She loved them—and had destroyed each of them.

It could not continue, not any longer. She could not stand to live with Alice, knowing all the while that she was going to end up like the others, like John.

The touch interrupted her thoughts again, running like thunder in the mountains, as huge and wild as night.

So it was an animal. And it was in agony. Absolute agony. The kind that would be felt by one deprived of Sleep. But there were no transformed animals.

Or were there?

Sarah Roberts, blindly experimenting, might have accomplished some rough approximation of transformation. So one of her beasts was meeting its end in a filthy cage. She felt the lost forests in its touch, the wide leafy spaces and the strength of the iron bars.

Her eyes widened, her hands snapped to the bars that protected her own window, closed around the cold iron. The window, its frame and the whole wall shook.

Soon after dawn Tom Haver opened his eyes. He had been trying not to wake up, but it was no use. The room was suffused with dull light. He looked at the clock. Seven-ten. Past time to get up. He swung out of bed and lurched in for his shower. The night had been spent sleeplessly in a fog of strategies, trying to find some way of extending Sarah’s appropriation. Every road led back to the Budget Committee and Hutch.

He paused in the door to the bathroom and looked back at her. There came to him a feeling so strange and tender that it seemed as if it had entered from another personality, not his own. He found that he wanted very badly for her to succeed.

He went about his shower in a sort of fury, lathering himself, rinsing, drying, all the while wretched for her and angry that he must suffer on her behalf.

When he opened the door the smell of breakfast drifted faintly in. None of the usual singing, however, arrived with it. She was not such a cheerful riser today. He wished that he didn’t feel so sorry for her; it reduced her, enlisted a kind of professional distance. A doctor’s habit to withdraw one’s emotions from the reality of pain.

“Happy meltdown,” she said when he arrived in the kitchen.

“Meltdown?”

“What’s happening to my lab is the equivalent of a reactor meltdown. Reaches critical mass and sinks to the center of the earth. Buried. Gone.”

There were a hundred encouraging lies he could not tell. “I’ll call you as soon as the meeting’s over,” was all that came out.

Once again he was cheating her. Why not simply let her know how he felt? Why was that such a frightening thought? Emotions confirm things, that was the trouble. Death, for example, always seems like a lie, a game of disappearance, until one’s grief makes it true.