"Sure," Fosdick said. "You're the expert on drawing blood. You know where the hypos are. Why don't you do the honors?"
The American scientist shook his head. "I'm serious, Fosdick. Pump some tranquilizer in through the feeding tube, knock her out and let's get a blood-level reading on her."
Fosdick wouldn't hear of it. "A tranquilizer will negate the experiment completely. Think about it. We can't build up people's muscles but in the process turn them into tranked-out zombies who can't get out of bed. Our most recent demographic studies show that eighty-three percent of the fun of having a hard body is showing it off."
"Tails are okay, though," Sternovsky said sarcastically.
"For all we know, the new diet might affect that, too. We could even get a complete reversal."
Sternovsky gawked at the research chemist. For a moment, he was speechless. When he recovered, he asked, "Where did you say you did your graduate work?"
"I didn't."
"You didn't do graduate work?"
"No, I didn't say. Actually, I had a two-year fellowship at Lever Brothers."
Oh, God, Sternovsky thought as a lump the size of a cantaloupe rose under his breastbone. Now it all became clear....
"You were in the floor-wax division?" he asked.
"No, I was with the Wisehart Center for Unguent Development."
Sternovsky was aghast. A balmer! The WHE project was being run by a fucking balmer!
"Fing," he said, barely controlling his understandable anger, "for Pete's sake, open your eyes. Our subject there has got a real corker of a tail going for her and, the change in diet notwithstanding, it doesn't appear to be getting any smaller."
The appendage in question, a stout, furry bit of baggage with a funny curl at the tip, trailed across the floor. As Okra nursed on the hose, it twitched and flipped around as if it had a mind of its own.
"We'd have to measure it to know for sure," Fosdick said. "It looks smaller to me."
Sternovsky had no intention of explaining the basic theories of biology to his Asian counterpart. "Do you expect her fur to fall out, too?"
Fosdick shrugged. "We believe that the fur is a fully manageable side effect. A daily depilatory application should handle that."
Sternovsky squinted at the monitor. The nursing woman had an all-over pelt. It was especially long and luxuriant on the backs of her legs and the insides of her arms, like a golden retriever or Irish setter.
"She's going to have to bathe in Nair to get rid of that coat," Sternovsky said.
Behind him, the medical-wing staff was already carrying out Fosdick's orders. A couple of female attendants were using cordless drills to bore holes through the walls of the test subjects' rooms. And from the other end of the hallway came a daisy chain of gurneys pushed by nurses and orderlies. Balanced on each hospital cart was a huge drum of peanut butter.
Carlos Sternovsky sagged against the corridor wall and stared at his empty hands. Had it really come down to this? he asked himself. All the dreaming since he was a small boy, all the hard and unrewarded work? Had he suffered the scorn and rejection of his peers for this idiocy? Like a man possessed, he had fled from his own country and sold his soul to the Fings in order to keep his precious line of research alive. And what were they doing with it? They were destroying it. If the Fings released the drug prematurely as they planned, it would undermine everything he had worked for. The drug's future usefulness would be tainted, its scientific and medical reputation ruined.
Somehow, blinded by his own mission, by his own thickheadedness, he had managed to hand the control of a cutting-edge discovery over to a Taiwanese unguentologist, a man whose advanced training was in making a baby's butt softer to the touch.
That Fosdick Fing was a blubbering, father-cowed moron was the icing on the cake.
Sternovsky watched the medical staff thread plastic feeding tubes through the walls of the corridor, thereby connecting the enraged test subjects to the elevated drums of Skippy.
Sure as the nose on his face, he knew. Things were going to get worse.
Chapter 29
When Fillmore Fing's bleary-eyed receptionist escorted the firm's U.S. legal counsel and the world's richest man into the boardroom, Fillmore rushed over to greet them. Though it was just past four in the morning, Taiwan time, and though he'd had a sleepless and tension-filled night, the elder Fing was almost painfully chipper.
"Come in, come in," he said, waving them into the nerve center of his global enterprise. Despite the lateness of the hour, he was most pleased to see one of the initial success stories of WHE in person. "Welcome to Taiwan, Mr. Korb," he said. "This is a wonderful surprise. And if I may say so, you are looking tremendously fit."
Dewayne Korb grunted in reply, his eyes narrowed as he searched the boardroom conference desk, the surrounding bookcases, tabletops, work surfaces for a hint of red-and-white foil and plastic pouch-the hermetically sealed packet that contained the drug and its delivery system.
"This is my oldest son, Farnham," Filimore said, indicating the casually dressed young man seated on the room's leather couch.
Farnham, who was less of a disappointment to his father than his brother was, nodded politely but didn't offer to shake hands with the computer billionaire. He didn't want to get that close to someone who had been taking the hormone. He and the entire Family Fing medical staff had learned the hard way that impinging on a WHE user's personal space was a good way to lose your head.
Fillmore Fing, a massive smile distorting his round face, gestured for the two Americans to have a seat at the long table. As Dewayne Korb drew back his chair, the patriarch couldn't help but stare at the back of the billionaire's pants. What he was looking for, and so pleased not to discover, was the protruding stub of a tail. There was, however, a certain puffiness to Korb's face, something Fillmore hadn't seen in any of the other subjects-their faces were uniformly lean, just like their bodies.
Jimmy Koch-Roche was dressed for high heat and humidity. In his baggy shorts, his hairless legs looked sickly, spindly, like white toothpicks.
It was Korb who spoke first, his voice gravelly and excessively loud. "I need some patches," he said. "I need them right now. And I'm hungry. I need something to eat, too."
"We ran out of food on the plane over the Marianas," Koch-Roche explained. "And Mr. Korb has been off the hormone medication for ten hours now. His time-release patches are all worn-out."
"How could you let that happen?" Fillmore asked in a tone of disbelief.
On the other side of the long table, from low in his belly, Korb started growling.
"I'll explain that," Koch-Roche said. "But, really, he can't wait any longer. We have to do something. .."
"Of course, of course," Fillmore said. "Mr. Korb, we'll go over to the medical wing at once and get you fixed up."
The four of them hurried from the boardroom. In the hall outside the entrance, a pair of electric golf carts was parked. Farnham and Korb got into the first one, and Fillmore and Koch-Roche climbed in the second. Farnham took off with a chirp of tires on the well-waxed tile and zoomed away. His father followed, but at a slower pace, down the otherwise deserted hallway.
Fillmore had waited long enough for an explanation. He turned to his attorney and said, "I thought you had an ample supply of the hormone extract on hand? Have recent sales been that brisk?"
"Sales have been excellent, exceeding even our most optimistic projections," Koch-Roche explained, "but in the last day or so, we've had some unexpected problems."
"I know, I know," Fillmore said. "But my youngest son assures me that he has worked the bugs out of the product. There will be no more unusual behavior from the users of WHE."
"That's not what I'm talking about," the attorney told him. "The problems aren't directly related to the recent violent public outbursts by my clients and your customers."
Fillmore's brow furrowed. "Go on."
"We've had a string of incidents that make it appear someone does not want WHE to become available, distribution-wise. Someone who is willing to kill in order to keep that from happening."
"You are certain of this?"
"Absolutely," Koch-Roche assured him. "I still have a good supply of patches at my home, but I couldn't retrieve them for fear of being killed myself. There has already been one attack on my residence. A successful attack in which a U.S. senator, the oldest user of the hormone to date, was kidnapped despite the protection of almost a dozen armed guards. He has not been seen again. Another of my clients was brutally murdered on a football field in broad daylight. Presumably by the same pair of hired assassins who kidnapped the senator."