The Hunger (29 page)

No?

She pushed through the revolving doors into a crowded lobby and was immediately assailed with the odor of human flesh in great quantity. Automatically, she evaluated the members of the hurrying throng: this one too strong, this one too small, another too sick. It was hard to bring herself into such a crowd with even the slightest hunger. The passing of perfect specimens kept distracting her.

She crossed to the elevators, pressed the button for the twelfth floor. As soon as the doors were closed she began to experience an agony of unease. She stood near the control panel, pressed by a solid mass of humanity, waiting through anguished moments as the thing stopped at every floor.

When the doors at last opened on twelve she popped out with a gasp of relief. But the doors closed behind her like the entrance to a tomb. And she was on the inside. A bell rang somewhere, a doctor was paged, two interns strolled past without glancing at her To the right was the waiting room with its inevitable crowd and questioning receptionist. A black door to the left led back into the suite of offices for executives and medical personnel. During her night here Miriam had been careful to memorize the layout of the clinic, and she took this door rather than face the receptionist.

Before her was a gray institutional hallway lined with more doors. Each practitioner working at the clinic had a small office. At the end of the hallway were the offices of the executive staff. Miriam went to Sarah’s door, third down on the right. She placed her hand on the knob, paused to prepare herself for the confrontation, then went in.

But the office was empty. There was, however, a powerful feeling of Sarah in the room. The desk was piled high with file folders and rolls of graphs. On the floor was a two-foot-high stack of computer printouts. Three soiled lab coats hung on the door. A poster of a grinning rhesus monkey was the only decoration. A stupid choice no doubt to many eyes, but to Sarah it must be a symbol of her triumphant research.

Just being in the room, Miriam realized that she was already beginning to love the woman. She didn’t want Sarah to suffer unnecessarily. Miriam was giving her a gift, after all, of something humanity had been trying to attain through all of its history. The great human religions all involved an assault on death. Man thought of death as a helpless concession to evil, and universally feared it.

Miriam must not forget the impact this gift had had on Sarah’s predecessors. In his heart each man feared and loved death. The release from such a contradiction was in itself an offering of great value.

She felt Sarah’s chair, her desk, fingered her nibbled pencils, stroked her lab coats, all the while trying to get a sense of her emotional state.

It came, thin and distant, a vapor of fear, hardly a
touch
at all.

One could tell very little from such a weak
touch
. There was nothing else for it. She would have to confront her directly.

‘If they try to keep me here I’ll need her loyalty,’ she thought as she went down the hall to the secretarial pool to locate Sarah. Physically, she was much more powerful than they. She could outrun, out-climb, and outmaneuver them. She also had her intelligence, which was greater than theirs, especially in the speed with which it could assess rapidly changing situation.

“I’m trying to locate Doctor Roberts,” she said to the secretary, who looked up, cracking gum.

“You a patient?”

“I’m expected.” Miriam smiled. “I’m not a patient.”

“They’re down on the lab floor,” she said. “I think they’re probably in Gerontology by now. You know the facility?”

“Oh sure. I’ve been up here a number of times.”

“Want me to say who’s coming down?”

“Don’t bother, I’m already late. Let’s not call too much attention to that!” She smiled again, backing away, turning to go to the elevators.

“I understand,” the girl said, laughing, “just want to edge in.”

Miriam took the stairs beside the elevator bank to save time and ascertain if there were any inner doors that might impede escape. Large signs indicated that all the floors below ten were locked for security reasons. Useful if not helpful information.

Contrary to what she had said to the girl, Miriam did not know the plan of the lab floor. When she emerged she found the whole layout was different from the floor above. Riverside was a hodgepodge of old buildings connected by unlikely passages and confusing hallways. This floor had halls going in three directions from the elevator bank. The lighting was poor and the large gray doors were unmarked. Each door opened on a separate laboratory. To find the one you wanted you simply had to know where it was.

With no choice, Miriam opened the first door she came to. Before her was a vast array of electronic equipment. The air was crackling with ozone, and motors hummed through the silence. “Excuse me.”

“Hey?” A voice from within a forest of equipment.

“I’m looking for Gerontology.”

“You’re at the opposite end of the wrong hallway, if that helps. This is Gas Chromatography.”

A face appeared behind a virtual wall of wires leading from a lab bench to a shelf of equipment above. “I’m trying to locate Sarah Roberts,” Miriam said.

Excitement registered in the face, which was concealed by welder’s goggles. A hand pushed the goggles up. “Welding a feeder line. No assistant. So you’re looking for Sarah. You involved in the project?”

“Which one?”

“There’s only one project around here at the moment. A hell of a project. Incredible. You a reporter?”

“No.”

“Well, I don’t think I’d better go shooting my mouth off anyway.”

“I’m from the Rockefeller Institute. Doctor Martin. Are you involved in the Blaylock project?”

“Look, I really can’t talk about it. If you want info go to Sarah or Tom Haver. Gerontology’s to the left past the elevator bank and four doors down. You’ll be able to locate it by the smell of the rhesus colony.”

He returned to his welding and Miriam left the lab. Too bad he hadn’t been more forthcoming. At least it was reassuring to know that they were keeping the details secret. No doubt they didn’t want information leaked until she was thoroughly measured.

She went down the hallway counting doors. ‘Very well,’ she thought, ‘measure me. The more you poke and prod, the more time I’ll have with Sarah.’

The technician had been right, you could certainly smell the Gerontology lab. Miriam opened the door, fully expecting the confrontation.

Instead, she found herself in a small outer office not unlike the one Sarah kept upstairs, but even more crowded with records. A computer terminal, glowing with numbers, stood on an old desk. Miriam spent a moment watching the display but it was useless. She couldn’t understand.

Miriam passed through the room to an inner office which contained rolled-up cables, television equipment and stacks of empty cages. There were two exits beyond. Miriam chose one and went through.

There was a thunderous uproar. She was in the rhesus colony. Monkeys leaped about their cages, gesticulating, posturing at her. Many of them had sockets embedded in their skulls so that electrodes could be plugged in at the researcher’s convenience.

How would it be to wear such a socket in her own head? Would they go that far if they had the chance?

The monkeys were made frantic by her presence; the odor of a strange animal disturbed them. She backed out of the room. The other door would certainly lead to Sarah. Once again she prepared herself, blanking her mind, opening the inner eyes to receive and evaluate Sarah’s emotional state. Even now she could feel it fairly well, but not well enough to understand it. Years of training were necessary before a human being’s emotional field extended much beyond his own body, years of loving someone with
touch
and wanting desperately to please him or her.

She turned the knob and swept the door open. Marshaling all of her confidence and power, forcing back the hunger their scent evoked, she strode into the room.

The warm emotional flow that emanated from Sarah Roberts was not what she had anticipated. It was the most delicious
touch
that she had experienced since her own family was alive. Sarah’s heart was full of eager curiosity and love for her coworkers. The edge of fear was still there, but in her laboratory, among friends, Sarah obviously felt secure despite the blood running in her veins.

Miriam had hoped that Sarah would be a good choice, had come to be sure of it, but had not dared hope for anything like this. If only these emotions could be redirected toward herself!

But not at this moment. As Sarah looked up from her work and saw Miriam the emotional atmosphere changed to anger and wary fear. The face was haggard too. Sarah would have had periods of great difficulty by now. She had the sunken cheeks of one who was ignoring the hunger. From now on, each time it came back it would be stronger.

“Hey,” Sarah said into the hum of voices, “a problem just arrived.” Miriam noticed that they were working with another computer terminal.

“Let’s see what happens if we standardize the baselines,” Tom Haver said to a woman, who punched the keyboard. The graphs glowing on the screen jiggled and changed shape.

Sarah grabbed his shoulder, turned him around. “Hey, folks,” he said in a quavering voice, “we have a visitor.”

A small, fat man, bald and sweating, said in an undertone to the one Miriam assumed was the computer operator, “Match the curves to standard deviations —”

“Charlie, Phyllis — heads up.”

“Oh.”

Miriam moved toward them. They drew together, four frightened people. “Sarah said yesterday that I was supposed to come back.”

The computer warbled and the woman Tom had called Phyllis turned it off. As did all moments of great importance in her life, this one brought Miriam a flash of understanding. If things had been just a little different, she realized that she would have been able to simply tell Sarah to come along and that would have been that. Sarah thought her beautiful. Her mind was full of avid fascination, guilty passion. Fear must be an aphrodisiac for Sarah.

Fear, then, would be the key.

Tom Haver went to a telephone. Miriam spoke, trying for every bit of authority she could muster. “Stop. I have a proposition. You may study me if you promise to let me go free at the end of the day.” Haver responded smoothly. “We have no intention of keeping you against your will. For that matter, we haven’t got the right.”

Miriam ignored that issue. If it was obvious to her that they could commit her it must be obvious to them too. Human courts were not set up in the expectation that situations such as this might arise. Miriam felt safest assuming that they would grant her no rights at all.

“Why did you do it, Miriam?” Sarah’s eyes were steady, cool. Behind them Miriam could sense the conflict and the turmoil, but the surface was admirably unruffled.

“Do what?”

In answer Sarah extended her left arm, the one Miriam had chosen for the transfusion. A purple blotch disfigured the white skin. Because of the need to create a maximum effect fast, the transfusion had been very large. Seeing its result, however, made Miriam want to help Sarah, to save her. Unbidden, a
touch
rose out of her heart. Sarah blinked and averted her eyes, her face flushing red. This
touch
was like a kiss, the kind that follows a first admission of love. Tom Haver’s arm came around Sarah, and she huddled against him. Miriam’s extended hand was not taken.

“Mrs. Blaylock, she asked you a question. I think you’d better answer it.” There was real menace in Haver’s voice. It told Miriam that he was very much in love with Sarah. Would he die for his love? Did he understand that it might well come to that?

“I came here to help you,” Miriam said gently. “I think you know why.”

Sarah shook her head. “We do not know why. We’d like very much to know.”

Miriam didn’t like that “we.” It was a wall between her and Sarah. “I want to share myself with you. I have read your work. I have reason to believe that my physical makeup may be of interest to you.” “Is that your motive?” Haver asked.

“Is that why you contaminated her with your blood? Don’t you realize how dangerous that is?”

“You could have killed me, Miriam!”

They were like two shrieking crows.

“I am the last of my kind,” Miriam said grandly. “What I gave you was a great gift. You should take it in that light.”

“The last?”

Miriam nodded. It perhaps wasn’t true, but it fit her needs at the moment. “I knew you would never take it voluntarily and I may have very little time. At the least, Sarah, it will double your life-span.”

Haver was becoming less menacing. There was also a slight reduction of tension in Sarah’s face.

“We have a battery of tests,” the fat man blurted. “We’d very much like to run them.”

“I’m ready.” There it was; the price and the payment. Now she must enter their dull catalogues, be weighed and analyzed. She, who soared so far above them, must submit to their machines. But what would they learn? Machines only gather facts and must therefore lie.

“I’d better get the bureaucracy rolling,” Tom said. “What shall we start with, Sarah?”

“X ray.”

“I’ll set up the appointment.”

Sarah nodded. She spoke gently to Miriam, a tone she might use with a frightened child. “We’d like to do an epidermal biopsy, which just involves scraping off some surface tissue, take some more blood, and run electrograms of various types. Would that be acceptable to you?”

Miriam nodded.

Sarah came to her, seemed about to touch her. “Why are you the last?”

Miriam hesitated. As an individual, she was so powerful that it was hard to think of herself as a member of a failed species. And yet, if she was not the last, she was certainly one of a very few. “I don’t know,” she said. The sorrow and the truth in her own voice surprised her.

“We have half an hour in X ray,” Tom said, putting down the telephone. “Let’s get going.”

Miriam followed them down the hallway feeling somewhat more confident. They hadn’t done anything violent to her yet. And Sarah was not in a state of panic. In fact, there was even some warmth there. A crack such as that in somebody’s resistance was to Miriam the same as a chasm. If she was bold and careful she had a very good chance with Sarah. She watched Sarah walking along, her gait a little heavy, her hair gleaming softly in the corridor’s shadows.