if Azor’s crystallographers were able to solve the structure of the receptor molecule before Mikos, there was no guarantee Remminger would be able to design the new drug or even that it would work. There was always a chance that the toxic side effect-causing structures of the molecule could not be separated from its anti-inflammatory action and could therefore not be eliminated. Or they could make it and then find out it made you crazy or caused cancer or birth defects.
    The more I thought about it, the more anxious I got. I felt overwhelmed and defeated without having even begun. I had to remind myself that that always happened at the beginning of a new case and I’d been there enough before to know it would pass. I found myself thinking of that hoary business riddle, “Q: How do you eat an elephant? A: One bite at a time.”
    By the time Lou Remminger knocked on my door she found me at the center of a blizzard of paper, as immersed in the problem of capital dilution as she was in the search for a successor molecule to ZK-501.
    “I didn’t think high-priced downtown lawyers had to work on Sundays,” she drawled as she came in and took a seat. She was dressed in a pair of low-rider black jeans and a T-shirt that was two sizes too small and best described as phlegm-colored. I’d heard that Remminger had been invited to a dinner at the Chicago Academy of Sciences honoring Stephen Hawkings, the world-famous mathematician, only to be turned away at the door when security refused to believe she was Dr. Lou Remminger, the famous chemist.
    I wondered why she did it. Maybe she’d decided the attention she got was worth the occasional hassles. It was hard to believe there were many places she went professionally where she didn’t turn heads.
    “I thought I’d come by and see if you were interested in furthering your scientific education,” she continued. “Always.”
    “Michelle’s got some crystals she’s going to try to diffract in a little while. I thought you might want to come down and watch.”
    “Does this mean she’s close to the structure?” I asked with transparent eagerness. I couldn’t help but think how wonderful it would be if we had the structure in time for the Takisawa visit.
    “I don’t know about close, but we’d sure be closer.”
    “So, tell me, how do they grow the crystals?” I asked. “Michelle starts out with the receptor that Borland purifies and then she adds another drug for the protein to latch onto. After that she suspends a drop of the solution from a glass slide and very slowly changes the composition of the solution and the surrounding vapor over a number of days. I think there may also be a magical chant involved that they teach you as a postdoc, but don’t quote me on that.”
    “So how big are these crystals when they’re ready to be looked at?”
    “A big one would be a sixteenth of an inch long.”
    I found myself marveling, not for the first time, at the certitude with which scientists like Borland and Remminger seemed to deal with the subatomic world. I found it nearly impossible to imagine what a piece of furniture would look like upholstered in a different fabric while to the scientists of the ZK-501 project atoms and molecules seemed as solid and tangible as a sack of apples.
    “The trouble, as you have no doubt heard, is that proteins in general and ZKBP