Overriding the usual antiseptic smell of the hospital was another odor. Unexpected. Mildly sweet, but also earthy and pungent.

"Jesus, is that peanut butter I smell?" Koch-Roche asked.

"My son Fosdick believes it is the solution to our side-effect-management problem."

As the duty nurse turned back from the cabinet, Dewayne Korb bailed out of the cart and snatched the strip of sealed pouches from her hands. After tearing open the front of his shirt, he ripped apart the safety packaging and stuck on four of the patches. That done, he looked down at himself. It was the first time in ten hours that he had examined his own chest. His pectorals sagged. His belly drooped. Though he hadn't been taking WHE during that interval, he had continued to eat as if he had. Korb had lost more than twenty percent of his muscle mass; it had been replaced by solid blubber.

"It looks like we have a lifelong customer there," Fillmore said smugly, giving the lawyer a nudge as they started to walk over to where the billionaire stood. The pharmaceutical baron was not displeased to see that the user was taking considerably more than the recommended dose. If his behavior represented a trend, Family Fing's projected profits might well quadruple.

Before they reached Korb's side, a very distraught Fosdick Fing rushed up to the service counter. He was so distraught, hopping up and down with anger at his brother, that he spoke in Chinese.

"Family squabble?" Koch-Roche asked.

"No, a technical issue," Fillmore answered. Actually, the research chemist was having a cow because his playboy sibling had mistakenly told the nurse to give the patient some of the synthetic drug. And also because said patient had immediately overdosed himself by a multiple of four. The "technical issue" under discussion was whether the Fings should have kept Mr. Korb on the natural drug as a one-man control group for the synthetic test subjects. "Please," Fosdick said, turning to Dewayne Korb, "you've been given the wrong medication. I need to replace those patches with the proper ones."

When the youngest Fing reached out for Korb's stomach to take away the patches, the billionaire slapped his hand away. The sound of contact, flesh on flesh, was like a gunshot. Fosdick slumped to his knees, clutching his shattered wrist, his face suddenly ashen.

Korb advanced on the moaning chemist, but then walked right past him. The other workers gave him plenty of room, flattening themselves against the corridor wall. They had nothing to worry about. It was the massive drums of Skippy that drew the computer billionaire's attention. Tearing the lid off the closest barrel, he grabbed a big, gooey handful and mashed it into his mouth. Groaning with pleasure, he fell upon the brown sticky stuff with both hands. That was too slow, it seemed. Gripping the drum's rim, Korb plunged his head into the top of the barrel.

A tall, skinny, balding man in a white sterile suit rushed around the ostrich-playing billionaire. "You got to make this stop!" Carlos Sternovsky said to Fillmore Fing. He waved a sheaf of computer printouts in the tycoon's face. "What we have here is a disaster, an unmitigated disaster."

Farnham tried to mollify the biochemist. "Easy, Carlos, let's step into an office and talk this over...."

Sternovsky would not be mollified. "Look at these tabulations," he insisted. "Fosdick's whole new diet concept is fatally flawed. I've calculated the potential muscle-mass increase. Its geometric. Don't you get it? The reason the test subjects are placid is because all their available energy is going to produce muscle mass. For Pete's sake, they are semiconscious."

Korb's drum tipped over, fell off its gurney and rolled on the floor. Instead of tipping the barrel back up, as he could have easily done, the billionaire got down on his hands and knees and crawled into it.

At least as far as the breadth of his shoulders would allow.

"And your point?" the patriarch Fing said.

"My figures indicate that the rate of change has already begun to level off," Sternovsky told him. "Very shortly, our test subjects will have maxed out. When the demands of WHE on their bodies to produce muscle begin to slack off, they will wake up. Bigger. Stronger. And even more dangerous."

"Fosdick!" Fillmore barked. "Is this true? You promised me that you had the situation well in hand." The youngest Fing wanted to reply, to defend himself, but the shock of his injury was such that though he opened his mouth to speak, he couldn't even manage a stutter.

Farnham, sensing that his father was about to turn on him, diverted attention by attacking the American biochemist and taking up the banner of his fallen brother. "All you're giving us is speculation," he said. "You don't know what's going to happen in the next two minutes, let alone the next half hour. And you certainly can't predict the behavior of our test subjects even if the synthetic's effect does level off as you suggest."

Sternovsky put his hands to his head and pulled at his comb-over, making it stick straight up. "You're not listening!" he cried. "There is no door, no lock on this ward that will hold them."

"I think we've heard enough," Fillmore said.

"No, you haven't," the biochemist countered. "God forgive us for what we've done to them, but these test subjects are no longer human beings. If you don't euthanize them now, and quickly, while they are still in a stuporous state, they will wake up and kill us all."

Fillmore had always figured Sternovsky for a whiner. There was something weak in the eyes and the dark circles that surrounded them. But the expression he now wore clearly declared he had reached his limit. No amount of browbeating would bring him back into line. "I'm canceling your contract, as of this instant," the elder Fing said. "Turn in your security badge at the desk downstairs and be off the grounds in two hours or I'll have you arrested."

"That suits me fine," Sternovsky said. "Just remember I told you so when the shit hits the fan." The lanky researcher, his hair still alarmingly upright, stormed off and out the bank-vault door.

The Fings and their U.S. attorney watched the man go.

"Could he make trouble for us, patent-wise, somewhere down the line?" Koch-Roche asked.

"A brilliant biochemist," Fillmore said, "but he has absolutely no business sense. The agreement he signed with Family Fing surrendered all commercial rights to the product."

"He actually signed something like that?"

"The contract was written in Chinese."

"Don't tell me," the lawyer said. "He used a translator that you recommended."

Fillmore smiled.

Suddenly, the steady, sloppy sounds of sucking ceased.

"They've stopped eating," one of the orderlies cried. "They've all stopped eating. Look!" Fillmore half turned to follow the man's pointing finger. The video monitors behind the nurses' station counter all showed movement. The test subjects had dropped their feeding tubes and, one by one, were rising to their feet.

Chapter 30

Remo had no complaint about the directions he'd been given by the bilingual car-rental clerk at the airport. After an hour and a half of driving on a two-lane road that ran straight as a string through miles of open farmland-pancake flat, diked and about half of it flooded for the cultivation of rice-the lights of Family Fing Pharmaceuticals had come into view. In the distance, he could see the white towers of the plant complex rising up out of the blackness of the plain. The feeling of dread he got every time he looked at them was very intense.

Up until this point, he and Chiun had had the luxury of confronting the hormone-altered killers one at a time. The last one, old Ludlow Baculum, had nearly had Remo's guts for garters, and would have succeeded if Chiun had not intervened at the last second. In the area of sheer physical power, Remo had never encountered foes quite like these. The idea that he would have to confront them en masse, and very soon, sent a chill down the back of his neck.