Doug had never seen himself as a salesman but had thrown himself into the job to see what he could wring from it. He’d approached it as he would a programming problem, establishing object relationships and then functionally decomposing them. His applied system had met with resounding success.

In Doug’s two years on the job, the most important truth he’d discovered was that knowing all the receptionists’ first names, knowing the names of all their children and grandchildren, burbling at their baby pictures, smiling for them until you thought your cheeks were going to cramp, did not guarantee you a sit-down with the doctor. You needed the secret weapon.

Food.

A crumb cake or bagels and cream cheese in the morning or pizzas and subs at noon and, for the battle-hardened veterans who manned Dr. Alcott’s front lines, the afternoon coup de grace: chocolate-covered strawberries.

Those had done it. The guardians of the gate had hoisted the white flag and all but demanded that their boss give that nice young Mr. Gleason five minutes.

Doug stowed his sample case in the trunk, then slipped into the front seat of his company car—more of a business office on wheels, actually. In addition to the indispensable cellular phone, he had a cellular fax, a cellular modem for his laptop computer, and a small inkjet printer.

He checked his cell phone—not wanting to be interrupted in Alcott’s office, he’d turned it off—and the display told him he had voice mail. The message was from a pharmacist in Sheepshead Bay wanting to know where he could return some TriCef that was going out of date.

Doug wondered about that as he returned the call. TriCef had been out a couple of years now, long enough to start hitting its initial expiration dates, but with the way it was selling, there shouldn’t be any of those old batches left.

When he got the pharmacist on the line, Doug identified himself and said, “So what did you do, lose a bottle in the back of one of your cabinets?”

“Not at all,” the man said with a vaguely Jamaican-sounding voice. “TriCef simply isn’t moving for me.”

“Top-selling branded cephalosporin in the country.”

“Yes, I read Pharmaceutical Forum too, but it’s not moving in my place. Same with most of the other pharmacies around here. Only a couple of our docs have ever written for it.”

Troubled, Doug gave the pharmacist directions for returning his outdated stock directly to the company and said good-bye.

Was this a trend? Were sales of TriCef slowing? Not according to his commission checks. But GEM commissions were based on dollar amounts shipped rather than number of prescriptions written. And GEM did its own distribution, so it was right on top of product flow. If sales were slowing, his checks would be shrinking.

So Sheepshead Bay had to be an anomaly.

But an anomaly was a glitch, and the programmer regions of Doug’s brain abhorred glitches. He opened the pharmacy section of his computer’s address book and made some random calls. First three, then five, then a dozen. Each pharmacy had the same story.