The Hunger

by Whitley Strieber

  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.

  2

  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.

  Yet he found himself seeking alternatives on her behalf. Her lust for success was contagious. There was something almost visceral in her belief, in her will. No doubt her faith in the valu
e of her work mirrored that of others who had approached discoveries with great impact on humankind. But there was some deep thing in Sarah, a kind of cruel yearning, heedless of herself and others, that swept beyond the norms of duty or even scientific curiosity and colored her hope with the tint of obsession.

  Tom looked at her, the brown hair, the frequently pretty face, her curiously flat pallor, and the rich, unquenchable sensuality of her compact body. He wanted to hold her again. After she had broken his last embrace she had hidden her feelings in gruffness.

  He wished that she did not feel victimized by her femininity. To his way of thinking, her tough, brilliant mind should be satisfactory compensation for all that was wrong with what she referred to as her sexual conditioning. But it was not enough, not for her.

  Tom was embarrassed for her. More, he felt sad. With the rhesus dead she was seriously set back. She couldn’t possibly make a case for continued project funding before the budget committee. She was a small, fuming woman, her eyes flashing prettily as she faced the cancellation of an experiment to which she had given five years of her life.

  Something ungenerous — a kind of glee — seemed to be hiding beneath Tom’s genuine sorrow. He knew it was there; it had been a long time since he had taken his own surface feelings at face value. The destruction of her project would hurl Sarah back into the depths of her relationship with him, would make her seek the comfort of being a junior partner again — and a part of him welcomed the power her need would confer.

  “I’ve got a meeting with Hutch now,” he said. “We’re reviewing the allocation requests.” His mouth was dry. The stench of the apes was sickening. “Sarah,” he said. He paused, surprised. Why had he used such a bedroom tone of voice? She whirled at him. Defeat had made her pugnacious. He wanted to comfort her, knew the condescension of it would outrage her. The touching a few minutes ago had been an unwilling concession.

  “Well?”

  For an instant the bluster in her eyes gave way. Then, with a tilt of her chin she was off, ordering a tranquilizer for Methuselah so they could get the cage open and pull out Betty’s remains.

  Tom left unnoticed, going slowly through the equipment-cluttered lab. Every item, every inch of space, had been pried out of Riverside Medical Research Center by the force of Sarah’s determination. Her discovery had come as an accident, incidental to some conventional work on sleep deprivation. The fact that the inner rhythm of the sleeping process also contained the key to aging was a totally unexpected result. Her initial findings had been published in her book, Sleep and Age. It had caused certain stirrings; the rigor of her methods could not be questioned, nor could her skill in her experiments. The implications were so large, though, that they hadn’t really been appreciated. Sarah’s view that old age was nothing more than a disease, potentially curable, was just too enormous a change. Her book had brought her much congratulation, little support.

  Tom exited into the wide tile hallway of the lab floor and took the staff elevator to the Sleep Therapy Clinic above. He occupied a small office beside Dr. Hutchinson’s suite. The old man had founded the clinic ten years ago. After eight years the board had hired Tom Haver to step in “when the director elects to retire.” It had been nothing more than sales talk; Hutch had not so elected. They had wanted a scientist-administrator with powerful credentials to draw more funding to the clinic.

  Lately, Tom had begun to catch himself looking hopefully for some sign of senility in the old man.

  Hutch sat in Tom’s office, his angular form folded into one of the old chairs. It was an affectation of his to scorn his own sumptuous quarters. “Dimethylaminoethanol,” he said in a reedy, amused voice.

  “She’s far beyond DME research, you know that. Aging Factor is a transient cellular protein. DME is nothing more than the regulating agent.”

  “The philosopher’s stone.”

  Tom went to his desk, forcing a thin smile. “More than that,” he said quietly. He refused to acknowledge the sarcasm. Hutch tossed a typed budget survey sheet on his desk. It was hard not to resent the man’s style. He picked up the summary. “What am I supposed to say, Doctor — ‘no gerontology appropriation’ and fall to my knees?”

  “You can if you want to but it won’t work.”

  Tom disliked smugness; it was poison in a scientist. “If you cancel the project, she’ll leave.”

  “Well, of course I’d hate to see that. But there just aren’t any results. Five years and no progress.”

  Tom tried to contain himself. If only Methuselah had waited another twenty-four hours! “They’ve developed a damn good schematic of cellular aging. I’d call that progress.”

  “Yes, for a pure research facility. The Rockefeller Institute would love them. But they don’t belong in a place like Riverside. Tom, we’ve got to justify every penny to the City Health and Hospitals Corporation. How the hell does a hospital explain the purchase of thirty-five rhesus monkeys, even a research hospital? Seventy thousand dollars’ worth of brachiating boobies. You tell me.”

  “Hutch, you weren’t born yesterday. If we lose Gerontology, there goes ten percent of the clinic’s overall budget. For that reason alone she should not be cut.”

  At once Tom regretted what he had just said. If Hutch was told to cut a budget he did it the hard way, by firing people and selling off equipment. He knew little of the reality of administration. To him the concept of maintaining functions while cutting dollars was a contradictory impossibility.

  “You’re going to tell me we ought to cut by charging for paper cups and installing pay toilets, I suppose.” He tapped his worn class ring on the edge of Tom’s desk. “I can’t see it that way. They give me a dollar figure upstairs. I’m going to meet that figure and have done with it.” Like an aging crane he rose out of the chair. “The committee convenes at ten A.M. in the boardroom.” He sighed, suddenly wistful, betraying his own losses.

  Then he was gone, striding down the hall, a sad, fierce old warrior in the declining castle of his hopes. Tom ran his fingers through his hair. He knew how Sarah felt; he wouldn’t have minded hitting a wall himself. The Health and Hospitals Corporation was so intractable, a bureaucracy of desperation. It worried about keeping emergency rooms in business, not obscure research projects. How ironic that man’s fate, the very secret of death, would be almost found — and perhaps forever lost — in the rubble of a bureaucracy’s dissolution.

  Tom looked at his watch. Nine-thirty. It had been a hell of a long day. Outside the sky was gray-black. There were no stars. It would rain soon, the promise of spring. Tom got his jacket and turned off the lights. Maybe he would beat Sarah home and fix her a nice dinner. It was the least he could do in view of the fact that he had lost her a career. It would be years while the bureaucrats at other institutions picked over the bones of her work and waffled about taking her on.

  Meanwhile, Tom would have to watch her vegetate in the Sleep Clinic, back to her old job processing incoming patients for physical disorders before they entered the therapeutic track — if she could even be convinced to return to such work.

  The sky was lowering as Tom walked down Second Avenue toward their apartment building. Gusts of wind lifted paper and dust around him and brought big, cold raindrops. Lightning flickered in the clouds. It was fourteen blocks from Riverside to the apartment building. Usually the walk was relaxing, but not tonight. He wished he had taken a cab but there were only a few blocks to go, no sense in getting one now. The rain came faster, and the brightly lit lobby of the building was a welcome sight when it appeared in the distance.

  As he went through the door into the lobby Alex the doorman nodded greeting. Tom planned his dinner as the elevator took him to the twenty-fifth floor.

  The apartment was freezing cold. This morning had been mild and they had left the windows open. Now the weather had changed and the wind was rising. It whipped through the living room dense with smells brought from far away, of darker country. Beyond the windows the lights of the city gl
ittered, now obscured by a scudding tendril of cloud, now twinkling brightly.

  Tom closed the windows and set the thermostat to 85° to warm the place up. Then he made the dinner. It turned out to be a lonely and unexpectedly tiresome job. He was a more than serviceable cook — his father had seen to that — but there was something about the lateness of the hour and the bitter disappointment; he just wanted to go to bed and forget the whole damn day.

  By ten-thirty it was ready. It looked cheerful enough despite the way he felt. He finished tossing the salad and turned on the fire under the pasta. The only thing left to do when she came home would be the veal. That was a matter of the last moment. He went into the living room and had a drink.

  At eleven he called the lab. It rang six times before there was an answer. “What’re you doing?”

  “Watching Methuselah not sleep. Even the tranks didn’t put him down. We’re trying to plug him in but he tears out the electrodes. So far we haven’t got half an EEG.” Her voice was leached of expression.

  “Who’s helping you?”

  “Phyllis. Charlie’s downstairs doing slides on Betty.”

  “Come home. I have something for you.”

  “Not tonight, darling.” She was sad, of course. That was why her voice sounded so empty. There, he felt it again — that ugly little stab of glee. Soon enough her nights would belong only to him.

  “I mean dinner. And it’s raining, so take a cab.”

  “I can tell if it’s raining, Tom.”

  “You might not notice. Look, you can always go back after we eat.”

  Coaxing Sarah out of her lab was never easy. He could only wait and hope tiredness and hunger would overcome her determination long enough to get her out the door. Salad, pasta, veal. Fruit and cheese afterward. Plenty of wine. By dinner’s end she’d probably be so close to sleeping that she wouldn’t try to go back. “There has to be room for more in life than a laboratory,” he thought.