She had chosen Sarah as the recipient because Sarah knew so much about aging. There was brilliance in such a choice. They were all making a great mistake about Miriam. In a sense they had not the right to disturb the experiment any more than they had the right to imprison Miriam. She was a genius, perhaps even beyond that. They owed her trust, not suspicion and the violence of involuntary commitment.

The transfusion was an act of courage. As the recipient, was she not also called to courage?

How dare they consider a blood wash.

A wave of hunger made Sarah gasp. Tom and Hutch were both looking at her. She managed a smile. ‘Miriam will know how to take care of me,’ she thought. ‘She would never have done such a thing in ignorance.’

The geneticist’s drone reached her ears again. “To complete the cytogenic analysis, we stained for G-banding and Q-banding. The specimen presents the longest chromosomal chain yet observed in a higher animal: sixty-eight chromosomes. No trisomes or other identifiable translocations or breaks are observed.”

Sarah could hardly sit still. If they had been more cooperative Miriam would probably already have helped her with this terrible feeling. It was greater than a simple appetite. Sarah didn’t want food. This felt like some kind of addiction. Hunger. God help her.

“Both ‘p’ and ‘q’ arms are of equal length, an unusual finding. There is superficial resemblance to a human chromosome, but only in the most general terms. The broad primate characteristics can be observed, however.”

Shut up, you long-winded bastard.

“The sexual component presents another sort of problem. I would doubt that the sexual functioning of this species parallels our own, or the rest of the primates, for that matter. The ambiguity of the sixty-six, XXY tripartite structure certainly implies both male and female components in the same personality. I would recommend a thorough examination of the sexual organs as the next step in this study.”

That did it. She could not abide the idea of Miriam strapped to some table with this bastard examining her sexual organs. She found herself on her feet. Tom started to rise as well. For an instant she was desperate, cornered. She had to get upstairs! “Relax,” she said as calmly as possible. “Does it have to cause a panic when I go to the bathroom?”

Only Hutch followed her out of the meeting. They walked down the hall side by side. It seemed that he had to go to the bathroom too. Sarah waited for him to disappear into the men’s room and then headed for the stairs. She paused on the landing. Sure enough, Hutch appeared a few moments later in the doorway. She realized that he would have to be dealt with. They were standing face to face. He held out his hand. She wasn’t really sure it would work, but she had read somewhere that a blow to the side of the head could stun.