by Barbara Paul
Gradually Megan sensed that the gray nothingness she’d created was lightening, changing color. It was warmer, but not really bright—a sort of beige. Her body was heavy, tingly.
“Megan, can you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know who I am?”
“You’re Snooks.”
“Do you know where we are?”
“We’re in your office.”
“Where were you born, Megan?”
“Aliquippa.”
“Where was your first home?”
“Seven twenty-four Beekman Street.”
“I want you to remember your fifth birthday. Do you remember it?”
“Yes.”
“What did you get for your birthday?”
“I got a puppy. I got Toby.”
“Now think of your tenth birthday. Do you remember?”
“Yes.”
“Were you still living on Beekman Street?”
“Yes.”
“What happened on your tenth birthday?”
“Mom gave me a party.”
Moving ahead a few years at a time, Dr. Snooks brought Megan toward the present, to her most recent birthday, her thirty-second. “When is your birthday, Megan?”
“February second.”
“I want you to remember the day after your birthday. Do you remember February third?”
“Yes.”
“What did you do on February third?”
“I went to work. I met Rich for dinner, then we went home.”
“Where did you go for dinner?”
“The Allegheny Club.”
“What did you have to eat?”
“Broiled lemon sole, broccoli, tossed salad, rolls, coffee. I wanted Brussels sprouts, but the waitress said they were all out.”
“Describe the waitress.”
“Around forty, fading blonde hair, pleasant manner, too much make-up. About my height, a little on the heavy side—maybe a hundred and forty pounds. Her hem was coming out on the left side.”
Dr. Snooks let a small silence develop as she got her excitement under control. The kind of recall Megan was displaying was far beyond what she’d hoped for. Most people didn’t even see the waitress who brought their food. She began speaking again, this time taking Megan all the way up to her missing weekend.
“Remember April twenty-eighth, the Friday before last. Do you remember?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me what you did that day.”
“I went to work. I stayed a little late.”
“How late?”
“Not long, about half an hour.”
“What did you do when you left your office?”
“I got on the elevator.”
“And then?”
“I don’t know.”
Dr. Snooks studied Megan carefully, lying so serenely in her chair. “All right, let’s take it step by step. You left your office at what time?”
“About five-thirty.”
“Tell me exactly what you did next.”
“I went to the elevator and pushed the button.”
“Was the elevator car on that floor?”
“No, I had to wait for it to come up.”
“Then what happened?”
“Then the elevator came. The doors opened and I got on. I pushed the button for the ground floor.”
Dr. Snooks waited a moment, but Megan did not continue. “Then what?”
“I don’t know.”
Again Dr. Snooks studied Megan’s body posture. This was wrong, all wrong. Megan was exhibiting no sign of stress or even tension. She certainly showed no indication of anxiety caused by a conflict between the need to suppress a memory and the need to follow the hypnotist’s instruction to remember. She was completely relaxed.
“Megan, now I want you to remember the next day, April twenty-ninth. Saturday. Do you remember?”
“No.”
“April twenty-ninth, Megan. The Saturday before last. Do you remember?”
“No.”
Dr. Snooks reworded the question, skipped ahead to Sunday and tried to back up, tried it again from Friday morning on. Nothing; Megan could not recall a single detail of that weekend. The psychiatrist decided she’d been in a trance long enough for this first session and brought her back. “How do you feel?”
“Marvelous. Did I remember?”
“Just about everything in the world except that weekend.”
“Oh.” Megan’s face fell.
“Well, now, I warned you this would probably happen,” Dr. Snooks said cheerily. “Early days yet. But I have great hopes—you’ve turned out to be a good subject for hypnosis.”
Megan laughed humorlessly. “Makes me sound like a will-less jellyfish.”
“Nonsense, just the opposite. Strong-willed people generally make the best subjects for hypnosis. I meant you were imaginative and capable of deep concentration. You have an excellent eidetic memory. Your mind photographs a scene and files the image away in your unconscious until some stimulus brings it out into the open again—hypnotic suggestion, in this case. I even know what you had to eat on the night of February third.”
“What did I eat on February third?”
“Broccoli instead of Brussels sprouts, for one thing.”
Megan shook her head. “That can’t be right. I love Brussels sprouts. I merely tolerate broccoli.”
“They were out of Brussels sprouts.”
Megan’s eyes grew wide. “I told you that?”
Dr. Snooks smiled. “You even told me the waitress’s hem was coming out.”
“Good heavens,” Megan said faintly. “I don’t remember that at all. I mean—”
“You mean you don’t remember it consciously. But the details are there in your mind. That virtually assures that the details of a more recent event, like a lost weekend, are in there somewhere too. I think we can get them out, Megan, now that I know how well you respond to hypnotic suggestion. Look, there’s nothing more we can do now. It’s after seven anyway. Let’s try again next week.” Dr. Snooks reached for her appointment book. “How’s Thursday? Six o’clock.”
“Thursday’s fine. Six o’clock.” Megan stood up and said goodbye and left. The door had no sooner closed behind her than Dr. Snooks’s stomach began to growl.
Gus Bilinski was waiting for Megan in the parking area behind their apartment building. Megan locked her car and the two of them walked to a small eatery on Walnut Street. Megan was feeling let down, and it showed.
Gus waited until they’d ordered before he asked her what her psychiatrist had had to say.
“She hypnotized me,” Megan said. “She told me I remembered everything in the world except that weekend.”
“Damn,” said Gus. “You must really have a block set up against it.”
“Well, Dr. Snooks said—”
“Dr. who?”
“Snooks. That’s her name.”
Gus’s face broke into a delighted grin. “As in Baby Snooks?”
“Yes, but you don’t dare call her that to her face. She’s kind of touchy about it—her name doesn’t suit her at all. Big, hefty woman.”
Gus laughed. “Wouldn’t you know. Well, what did she say?”
“She said I was a good subject for hypnosis and she had hopes we’d dig it out in future sessions. We haven’t given up on it. But it’s a little scary, you know? She told me I could remember what I had to eat on February third but I couldn’t come up with one single detail from that Friday night or Saturday. Why would I remember all that trivia—but recall nothing of those missing thirty-eight hours?”
Gus scowled at the plate of pastrami and cole slaw that had just been placed in front of him. “Sounds fishy. The whole thing sounds fishy.”
Megan was vaguely grateful he hadn’t said something like, Well, the mind plays funny tricks, you know. Gus’s first venture into sleuthing had been a total bust. He’d asked the man who ran the newsstand in the lobby of Megan’s office building,
and he’d asked the watchman who locked the doors at six o’clock. He’d even tracked down two of the janitors. None of them remembered seeing Megan leave Friday night. But that didn’t prove anything; they probably wouldn’t remember seeing anybody on any particular night. Megan had said she thought the watchman hid in a closet somewhere during the daily five-to-six exodus.
“I don’t like depending on hypnosis,” Gus said, “but I sure as hell can’t think of anything else. When’s your next session?”
“Thursday.”
“I have a class Thursday nights,” he said absently. “You couldn’t have been invisible that entire weekend. Somebody had to see you. But where do we start looking? Megan, when you woke up Sunday morning, were you especially hungry?”
“No more than usual. Why?”
“That means you didn’t fast all weekend. You had to eat somewhere, and we know you didn’t come home for meals.”
“So what are you thinking of doing?” she smiled. “Checking every restaurant in Pittsburgh?”
“If only we knew which section of town you were in—that would narrow it down.”
“But we don’t know. Gus, stop worrying about it. It’s hopeless. Leave it in Dr. Snooks’s hands.”
“Don’t say hopeless.” There ought to be something he could do, some way of figuring out where to start looking.
They finished eating and walked back to the apartment building without speaking. Gus followed Megan up to the third floor. He liked Megan’s apartment—big and roomy and expensive-looking. Lots of wall space. He sat on the edge of Megan’s sofa visualizing bookshelves all around the room.
“From what I’ve read of hypnosis,” he said, “you need to be in accord with the hypnotist’s wishes if it’s to work. I mean, if you really don’t want to unblock that weekend, there’s no way your Dr. Snooks is going to get through. If you—” He was interrupted by the phone ringing.
“Excuse me,” Megan said and walked over to the desk. “Hello?”
“Full fathom five thy father lies,” the voice on the phone said.
“Yes,” said Megan.
“Of his bones are coral made.”
“No.” There was a click on the line; Megan replaced the receiver.
Nosy Gus looked a question at her.
“Wrong number. Now what were you saying?”
“Just talking, really. To cover up the fact that I don’t have any ideas. Megan, would you consider hiring a real detective?”
“Let’s put that off until after next Thursday’s session.”
“The longer you wait, the colder the trail’s going to get.”
“It’s probably turned to ice already,” she sighed. “Let’s wait and see what happens on Thursday.”
CHAPTER 4
The following week at Glickman Pharmaceuticals was one of suppressed excitement—part of it good, part of it not so good.
The good part had to do with the imminent appearance on the market of a new Glickman product called Lipan. Lipan was a drug that stimulated the body’s manufacture of high-density lipoproteins to combat cholesterol buildup. Lipan had no imitators and no generic form. Glickman’s sales projections had indicated that with correct marketing procedures, next year the new product could alone account for as high as thirty percent of the company’s gross profit.
Glickman had developed the formula for Lipan over three years earlier, but the Food and Drug Administration had withheld its go-ahead all that time. It had not been conclusively proved, the FDA argued, that high-density lipoproteins were indeed an effective weapon against cholesterol buildup. So Glickman researchers had accumulated a pile of data so high that even the government couldn’t ignore it.
Then the FDA had expressed concern that the public would misunderstand the way the new drug was to be used. They were afraid the consumer would look upon it as a sort of morning-after pill, something to be taken to counteract immediately the bad effects of recently consumed high-cholesterol foods. Glickman assured the federal worriers that the advertising campaign would stress that Lipan was to be taken in controlled amounts every day, like vitamins.
That advertising campaign was scheduled to begin the following Monday, but all the advertising in the world wouldn’t do any good if the product wasn’t available when customers started asking for it. Megan checked over the arrangements she’d made for the tenth time, looking for any possible sources of trouble. For every shipment she’d assigned, she’d instructed the computer to list at least three separate contingency plans—in case this airplane developed engine trouble or that trucking line lost its drivers to a strike. She couldn’t find a weak spot anywhere. But still she worried.
Lipan was just too important for any of them at Glickman to blow it now. Everything had to go right. Not that Glickman was dependent upon Lipan to save the company from financial ruin. Glickman had never had to turn to the government for reimbursement for its own inadequacies, as certain of its competitors had. But because they’d been bailed out by the government, those competitors were able to go in for research in a big way as long as somebody else was picking up the tab.
Nevertheless, it was Glickman research that got there first. For years the company had been funding various universities and private laboratories doing work in high-density lipoproteins, and gradually the evidence had come pouring in. An increasingly cholesterol-conscious public was on the verge of being offered a way of controlling the insidious killer that lurked in even innocent-appearing foods like soda crackers (most of which contain coconut oil). Glickman had patented its process—a process that would be challenged in the courts the minute Lipan appeared on the market, of course. But that kind of litigation could be stretched out for years. The odds were better than even that Glickman would eventually lose its monopoly. But by the time that happened, not only would they have made a killing, but also—and perhaps more importantly—the public’s Lipan-buying habit would be firmly established. That kind of clean head start came along about as often as an ice age.
Megan owned a few shares of Glickman. Not many, just the fewest number she could legally buy. But even that miniblock had taken all her savings. Yet if Lipan performed as predicted and increased company profits by nearly a third, the value of Megan’s shares would go through the ceiling.
Because more was involved than the actual profit realized through sales. At least two of Glickman’s financially troubled competitors had put all their eggs in one basket and gambled their futures on being the first to come out with an anti-cholesterol pill. Their losing the gamble meant probable bankruptcy; not even the government could be counted on to go on rewarding incompetence forever. And who else but Glickman would be right there in the front row bidding ten cents on the dollar for the bankrupt companies’ diminished assets? Lipan could be the means of a take-over that might well enable Glickman to pass Upjohn, Bristol-Myers, American Cyanamid, Roche, Squibb, all of them. That little lavender tablet had the potential to make Glickman the giant in the pharmaceuticals field.
Megan swallowed nervously and checked her arrangements again.
The other element of suppressed excitement in the Glickman offices was limited to a small group of people and was frankly tinged with Schadenfreude: it was always titillating to watch some high-ranking executive fall on his face. The vice president in charge of marketing and distribution was a man named Unruh, and he was in hot water. Not because of his failure to stop Bogert’s meddling, but because he’d failed to pull off an important deal in Boston. And Unruh had failed simply because he’d gone into the negotiations inadequately prepared.
A Boston-based pharmaceuticals distributor was in the process of expanding its line; and since Glickman had no New England branch, the opportunity seemed heaven-made. Unruh had gone to Boston to close the deal. He’d had all the financial details down pat; but when the distributor had started asking about stock on hand and Glickman’s capability for making emergency deliveries and how the insurance for long-distance hauling was handled, he’d flounder
ed. To question after question Unruh had found himself saying, “I’ll have to get back to you on that.” (Executives never say, “I don’t know.”) As a result the Boston distributor had had very serious second thoughts, and Unruh had come back to Pittsburgh without the contract.
Which was dumb, Megan thought. Every one of the details the Boston distributor had asked for was right there in the Glickman computer. All Unruh had had to do was pick up a phone and call Megan; she could have gotten everything he needed in a matter of hours.
But that wasn’t Unruh’s way. To him, asking for so much additional information would have been an admission that he hadn’t done his homework. So instead he’d chosen to try to bluff it out, to protect himself at the expense of the company’s best interests. It hadn’t worked. There were Unruhs in every corporation, people who were quite willing to let the company take a bath rather than stick their own necks out. Glickman’s vice president in charge of marketing and distribution had been Peter Principled beyond his capabilities; as a result, most of his energy was directed toward protecting his position instead of working for the good of the company.
Sometimes Megan thought Unruh just wasn’t very bright. He’d overlook the most obvious things, and he was slow at making connections. He didn’t really understand how the computer could be used to best advantage and he’d made no effort to learn. Unruh had a smooth and affable manner, though; he functioned well in an old-boys atmosphere. He’d built up a lot of good will for Glickman, and good will preceded good contracts. But as a practical, working executive, Unruh left a lot to be desired.
Unruh’s secretary had made the trip to Boston with him, and from her Megan was able to find out exactly what it was the distributor had wanted to know. She’d called up the information from the computer and formally made an appointment to speak to the president.
Mr. Ziegler made her wait two days; he was up to his ears in work. But at last she went in with a stack of printouts under her arm and asked him straight out about the Boston distributor. “Have they closed the door? Or is there still a chance of getting the contract?”
“The door’s still open. A crack.” Mr. Ziegler wasn’t smiling. “I’m afraid we didn’t make too good an impression.”
