Sarah was stunned yet again by the power of the unknown. The now-dead ape’s skin cracked along the bones and began to fall like tissue to the floor of the cage. Soon the skeleton, still held together by tendons, lay amid a pile of rubble. Then it also collapsed, and what had been alive just minutes before was reduced to dust. “The process of postmortem decay accelerated approximately two years of dry-air degeneration into seventy-one point five six seconds.” The dust in the bottom of the cage became finer and finer and at last was whisked away by an errant breeze.

At this point there was a sudden series of thuds on the audio track, then the brief clanging of an alarm. That had been Phyllis sealing the room to prevent spread of a possible disease vector.

“Methuselah remained awake one hundred nineteen hours,” Phyllis said. “I noted the first overt degenerative changes after the seventieth hour.”

“His lipofuscin accumulation rate started an exponential rise in sample two thousand one hundred forty-one, taken at the seventy-first hour,” Charlie said. “Subsequently, his blood cells began to lose their ability to uptake oxygen.”

There was a long silence. “I don’t know what the hell to make of it,” Sarah said at last.

“That’s putting it mildly.”

“Let’s see. The time is now eleven-fifteen. My guess is that the board is just about to approve Hutch’s budget appropriation. Us not included. What say we just crack the quarantine on the cages and go home.”

“Don’t get a heart attack,” Charlie said softly, “they’ll find the money for us now.”

Sarah sniffed. She folded her arms. “As a matter of fact, I don’t feel one bit like a heart attack. I’m enjoying thinking about the trouble this tape is going to cause him.”

“The physical sciences are going to be in an uproar,” Phyllis muttered. “There’s something in the old body we don’t know nothin’ about.”

“Hutch is going to be forced to go right back to the committee and ask for a review.”

“Let’s hope.”

“Look, I’m director of this lab, so get ready for some directions. I want to get a thousand K of the computer under key, access limited to us three. We need a nice roomy memory bank to foodle our numbers in.”

“How do we set it up for billing?” Charlie asked.

“Don’t worry about it. The administrator will fix it up.”

“You mean Hutch?”

Her voice gentled. “I mean Tom. Hutch might not survive this.”

Charlie applauded expansively.

They laughed. Sarah looked at the glowing TV screen. The mystery represented by the empty cage was awesome. It meant that the body did indeed contain a secret clock, and the clock could be tampered with. If age could speed up it could also slow down. It could stop.