In his spare time Terry Schmidt read, watched satellite television, collected rare and uncirculated US coins, ran discriminant analyses of TFG statistics on his Apple PowerBook, worked in the small home laboratory he’d established in his condominium’s utility room, and power-walked on a treadmill in a line of eighteen identical treadmills on the mezzanine-level CardioDeck of a Bally Total Fitness franchise just east of the Prudential Center on Mies van der Rohe Way, where he sometimes also used the sauna. Favoring beige, rust, and cocoa-brown in his professional wardrobe, soft and round-faced and vestigially freckled, with a helmetish haircut and a smile that always looked pained no matter how real the cheer, Terry Schmidt had been described by one of Scott R. Laleman’s toadies in Technical Processing as looking like a ’70s yearbook photo come to life. Agency MROPs whom Terry’d worked with for years had trouble recalling his name, and always greeted him with an exaggerated bonhomie designed to obscure this fact. Ricin and botulinus were about equally easy to cultivate. Actually they were both quite easy indeed, assuming you were comfortable in a laboratory environment and exercised due care in your procedures. Schmidt himself had personally overheard some of the other young men in Technical Processing refer to Darlene Lilley as Lurch or Herman and make fun of her height and physical solidity, and had been outraged enough to have come very very close indeed to confronting them directly.
41.6 % of what Schmidt mistakenly believed were the TFG’s twelve true sample consumers were presenting with the classic dilated eyes and shiny pallor of low-grade insulin shock as Schmidt announced that he’d decided to ‘privately confide’ to the men that the product’s original proposed trade name had actually been Devils! a cognomen designed both to connote the snack cake’s chocolate-intensive composition and to simultaneously invoke and parody associations of sin, sinful indulgence, yielding to temptation, & c., and that considerable resources had been devoted to developing, refining, and target-testing the product inside various combinations of red-and-black individual wrappers with various cartoonishly demonic incarnations of the familiar Mister Squishy icon, presented here as rubicund and heavy-browed and grinning fiendishly instead of endearingly, before negative test data scrapped the whole strategy. Both Darlene Lilley and Trudi Keener had worked some of these early Focus Groups, which apparently some inträagency political enemy of the Creative Packaging Director at Reesemeyer Shannon Belt who’d pitched the trade name Devils! had used his (meaning the CPD’s enemy’s) influence with R.S.B.’s MROP coordinator to stock heavily with consumers from downstate IL — a region that as Terry Schmidt knew all too well tended to be Republican and Bible-Beltish — and without going into any of the Medicean intrigues and retaliations that had ended up costing three midlevel R.S.B. executives their jobs and resulted in at least one six-figure settlement to forestall WT* litigation (which was the only truly interesting part of the story, Schmidt himself believed, jingling a pocket’s contents and watching his cordovan rotate slowly from 10:00 to 2:00 and back again as straticulate clouds in the lake’s upper atmosphere began to lend the sunlight a pearly cast that the conference room’s windows embrowned), the nub was that the stacked Groups’ responses to taglines that included Sinfully Delicious, Demonically Indulgent, and Why Do You Think It’s Called [in red] Temptation? as well as to video storyboards in which shadowed and voice-distorted figures in hoods supposedly confessed to being regular upstanding citizens and consumers who unbeknownst to anyone ‘worshipped the Devil’ in ‘secret orgies of indulgence,’ had been so uniformly extreme as to produce markedly different Taste and Overall Satisfaction aggregates for the snack cakes on IRPs and GRDSs completed before and after exposure to the lines and boards themselves, which after much midlevel headrolling and high-level caucuses had resulted in the present Felonies!®, with its milder penal and thus renegade associations designed to offend absolutely no one except maybe anticrime wackos and prison-reform fringes. With the facilitator’s stated point being that please let none of those assembled here today doubt that their judgments and responses and the hard evaluative work they had already put in and would shortly plunge into again qua group in the vital GRDS phase were important or were taken very seriously indeed by the folks over at Mister Squishy.
Showing as yet no signs of polypeptide surfeit, a balding blue-eyed 30ish man whose tag’s block caps read HANK was staring, from his place at the corner of the conference table nearest Schmidt and the whiteboard, either absently or intently at Schmidt’s valise, which was made of a pebbled black synthetic leather material and happened to be markedly wider and squatter than your average-type briefcase or valise, resembling almost more a doctor’s bag or computer technician’s upscale toolcase. Among the periodicals to which Schmidt subscribed were US News & World Report, Numismatic News, Advertising Age, and the quarterly Journal of Applied Statistics, the last of which was divided into four stacks of three years each and as such supported the sanded pine plank and sodium worklamp that functioned as a laboratory table with various decanters, retorts, flasks, vacuum jars, filters, and Reese-Handey-brand alcohol burners in the small utility room that was separated from Schmidt’s condominium’s kitchen by a foldable door of louvered enamel composite. Ricin and its close relative abrin are powerful phytotoxins, respectively derived from castor and jequirity beans, whose attractive flowering plants can be purchased at most commercial nurseries and require just three months of cultivation to yield mature beans, which beans are lima-shaped and either scarlet or a lustrous brown and historically were, Schmidt had gotten that eerie Big Brothers/Big Sisters-like sensation again when he discovered during his careful researches, sometimes employed as rosary beads by medieval flagellants. Castor beans’ seed hulls must be removed by soaking 1–4 oz. of the beans in 12–36 oz. of distilled water with 4–6 tablespoons of NaOH or 6–8 ts. of commercial lye (the beans’ natural buoyancy requiring here that they be weighted down with marbles, sterilized gravel, or low-value coins combined and tied in an ordinary Trojan condom). After one hour of soaking, the beans can be taken out of solution and dried and the hulls carefully removed by anyone wearing quality surgical gloves. (NB: Ordinary rubber household gloves are too thick and unwieldy for removing castor hulls.) Schmidt had step-by-step instructions stored on both the hard drive and backup disks of his Apple home computer, which possessed a three-hour battery capacity and could itself be set up right there on the pine worktable in order to keep a very precise and time-indexed experimental log, which is one of the absolutely basic principles of proper lab procedure. A blender set on Purée is used to grind the hulled beans plus commercial acetone in a 1:4 ratio. Discard blender after use. Pour castor-and-acetone mixture into a covered sterile jar and let stand for 72–96 hours. Then attach a sturdy commercial coffee filter to an identical jar and pour mixture slowly and carefully through filter. You are not decanting; you’re after what is being filtered out. Wearing two pairs of surgical gloves and at least two standard commercial filtration masks, use manual pressure to squish as much acetone as possible out of the filter’s sediment. Bear down as hard as due caution permits. Weigh the remainder of the filter’s contents and place them in a third sterile jar along with × 4 their weight in fresh CH3COCH3. Repeat standing, filtering, and manual squishing process 3–5 times. The residue at the procedures’ terminus will be nearly pure ricin, of which 0.04 mg is lethal if injected directly (note that 9.5-12 times this dose is required for lethality through ingestion). Saline or distilled water can be used to load a 0.4 mg ricin solution in a standard fine-gauge hypodermic injector, available at better pharmacies everywhere under Diabetes Supplies. Ricin requires 24–36 hours to produce initial symptoms of severe nausea, vomiting, disorientation, and cyanosis. Terminal VF and circulatory collapse follow within twelve hours. Note that in situ concentrations under 1.5 mg are undetectable by standard forensic reagents.