Sarah was relieved when Tom’s eyes returned to the monitors. Their place right now was here, recording phenomena. Mrs. Blaylock’s extraordinary sleep pattern continued to flicker across the displays. Sarah tried to add it up—low-intensity delta waves, alpha waves curving as in a trance state. This was the intercranial activity pattern of an injury victim or perhaps some kind of meditation master. “Let’s do a zone scan,” Sarah said slowly.

“You think there’s something we’re not picking up?”

“We’re getting too many nil readings. Yet her eyes are moving as if she was in an intense dream.”

“Maybe it’s the hippocampus. You can get intensive hallucinatory effects when it’s stimulated. They’d cause REM.”

“That’s a good idea, Doctor. But to pick up electrical activity from that deep we’re gonna have to move our electrodes.”

“So let’s do it.”

“You’re elected, Thomas. You told me not to go back in there alone, remember?”

“OK.” He started for the door, then paused. “You’re better at placement than me, darling.”

“One on each temporal bone and two side by side just above the lambdoid suture. If we can’t read the hippocampus from there we need a probe.”

“How the hell can I get to the lambdoid suture? I’ll have to lift her head.”

“Tom, the woman is immobilized with some incredibly powerful equivalent of dreaming sleep. She’s not going to know if you lift her head.” Sarah felt her stomach turn. The very idea of being near that creature again made her feel queasy. This brain activity was no more human than the blood.

Tom left, but there was a long pause before he appeared on the video monitor. He wasn’t hurrying. She watched him move the electrodes. At first the graphs went absolutely straight. No pickup. Sarah was adjusting electrode sensitivity when all hell broke loose. The four electrodes were switched into two different needles in case pickup was better from one region than the other. But it didn’t matter, the voltage surges were tremendous.

“God damn,” Tom said as he returned.

“It’s brain damage,” Sarah said. “Has to be.”

“If it is, then there aren’t any gross effects.”

A hand dropped to her shoulder. Leaning her head back, she saw Geoff standing over her, the rims of his glasses glittering in the fluorescent light. “You were right,” he said, “she’s a freak.”

Sarah looked at the woman on the video monitor. She was a stirring beauty, there was no doubt of it. But she was also this other thing, what Geoff called a freak.