Your Eyelids Are Growing Heavy (9 page)

She floated back to her office and stood for a long time staring out the window. So the chairman would want to know what she thought Glickman should be doing five years from now. That was something she'd start working on the minute she came down from her cloud. Megan thought about her lack of a marketing background and wondered how much it would hurt her chances. She appreciated that Mr. Ziegler was taking a risk in recommending her instead of going to the traditional well for his new vice president.

Or was he? In Unruh the president had a perfect example of the weakness of the system. Unruh had probably been a good salesman. He had all the right qualities—nice appearance, pleasant manner, presumably a knowledge of his product. But in an executive position the man was way out of his league. Unruh just couldn't handle making big decisions.

Megan never doubted for one minute that she could manage the responsibilities of the vice president's job. And if Mr. Ziegler's offbeat choice worked out, then
he
would look good. Mutual back-scratching here; Mr. Ziegler didn't get to be president of Glickman Pharmaceuticals without making a few deals along the way.

She heard a throat-clearing sound and turned to see Bogert standing in the doorway. “We're going to have to change a shipment.”

“Which one?”

“The shipment of morphine going to Harrisburg area hospitals tomorrow. You've got the truck scheduled to take the turnpike all the way instead of following local bypass routes. There was a morphine hijacking on the turnpike last week. One of the guards was shot.”

Megan grimaced and turned to her terminal keyboard. She started to punch out a number.

And stopped.

Something teased at her memory. “Wait a minute,” she told Bogert. She opened the bottom drawer of her desk and took out that morning's
Post-Gazette
. There it was, right on the front page. “You mean the Allegheny Laboratories truck?”

“Yeah, that's the one.”

“The hijackers have been caught.” She handed him the newspaper.

His face turned red as he read the article. He dropped the paper back on her desk, and Megan watched with interest as he struggled to get the word out. “Sorry.”

“That's perfectly all right,” she said sweetly.

CHAPTER 6

When Bogert had left, Megan was able to turn with a cheerful mind to a minor problem that had popped up. A small shipment of Lipan had gone astray. The first wave of shipments had gone out without incident, while Megan was in Boston. Glickman was now in the follow-up stage—quick reorders, a distributor here and there who'd decided to keep a larger supply of Lipan on hand than originally planned, a drugstore chain that had somehow missed out on the original shipments. Cleanup work. A small distributor in Chattanooga, Tennessee, had complained his second order of Lipan had never arrived.

Megan had already instructed the computer to authorize a new shipment, so that part was all right. What she wanted to do now was track down the missing shipment. She tapped out the Chattanooga distributor's code number. The display screen told her the distributor's order of twenty-four cases of Lipan at three hundred ninety dollars per case had gone out on the fourteenth of the month to STK 44-106. What the hell was STK 44-106? She cleared the screen and tapped out the mystery destination code.

It was a different distributor—in Stockton, California.

Stockton?
How did the Chattanooga distributor's shipment end up across the country in Stockton, California?

Megan telephoned the Stockton distributor and got a man named Fred Culley.

“Oh yeah, I was meaning to call you about that,” Fred Culley said laconically. “You sent us a hundred cases and we only ordered sixteen.”

“A
hundred
…!” Megan was appalled. “We shipped you eighty-four cases more than you ordered and you accepted delivery?”

“Well, that was my day off and we got this new man here—you sent 'em, lady, I didn't,” he finished defensively.

A hundred cases
. Even with the error there should have been only forty—Stockton's sixteen and Chattanooga's twenty-four. “Mr. Culley, did the shipment come from our Fresno branch?”

“Lemme find the papers.” Shuffle, shuffle. “Our sixteen cases did. But the others—well, under ‘Point of Origin' it says ‘ATL.' Is that Atlanta?”

“Unfortunately, yes.” Chattanooga got all its Glickman products from the Atlanta branch.

A horselaugh came over the line. “You shipped eighty-four cases of that stuff all the way across the country when you got a branch only a little more'n a hundred miles from here? Haw.”

Very funny. “I'll have the Fresno branch pick up the extra cases the next time they make a delivery.” No point in paying shipping charges
back
across the country. “Mr. Culley, I'm sorry about the confusion. Hold on to the papers until the pickup, will you? Thanks.”

Fred Culley was still chuckling when she hung up. Creep.

Eighty-four extra cases in Stockton. Twenty-four of them were supposed to have gone to Chattanooga. What about the other sixty—where should they have gone? Megan turned back to the terminal and tapped in her message number to see if any other non-deliveries had been reported.

There were four. Greenville, South Carolina, was missing twenty cases. Macon, Georgia—ten. Athens, Georgia—eight. Birmingham, Alabama—twenty-two. Total: sixty cases.

“What in the hell is going on?” Megan said aloud. How did all those southern shipments get diverted to California? She checked the delivery schedules for the four missing shipments. They all had STK 44-106 listed as their destination. Stockton. Why?

The people who filled the orders in the Atlanta branch should have questioned their instructions once they saw that STK 44-106 in the destination column on their display screens. Glickman's automated distribution system was not a complicated one. If an order came in that a local branch couldn't fill completely, the order (or partial order) was automatically kicked through to the
next nearest
branch. If that branch was also low on whatever product was being requested, the order was kicked through again.

In all her time at Glickman, Megan had never known an order to have to pass through more than two branches. Always, always the order was filled by the time it reached the third branch. Certainly no order had ever been kicked all the way across the country before enough stock on hand could be located. The people in Atlanta should have known something was wrong when they were called upon to ship eighty-four cases of a brand-new product to California. Lipan was one thing
all
the branches had a plentiful supply of. The Atlanta folks just weren't thinking; and so eighty-four cases of Glickman's new wonder product had made a totally unnecessary (and costly) trip to the West Coast.

Megan made a note to work on some sort of fail-safe program to prevent such idiocy in the future. The machine could be programmed to kick through all orders directly to her if a third branch couldn't fill them, something like that. Right then she was more interested in finding out how the mistake had been made in the first place. Somebody had had to instruct the machine to send all that Lipan to Stockton, and Megan was determined to find out who.
Start at the beginning, trace the shipments step by step
. She called up the original shipping instructions—and found out who had sent the Lipan to California.

Megan Phillips.

Her vision blurred for a moment.
She
had done it? She had ordered eighty-four cases … she forced her eyes to focus and read every letter and punctuation mark on the display screen. Those were her orders, all right—there was her code number. In another few months all the Lipan shipments would be handled locally, by the branches. But during Glickman's initial coast-to-coast saturation of the distributors, every shipment was scheduled from Megan's office. That code number at the beginning of each order was to tell the branches that this one was official—go ahead and ship.

There was no mistake. She was responsible for this mess. Megan sat for a while with her head in her hands.
I am not losing my mind
, she told herself. Many times. And didn't completely believe it.

What was happening to her? How could she have done a thing like that—and not even remember it? What would she forget next—her name, where she lived? Megan had always prided herself on having a good memory, not even needing to rely upon mnemonic tricks to help her recall details. But now … first the weekend, then her work … If Snooks was right and she had been hypnotized that weekend, then her mind wasn't failing. But that was just a supposition on Snooks's part—it was the uncertainty, the not knowing that made it so hard.

So the misdirected shipments weren't the fault of the Atlanta people at all. The order hadn't been kicked through by the computer; their instructions had come directly from her office. No wonder they'd followed through without question. Damn. Damn, damn,
damn
.

No
, Megan thought.
I will not accept this
. She'd recently had a physical examination, she'd consulted a psychiatrist. Neither of them could find anything wrong. But more than that, Megan didn't
feel
as if anything were wrong. She wryly remembered the commonplace that crazy people were always supposed not to know they were crazy—and dismissed it.
I am not losing my mind
.

Once the initial shock had passed, Megan tried to think of alternative explanations. She'd been too quick to blame herself; that's what her lost weekend had done for her. But say somebody else deliberately changed her shipping orders. How could it have been done?

Her code number that appeared on the display screen to give official blessing to a shipping order was not the same number Megan typed out to initiate the procedure. The computer was programmed to accept one number and display another—a precaution against industrial spies. If Megan's access number were known, anybody could sit down at any terminal in the building and screw up Glickman's shipping arrangements. Therefore that access number was a well-kept secret.

Not even the programmer who'd set up the system knew what the number was; he'd left the room while Megan punched it in herself. Only two other people in the company knew it. One was Mr. Unruh, the vice president in charge of marketing and distribution and her immediate boss—who never used the computer if he could avoid it. The other was Glickman's chief of security. Bogert.

I'm not going to forget this
, he'd threatened when she revealed his mistake about the polio vaccine.

He'd changed her orders before; he knew the procedure. Was this his way of getting even? But surely he'd know she would figure out who'd sabotaged her arrangements—no one could seriously suspect Mr. Unruh. But maybe Bogert didn't care if she guessed what had happened. It would be only her suspicion against his denial.

Hold up a minute
. Maybe she'd been too quick to dismiss Mr. Unruh. Her boss certainly had no reason to love her. She'd succeeded in Boston where he had failed; he'd already as well as lost his job to her. Unruh was being “promoted laterally,” as the euphemism went. Executives of long standing were never fired outright; they were just eased over into positions where they could do little harm. Mr. Ziegler had decided the soon-to-be former vice president in charge of marketing and distribution would take over the company's program of grants and charitable donations. Good-will-building community-relations busy work that nobody wanted to get stuck with. Mr. Unruh's ineptness had been clear for a long time; he didn't lose his job solely because he almost cost Glickman the Boston contract. But that was the
last
bad thing that had happened to him, and it was bound to be uppermost in his mind. Of course he bore Megan a grudge: the only alternative was to accept responsibility for his own failings and that just wasn't Mr. Unruh's style.

He could have tampered with her shipping arrangements just to make her look bad. For revenge? Or did he have some cockamamie idea that embarrassing her would somehow help him hold on to his job? But
could
he have tampered with the computer? That's where the case against Mr. Unruh fell apart. He wouldn't hesitate to hurt her if he could, Megan had no doubt; but he wouldn't do it through the computer. He wouldn't know how.

Bogert knew how. Ergo—it had to be Bogert. There were only two possible explanations for the misdirected shipments: either it was Bogert or she was losing her mind. She chose to believe it was Bogert.

Protect yourself, protect yourself
. If he got away with it once, he'd try it again. One mess-up wouldn't do much harm—but if Bogert could establish a pattern of shipments going awry on the basis of instructions coming from her office, he'd have her. So the only logical conclusion was to make sure he could never do it again.
Protect yourself
.

She would change her access code number and not tell anybody—an act that was strictly verboten at Glickman. Every “secret” code number had to be known by at least two people, in case one of them got hit by a truck on the way to work one day. If Mr. Ziegler learned she had changed her access code without telling anybody, it could well cost her her chance at the vice-presidency. But how would he find out? From Bogert? Not very likely. If Bogert tried to change her instructions again and the computer denied him access, what could he do about it? He'd been ordered not to interfere with Megan's shipping arrangements, and the order had come from the president of the company himself. It was a gamble worth taking.

Megan left her office and hurried toward the computer room.

Snooks took a bite of steak and chewed thoughtfully. “How sure are you it was Bogert?”

Megan sighed. “Maybe sixty percent? More than half sure. It's that other forty percent I'm worried about.”