Dressed for Disaster: The Sequel

"Yes. Do you have a family?" she probed.

"No," Pat lied. "I live alone, in Chicago. For a variety of reasons, I have time on my hands over the next several months, and your experiment intrigued me. Is this some kind of university study?"

"No," she replied. "It is a privately funded program. I take it you read the qualifications in the advertisement?"

"Yes, I am a straight man under thirty, if that's what you mean."

"Excellent. Let me get you something to drink." She had already decided that he was a perfect subject, slender and relatively short, and his boyish face was too good to be true. She went into a small kitchen, and emerged a minute later with two glasses of ice tea. Pat drank as she observed him carefully, then she took a sip from her own glass and picked up a notepad from a small table beside her chair.

"What is your name, please?" she asked him.

"John Smith," he replied.

She raised an eyebrow as she wrote it down. "Mr. Smith, the program for which you are a candidate requires your one hundred percent participation over a period of twelve weeks. Will that present any problems in terms of your family or employment?"

"I've already told you, I have no family, and I am an independent contractor, so there are no restrictions on my time." He began to feel more at ease, and started to loosen up. "Tell me about the program."

"Certainly. First, I have a few other questions. Should you be selected, and choose to enroll, we have to start immediately. Do you have any other commitments that you will have to disengage from in order to proceed?"

Pat took another sip of ice tea, and began to feel slightly light-headed. "No, I've already told you, I wasn't even expecting to be in New York tonight."

"Does anybody know where you are right now?"

If Pat had not already been drugged, he might have been alarmed by this question, and possibly tried to save himself. Instead, he replied thickly, "No, why do you ask?"