The Hunger by Whitley Strieber

squishing. “Monkeys are bastards.”
    “Get Tom down here,” Sarah said. She needed him for her own sanity, forget the ape. Moments later he came rushing in, his face gray. “Nobody’s hurt,” she said, seeing the fear in his eyes. “No human body, that is.”
    “Is that Betty?”
    “Methuselah tore her apart. He stopped sleeping two days ago and he’s been getting increasingly irritable. But we had no reason to expect this.” There was a flurry of activity behind them as Phyllis set up the videotape equipment. She would record Methuselah’s further behavior for later analysis.
    Sarah watched Tom react to the catastrophe. She could practically see him calculating how this affected his own career track. Number One was never far from mind with Tom Haver. Then he turned his eyes on her, full of wonderful, totally genuine concern. “Is this going to hurt you? What’s the latest on the blood runs?”
    “Still indexing to the same curve as before. No change.”
    “So there’s no resolution. And Betty’s dead. Oh, Christ, you’re in trouble.”
    She almost wanted to laugh at the obviousness of his emphasis on the you . He didn’t want to seem like what he was, to come right out and say it: my damn career rides on this too. She held out her hands, suddenly realizing that Tom was even more upset than she was. He took them, stepped toward her, seemed about to speak. She spoke first. “I guess I take my dead star performer to the Budget Committee tomorrow.”
    He looked sick. “Hutch was going to recommend against extension anyway. Now with Betty dead —”
    “It means that we have to start all over again. She’s still the only one that had actually stopped aging.”
    She stared at Methuselah, who stared back as if he were wishing he could repeat his little trick. He was a handsome ape, with his spread of gray hair and his powerful body.
    Betty, who looked like an adolescent, had been his mate.
    “Pardon me while I break down and cry,” Sarah said in her most sardonic tone. But she meant it. She went gratefully into Tom’s arms.
    “Now, now, we’re still on public property.” That was old reticent Tom, embarrassed by any show of emotion.
    “We’re all family here. We’re going on the unemployment line together.”
    “That’ll never happen. Some other facility will pick you up.”
    “In a couple of years. Meanwhile, we lose all our apes, disrupt the experiments, and waste time !” It made Sarah crazy just thinking about it. Ever since she had accidentally discovered the blood factor that controlled aging while doing blood counts on sleep-disturbed rats, she had been a woman with a mission. In this laboratory they were seeking the cure for man’s most universal disease — old age. And Betty had been proof that the cure existed. Somewhere in the rhesus’ blood some hidden key had been turned on by their application of drugs, temperature and diet. Whatever it was had deepened her sleep almost to the point of death. And as sleep had deepened, aging had slowed. The same set of conditions had worked for a while with Methuselah. Last week his sleep had abruptly stopped. He had dozed a little, then — a monster.
    Betty might have been immortal, if Methuselah hadn’t killed her. Sarah would have shot him if she had a gun. She went to the gray-painted wall and hit it a couple of times. “We’re dealing with a degenerating gene pool,” she said softly.
    “Not the apes,” Phyllis answered.
    “The human race! For God’s sake, we’re about to find the mechanism that controls aging and we’re going to lose our budget! I’ll tell you all something! I think Hutch and that whole crowd of senile appendix poppers on the board are jealous. Jealous as hell! They’re already terminal geriatrics and they want to make sure the same thing happens to the rest of the world!”
    The anger in Sarah’s voice caused Tom to feel a familiar sense of frustration. She was and remained blind to the problems he