Warren Murphy: Bottom Line

Not her, though. She had to be smart and work for the government. That was the pain in the neck. And Remo, he was a pain in the neck. Chiun and Smith, pains in the neck. Her brother, Lucius. No, he wasn't a pain in the neck. He was a pain in the ass.

Her eyes opened and the pain in her neck was real. It felt like the bite of a June bottle fly and she tried to move her right hand up to the left side of her throat to touch the sore spot but she couldn't. She craned her head and saw that her right hand was strapped down. So was the left hand. So was she. She was lying on a hospital cot, with thick broad bands of canvas holding her down she she couldn't move. And

147

it all came back to her. The Mace in the face as she tried to escape. And there, across the room, hanging up the telephone was Dr. Elena Gladstone who had a broad smile on" her face as she turned toward Ruby and walked toward her. The room was brightly lighted with overhead fluorescent fixtures. Ruby had seen that kind of lighting SQmewhere recently. Where? She shuddered as she remembered. In the city morgue, when she was examining corpses.

"How are you feeling, Miss Gonzalez?"

"How'd you know my name?" asked Ruby. . "I know a great deal about you. Your name. Who you work for. What you do. The identities of the American and the Oriental who have been bothering me. Your suspicions about the Lippincott tragedies and the death of Mr. Meadows."

"You drugged me," Ruby said. It was not a question, but more a silent grudging acceptance of an unpleasant fact.

"Yes, dear, I did. Now how would you like to die?

"Either of two ways," Ruby said. "Not much and not at all."

"Neither of those is acceptable," Dr. Gladstone said. "We'll have to find something better."

"Take your time. I'm in no hurry." Ruby's cautious cat's eyes had prowled the entire room. The walls of the room were lined with more cages, holding rats and hamsters. She saw a scalpel on a table across the room. Maybe there was a chance.

"You seemTto have figured out everything about me," Ruby said. "I'm sure impressed by all that science stuff, but I can't figure out what you're doing at all."

148

"It's not surprising," Dr. Gladstone said. "Few could."

Pickaninny wouldn't work, Ruby decided. Maybe vanity.

"The advances you've made with peptides are really a breakthrough," Ruby said.

Dr. Gladstone's eyebrows lifted. "Peptides? My, you are well read."

Ruby nodded and ignored the patronizing. "I just don't understand how you can synthesize compounds from one species and make them work in a totally different species."

The redheaded doctor's eyes sparkled with interest. "I don't synthesize them. I use natural compounds. What I synthesized and what made it all work, was . . . well, you recall in organ transplants, the necessity to use anti-rejection medicines so or-" gans from one person would be accept by another's body?"

"I remember," Ruby said.

"I synthesized the basic components that prevent rejection, and found out how to bind those to the peptide compounds. I can move substances from one species to another with one hundred percent effectiveness."

"Incredible," Ruby said. "What got me too was the range of responses you can program. I can see training an animal to be afraid of the dark or of water. But of Orientals? Of clothing or restraints? That's amazing."

"Not really. It's just the natural outgrowth of simple behavioral training. Use an Oriental assistant to abuse animals. When you inflict pain on him, make sure his environment is yellow-colored. They will

149

react soon enough. Clothing? You just couple some kind of blanket with electric shock. Then switch to other fabric coverings. Before long, the rats learn. Anything covering them means a painful jolt of electricity, and that knowledge creates peptide compounds in the brain, and those can make a man afraid of the same thing."

"Like Randall Lippincott?" asked Ruby.

"Exactly like Randall Lippincott," Dr. Gladstone's eyes narrowed as she realized the woman strapped to the hospital cot in front of her was still the enemy.

"But why? Why the Lippincotts?" asked Ruby.

"Because we're going to get rid of all of them," said Dr. Gladstone, "and then what they've got is ours."

"Their heirs might have something to say about that," Ruby said.

"They will. They will. And now, dear, if twenty questions is done, I think we have to decide what to do with you."

The telephone rang. Dr. Gladstone answered it, then said "I'll be right there."

She replaced the phone and told Ruby: "Your friends have arrived. This Remo and Chiun. I have to go chase them first and then I'll be back to take care of you."

"I don't mind waiting," Ruby said.

"By the way, if you wish to yell, feel free. But this place is ten feet below the brownstone and is quite soundproof. No one will hear you yell, just as no one will hear you scream."

The doctor left and Ruby let out a hiss of air. That was one mean woman. With no time to waste, she began rocking her body back and forth on the hospi-

150

tal cot. She hoped that the wheels had not been locked in place.

They hadn't and a sudden jerk of her body was rewarded by the cot rolling two inches closer to the counter on which she saw the scalpel.

Two inches down. Ten feet to go. Ruby kept rocking.

Elena Gladstone smiled automatically as she walked into her book-lined main office in the front of the brownstone and saw Remo and Chiun sitting before her desk.

"How do you do?" she said. "I'm Dr. Gladstone. I understand you've been sent by Mr. Elmer Lippincott, Senior."

"That's right," Remo said. "My name is Williams. This is Chiun."

"You can call me Master," Chiun said.

"I'm pleased to meet you both," she said. She brushed past Remo as she walked behind her desk. She gave off a heavy femine scent, a scent her body deserved even if the stark white laboratory clothing she was wearing did not. He knew that scent from somewhere.

"What can I do for you?" she asked as she sat down.

"First, it was Lem Lippincott and then Randall," Remo said. "We wondered if you have any explanation for why they did what they did. Mr. Lippincott told us you're the family doctor."

"That's right," Elena said, but shook her head. "I don't know what happened to them. They were both in good health, or as good as sedentary men can be. They had no serious emotional problems that I know

151

of. They weren't on drugs or any medication. I don't know what happened to them."

"Randall Lippincott was afraid of clothing," Remo said. "He couldn't stand having anything on his body."

"And I just don't understand that," Elena said. "I've never, in all these years, heard of such an irrational fear."

"You think you could have helped him?" Remo asked.

"I don't know. Perhaps. I would have tried. But I wasn't called when he became ill."

"What kind of work do you do here?" Remo asked.

"This is a life preservation facility. We try to find illnesses before they flare up. We do physical examinations whose goal is to prevent serious illness. If we find someone is losing the tone in his back muscles, for instance, and we have sophisticated ways of measuring that, we prescribe for them a series of exercise that will prevent the trouble before it begins."

"A big place just to look for bad backs," Remo said.

Elena Gladstone smiled at him. Her broad smile usually brought a response from men, an eagerness to please her. From this Remo Williams, it brought nothing but a deepening of his eyes, already dark pools sunk deep into his skull. He looked vaguely Oriental himself, she thought, and wondered if he were somehow related to the old Oriental who sat silently at her desk, examining the sharpened pencils in her pencil holder.