Your Eyelids Are Growing Heavy (2 page)

With one ear he listened for Megan's footsteps on the stair as he turned back to his book. A few minutes later he realized he hadn't yet heard her go up.

He closed the book. She really had looked pretty rotten.

Gus opened his front door and looked up the six steps into the lobby; couldn't see anything. He took the steps in three strides—and there she was. Sitting on the stairway to the next floor, head lowered, body drooping.

“What's the matter? Are you all right?” he said in a rush, concerned.

She jumped. “Oh, hello, ah, I didn't see you.”

“Didn't mean to startle you. Are you all right?”

“Yes, I'm all right. The thought of climbing those stairs just got to me for a moment.” She stood up. “But thanks for asking, ah.”

She doesn't remember my name
, Gus thought. The building contained four apartments on each of its three floors plus the one in the basement, not enough to justify installing an elevator. “If you don't feel like walking up, how about walking down six steps? I'll make you a cup of tea.” He squinted his eyes at her. “Or maybe a drink?”

That made her smile. “I'm not hung over, ah. But thanks anyway.”

I wish she'd stop calling me “ah.”
“Tea, then?”

Megan's eyes slid to the left and read the name on the first mailbox. “Thanks, Gus, I appreciate the offer. But what I want right now is a hot shower. Then I think I'll just crawl into bed and pull the covers over my head.”

A most un-Meganlike thing to say. “That bad, huh?” he asked sympathetically.

She hesitated; but she merely smiled again and reached out and lightly touched his shoulder. Then she turned and went up the stairs. She'd rejected his offer of help, but she'd done it so nicely he didn't mind being turned down.

Most of the people Gus knew wouldn't have bothered being nice at all.

The corporate headquarters of Glickman Pharmaceuticals occupied the top four floors of the Sprague Building in downtown Pittsburgh. Eleven Glickman laboratories were dotted across the country; the Pittsburgh laboratory wasn't in metropolitan Pittsburgh at all but in an outlying district called Bethel Park, south of town. The distribution of all Glickman products was controlled from corporate headquarters, from the office of Megan Phillips.

Megan was the distribution manager, but on her rare dark days she thought of herself as a drug dispatcher. She didn't have a secretary. What she had was a computer terminal. Most of her correspondence was in-company business that the computer's mailbox system handled. If she ever needed to dictate a letter or a memo, she called for someone from the secretarial pool. But the computer did most of the work.

Monday morning Megan sat staring at the display screen without seeing it. She was having trouble getting started. She'd even come in early, counting on work to act as an antidote to her blank weekend. Megan was still frightened by what had happened to her and unsure of what to do about it. She knew she had to do something. You don't lose thirty-eight hours of your life and just shrug it off.

Megan liked to think of herself as reasonably self-sufficient, but she was realistic enough to recognize her own limitations. She was not one of those people who needed to talk about everything that happened to them, but Monday morning Megan felt the unfamiliar urge to talk to somebody and do it right then. But there wasn't one person at Glickman she cared to go to with her strange story.

At thirty-two, Megan Phillips was the wrong age to be working at Glickman. All the other women employees fell naturally into two groups. Older women made up one group, women in their late forties and fifties. Women who'd been at Glickman for years, some of them all their adult lives, working their way up through yearly increments and small promotions. They were occasionally sharp-tongued, often opinionated, but not unfriendly: they would welcome Megan pleasantly whenever she joined one or more of them for lunch. But there was no sense of connectedness; Megan tried to attune herself to their rhythms but never quite managed to bring it off. Their talk was always the same: shop, family, television. Whenever Megan tried to talk about something else, they'd nod and smile vaguely at her and change the subject.

The other group was made up of what Megan had come to think of as the girl graduates. Fresh out of college, incredibly naïve, still thinking life was one big long rap session. Nice girls, most of them, but still schoolgirls. Rather lazy. Most of the girls were in the advertising department, and Megan had been attracted by their talk of books and music. But when she learned their awareness of music was limited to that week's pop favorite and their literary perceptions went no farther than
I liked it
or
I didn't like it
, she lost interest. The girls enjoyed making verbal lists of things, especially of books they planned on reading—all of Thomas Hardy, the rest of Jane Austen. But the paperbacks in their purses were written by John Jakes and Victoria Holt. Megan was closer in age to the girl graduates than to the older ladies, but she felt even less connection with the younger group.

So what it came down to was that Megan Phillips had no woman friend at Glickman. She missed having a woman friend at work. Not that her job allowed all that much time for palling around—lunch, coffee breaks. But still, a little companionship would have been welcome.

The men—well, they were just men. On the make, jockeying for position, obsessed with their status within the company and concerned only secondarily with the welfare of the company itself. Showing off for each other by loading their speech with sexual innuendo: doin' the macho strut. No chance for companionship there. In fact, most men approached Megan either professionally or sexually; they simply didn't know how to be just plain friends with women.

Her reverie was interrupted, rudely. A computer printout slapped down on her desk and a voice said, “I've changed this shipment. I've told you a dozen times one large truck is easier to guard than two small ones.”

A wave of nausea passed through Megan. It had actually come to that: all she had to do was hear Bogert's voice and she got sick to her stomach. She looked up at the big man lounging arrogantly against her desk. Waiting to make sure the dumb broad understood what he was saying.

She picked up the printout. “It's a shipment of polio vaccine, Bogert. Who's going to hijack polio vaccine?”

“I'm in charge of security, not you. I checked with Bethel Park. There's a big truck available you could have used. I ordered the switch.”

Speak calmly
. “I have asked you numerous times not to interfere with my shipping arrangements without checking with me first.”

“I have the authority to override any arrangement you make if I think the shipment's not secure. And I've told you
that
a dozen times too. Something wrong with your memory?”

“Your authority is not the point. The point is that sometimes there are other factors you don't know about—”

“Don't bullshit me, lady. You blew it again, and I corrected your mistake. ‘Largest vehicle available in lieu of two or more small ones for the same shipment,' that's what security guidelines say. You want me to show you the book again?”

“You wrote those guidelines yourself,” Megan snapped. “You can make them say anything you like.”

Bogert gave her an insolent smile. “I'm glad you remembered that. Now if you can just remember what the guidelines say, you and I'll get along just fine. And don't try anything cute, like countermanding my order. I have to go out to Bethel Park this afternoon and I'm going to watch that stuff being loaded myself.” With that parting shot he sauntered out of her office, taking his time.

Great. Just what she needed to start the week. Megan did not, as a matter of fact, remember why she'd ordered two small vehicles instead of one large one. And Bogert's crack about her memory had made her uncomfortable in view of her recent blackout. But that was just coincidence; she knew the game Bogert was playing.

A lot of Bogert's security precautions were really paycheck precautions: a self-important man kicking up as big a fuss as he could to justify the check he received every other week. He made a lot of trouble for Megan, changing her arrangements and screwing up other shipments she was trying to move. It had gotten so bad that Megan had once gone to her boss, the vice president in charge of marketing and distribution, and asked that Bogert be
ordered
to check with her first. But the vice president was a don't-stick-your-neck-out type; he'd given her a lot of clichés about industrial sabotage and the need for security and in the end had ignored the problem of Bogert's interference.

The ironic part was that Megan felt sure Bogert had nothing against her personally; it was simply that her job made her more vulnerable than most to the security man's nasty methods of self-justification. The movement of pharmaceuticals from one place to another place was something he could really zoom in on. He ran security at the Bethel Park laboratory like a concentration camp, so rumor said; Megan had heard complaints from the lab workers that they couldn't go pee without first signing a register. So Bogert had started looking around corporate headquarters for what he called weak-security areas, and had quickly fixed on the distribution manager's office.

Megan sighed and picked up the computer printout again. The vaccine was scheduled for local shipment, to area hospitals. She checked over the details of the arrangements she'd made, taking note of the “R” in the special requirements column. The two vehicles she'd assigned both had registry numbers ending with the letter “R”, so that was all right. She looked at the registry number of the larger truck Bogert had switched the shipment to.

No “R”.

Megan sat absolutely still, thinking over what that meant. Then she checked the computer. No mistake. “R” meant the material being shipped had to be kept refrigerated. Bogert had switched the vaccine from two small refrigerated vehicles to one large unrefrigerated one.

That's why she'd assigned two small instead of one large in the first place—the smaller vehicles were the only refrigerated ones available. If that vaccine went out in the unrefrigerated truck, it would spoil in transit. And if the hospital personnel somehow failed to catch it, that meant that hundreds of children would be inoculated with worthless vaccine. Megan reached toward the computer keyboard.

But pulled her hands back. Bogert had warned her he'd be at Bethel Park overseeing the loading of the vaccine. He'd be right there in a position to override her countermanding order. Bogert would have to be told why.

She reached for the phone—and pulled her hand back again.
Wait a minute, wait a minute: think it through
. Bogert had made a serious mistake, a dreadful one in fact. There must be some way she could use it to get him out of her hair.

If she told him directly, it would go no further; Bogert wasn't the type to go around advertising his own mistakes. But what if she didn't notice the security man's error for another few hours? Not until he was on his way to Bethel Park, in fact?

Since Bogert could override her own instructions, she'd need the backing of someone higher up in Glickman's chain of authority. She'd certainly be justified in going over Bogert's head to the vice president in charge of marketing and distribution—no, that wouldn't work; Megan remembered he was in Boston this week. When the implications of
that
sank in, she began to smile. She'd once given the vice president the opportunity to prevent just this kind of error and he'd failed to take action. So if that meant Megan had to go straight to the president of the company to save a shipment of vaccine from being ruined because of one man's meddling and another man's wishywashyness—why, then, that's exactly what she'd do.

Megan felt a surge of energy, the first she'd felt since she'd awakened on the Schenley Park golf course. All she had to do was time it right, keep an eye on Bogert and wait until he left before she made her move. She dropped the printout into the bottom drawer of her desk and locked it. Evidence.

Now Megan was able to work. She put both Bogert and blackouts out of her mind and got to it. Having a plan of action can do wonders for one's morale.

Later in the morning Megan started inventing errands for herself that took her past Bogert's office. When at twelve o'clock she saw him leave, she went back to her own office. She waited fifteen minutes and went up to the president's office, the incriminating printout tucked under one arm. If the president was in conference, she would insist that he be interrupted.

He wasn't in conference. Megan could see him at his desk in the inner office. She walked up to the secretary and said in an urgent voice meant to carry, “I must see Mr. Ziegler. It's an emergency.”

“Something wrong, Ms Phillips?” Mr. Ziegler called. “Come on in.”

Megan did not close the door behind her, inviting the secretary to eavesdrop. She explained to the president of Glickman Pharmaceuticals that a shipment of perishable vaccine was about to be sent out on an unrefrigerated truck. She explained that Bogert had changed her shipping arrangements without consulting her, and showed him the printout. She explained that this was a recurring problem she had earlier taken to the vice president in charge of marketing and distribution, who had done nothing. She explained that since Bogert would override any instruction she could send through to Bethel Park, only he—Mr. Ziegler—could now stop the unrefrigerated shipment.

Mr. Ziegler heard her out, asked a few questions, then reached for the phone. He called Bethel Park and straightened out the mess with a minimum of talk. He also left word Bogert was to get in touch with him the minute he got there. Then he thanked Megan for catching the error and assured her Bogert would no longer be allowed to interfere; he himself would pass the word on to the vice president when he returned from Boston. Megan barely managed to refrain from grinning.