Rivercliff. Also, Herr Muller might not panic as easily as I hoped he would; he could confer with his colleagues, who might conclude that, in fact, I probably couldn't prove anything. Then they would take the defensive posture of complete stonewalling, denying everything, letting matters drag on in court, if it ever came to that, for years.
There was nothing left to do at 4:30 in the morning, so I went back to bed.
I awoke again at 6:45. I made more coffee for Michael and myself, then went down to my office. I was very anxious to talk to Bailey Kramer to get at least a preliminary indication of whether or not he could do the job I wanted him to do, and so I called his apartment on the Lower East Side at 7:50. There was no answer, which surprised me; he didn't go in to work until nine, and at that hour of the morning he should have been up and eating breakfast, maybe reading the newspaper. Thinking that he might be in the shower, I waited twenty minutes, called again. There was still no answer.
Now I was getting nervous. I didn't want to call him at work, because I didn't want Frank Lemengello to know anything about the private little arrangement between Bailey and myself. At the same time I wanted to know where we stood, and I didn't want to have to sit around all day biting my fingernails while waiting for Bailey to call me. I presumed it would take some time to find suitable lab space and equipment and anything else Bailey might need if it was possible for him to replicate the drug, and I wanted to get started as soon as possible. I tried Bailey's apartment once more, with the same result, then, at 9:15, I called the lab, thinking that if Frank answered I would simply hang up.
I needn't have worried. What I got was a recorded message informing me that Frank was on vacation and the lab would be closed until after New Year's. Frank hadn't told me he was going away on vacation, but then there was no reason why he should have; we had concluded our business. But with the lab closed, that left the very loud question of just where Bailey Kramer might be.
I worked in the office through the morning, trying to concentrate on contracts and reports while I waited for the phone to ring. At noon a deliveryman arrived with pizza, apparently my guests' choice for their midday meal. Francisco had given Chico Velasquez, one of the day's guards, money to pay, but I waved him off, paid the deliveryman, then took the two pies upstairs myself. I gathered Margaret, Michael, Emily, and Sharon Stephens in my kitchen, and I shared their meal with them. When we had finished, I said, "We have to talk."
Margaret, who was sitting next to me at the table, touched my arm. "Mongo, what's wrong?"
"What's wrong is that you don't have enough capsules to make it to Christmas Eve," I said, turning toward her, glancing at Michael and Emily. "I assume everybody's supply is going to be running out by then. There'll be no safety margin."
Michael ran a hand back through his hair, and his blue eyes glowed with intensity. "Margaret can have some of my capsules. I have twenty-one."
"I'll share mine too," Emily said quietly.
"No," Margaret declared in a firm voice. "I can't accept your offers. But thank you."
"Look," I said, once more glancing in turn at the others around the table, "in a way, it doesn't make any difference. You'll only be postponing the problem of what will happen to all of you when you run out. There may not be any of the drug left in existence; all supplies of it, in this country or anywhere else, could have been destroyed after Raymond Rogers ran amok and you people escaped from Rivercliff. Even the formula itself may have been destroyed. There's a very good chance that's exactly what happened. There are a whole lot of individuals, and one very large corporation, that stand to lose a great deal if any of you survive to tell your stories, and a whole lot to gain if you all end up dead or insane once again."
"Mongo," Sharon Stephens said quietly, "is there any hope at all?"
"Yes, there's hope-but absolutely no guarantees. I've taken steps to try to force Lorminix to supply us with more of the drug, and I've got a very good chemist trying to make more of it. The problem is that I'm not sure Lorminix will come through, even if they do have more of the drug to send, and the chemist seems to have disappeared. There's nothing we can do now about the others, because we have no way to contact them. We just have to hope that I can come up with more of the stuff by the time we rendezvous with them on Christmas Eve. But you're not in that position. You know what will happen to you if you run out of the medication. Right now is the time, while you still have a few days' supply left, for you to check yourselves into a hospital and tell your story. Dr. Stephens and I will be with you to back you up. If the three of you lapse back into insanity, and maybe die, then all of this will have been a wasted exercise. So that's my recommendation; the three of you go to a hospital now, while there's still time for the doctors to study your conditions and treat you."
There was a prolonged silence, which was finally broken by the psychiatrist. "I think Mongo's right," Sharon Stephens said softly. "If you run out, you'll first lose your rationality, and then you'll die. Maybe it is possible for the doctors to come up with at least an interim treatment to prevent the cellular collapse that occurs when you stop taking the drug. Turning yourselves in now for treatment may be the wisest thing to do."
Margaret, Michael, and Emily all looked at one another, and finally Michael turned to Sharon Stephens. "Does what you just said mean you think they'll let us keep taking our meds as long as we have them while they work on us?"
"I don't know," the psychiatrist said in a small voice, looking away.
I said, "Michael asked what you thought. Give us your best guess."
"I. . think not," the woman replied. There was anguish in her voice and expressive green eyes as her gaze swept around the table. "You have to understand the thinking of the medical establishment, which is conservative by nature to begin with. You have to look at things from their perspective. They'd see five people walking into an emergency room. Three of these people announce that they're schizophrenics, but they display absolutely no signs of mental illness, nor do they exhibit any of the side effects normally associated with any of the drugs used to treat mental illness. They talk about being patients at a mental hospital called Rivercliff, which these doctors have never heard of. Their records, of course, no longer exist anywhere. Then these people start talking about illegal experiments that were conducted at this place the doctors can't find listed anywhere. They also claim that the ice-pick killer on the streets also came from Rivercliff. So now the doctors start thinking that maybe these three people really are crazy, but they're going to be extremely cautious in diagnosing and treating them. It won't matter what Dr. Stephens or the highly respected Dr. Frederickson have to say on the matter. Doctors and hospitals are being sued all the time. Finally, these three people who claim to be schizophrenic pull out bags of capsules, supposed medication that doesn't have a name, and ask that they be allowed to continue taking one a day while the doctors check them out. I ask you, Mongo, if you were a hospital administrator, would you allow the people I've just described to self-medicate after you'd admitted them into your hospital?"
"But you're an MD yourself, a psychiatrist. You'd be there along with me to back up their story."
"My best guess that you asked for is that they're not going to take my word for anything-or yours. How long will it take them to check my credentials? And how do you know what kinds of trash stories my former employer may have already put out about me? Considering the legal consequences of what could happen to them if they make a bad decision, do you think the physicians at any hospital we go to will be able to check our stories and test that medication within twenty-four hours? I said I agreed with your recommendation because we're running out of time and it looks like that may be our best hope, our only choice. You know what's at stake as well as I do. I'm just not optimistic about our chances."