Tom could only shake his head. He had always suspected Hutch of a paranoid streak. Now, under pressure, the weakness was surfacing. That was always the way when people faced pressure. Some of them caved in, others did their best work.
“Look, I’ll take all this under advisement. But the project group is due to meet at eight and I want to make sure everybody’s on schedule.”
That was enough of a dismissal to make Hutch stalk out. Fine. Calling the labs could wait five minutes. Tom needed some time alone. So many contradictory thoughts were pouring through his mind. It had been a matter of pride to reveal nothing of his feelings to Hutch, but in truth he also was frightened. Sarah had a much more serious problem than she would admit, that was obvious from the tests. Geoff’s analogy comparing Miriam’s blood to a parasitic organism was proving to be correct. Soon Sarah would be suffering from all the effects of massive parasitization. Terminally, if it came to that, she would starve, her body overwhelmed by the nutritional needs of the parasite.
That possibility, however, was not what most bothered him. He had almost unlimited confidence in Riverside. If all else failed, they would save Sarah. The thing he could not understand was why Miriam had done it. He remembered that she had been reading Sarah’s book in the sleep cubicle two nights ago. Numerous times she had made reference to doing “research” on them all.
The more he considered the situation, the more obvious it became that Miriam’s appearance here was planned right down to the claim of night terrors, which had been used to draw Sarah’s interest.
The approach was subtle, to be sure. But Tom was himself quite good at designing plans that bore a superficial appearance of accident. Such was the nature of the political mind. He had to admire Miriam’s expertise.
It had all led up to the transfusion. Surely it was not simply a crazy attempt to kill. Why go to such pains? There were a thousand easier, less detectable ways of killing a person. That blood running in Sarah’s veins was far more identifying than a fingerprint. No, there had to be another reason.
As to what it might be, Tom simply could not imagine. Possibly it was too alien even to make sense to a human being. They had only just begun to study Miriam. The most distant reaches of her mind might elude them for years — or forever. Yet they had to try to understand. He could see a situation in the near future — if Sarah became seriously ill — in which her very life might depend on their insights.
He pressed his intercom, hoping that his secretary hadn’t left for the day. There was no response. It was his own fault, he hadn’t asked her to stay. With a tired sigh he returned to the schedule and began to call the various labs.
Phones were answered by bright, excited voices. What irony. Here he was in the center of one of the most extraordinary discoveries ever made, right at the core of the event, and all he could feel was foreboding.
He called Sarah last. She pleaded for more time. He had to tell her that the others would all be ready at eight.
“No doubt you’re saying that to everybody.”
He supposed that he deserved such suspicions. “I’m not, it happens to be true.”
“I’ll just have to be there, then. These EEGs are an unholy mess. Not only are the alpha and lambda waves close to unreadable, nothing else follows any established patterns. I suspect that we’ll have to relearn brain function before we can figure out what’s going on here.”
“You feeling all right?”
“I’ll tell you when and if my symptoms require more attention. I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Tom —”
“You’re sure? Wouldn’t it be just a little fun?”
“Feeling sorry for yourself? I was trying to be kind. Just let me do my work. If I have any more problems, believe me I’ll tell you.”
Sarah was in agony. She forced herself to appear interested in the meeting, but all she could think of was eating. Soon there would have to be some kind of reckoning.
They all looked so evil — or so blind. “We have a most interesting picture,” the geneticist droned. Sarah couldn’t even remember his name. He fumbled with the overhead projector, finally casting a karyotype of Miriam’s chromosomes on the meeting room’s whiteboard.
Poor Miriam, she was becoming a bunch of charts and graphs. But what could they tell of her beauty? She was the most free spirit Sarah had ever known. Free, and also brave. Sarah had decided that the transfusion had really been an act of courage and love. Miriam wanted to transmit her gift to mankind.
She had chosen Sarah as the recipient because Sarah knew so much about aging. There was brilliance in such a choice. They were all making a great mistake about Miriam. In a sense they had not the right to disturb the experiment any more than they had the right to imprison Miriam. She was a genius, perhaps even beyond that. They owed her trust, not suspicion and the violence of involuntary commitment.
The transfusion was an act of courage. As the recipient, was she not also called to courage?
How dare they consider a blood wash.
A wave of hunger made Sarah gasp. Tom and Hutch were both looking at her. She managed a smile. ‘Miriam will know how to take care of me,’ she thought. ‘She would never have done such a thing in ignorance.’
The geneticist’s drone reached her ears again. “To complete the cytogenic analysis, we stained for G-banding and Q-banding. The specimen presents the longest chromosomal chain yet observed in a higher animal: sixty-eight chromosomes. No trisomes or other identifiable translocations or breaks are observed.”
Sarah could hardly sit still. If they had been more cooperative Miriam would probably already have helped her with this terrible feeling. It was greater than a simple appetite. Sarah didn’t want food. This felt like some kind of addiction. Hunger. God help her.
“Both ‘p’ and ‘q’ arms are of equal length, an unusual finding. There is superficial resemblance to a human chromosome, but only in the most general terms. The broad primate characteristics can be observed, however.”
Shut up, you long-winded bastard.
“The sexual component presents another sort of problem. I would doubt that the sexual functioning of this species parallels our own, or the rest of the primates, for that matter. The ambiguity of the sixty-six, XXY tripartite structure certainly implies both male and female components in the same personality. I would recommend a thorough examination of the sexual organs as the next step in this study.”
That did it. She could not abide the idea of Miriam strapped to some table with this bastard examining her sexual organs. She found herself on her feet. Tom started to rise as well. For an instant she was desperate, cornered. She had to get upstairs! “Relax,” she said as calmly as possible. “Does it have to cause a panic when I go to the bathroom?”
Only Hutch followed her out of the meeting. They walked down the hall side by side. It seemed that he had to go to the bathroom too. Sarah waited for him to disappear into the men’s room and then headed for the stairs. She paused on the landing. Sure enough, Hutch appeared a few moments later in the doorway. She realized that he would have to be dealt with. They were standing face to face. He held out his hand. She wasn’t really sure it would work, but she had read somewhere that a blow to the side of the head could stun.
She hit him above the temple with her closed fist. His eyes rolled and he sank to the floor. “I’m sorry,” she said. She hated violence. Always, she had been a person of the deepest humanitarian ethic.
She took the stairs three at a time.
Tom could not contain his own excitement as finding piled on finding. These results were marvelous. There was going to be recognition for everybody. Extraordinary discoveries. Fame. It was like the best of Christmases. No, better.
All it would take would be a few more weeks of intensive testing of Miriam and they would be ready to make everything public. The discovery of the new species could be announced at the same time they announced the antidote for aging. During her deep sleep, it seemed, Miriam’s body generated the same l
ipofuscin inhibitor that had been briefly present in Methuselah’s blood before he broke down. The difference was that for Miriam there were no breakdowns. It was only a matter of time before they understood why.
He thought of that cell on the Psychiatric Ward. Involuntary commitment. Unpleasant, but unavoidable.
Hutch reeled into the room, shattering Tom’s thoughts and the whole meeting with the sound of the door crashing back against the wall. Hutch didn’t have to speak, they all knew that something had gone wrong with Sarah.
“Which way did she go?” Tom heard Charlie Humphries ask.
Tom waited until he heard Hutch breathe the word “stairs” before he was off.
He headed for the sixteenth floor. Bursting into the reception area, Tom caused the attendant to vault his desk, his nightstick in his hand.
“Is Doctor Roberts up here?”
“Jesus! You goin’ to a fire?”
“IS SHE!”
“Lessee. She signed into room fourteen ten minutes ago. Signed out three minutes later.”
“Goddamnit!” He signed himself in, waited for the attendant to buzz him through the door to the ward, rushed down to Miriam’s room. The special guard sat with his chair tilted against the wall. “Open it.”
The man looked up, recognized Tom. “Hasn’t been a sound since Doctor Roberts left.” He unlocked the door, swung it wide.
The room was cold with the night wind. The window, its bars gone, gaped darkly. “Sarah left here alone?”
“Yeah! Not five minutes ago. She didn’t say a damn thing about this.”
Tom went over to the window. He couldn’t have climbed up or down from there. But Miriam evidently could, because she was gone.
Miriam went swiftly through Central Park, heading for the West Side. She was literally wild with hunger. By the time Sarah had come she had already pushed the bars off the window. It was just as well. Sarah had wanted to be held. Miriam did not trust herself so far, not in this state. She reassured the suffering woman that there would be relief, and told her to meet her at her house in half an hour. Then she had climbed down to the sidewalk, with Sarah leaning far out the window, watching her progress.
She ran across the Sheep Meadow with the soaring cliffs of buildings sparkling beyond the dark trees. She had much to do in half an hour.
Only when she emerged onto Central Park West she did break her run. Now she walked swiftly, crossing to Seventy-sixth Street and counting the houses to the one she would enter.
She chose a house four doors down from the target in case she was seen on the stairway. Taking the steps four at a time, she passed the doors of apartments, the sounds of television, the smell of frying steak. When she got to the top of the house, she climbed the ladder to the roof and let herself out. New York building codes require that tenants have free access to the roof. This made things much more convenient.
These old row houses were connected by shared walls. Miriam passed silently across the tar-paper roofs until she reached her objective. The landlord of the target house had been clever. He had gained an extra apartment by building a bedroom on the roof. The apartment was a duplex, fashionably provided with a spiral staircase to connect sleeping and living quarters. Miriam considered it an ideal early evening choice because you could get into the upstairs bedroom and await your chance at the top of the spiral stairs. From there you had a view of the whole living-dining room below.
The bedroom had a door to the outside, locked by a spring-loaded dead bolt. You could open it from inside, but not from the roof. Or so they had assumed. The lock hadn’t been changed. It was still the same substandard mechanism that had been there six years ago. She was inside within thirty seconds. There were three steps down to the bedroom floor.
Looking down the spiral stairs from the darkness above, she evaluated both occupants. The girl was the lighter, she would be the one to be taken alive. Miriam watched the man. He fit her personal needs very well. The last time she had been here all had been as now: a young couple, dinnertime. The only difference was that John had been with her then, and they had shared their meal on the bedroom floor.
Miriam used the same ploy she had before: she hissed. Dinner stopped downstairs. She did it again, louder.
“Is that a cat?”
She repeated the sound.
“Frank, there’s a cat upstairs.”
“Goddamn it.”
She did it another time, imagining herself to be a cat in pain.
“Frank, go see. It sounds like it’s hurt.”
His chair scraped. Instantly, Miriam stepped back into the bathroom. A moment later the bedroom light came on and Frank’s heavy tread sounded on the stairs. She watched him from the shadows, tensing for the kill. He did exactly the same thing his predecessor had done: looked around and, seeing nothing, bent to peer under the bed.
Miriam had no need of a scalpel. Nature had given her race a tongue proper to its uses and she penetrated the flesh instantly. He sucked in his breath, kicked once against the floor, and was dead. In ten seconds she filled her body with the fire of his life.
“Frank? What’s that sucking?”
Miriam removed her chloroformed rag from its Ziploc bag and once again withdrew to the bathroom. She took with her the loose bundle of clothing that had been the male.
“Frank?”
She made the hiss of the cat again. Then she stomped on the floor.
“Are you killing that animal? Frank, that’s probably Mrs. Ransom’s cat, you realize that!” Another strangled hiss. “Frank, don’t!” The scrape of a chair, patter of feet.
Miriam knew the type very well. With this one she would step out into the light, stunning it into momentary immobility. She got to the top of the stairs. “Fra-ank? Oh!” She stood, mouth gaping with surprise, eyes darting in confusion.
“I’m a policewoman,” Miriam said, crossing the room with one bound. “It’s perfectly all right.”
The girl lurched and mumbled in the chloroformed rag, but soon went limp. Miriam put the remains of Frank in the usual black plastic bag. The unconscious girl was more of a problem, but Miriam had thought carefully about that. Getting her home would be the riskiest part of the procedure. If anybody came out of one of the other apartments while they were on the staircase, she would have to kill again.
She went downstairs quickly. Nobody appeared. There were a few people in the street, but women in the human culture are shielded by their position from any expectation of violence, so she was only mildly concerned that she would raise suspicions by assisting her woozy “girl friend” into a cab.
They got home without incident, Miriam alternately comforting the half-conscious girl and threatening her. But until the girl was locked in the bedroom closet Miriam remained vigilant. With the turning of the key in that lock, all was at last prepared. It was now nine-thirty. Miriam herself was fed and once again able to be among human beings without the constant temptation of the hunger. And Sarah’s first victim awaited her.
Tom sought Sarah with increasing desperation, in her office, then in her lab, then in Geoff’s lab where the blood wash was to have been done. Geoff was there and he had all the fresh blood he needed.
But he did not have Sarah.
Tom finally had to accept the truth. She had left Riverside in spite of her condition. “How much time does she have?” Geoff’s expression said it all.
“I was afraid of that.”
“I did all I could, Tom. I practically had to rob the Red Cross to get this stuff.”
Tom rushed down the halls, blind with sorrow and terror. How could she have done this? The thought crossed his mind that Miriam might have kidnapped her, but he dismissed it. Even Miriam could not have negotiated the drop from her window with Sarah on her hands.
He came to the conference room, saw Hutch slumped in a chair. Phyllis was nursing him with wet paper towels. “Hutch,” Tom said, “any idea at all where she might be?”
“As soon as I tried to stop her she hit me
so hard I was stunned.”
Tom bolted from the room, went to the elevators, hammered at the button. He felt nauseous, he was shaking. But he knew now where she had gone. The only place she would have gone.
Sarah. Please, darling. Please!
The night air was damp and sharp as Sarah ran down First Avenue. Never had she experienced such a wild sense of freedom. Her body felt incredibly capable. She was moving fast, not even breathing hard, enjoying the wind in her face.
For a brief moment she had embraced Miriam in the Psychiatric Ward. In that instant she was filled with gladness and wonder. She had seen into Miriam’s mystery. How dense they all had been. Not one of them had noticed the ecstasy that could be drawn from Miriam’s gaze, or the joy of her touch.
These feelings could not be explained by science. The effect Miriam had on her was beyond measurement. How could you weigh the difference between a spirit imprisoned and a spirit free?
A thrill went through her. Two blocks ahead a lone figure had come out of a coffee shop. She increased her pace, her feet drumming on the pavement. There was a delicious sense of precision about her movements.
That figure seemed so delicate as it strolled along. It would be like digging into a honeycomb and tasting its hot, secret sweetness.
Did she want to hit that man? No, it was worse than that. She imagined his head flying like a melon beneath the wheels of a passing bus, saw the blood spurt from his neck.
She stopped running.
These were not her thoughts, could not be.
The man stopped at a corner and lit a cigarette. Sarah saw the white neck exposed as the head bent forward, then the profile in the glow of the match.
The man straightened up and stared back in her direction, seemingly aware of her sudden change of pace. His bland, haggard face regarded her with the mildest curiosity and then he went his way.
His very gentleness enraged her. She took a few strides toward him, then stopped herself. A radio was playing in a passing car. Two children came out of an apartment house lobby and dashed off into the night.