Mrs. Blaylock laughed, touched Sarah’s wrist. “You really mustn’t be so afraid, dear. It was just an accident. We don’t ever need to think of it again.” Her eyes twinkled. “It doesn’t mean a thing.”

Sarah was absurdly, ridiculously grateful, but she controlled the hot embarrassment. “Let me apply these connectors, and then you can try to get to sleep.”

Mrs. Blaylock took off the nightgown. The electrodes went on quickly. Sarah told herself that this was just another female body, no different from all the others she had seen and touched in her career. As soon as she was finished she turned to leave. Mrs. Blaylock’s hand came up, took her wrist. Sarah stopped, did not move.

“Wait.” It was a command, beyond resistance, delivered as softly as a plea. Sarah turned and stood before her. Despite the forest of electrodes and her nakedness Mrs. Blaylock seemed no less imperial. “Your generation has no respect for what is sacred.” Sarah glanced at her. Whose generation? Miriam Blaylock was easily five years younger than Sarah herself. “Love matters, Doctor. It cannot be imprisoned.”

“Of course not.”

Very slowly, with the exaggerated humility of a bad actress, Mrs. Blaylock inclined her head. It should have been laughable, the set piece of some dreary melodrama, but instead it moved Sarah deeply, making her feel brutal and indifferent to the delicacy of the human heart.

What gave this woman the right to make her feel so awful about herself!

Sarah snatched her hands away and went back to the control room. The moment she entered it she realized how very alien Miriam Blaylock really was. This seemed such a welcoming, familiar place, cozy with a purpose she appreciated. There had been something in that cubicle, some indefinable thing, that reminded her in an odd way of the evil in Methuselah’s cage. As in the cage, there was a dirty scent in the cubicle, but sweet rather than sour—and the raw seductiveness beneath the cloak, almost of majesty, as wild as Methuselah’s rage . . . A demon—if such a thing existed—would, like Miriam, be too beautiful. Methuselah had been another manifestation of a demon’s evil: naked and real, screaming hate even as he died. But Sarah didn’t believe in evil. Rather she believed in the shadowed inner world of man, where to lose is to win and to win is to fail to see the truth. “She’ll have a night terror, all right,” Sarah said. She was absolutely certain of it. No one like Miriam Blaylock could pass a night without one.