So that was it. She hadn’t forgotten about the connection between Miriam Blaylock and the dead ape. She must be thinking that she was about to go the way of Methuselah, poor woman. He wished to God that he could somehow reassure her. But it would be a waste of effort with Sarah. Once she got an idea it took a lot more than reassurance to convince her she was wrong. The worst of it was, he didn’t feel so certain himself. The physicists had long since dispensed with commonly held notions of coincidence, replacing them with more elegant and truer ideas of space-time as a whole event, a woven continuum. In the light of such concepts the relationship between Miriam’s appearance and Methuselah’s death was not only accidental, it wasn’t even coincidental. It followed as certainly as one brick after another in a wall, or the spewing of radiant poisons beyond the horizon of critical mass.

The centrifuge wound down and Sarah removed the now-separated tubes of blood. “Is there somewhere she can lie down?” Tom asked. She was rapidly losing all color.

“I’ll tell you if I need to be admitted,” she snapped. “I know this place has hospital facilities.” She put the tubes in a rack and started drawing out the various blood components with a pipette.

“Let me see a slide of whites,” Geoff said without moving from his microscope. Sarah quickly prepared one, placed it in the scope’s receiving tray. Tom admired the superb laboratory technique being displayed by the three of them. By Sarah in particular. All of his caring and love was surfacing. What bravado she had. “I want another slide,” Geoff murmured. “Wright’s stain, please.”

There was a silence while he examined it. “I observe foreign leukocytes.” Tom felt a wave of new anxiety: this was confirmation, ugly and real. Miriam’s blood was actually running in Sarah’s veins. “The eosinophilelike cell is present at a concentration of about three percent. Pseudopodial activity is high. The cell is thriving.”

“What is the concentration in Miriam’s own blood?” Sarah asked. Her tone was clipped. She was forcing calm.

“Eighteen percent.”

“You mentioned pseudopodial activity. What’s taking place?”

Geoff leaned back from his microscope. The fluorescent lighting overhead threw his face into shadow. His forehead glistened. “It appears to be consuming your blood,” he said carefully, “and reproducing cells of its own kind.”

10

10

MIRIAM AWOKE FROM THE first peaceful Sleep she had experienced in days. It was nine A.M. At once she touched, sensing for John’s presence. Her whole body jerked with the intensity of the feeling. He was here, and in a highly charged emotional state.

He was exultant.