There was no holding back this time. Quinn cried out in terror as she recoiled from the glare and instinctively batted at the light. Her shoes were still in her hand and they connected, sending the flashlight flying. It landed with a crash and a tinkle of broken glass and abruptly the An Lab was dark again. As she rose, a clutching hand brushed her arm; she yanked the sheet off the nearest corpse, tossing it at the intruder, tangling him in it. He stumbled and went to his knees. She slid the half-dissected corpse off its table and pulled it on top of him.
As he cried out in shock and loathing, Quinn turned and ran for the doors, her socks slipping on the floor. She heard scrabbling footsteps behind her and lunged for the light-sliver, felt her palms slam against the doors, sending them swinging open into the light, but she wasn't home free, she knew. The building was empty and she was as vulnerable as ever, so she kept running, careening around the corner—
—and colliding into someone, someone male and heavy, someone with two strong hands that gripped her shoulders and pulled her upright, someone with white hair and round, rimless glasses—
"Dr. Emerson!"
"Quinn!" he said. "What on earth—?"
She was so relieved she wanted to cry. She clung to him.
"In the anatomy lab!" she said, gasping for air. "Someone in there! After me! Had a light!"
He disengaged her arms. "After you? Are you sure?"
"Yes!"
"Here? On campus? This is intolerable!"
He started down the hall, toward the lab, but Quinn pulled him back. She was afraid for him.
"No, don't. He might still be there. Let's get out of here."
"Very well," said. "You come to my office. We'll call campus security from there and have them check it out." He took her arm and led her toward the front doors. "By the way, what on earth are you doing here at this hour?"
"I was supposed to meet Tim—"
"Oh, yes. Mr. Brown. Your cadaver mate. A little last-minute cramming before the practical?"
Quinn didn't know how much to tell Dr. Emerson. She didn't want him thinking Tim had gone crazy. As they stepped out into the chill air, she slipped back into her shoes and ducked his question by asking one of her own.
"I know why I'm here at this hour," she said. "But why are you? You don't have a practical tomorrow."
"I don't sleep well. Haven't since my wife died. Maybe I don't need as much sleep as I used to."
Quinn had heard he was a widower, but this was the first time he'd mentioned it.
He tapped the frayed notebook protruding from the side pocket of his coat. "I came to retrieve this from Lecture B. Then I was going over to Science for a while."
"More work on 9574?" Quinn said.
He nodded. "I suppose. But I'll gladly postpone that." He pointed toward the Administration building across the pond. "We'll stop in my office, we'll call security, I'll make us some tea, and you'll tell me exactly what happened tonight."
Quinn nodded in the darkness. She'd like that. She felt safe with Dr. Emerson.
But where was Tim?
*
Tim watched Dr. Alston pace back and forth before him.
"You've heard my lectures, Mr. Brown," he said. "You're a bright young man. I trust I don't have to go into too much detail about the grim future of medical care and the delivery of medical services during the span of your productive years."
"I don't care about any of that," Tim said. "I want to know about Quinn."
"Forget her for now. You must listen to me and—"
Tim glared up at him. "How can I listen to you when she might be in trouble? Get real, Alston."
"Oh?" he said with arched eyebrows. "It's 'Alston' now, is it?" He turned to Verran and sighed. "Louis, see if you can learn the status of the Cleary girl."
Verran said, "I'll signal Kurt to call in."
He went to another console and tapped in a code, then they all waited in silence, a sweaty, anxious silence for Tim—until a bell rang. Verran flipped a switch and muttered into the mike on his headset. Then he turned to Dr. Alston.
Tim's heart leaped at his first words.
"She got away," he said. "Kurt almost had her but your buddy, Dr. Emerson, happened by at the wrong moment and so Kurt had to let her go."
"Walter?" Alston said. "He has a talent for saying and doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. What's he doing here at this hour?"
"I dunno," Verran said with a shrug. "Maybe—"
The phone by his elbow jangled. He picked up on the second ring.
"Campus Security...Yes, sir. In the anatomy lab you say?...Yes, sir. We'll get right on it."
He grinned at Alston. "Speak of the devil. That was your friend Emerson on the phone, telling me that a 'Miss Cleary' reported being chased through the anatomy lab by an unknown intruder. He says the girl is staying with him—drinking tea, he said—until we've checked the matter out."
"At least we know where she is." He turned to Tim. "Satisfied?"
"How do I know any of it's true?"
Alston smirked. "Look at where you are and look at where I am. I don't have to lie to you, Mr. Brown."
"Okay, okay," Tim said. Quinn trusted Dr. Emerson. If he was looking after her, she was probably all right. "What do you want from me?"
"Your attention. Listen to me with an open mind and then we'll see what you think when I'm finished."
"I already know what I think."
"But you're intelligent enough to be influenced by logic, and logic is what I'm going to give you."
"How about unstrapping me from this chair?"
"All in good time. First, you listen." He began to pace again. "I'm going to tell you everything. But in order for you to fully grasp the import of what I have to say, you'll have to have some background."
"That's usually helpful."
"When Mr. Kleederman set up his Foundation—years before you were conceived, Mr. Brown—he peopled its board not only with a former senator, but with an international array of high government officials and other influential men in industry and labor who shared his cause, his vision. Kleederman Pharmaceuticals was already well established in the U.S. by that time, but even then he saw the writing on the wall: the new drug approval process was going to thicken into a stagnant quamire unless intelligent changes were made. But he knew those changes would never be made, so he embarked upon a course to find a better way to bring new pharmaceuticals to the sick of the world despite the interference of their own governments."
"And perhaps in the process," Tim said, "move Johann Kleederman from the ranks of mere multimillionaire to multibillionaire?"
"I don't believe he is driven by money. I doubt that he and all his heirs can spend even the interest on his fortune. No, he truly has a vision. Disease is a scourge upon mankind. The tools to defeat it merely wait to be discovered. Yet petty bureaucrats entangle new compounds in endless miles of red tape, delaying their use for years. Mr. Kleederman finds that unconscionable, and so do I."
"Everybody seems to have a bitch about the FDA, but what's that got to—"
"The bedrock of the Kleederman vision is Kleederman Pharmaceuticals. From there he branched out into medical care, building nursing homes, buying up failing hospitals within easy reach of major cities and converting them to medical centers which have become paradigms of compassionate, top-quality care. Those medical centers have always operated under the rule of providing that top-quality care to everyone, regardless of ability to pay. That's why they're always located near urban centers—to allow access to the neediest cases from the inner cities. Mr. Kleederman gathered the medical centers, the nursing homes, and the pharamceutical company under the conglomerate umbrella of Kleederman Medical Industries. KMI funds the Kleederman Foundation, which in turn funds the Ingraham College of Medicine."
"Fine," Tim said. Alston hadn't told him a damn thing he didn't already know. "But none of that explains the bugs, or the contraptions in our headboards."
"Tell me, Mr. Brown: Do y
ou have any idea what it currently costs to bring a new drug to market in the United States?"
"That doesn't answer my question."
"Do you know?"
Tim didn't, so he picked a number out of the air. "Fifty million."
"Oh, if only that were so!" Alston said, laughing. "Actually, the figure is closer to a quarter of a billion—231 million dollars, to be exact."
Tim blinked at the staggering figure. "Okay, I'm impressed, but you've got 17 years under patent to get your money back."
"Not true. We have nowhere near 17 years. It takes 12 years, from synthesis to FDA approval, to bring a new drug to market...twelve years before you can recoup dollar one on a new drug. But the patent clock begins running as soon as the compound is registered, so you try to hold off registering a compound as long as you can. But still it frequently takes a full seven years from registration to final approval. That leaves you only ten years with exclusive rights to sell a product you developed from scratch."
"I haven't seen the pharmaceutical companies standing in line to file for bankruptcy."
"With the price regulation the president's talking about, you may. But profits aren't the point. At least not the whole point. I'm speaking of an enormous waste of resources. And a tremendous human cost as beneficial drugs sit unrecognized while their useless brothers go through exhaustive animal trials only to be discarded because they are ineffective in humans; and even when the useful compounds are identified, they sit on the shelf, beyond the reach of the people they could help, while their paperwork drags through the quagmire of the approval process. For every 10,000 investigational compounds, only ten—ten!—make it past rodent and primate studies. That's an enormous loss in and of itself. But then consider that of the ten surviving compounds, only one makes it through human studies and gets to market. A one in ten thousand success rate, Mr. Brown. A ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent failure rate. What's your gambler's opinion of those odds, Mr. Brown?"
"Sort of like dropping a marble off the edge of the Grand Canyon and trying to hit a particular ant on the bottom."
"Precisely. And people wonder why new drugs cost so much. That lone surviving compound has only ten years to make up all the negative costs of the 9,999 compounds that didn't make it, plus show enough profit to convince the stockholders that this research and development merry-go-round is worthwhile. But without R&D, there'd be no new drugs at all."
"Isn't the answer obvious?" Tim said "Lengthen the patent life for new drugs."
Alston's smile was sour. "A few lucky compounds do get an extension, but it's a form of noblesse oblige, rather than a legal right. The pharmaceutical companies have spent decades lobbying for more time...to no avail."
"Then get the FDA to speed the approval process."
"We're already paying for extra staff at the FDA—to keep the line moving, as it were. Any futher suggestions?"
Tim thought a moment, bringing his economics courses into play. "Only one other way I can see: narrow the field."
"Meaning?"
"Find a way of weeding out the useless compounds earlier in the process. That will cut your front-end expenses."
Alston grinned and clapped his hands. "Mr. Kleederman would be proud of you! Exactly his solution! Running an investigational compound through the endless mandatory animal studies only to learn later that it's completely worthless in humans is a sinful waste of time and money."
"So what are you talking about? Trying it on humans first?" He was afraid of the answer.
"Of course not."
"Good. For a moment there—"
"We run it through some rodents and primates to make sure it's not toxic, then we try it on humans."
Tim stared at him, not wanting to believe this.
"The problem, of course," Alston went on, "is the supply of human subjects—sick human subjects. Obviously we can't evaluate a drug's efficacy against disease by giving it to healthy people. That's where The Ingraham graduates come in."
Tim saw a mental image of the "Where Are They Now" board and the pieces began to fall into place.
"All those inner-city clinics, the nursing homes..."
"Precisely. The inner cities especially are loaded with disconnected people of no social significance who do not care for their health and are consequently rife with diseases—some of them might be described as ambulatory pathology textbooks. We needed a way to funnel those patients to the Kleederman medical centers where investigational compounds from Kleederman Pharmaceuticals could be tested on their many and various conditions. Since we could not count on enough run-of-the-mill physicians to come through for us, no matter how much of a bounty we offered them, the Foundation decided to produce a custom-designed model of physician to serve its needs. And the only way they could see to do that was start their own medical school. They bought Laurel Hills hospital, turned it into a top medical center, built a medical school adjacent, and voila, The Ingraham."
"So you admit it, then!" Christ, it was true. No reason for Alston to make this up. "You have been brainwashing us!"
"Brainwashing is such a loaded term, Mr. Brown. Attitude adjustment is much more palatable. You see, with its well-connected board, the Foundation had access to all sorts of government agencies. The Vietnam war was going full swing then, and one such agency developed something called a subliminal learning and indoctrination unit for use on U.S. troops before they went overseas—to give them the proper attitude toward the war effort and their Viet Cong enemies. But the SLI proved impractical for that use. It worked, but it took years to achieve its maximum effect, so the project was defunded. The Foundation saw a use for the SLI units and intercepted them on their way to the scrap heap. They hired the original designers and technicians to perfect them and retool them to the Foundation's needs, and the units have been in use at The Ingraham with great success for almost two decades now."
"That's brainwashing," Tim said. "Pure and simple."
"No. Attitude adjustment. We don't wash your brain, we don't change who you are, we simply mold your attitudes concerning the appropriateness of certain sickly individuals reimbursing society for all the benefits they have reaped but never contributed to; or of allowing other individuals with but a few useless years left to help make this world a better place as they take leave of it. We also incite in you a desire to practice where you are most likely to run across such patients. And when you do find a disconnected individual suffering from one of the more common ailments that afflict mankind, you feel a compulsion to refer that individual to the nearest KMI medical center."
Tim thought of Dorothy, the cadaver he shared with Quinn. Her doctor had been an Ingraham graduate who referred her to the medical center next door. She didn't leave it alive. Had she been a human guinea pig? And he thought again of all those Ingraham graduates working the inner city clinics across the country, all connected to KMI medical centers. This was big.
He swallowed his loathing.
"So all this talk about rationed medical has been a smoke screen."
"Not completely. Rationed care is on the way, I guarantee it. But that was merely a vehicle to introduce the concept of social tiering to your conscious minds while the SLI units were whispering it to your unconscious."
"How? I've never heard of a subliminal method that's a hundred percent effective."
"None is. But The Ingraham system works—not by chance, but by careful selection of its students."
Dr. Alston pulled a chair closer and sat a few feet before Tim, leaning forward, his face and hands more animated than Tim had ever seen them. An air of suppressed excitement crackled around him. He was really into his story now.
"The special entrance exam is the key. Because The Ingraham is the so-called '24-karat medical school,' all the best pre-med students in the country apply here. From those applications we choose the brightest and most outgoing, and we invite them here to spend the day and night before the entrance exam—actually, we insist on it, but we're euphemistic about i
t. While they're asleep in the dorm the night before the exam, we introduce them to the SLI unit by implanting information in their unconscious minds about a non-existent formula called the Kleederman equation. In the exam the following day, we ask them three questions about the Kleederman equation. Those who answer them correctly reveal themselves as being susceptible to the SLI's influence. In one fell swoop we've identified the susceptible subgroup out of our applicant population. We choose our students exclusively from that." He barked a laugh. "Isn't it brilliant?"
You son of a bitch, Tim thought. You son of a bitch!
"Not so brilliant," Verran said. "What about Cleary?"
Tim stiffened at the mention of Quinn's name. "What about her?"
"We've had some trouble with the SLI unit in your girlfriend's room," Alston said.
"The unit's working fine," Verran said. "The kid's not responding."
Alston seemed uncomfortable. "At this time I am unable to explain Miss Cleary's apparent imperviousness to the influence of the SLI. She answered two of the three Kleederman equations on her test and got them both right. She couldn't have done that unless she was susceptible to the SLI. There's a variable here that I haven't been able to identify. But I will. I assure you, I will."
Tim repressed a smile as he realized he was the variable. He'd marked the correct answers on Quinn's sheet as he'd passed on his way to hand in his test. Quinn hadn't had the faintest idea what the Kleederman equations were.
But the inner smile died in the heat of Tim's mounting anger as it dawned on him how he'd been duped and manipulated—how they'd all been duped and manipulated by the Kleederman Foundation, by The Ingraham's administration.
But how far did this conspiracy go? How deep did it reach? It was big, no doubt about it. Johann Kleederman controlled a multi-national empire, and apparently people like former Senator Whitney jumped when he spoke. So it went high, but how far down The Ingraham's academic tree did it reach? The Ingraham wasn't a complete front. There was a real medical center attached, and genuinely important research like Dr. Emerson's was going on here.