If only there had been some scorn in that voice. But it was neutral and pleasant. There wasn’t a whisper of response to the emotional explosion that had occurred in Sarah.

“You’re going to five B,” Tom called from down the hall as they appeared in the corridor. “New room assignment.”

“Now I’m beginning to feel like this is a hotel,” Mrs. Blaylock laughed. When they reached the cubicle she was amused again. “Talk about small! It’s more like a Pullman berth.”

“You can spend the evening in the patients’ lounge,” Tom said.

Sarah was utterly miserable.

6

6

MIRIAM SAT in the grimly cheerful patients’ lounge with the other patients. She faced the television screen but her thoughts were elsewhere. The visitation had changed drastically in significance since Alice’s death.

She felt so wronged, so betrayed. Not since she had crawled exhausted up a beach in Ilium had she been this lost in the world. Even after her father’s death, wandering in strange lands, she had reconstructed her life. She intended to do it again. The little doctor was her new object. Before, Sarah Roberts would have been used and discarded. Now she would be kept.

In a way it was good; it would have been a pity to destroy such a person. Sarah was bright, full of kindness, and possessed of the rare avidity for life that was so basic to the development of hunger.

Miriam would think more on this during the next few days and weeks, but she was resolved to transform Sarah. If the choice had imperfections, they would have to be faced later. At least Sarah’s motive to solve the problem of transformation could not be better. Her own life would be at stake.

A sound behind her made her start. Miriam felt like an animal in an open cage in this place, waiting to hear the clang of the shutting bars. By revealing herself to them she would certainly draw Sarah’s total and absolute interest—but it was a dangerous technique. She could imagine herself strapped to some table, the victim of rampant scientific curiosity and the fact that human laws would not protect her once they discovered that she was not one of them. Sarah’s was a ruthlessly predatory personality. She, the one who had so indifferently destroyed Methuselah and no doubt dozens of other primates, would capture Miriam. Intelligence might or might not convey rights in the mind of such a person. If their curiosity was intense enough, their ambition sufficiently excited, Miriam had no doubt that Sarah and her colleagues would not hesitate to commit her, or simply confine her as an experimental animal “for the good of humanity and the furtherance of science.”

The thought that she might be confined, unable to serve her hunger, was terrifying. She had seen up close what extremes of suffering that involved. Such anguish lived in her own attic, stirring restlessly in the boxes.