The Hunger (6 page)

She was speaking to him.

“Mister, was that a Number Two bus?”

She was smiling, her teeth yellow with neglect. Ignoring her, John hurried back to the security of the house.

As he approached he heard voices through the open window of the living room. At once he felt the hollow despair of jealousy — Alice and Miriam were chatting, no doubt waiting for him to appear so that they could begin practicing the Handel Trio.

He mounted the stairs, moved softly across the hallway, past the hall table with its spray of roses, and entered the living room. Miriam looked magnificently fresh and beautiful in a bright-blue dress. A blue ribbon was tied prettily about her neck. Alice lay on a settee nearby in her usual jeans and sweat shirt. He felt Miriam watching him as he went across to his place. Until he was settled, Miriam’s body remained tense, as if ready to spring.

“John,” Alice said, leaning her head back, “I didn’t even hear you come in. You always sneak.” Her thirteen-year-old smile made him catch his breath. She was indeed a marvelous toy, fragile and succulent.

Miriam crashed out an arpeggio on the harpsichord. “Let’s get going,” she said.

“I don’t want to do that trio again. It’s boring.” Alice was in a typical sulky mood.

“How about the Scarlatti we were doing last week?”

Miriam went through some fingerings. “We could do it if John can keep up.”

“All the music he knows is boring.”

Miriam’s fingers flew across the keys. “I know Corelli, Abaco, Bach —” She tossed a thick book of music at Alice. “Pick whatever you want.”

There was a silence. “I barely know the Handel,” John said. “It’s hard for the cello.”

Miriam and Alice glanced at each other. “We’ll do the Handel,” Alice said. “It’s either that or finger and bow practice, right, John?” She picked up her violin and tucked it under her chin.

“I’m one of the few musicians who can do Chopsticks on the cello, dear.”

“As you always say.”

Before he had even tuned they were starting. He entered raggedly, rushing after them, overtaking and then struggling to keep his place for the rest of the piece.

They played for an hour, repeating the trio three times. John eventually began to enjoy the way it became coherent, finally beautiful. He liked the music. It seemed to fit the moment, the rich quality of the sunlight, the beauty of the women.

“Well,” Alice said when they were done, “that’s that.” She was flushed, which accentuated her incipient womanhood. A pang passed again through John’s heart.

He knew all the things Miriam was able to do to people. It was impossible to tell exactly what treatment was intended for Alice. Miriam could bless or destroy. Sometimes she would compel them to violence as a cover for her own activities. Other times, there could be unimaginable bliss.

Miriam was practical; she did what was most useful. Alice, for example, would inherit a considerable fortune, as John had. That could be the motive for Miriam’s interest. She was always short of money, and those who loved her gave her everything.

“Let’s have a drink,” Miriam said. She picked up the Madeira from the bar. It was an 1838 Warre, bought from the old Berry Brothers Stores in London. As it had aged it had become first strong and sweet, then full of subtle overtones. Now it was almost light, but possessed of complex and ancient flavors. It was certainly the finest Madeira in the world, perhaps of all time.

“I’m not supposed to have liquor.”

Miriam poured Alice some of the wine.

“It’s very light. Only barbarians would refuse their children the right to a glass of wine.”

Alice swallowed it at a gulp and held out her glass for more.

“That’s a sacrilege,” John said. “You’re drinking it like tequila.”

“I like the way it makes me feel, not the way it tastes.”

Miriam poured her another glass. “Don’t get drunk. John molests the helpless.” The remark came unexpectedly and shocked John.

Alice laughed, her eyes regarding him with taunting appraisal. Rather than endure that, John retreated. He gazed out the window, forcing himself to concentrate on the view. Across the street was a block of cooperative apartments. It seemed such a short time ago that houses such as their own had lined both sides of the street, it was hard to believe that vines could already be growing up the front of one of those new buildings. The cries of children came as always from the street. John was touched by the eternal shrill excitement of those voices, a sound that belonged to all time. Maturing was the horrible process of losing immortality. John felt his face. Already the whiskers were coming back. He had inexplicably entered the deadly shadow; it could no longer be denied.

Alice came to his side, her shoulder just touching his elbow. No doubt she told herself that she ought to conquer him, to include him. But he suspected it was really a simpler and more morbid interest: she wanted to see him suffer. In that sense she was as natural a predator as Miriam herself — or as John.

“What are they playing, Alice? Ringolevio?”

“Ringo — what?”

“Ringolevio. The game.”

“They’re playing Alien.”

Miriam watched her destroyed man. He could have killed her this morning. Killed. The thought of it made her feel cold toward him, but only for a moment. She had fought hard to make him perfect. It was so sad to see him disintegrating even more quickly than his predecessors. Eumenes had been with her more than 400 years, Lollia nearly as long. Until now not one of her transformations had failed to last 200 years. Was she getting worse at it, or was the strength of the human stock in decline?

She took another swallow of the Madeira, held it in her mouth. Time itself must taste so. In wine time could be captured and in life delayed, but not forever. In John’s case not even for very long.

There was much to do and possibly only a few days of grace. She had been moving slowly, capturing Alice by careful degrees. Now it was an emergency. She had to prepare for the storm that was going to break when John discovered his predicament, and at the same time prevent Alice from knowing what was happening to him. As Alice was to be his replacement it would be most inconvenient if she learned the consequences of transformation.

Especially in view of the fact that, this time, there might be no consequences. Miriam would have to approach Sarah Roberts much more quickly now. The research she had done already into the woman’s work and habits would have to suffice.

If anybody on this planet could discover what went wrong with the transformed it would be Dr. Roberts. In her book
Sleep and Age
Miriam had seen the beginnings of a deeper understanding than Roberts herself could possibly realize. The work that Roberts had done on primates was fascinating. She had achieved extraordinary increases in life-span. Given the proper information, would she also be able to confer real immortality on the transformed?

Miriam put down her glass and left the room. She would have to risk being separated from Alice and John for a few minutes. His violence was still sporadic. And there was a task to be faced in the attic, a dreary task of preparation, amid the sad ruins of her past loves. Unlike the dusty and disused appearance of the rest of the attic, the door to this room was perfectly maintained. It opened soundlessly as Miriam unlocked it. She stepped into the tiny, hot space. Only when the heavy door was closed and she was safely hidden did she give voice to the turmoil of fears within her. Her fists went to her temples, her eyes screwed shut and she moaned aloud.

Silence followed, but not absolute silence. As if in answer, there came from the darkness around her the seething of slow and powerful movement.

Miriam hesitated a moment before beginning her task. “I love you,” she said softly, remembering each person who rested here, each lost friend. Perhaps because in the end she had failed all of them she remained loyal to them. Some, like Eumenes and Lollia, she had carried across half the world. Their boxes were black with age, bound with leather and studded with iron. The more recent ones were as strong or stronger. Miriam pulled the newest box to the center of the little room. This one was about twenty years old, made of carbon fiber steel and locked by bolts, bought and stored on John’s behalf. She lifted off the lid and examined the interior, then took the bag of bolts from inside. There were twelve of them, and she fitted them around the lid. Now it could be closed and locked in a matter of seconds.

She left it open, however, the lid gaping. When she brought him to this place, there might be very little time. With a last glance at the other boxes, pausing in the room’s rustling silence, she whispered goodbye.

The door hissed shut on her tragedy. She secured the locks, which were there for two reasons: to keep danger out, and to keep it in. She went back downstairs, assured that she was well prepared for the worst, uneasy at leaving Alice unprotected any longer than necessary.

THE HOLLOW SHRIEKS of a terrified rhesus brought Sarah Roberts to her feet. She ran down the hall to the cage room, her shoes clattering on the linoleum.

What she saw when she peered into the cage of their most important animals made her feel cold. Methuselah was brachiating madly through the cage screaming as only a rhesus can scream. On the floor lay Betty’s head, its monkey face frozen in last agony. As he shot around the cage Methuselah brandished Betty’s arm, the little hand open as if waving goodbye. The rest of Betty lay scattered across the cage. As she rushed from the room to get help Sarah almost slipped in the blood that had run down to the floor.

Before she reached the door, it swung open. Methuselah’s shrieks had brought the whole Gerontology group.

“What the hell did you
do
, Methuselah!” Phyllis Rockler shouted. She was the lab’s animal keeper.

The monkey’s face was as crazy as any Sarah had ever seen, and a psychiatric internship at Bellevue had given her a look at a good number of crazy faces.

Charlie Humphries, their resident blood expert, pressed his face to the cage. “God, how ugly!” He stepped back, his sneakers squishing. “Monkeys are bastards.”

“Get Tom down here,” Sarah said. She needed him for her own sanity, forget the ape. Moments later he came rushing in, his face gray. “Nobody’s hurt,” she said, seeing the fear in his eyes. “No human body, that is.”

“Is that Betty?”

“Methuselah tore her apart. He stopped sleeping two days ago and he’s been getting increasingly irritable. But we had no reason to expect this.” There was a flurry of activity behind them as Phyllis set up the videotape equipment. She would record Methuselah’s further behavior for later analysis.

Sarah watched Tom react to the catastrophe. She could practically see him calculating how this affected his own career track. Number One was never far from mind with Tom Haver. Then he turned his eyes on her, full of wonderful, totally genuine concern. “Is this going to hurt you? What’s the latest on the blood runs?”

“Still indexing to the same curve as before. No change.”

“So there’s no resolution. And Betty’s dead. Oh, Christ, you’re in trouble.”

She almost wanted to laugh at the obviousness of his emphasis on the
you
. He didn’t want to seem like what he was, to come right out and say it: my damn career rides on this too. She held out her hands, suddenly realizing that Tom was even more upset than she was. He took them, stepped toward her, seemed about to speak. She spoke first. “I guess I take my dead star performer to the Budget Committee tomorrow.”

He looked sick. “Hutch was going to recommend against extension anyway. Now with Betty dead —”

“It means that we have to start all over again. She’s still the only one that had actually stopped aging.”

She stared at Methuselah, who stared back as if he were wishing he could repeat his little trick. He was a handsome ape, with his spread of gray hair and his powerful body.

Betty, who looked like an adolescent, had been his mate.

“Pardon me while I break down and cry,” Sarah said in her most sardonic tone. But she meant it. She went gratefully into Tom’s arms.

“Now, now, we’re still on public property.” That was old reticent Tom, embarrassed by any show of emotion.

“We’re all family here. We’re going on the unemployment line together.”

“That’ll never happen. Some other facility will pick you up.”

“In a couple of years. Meanwhile, we lose all our apes, disrupt the experiments, and
waste time
!” It made Sarah crazy just thinking about it. Ever since she had accidentally discovered the blood factor that controlled aging while doing blood counts on sleep-disturbed rats, she had been a woman with a mission. In this laboratory they were seeking the cure for man’s most universal disease — old age. And Betty had been proof that the cure existed. Somewhere in the rhesus’ blood some hidden key had been turned on by their application of drugs, temperature and diet. Whatever it was had deepened her sleep almost to the point of death. And as sleep had deepened, aging had slowed. The same set of conditions had worked for a while with Methuselah. Last week his sleep had abruptly stopped. He had dozed a little, then — a monster.

Betty might have been immortal, if Methuselah hadn’t killed her. Sarah would have shot him if she had a gun. She went to the gray-painted wall and hit it a couple of times. “We’re dealing with a degenerating gene pool,” she said softly.

“Not the apes,” Phyllis answered.

“The human race! For God’s sake, we’re about to find the mechanism that controls aging and we’re going to lose our budget! I’ll tell you all something! I think Hutch and that whole crowd of senile appendix poppers on the board are jealous. Jealous as hell! They’re already terminal geriatrics and they want to make sure the same thing happens to the rest of the world!”

The anger in Sarah’s voice caused Tom to feel a familiar sense of frustration. She was and remained blind to the problems he experienced as an administrator. In part that was a proper professional attitude, but not the way she allowed it to sweep aside even the slim chance of survival that the politics of the situation might allow.