True-Life Adventure

newspaper agrees to interview them, they’ve just been offered a public forum for their ideas or a free ad for their business or a guaranteed press release that’ll get them a better job. If the story doesn’t come out that way, they get pissed off.
    I told Jacob we couldn’t tell people to bring Terry home without first saying she was missing and he said he didn’t see why not and we went around for a while. That’s the way it always is.
    Finally he saw that nothing was going to get in the paper unless he gave in a bit, and so he did. That’s also the way it always is, and it’s very trying, all that wasted energy.
    Then I told Jacob I needed a couple of desperate-father quotes to round things out.
    “Just tell them,” he said, “that I miss her. I’m not myself without her. I need her and miss her and want her back with me.”
    Now was the time to ask the question that was bothering me. “Do you love her?” I said.
    “She’s my whole life.”
    It was about the weirdest breakfast of my life, but at least there was a page 1 story in it. I went back, wrote it, and handed it in. Joey did exactly what I knew he’d do— sent me back to Kogene with a cameraman.
    Steve Koehler was in the reception area when we got there. He walked over and shook hands, all smiles. “Nice to see you again. What can we do for you?”
    But I didn’t have to answer because Jacob poked his head out about that time, apparently looking for Steve. I told him we needed a picture to go with the story and also mentioned something else Joey wanted— a few quotes from Marilyn.
    So he went to get her and it was obvious this was the first she’d heard of the interview. But she gave the quotes and they posed together. They seemed happy. At least they seemed to have some sort of strong bond between them. Probably it was genetics. At any rate, it was hard for me to reconcile the notion of being married to a woman like Marilyn Markham with Jacob’s cold dismissal— “How on earth could she be my mate? How could I possibly breed with her?”
    It was equally hard to reconcile his crazy story about Project Terry with the way he said “She’s my whole life.” The way he looked and sounded when he said it damn near made me cry.

CHAPTER 17
    I went back to the office and called the University of California Medical Center. They told me Dr. Rumler was in pediatrics at Moffitt Hospital and on vacation. So I called Booker the burglar.
    “How’d you like to help me out again tonight?”
    “I don’t know. How interesting is it?”
    “UC Med Center. A doctor’s office.”
    “Not bad.” He thought a minute. “A piece of cake, of course, but at least it has a little color to it. What are we looking for?”
    “A patient’s chart.”
    “I like it. I wouldn’t mind at all.”
    “What time do we go?”
    “I can’t tell yet. I’ve got some arrangements to make. Can you call back in two hours?”
    “Sure.”
    Next I called John Reid, the young biochemist who’d shown me around Kogene.
    “Have you ever heard of something called a smart bomb?”
    “Sure. It’s a way of delivering a drug to the target site.”
    “Come again?”
    “Say the disease is— oh, breast cancer— and you’ve got a cure for it. You’ve still got to get it to the afflicted cells— they’re the target site.”
    “Go on.”
    “So, say breast cancer manifests a protein that distinguishes it from healthy cells— let’s call that Protein B. You can use antibodies to recognize it.”
    “How’s that?”
    “A monoclonal antibody is one that will bind to only one thing. So if you can find the one that binds to Protein B, you can make a smart bomb and zap the cancer.”
    “Oh. So how do I do it?”
    “Well, you just mix your drug with your antibody and a lipid and you pass sound through it. Then what happens is like a miracle. Everything assembles into a biological form called a micelle— a little cell with the drug in it. The antibody is embedded in the lipid, and it sticks out, so it can bind with the protein. It’s like one of those oranges stuck with cloves.”
    I thanked him and hung up.
    It was late enough to have a beer and go home and I did, hoping I wasn’t going to find an empty house again. I kind of liked having Sardis around.
    She was there all right, with a pork roast in the oven and a pie cooling on top of the fridge. She all but met me at the door with a martini. She had on a dress and her legs looked terrific. She was terrific. Spot