“I don’t want to stop you, boss,” he said. “What I want is for somebody to stop my heart now and see if I can survive it. I volunteer. Stop my heart. Let it remain stopped for an hour, for all I care, then try to wake me up. If I can survive, can’t you survive?”

“You’re mixing everything up!” I protested. “One minute we’re talking about me dying when my heart’s stopped, and the next about all of you dying when my heart’s stopped.”

“No, best to do it to me,” said Viktor. “You’ve got thousands of years in the Blood. I was born yesterday. Do it to me.”

Rose immediately insisted that she must be the one for she was most certainly the weakest and everyone was quarreling again. But then Thorne protested that he was not even fifteen hundred years old, and he ought to be the one, and then David insisted he should be the one and so on it went.

They were confusing me mightily. But I might have been the only one to observe Fareed slipping away quietly, and disappearing into his laboratory amid the apparatuses and the machines.

Everyone was still arguing when Fareed returned. He had two syringes in his hand.

He gave one of these syringes to Seth as he whispered in Seth’s ear. Then he plunged the other syringe into his chest and went down unconscious on the floor.

“He’s done it,” I said. “He’s stopped his heart.”

What followed was likely the longest half hour of my life.

No one spoke, but I think we were turning the idea round and round in our minds, trying to think of every conceivable possibility, as Fareed lay there on the tiled floor in his white coat and pants staring straight up into the ceiling lights.

At last Seth knelt down beside Fareed and plunged his syringe into Fareed’s chest. A big hoarse breath came from Fareed. He blinked, and then closed his eyes. Then very slowly he sat up. He appeared shaky, and though Seth offered his hand, Fareed sat still for a moment with his own hand to his eyes.

Perhaps two minutes passed, and then Fareed rose to his feet.

“Well, I seem to be quite all right,” he said. “Now let’s take it a step further. I was hypersensitive to the pain Lestat felt when Amel convulsed or whatever it was that Amel did, so let’s devise some reasonable pain test now to see if I am truly disconnected as well as perfectly all right.”

Another heated argument started, with everyone talking at once. I tried to get a word in, that we might make it a mild experiment, but Seth was shouting at Fareed this time, and Flannery Gilman had come in and demanded to know what was going on.