“Visual, mostly. I went out, I was terribly hungry. If you can believe it I want up to McDonald’s on Eighty-sixth at three.” She sighed. “I’m hungry now, as a matter of fact.”

“What kind of hallucinations?”

She flared at him. “I told you! That creature with the blood pack! God, Tom, you can be persistent. Let’s talk about it later, I really can’t deal with it right now.”

Phyllis had transferred Sarah’s blood to ten test tubes. “One through eight are treated with anticoagulant,” she said. “Nine and ten are clear.”

“I’d like to pitch in. I can’t just sit here waiting, it’s making my flesh crawl. Let me do the centrifuging.” Phyllis handed Sarah two tubes of blood. She placed them in the centrifuge, adjusted the rpm gauge, closed it, and flipped the switch.

“Listen,” Geoff said, “it’s harmonizing with Mozart.” He had turned on his radio a few moments before. Tom almost screamed at him to get on with it, then forced self-control. Geoff was right to treat the situation lightly. Panic and professional standards of practice don’t mix. He looked at his Sarah, bending over the centrifuge, still a bit pallid, perhaps slightly swollen, her face sharply intent on her work.

Phyllis prepared slides, placing a drop of blood on each and smearing it to a thin film. Each slide was numbered and slipped into a rack beside Geoff’s microscope. “I’ll do a reticulocyte count first,” he said. That made sense to Tom, it would tell them at once if any internal bleeding was taking place. If the blood was type-incompatible, hemorrhage was certainly a possibility.

“Set up a Westergren tube,” Sarah said. “We’ll want the sedimentation rate.”

As Phyllis prepared the tube, Tom mentally ran down the list of reasons for doing a sedimentation study. He couldn’t understand why Sarah would feel a need to know about possible infection and inflammation. “It takes an hour,” he said, “and it’ll mean two hundred ccs just on that. I think we’ll have apparent pathological signs if the infection proceeds out of the arm.” The beautiful arm.

“Methuselah showed an elevated sedimentation rate before the end.”