80

The elation you feel at having found the medicine store is dampened when you take stock of your surroundings. Tens of thousands of bottles and containers line the shelves, not only in this room but in several other adjoining storage areas as well. And to make matters worse, there seems to be no logical order to the way the medicines have been stored. It could take you a week or more to inspect them individually.

Hoping to get lucky, you search the shelves for the better part of an hour until you notice, by chance, that the base of each container carries an index number. Now you concentrate your efforts on finding the catalogue, or file, that is the key to this storage system. Ironically, you discover it—a weighty computer print-out—lying in a drawer of the table on which you took refuge from the cockroaches.

Within minutes of finding the print-out, you locate a tub of Atropine tablets. You check that its seal is intact, and then slip the tub into your pocket as you hurry back to the roadster. (You need not make a record of the Atropine on your Action Chart.)

Turn to 232.