Pandemic

Moskor shrugged helplessly. "Look, kid, viruses I understand. People I don't."

Gwen smiled again. God, she had missed the man. And even though he showed no sign of interest in her domestic tribulations, it felt good to finally unload on someone. While Moskor slumped back in his seat, sipping his beer and once that was finished teetering on the brink of sleep, Gwen poured out her heart She filled in the details of the terminal months of her marriage, from her ambivalence about the failed fertility drugs to the travel schedule she deliberately calculated to increase time apart from her husband.

When she had finished, she wasn't sure if Moskor was still awake. Just as she leaned closer to peer into his half-mast eyes, he said, "Kid, I don't do personal advice. You know that. But I will say this again. Apart from being too skinny, you look okay."

Gwen felt a weight lift off her shoulder. In her role as a top-level government scientist, who at times reported directly to the President, few people held sway over her, but Moskor's acceptance provided the absolution she sought.

He stretched his long arms over his head. "Hope you didn't drive all the way up here just to announce you're single again," he said. "Because the only single guy in my lab is gay."

Gwen smiled. "I appreciate you listening, Isaac. It helps."

Moskor shrugged, looking slightly embarrassed.

"I came up here to hear about your latest research."

He sat up straighter in his seat. His face lit up, shedding years. "Gwen, it's showing some real promise."

Gwen leaned forward and cocked her head in curiosity. "How so?"

"A single-stranded RNA virus like influenza. Nothing to the bug, really. Can't even reproduce without invading a host cell. But, damned if it doesn't offer one of the most complex defenses known to nature!" Moskor was suddenly more animated, like a jock at a party where the topic of conversation had just shifted from ballet to football. "With our earlier drugs, A35321 through 348, we saw some promising early results with the chimps, but the bug mutated so quickly they were as good as useless in a couple of life cycles."

Moskor stood up and hurried out of the room. He jogged back in moments later, carrying a binder under his arm and wheezing slightly. He flopped back onto the sofa and opened the binder in front of him. The page showed a schematic drawing of an organic molecule with multiple limbs, some ending in circular chains. "Here's the original A35321. The beauty is that she doesn't target DNA transcription, like most antivirals. No. She blocks the ribosomal RNA translation of the genes. Shuts down the whole protein-producing factory. Influenza can't replicate without that Ergo, end of infection." He exhaled heavily. "But the whole A35 series was flawed. Within a few life cycles the microbe kept developing a resistance to it. We kept making minor adjustments, lopping off a chain here or throwing in another there." His finger flew over the complex structure, pointing to the rings and chains. "But at the end of the day, we were fighting a losing battle. We'd run out of fingers to plug all the leaks that kept springing, you understand?"

His lips curved into a proud grin. "Forced us back to the drawing board. Truth be told, it was Clara's idea. 'Why not make it simpler?' she said." His hand cut across the sketch, pantomiming the act of cleaving the molecule in half. "Sometimes less is truly more!" His voice rose joyfully. When he flipped a page, the next diagram showed a much more compact molecule. "Meet A36112. Same mechanism of action — we've tested several strains of the bug in primates — but so far no resistance documented. As of yet the little devil doesn't know what hit her."

"Is it a pill?" Gwen asked.

Moskor nodded. "We're using one hundred milligrams twice a day, but it's likely that once a day would do the trick."

"Do the results depend on the stage of the infection?"

Moskor grinned. "Ah, kid, I taught you well, didn't I? The curse of most antivirals is that unless given early — the first forty-eight to seventy-two hours of infection — they don't work worth a damn. Of course earlier is always better than later, but A36112 seems to work at any point of the infection." His grin grew wider. "Eighty percent of our chimps lost their fever within twenty-four hours of treatment."

Swept up in Moskor's enthusiasm, Gwen rose from her seat and hovered over the diagram as if it were a treasure map. "What about human trials?" she asked.

Moskor nodded. "Took us a while to steer through Ethics and get FDA approval, but phase one trials have begun on volunteers."

Gwen nodded. She knew that phase one trials weren't used to prove much more than the drug wasn't more dangerous than the disease it was trying to treat "Preliminary resultst" she asked.

"So far, so good." Moskor shrugged. "Ten to twenty percent get diarrhea, just like our poor monkeys. But give sugar pills to people and ten to twenty percent will get explosive diarrhea, too."