Free Final Reckoning: The Fate of Bester by J. Gregory Keyes Page B

up. But inevitably, the neurotransmitter starts overproducing, triggering functions without threshold electrical potential…”
    “It short-circuits?”
    “Put crudely, yes.”
    “And only telepaths get this. I bet they were all Corps telepaths, weren’t they?”
    “I can check.”
    “Yeah. The Corps had dozens of black-box experiments designed to make telepaths stronger, or make them telekinetic. Five will get you ten this was the result of one of them.”
    “They experimented on themselves?”
    “Man, have you been asleep all your life? Those guys in Psi Corps did experiments on people that would have made Josef Mengele lose his lunch. What do you think all of those trials were about a few years ago?”
    “I don’t pay much attention to the news.”
    Yeah, I’ll bet you don’t, Garibaldi thought to himself.
    Not important.
    “Still, I can’t imagine this guy volunteer to be a guinea pig.”
    He scratched his chin.
    “Of course, he had enemies in the Corps, or if the insertion was done with a virus, like you said, he may have gotten contaminated accidentally.”
    He smiled suddenly, clapped Drennan on the back, and indicated the choline ribosylase diagram on the notebook.
    “Doesn’t matter. What happens if he doesn’t take this?”
    “Oh - first euphoria, heightened senses, faster cognition. Like being on a stimulators. That’s followed by hallucinations and seizures, and finally the collapse of the nervous system.”
    “Any other treatment?”
    “Not that I know of. The mutant cells are resistant to gene tampering. You can insert a replacement sequence to try and normalize them, but within weeks they return to the state they started in. We think they somehow code their genetic information in non-DNA form in the neural net itself-another good indication that they are engineered. In fact, in that way, they resemble the Drakh plague. You can’t kill them all and replace them with normal cells, either, because in the meantime the neurons they keep alive, functioning, and supporting would die. Besides, there aren’t enough people who have this to make the research worthwhile, and it doesn’t seem to be communicable.”
    “But if the man using this inhibitor takes this medication every-how often?”
    “Once a month.”
    “Once a month, he’s okay?”
    “Yes. The drug is a hundred percent effective, when used on schedule.”
    “Yes!” Garibaldi said.
    “That’s great. Thanks, Drennan.”
    The fellow nodded, but he’d turned away. Apparently the whole conversation had already been forgotten in favor of whatever he was working on. Garibaldi left the lab whistling.
    “One of your own damn bugs bit you, Bester. Serves you right. And now I’ve found your little trail of breadcrumbs. When I find you, you’re gonna wish the wicked witch had just eaten you.”
    But at that a thought dampened his spirits, if only a little. Bester was sick. What if he couldn’t get the treatment? What if he was dying? No. Nothing could beat him to the punch-nothing. Garibaldi took comfort in knowing something about his enemy, and that included one very important fact: Bester wanted to live. And nobody and nothing got between Bester and what he wanted.
    In that one way, he and Bester were alike. Here was something he could trace, something Bester had to have.
    At last he had a real lead.

Chapter 7
    “Always dark clothes,” Louise said, her voice somehow laughing and complaining at the same time.
    “I’m a winter,” Bester replied, checking the price tag on a gabardine suit.
    “Even in winter it isn’t always nighttime. What about this?”
    She held up a deep burgundy jacket with a flaring collar. Big collars had come back in style while he had been gone, apparently.
    “Not me,” he replied.
    “So you ask me to come shopping with you, and now you disregard all of my advice.”
    “I didn’t ask you to come shopping with me,” Bester replied, mildly.
    “Well, you should have. You have terrible taste. You