cancer. But she doesn’t have it now. In fact, she’s in perfect health. What do you think of that?”
“I think you aren’t paying me to find a cure for cancer,” Jeanette answered, but Robert’s smug smile only grew wider.
“That’s right. But actually, I don’t think you need to work on refining your formula any more. We know it works on ten percent of the population. We just have to find the ten percent it works on.” He sat down in the chair opposite her desk, the big comfy leather one that only Robert ever sat in.
He was talking about mass trials.
“So where are you going to get enough people to put together a profile for that? Carradine and Borden both manifested Talent, but other than that, they have nothing in common. He was white. She’s black. He was a teenager. She’s in her thirties. They were both users, but we don’t even know they were using the same things.”
“Campbell, Campbell, Campbell. When are you ever going to learn to trust me? I have this all figured out.” He leaned forward, and she caught a whiff of soap and expensive cologne.
“I want you to go into production with this. Whip me up a few kilos of Batch 157 and portion it out into single-dose packets—we’ll call it something like T-Stroke. I’ll put it out on the street—we’ll sell it of course, but we’ll under­cut everything else—crank, Mexican brown, snow, the whole menu. They’ll buy it, and you’ll have your test pool—cheap, easy, and nothing for us to clean up after. We’ll rope in the ones that survive, run them through the mill, and find the common thread. Once we have that profile, we can use it to find volunteer subjects.”
Jeanette had always been serenely convinced that nothing could shock