That assay set up, Sandy moves on to trickier stuff. The new drug’s effect on lymphocytes has to be checked as well, because blood will be carrying it a lot of the time. So Sandy begins a chromium release assay, injecting chromium 51 into lymphocytes, then centrifuging them so only the cells remain. At that point all the chromium in the mix is within the cells. Then the Visionary is added—in doses ranging from femptomolars up through picomolars, nanomolars, micromolars—and it all goes into a growth medium that should keep lymphocytes happy. But with the drug in there who knows. In any case dying or dead cells will release the chromium, and after another centrifuging, the free chromium found will be a good measure of the drug’s toxicity.
Later more tests of stationary cells and organ cells, particularly bone marrow cells, will be necessary. And eventually, after a lot of hours in the lab, Sandy will have a good idea of the Visionary’s toxicity. Neat. As for long-term negative effects of the new drug, well, that’s not so clear. That’s not in the guarantee. That’s not something he likes to think about, and neither does anybody else. None of these new drugs are well understood on the long-term level. But if there are problems down the road, they will no doubt come up with something, like they did for the various viral killers. Make the body into a micro-battlefield and win it alclass="underline" the brain can finally prove it is smarter than viruses. Who knows what demon will fall next?
So, not to worry about long-term physical effects. As for the new drugs’ effects on the mind, well, it isn’t so cut and dried, but he does have a collection of cross spiders, building their webs under the influence of the new products. The particular nature of the altered state induced by the drug can be partially predicted by the computer’s Witt analysis of the webs. Amazing but true. More precise knowledge in this area will come after some extensive field testing; he has a lot of volunteers.
The fact is, he buys his drugs in an advanced state, so the molecular engineering he does to make his new products is nothing really supercomplex, though he has a reputation for genius that he does nothing to try to dispel. Actually, he has got a talent for pharmacometrics—taking the basic drugs from the companies and then guessing, with the aid of a structure/activity relationships program pirated from Upjohn, which alterations in chemical structure will shift the psychoactive properties of the drugs in an interesting way. Pharmacometrics is really quite an art, still, even with the program’s indispensable aid: structure/activity relationships is a big and complex field, and no one knows it all. So to that extent he is a kind of artist.
Into the second hour of work. Sandy moves among the various endomorphins and alkaloids and solutions on the shelves in their bottles and flasks, and the reference texts and papers that spill over one big bookcase, and the bulks of the secondhand centrifuges, refrigerators, the g.c./mass spec… It would be easy to impress any visitors allowed to drop by. For a few minutes he attacks again the problem of the synergistic self-assembly effects of La Morpholide 15 and an enkephalin introduced into the brain at the same time—a sophisticated problem in pharmacokinetics, sure, and interesting as hell, but a little bit much for this morning. Easier to return to the final plans for fitting 5-HIAA to the serotoninergic neurons, which he’s already almost mastered. Should be a nice hallucinogen, that.
So it’s a fascinating couple of hours in the lab, as always. But he’s supposed to meet one of his suppliers, Charles, at noon, and looking up at the clock he finds he’d better hurry. Sure enough, he shows up at Charles’s place in Santa Ana at 12:05. Nothing to complain about, right?
However, the inevitable process of getting behind schedule begins immediately, with Charles inviting him in to share an eyedropper, followed by a close discussion of Charles’s difficulties in life. So the simple pickup of a liter of Sandoz DMT takes him until 1:30.
He then heads to the first of his distributors, in Garden Grove, and discovers no one home. Twenty minutes of waiting and they show up, and it’s the same program there; only really need to lay twenty eyedroppers on them and collect the money for them, could take five minutes, right? But no. Got to blink another eyedropper of Social Affability, light up a Sandy spliff, and socialize for a bit. That’s sales for you, it’s a social job and you can’t escape that. Not many people realize how full Sandy’s schedule of deliveries actually is, and of course he doesn’t want to make too big a point of saying so. It’s a test of his diplomacy to get out in under an hour; so now it’s almost three. He hurries up to Stanton to make a drop at June’s, then tracks at street level to La Palma to meet Sidney, hits the freeway to get back to Tustin and the Tunaville drug retailers’ weekly meeting, down to Costa Mesa to see Arnie Kalish, on to Garden Grove to see those Vietnamese guys in Little Saigon… until he’s over three hours behind schedule and losing ground fast, with a dozen more people who want to see him before dinner. Whew.
Luckily this happens every day, and so everyone expects Sandy to be late. It’s an OC legend; stories abound of Sandy showing up for lunches at dinner, for dinners at midnight, for parties the next day… By this time it would no doubt actually shock people if he showed up on time. But, he thinks, it’s never my fault!
So he works his way along, tracking like a maniac to sit through one glacial transaction after another. It’s a bit of an effort, when he’s tired or depressed, living up to the task of being Sandy Chapman; he’s expected to show up at a friend/client’s house and galvanize the day, burst in with manic energy and his crazy man’s grin, discuss all the latest developments in music, movies, sports, whatever, shifting registers from full-blown culturevulturehood to astonishing mallworld ignorance… pull out yet another eye-dropper, of Affability or Funny Bone or California Mello or the Buzz, whatever seems to be called for at the moment, eyes bugging out with manic glee as he holds up the dropper and pulls his face under it.… He’s used to operating rationally under the weight of monumental highs; in fact it’s just everyday reality for him, stonedness, it’s a handicap he barely notices anymore. His tolerance level is so high that he only really notices the effect of that first drip of Apprehension of Beauty at the beginning of each day. So he lids with whatever household he has reoriented to party mode, smokes dope with them, inhales capsules of snapper, giggles at them as they exhibit the first signs of brain damage, fills them full of that comic spirit that is surely the main thing he is selling. It’s quite a performance, though he seldom feels it as such. Method acting.
Long after sundown he finishes making his last delivery, some five hours late. On the way home he stops and buys the ten-trillionth Big Mac fries and a Coke, eats while tracking home. Reaches home, but it’s no rest for the weary; the party there is in dormant mode and reflexively he sparkplugs it, gets it ontrack and rolling. Then into his bedroom, to check on phone messages.
The answering machine can barely hold all the messages that have been left, and Sandy sits on the bed buzzing like a vibrator, watching the surfing on the wall screens and listening to them. One catches his wandering attention and he repeats it from the start:
“Hey, Sandy. Tompkins here. We’re having a small party tonight at my place and we’d like to see you, if you can make it. We want to introduce you to a friend from Hawaii who has a proposal, too. It’ll go late so don’t worry about when you arrive. Hope this reaches you in time—later—”