The Hunger (9 page)

Miriam had been angered when Alice went earlier to the front window with John. The girl should not take such liberties. Miriam looked forward to the time when Alice would want only her, care only about her, live for their life together.

As she and Alice stood there, Miriam’s eyes searched the garden. She was sure that she had seen movement. Had Alice noticed it? The girl was looking up at her, a question forming on her lips. “What’s there?”

Miriam forced a smile. “Nothing.” But that wasn’t true, not at all. John was standing behind a hedge, his face turned toward this window. Miriam sensed menace. Her skin prickled beneath her clothes. “We ought to keep working on these ideas, Alice. Don’t you agree?”

“I thought I saw someone out there. Where’s John?”

“Not out there! You can see the garden’s empty.”

“Yeah.”

“So don’t change the subject. I asked you a question.”

“And I ignored it. That was an answer.”

Miriam turned from the window. “You’ll find out soon enough how important these sessions are. You’re learning a great deal. Later, it’ll all be useful.”

“You’re the only person I know who cares about such weird stuff.”

“You’ll come back tomorrow, then?”

“Why are you acting so funny, Miriam? Course I’ll come back tomorrow. I come every day. I don’t even need to go now.”

“You’d better. I’m expecting a guest.” For the briefest of instants her fingers smoothed the girl’s hair.

It was a mistake. Furious, she snatched her hand away, quelling the explosion of raw hunger that the contact produced. Then Alice was out the door, scampering down the steps, promising to return the next day. She would be such a good companion. For variety Miriam was in the habit of alternating men and women. Their sex was a matter of indifference to her. Miriam turned back into the house, to face John. This was going to be a painful confrontation. He would be returning once again from the hunt. His forays would be getting frequent now, and desperately less satisfying.

The garden appeared empty, but she knew he had not gone. She closed her eyes, hating so to fear her beloved. The fear, though, was appropriate. No longer the love. She moved swiftly through the rooms, striving to prepare herself for the return of her poor hunter, broken and furious, from his paths of hell.

The lab was dark, silent except for the soft
whoo-whoo
of the ape on the video monitor. Sarah had put it all aside — budget committees, allocation requests, threats — to concentrate on the spectacle being replayed on the videotape.

“Effective age thirty-five years at this point,” Phyllis Rockler said. She was hoarse with exhaustion, she had been at work a long, long time.

“The curve starts accelerating now,” Charlie Humphries added.

Charlie himself appeared on the tape and drew a sample of blood. The ape’s protest was violent, but weak with age. “Effective forty,” Phyllis said. “It’s been seven minutes.”

“That’s a rate of one point four years a minute.”

The ape’s mouth began to work. First one, then another, then a cascade of teeth fell out. Its face was a study in black fury.

“Effective age fifty-five.”

“What’s the human equivalent of a fifty-five-year-old rhesus?” Sarah asked. They had logged the equivalences only as far as thirty years. Older apes of the species were unknown.

“I figured it at about ninety-two if the scale is a straight linear regression,” Phyllis replied. “That would mean he gets to a hundred and thirty-seven equivalent age before death.”

Long gray hairs were falling like rain around his head and off his shoulders. Slowly, a hand came up to touch the sinking lips. As the hand moved, the fingers grew disfiguring arthritic knobs. The monkey began to sway, and his body started curving to the right.

“That’s scoliosis of aging,” Phyllis said.

There came a heartrending, infuriated howl. All three of the viewers stirred. Sarah wondered if the feeling that they were intruding into something forbidden affected the others as well. The ape had been a good and loving friend to the whole lab. Had those he loved the right to bring him such suffering? And yet . . . and yet — Sarah wondered if death was such a certainty, if the gates of Eden were really locked forever. It was simple, wasn’t it? A matter of finding the key. Once the gates swung open, man’s ancient, lost war with death would be won.
‘We need not die,’
Sarah thought. She folded her arms and looked with cold determination at Methuselah’s remarkable destruction. His life was a fair price for such an enormous gain to humanity.

“Effective age seventy. Rate one point nine five years per minute. Equivalent age one hundred twenty-one.” A last, despairing grimace of defiance crossed his face.

Then it happened on tape just as it had in reality two hours ago. Methuselah fell onto his side, a terrible look in his eyes. His mouth worked, his arms slashed the air.

Wrinkles and fissures raced through his skin. The face withered like a drying apple. The eyes glazed over with layers of cataracts and then closed to slits. Hands and feet balled to fists. The skin began slackening on the bones.

The whole skeleton, slowly moving, was visible beneath the loose skin.

“Effective age eighty-five. Rate two point four zero years per minute. Equivalent age one hundred twenty-nine.”

There was a long, rattling sigh.

“Life signs terminate,” Phyllis said.

Sarah was stunned yet again by the power of the unknown. The now-dead ape’s skin cracked along the bones and began to fall like tissue to the floor of the cage. Soon the skeleton, still held together by tendons, lay amid a pile of rubble. Then it also collapsed, and what had been alive just minutes before was reduced to dust. “The process of postmortem decay accelerated approximately two years of dry-air degeneration into seventy-one point five six seconds.” The dust in the bottom of the cage became finer and finer and at last was whisked away by an errant breeze.

At this point there was a sudden series of thuds on the audio track, then the brief clanging of an alarm. That had been Phyllis sealing the room to prevent spread of a possible disease vector.

“Methuselah remained awake one hundred nineteen hours,” Phyllis said. “I noted the first overt degenerative changes after the seventieth hour.”

“His lipofuscin accumulation rate started an exponential rise in sample two thousand one hundred forty-one, taken at the seventy-first hour,” Charlie said. “Subsequently, his blood cells began to lose their ability to uptake oxygen.”

There was a long silence. “I don’t know what the hell to make of it,” Sarah said at last.

“That’s putting it mildly.”

“Let’s see. The time is now eleven-fifteen. My guess is that the board is just about to approve Hutch’s budget appropriation. Us not included. What say we just crack the quarantine on the cages and go home.”

“Don’t get a heart attack,” Charlie said softly, “they’ll find the money for us now.”

Sarah sniffed. She folded her arms. “As a matter of fact, I don’t feel
one bit
like a heart attack. I’m enjoying thinking about the trouble this tape is going to cause him.”

“The physical sciences are going to be in an uproar,” Phyllis muttered. “There’s something in the old body we don’t know nothin’ about.”

“Hutch is going to be forced to go right back to the committee and ask for a review.”

“Let’s hope.”

“Look, I’m director of this lab, so get ready for some directions. I want to get a thousand K of the computer
under key
, access limited to us three. We need a nice roomy memory bank to foodle our numbers in.”

“How do we set it up for billing?” Charlie asked.

“Don’t worry about it. The administrator will fix it up.”

“You mean Hutch?”

Her voice gentled. “I mean Tom. Hutch might not survive this.”

Charlie applauded expansively.

They laughed. Sarah looked at the glowing TV screen. The mystery represented by the empty cage was awesome. It meant that the body did indeed contain a secret clock, and the clock could be tampered with. If age could speed up it could also slow down. It could stop.

All three of them continued to watch the cage even though there was nothing more to see. Sarah found her mind racing from question to question. It was a high moment, the kind of discovery few scientists ever encounter. She was acutely aware that they had made history. Schoolchildren, if such would still be birthed after immortality, would read about this moment. Models of this very lab would stand in museums.

She stopped herself with a shudder. It was not healthy to think about such things. Her mind turned back to the more immediate questions but the chill remained, a feeling of disquiet that must mask, deep in her heart, the sick dread she suspected was there.

“The sleep deprivation was the triggering mechanism for the aging acceleration. But what caused him to stop sleeping in the first place?”

“His whole system collapsed.”

“That’s not an answer.”

They lapsed into silence. Sarah suspected the others felt much as she did. She brushed aside her fear, told herself the situation wasn’t threatening.

The cage on the TV screen had a dark and evil cast to it, almost as if some inhuman spirit now possessed it. Sarah did not believe in old-fashioned notions of good and evil; she told herself that she did not. But she wouldn’t go near that cage unless absolutely necessary.

There was a noise and a stab of light as the door to the hall was opened. Tom’s angular form appeared, backlighted by the cold fluorescent glow of the hallway. He came in quietly, a doctor among the sick, and put his hand on her shoulder. His stoop told her all that he planned to say. He did not yet know of the tape, and the triumph represented by Methuselah’s destruction.

Miriam’s worst fear surfaced when she realized that John had entered the house. In all time and in all the world, this was the most terrible thing. He would be fiercely angry in his aging, dangerous as he died. She breathed a charm against him, calling on the ancient gods of her species, seeking in her heart their embrace.

She hunted him through her cheerful rooms, happy places each. Warm memories of their long time here flooded her. She ran her hand lightly along the back of the rosewood love seat, touched the mahogany elegance of the side table. On it were gold candlesticks. They still enjoyed that courtly old light and often lit the house with it.

She heard, distinctly, the soft hiss of a door opening across a carpet.

The house was so still that she could sense the faint rustle of her own dress as she breathed. She stood in a corner of the room. To her right was the hallway and the front door. Ahead the arched doorway into the dining room. She knew now that he had come up the basement stairs and must be at this moment standing between the pantry and the dining room. Then she heard a sound, a much aged voice, singing. “Sweetest songs of saddest thoughts, of times we’ve lost and loves forgot.” The voice sank to a mutter and stopped. That song had been a popular tune of his youth. She remembered well singing it with him.

Then he came into the light. She concealed her surprise; he was naked. “Please,” he said softly. “Please, Miriam, help me.”

The firm, young body that had so delighted her was gone. In its place was this thinned form, with liqueous pouches were muscle had been.

“Look at me, Miriam!” He sounded so pitiful, she hated to hear him.

“Put your clothes on.”

“They don’t fit!” Now he spat the words. Sudden rage was one of the most common characteristics of the disease. This time it declined as quickly as it had risen, leaving him only his despair. Before the reality of his suffering, Miriam’s thoughts seemed to move slowly, her body to be stilled. Hesitant, not sure he would be tolerated, he came to her. His breath was so foul that she turned her head aside. Her mind, revolted by the ugliness, used as an antidote an image of Alice’s bright face, of her creamy young skin. As his lips touched hers she took solace in this image.

“Don’t you enjoy me? Please try.” His face, spotted, sunken, bearded with hard white stubble, bobbed before her like the glowing image of death itself. He squeezed her shoulders, his hands sliding up to the base of her neck. “
You’re
just as young as ever.
You
look marvelous.” Suddenly he stepped back, blocking the door to the hallway. “Don’t leave me,” he said. His eyes were wide. “Don’t leave me!”

She stood, head bowed, wishing that — just once — she dared surrender herself to another being. But she remained wary. The rage may come upon him again at any moment. Her throat was still a little raw from yesterday’s episode. She looked up, met his eyes. “I won’t ever leave you, John, not ever.”

“Miriam —” He sobbed, wretched, obviously furious with himself for being so blatantly emotional. She could no longer ignore the plea in his voice. Against her own best judgment she went to him, put her arm around him, and guided him to the leather library sofa.

He leaned his head against her shoulder. “I’m so old. How did I get so old?”

“Time —”

“
What
time? It’s been two days!”

“A great deal of time concentrated in a small space.”

He looked at her, eyes stricken. “Where does it end?”

This was the hardest part. How do you face it, the fact that the seed of death, hidden deep in the body, has started to grow? She could not speak. Overcoming her revulsion, she stroked his head, held his hand. There was a low, awful sound from his throat. “I loved you,” he whispered. “I trusted you so.”

It hurt most terribly.

JOHN RUSHED BLINDLY down Eighth Avenue, heading toward Forty-second Street. It was four the next morning. He wore an overcoat, a wide-brimmed hat to shadow his face and carried a Samsonite briefcase. Energy was leaving him like light from the sky. He kept the hatbrim snapped low over his face. Occasionally, he attracted some interest from a dark doorway. A boy woke up long enough to make a few disinterested sucking noises, a thin girl muttered again and again, “wanna bj, wanna bj,” like a grotesque machine, stopping the instant he had passed her doorway.