The Hunger by Whitley Strieber Page B

more funding to the clinic.
    Lately, Tom had begun to catch himself looking hopefully for some sign of senility in the old man.
    Hutch sat in Tom’s office, his angular form folded into one of the old chairs. It was an affectation of his to scorn his own sumptuous quarters. “Dimethylaminoethanol,” he said in a reedy, amused voice.
    “She’s far beyond DME research, you know that. Aging Factor is a transient cellular protein. DME is nothing more than the regulating agent.”
    “The philosopher’s stone.”
    Tom went to his desk, forcing a thin smile. “More than that,” he said quietly. He refused to acknowledge the sarcasm. Hutch tossed a typed budget survey sheet on his desk. It was hard not to resent the man’s style. He picked up the summary. “What am I supposed to say, Doctor — ‘no gerontology appropriation’ and fall to my knees?”
    “You can if you want to but it won’t work.”
    Tom disliked smugness; it was poison in a scientist. “If you cancel the project, she’ll leave.”
    “Well, of course I’d hate to see that. But there just aren’t any results. Five years and no progress.”
    Tom tried to contain himself. If only Methuselah had waited another twenty-four hours! “They’ve developed a damn good schematic of cellular aging. I’d call that progress.”
    “Yes, for a pure research facility. The Rockefeller Institute would love them. But they don’t belong in a place like Riverside. Tom, we’ve got to justify every penny to the City Health and Hospitals Corporation. How the hell does a hospital explain the purchase of thirty-five rhesus monkeys, even a research hospital? Seventy thousand dollars’ worth of brachiating boobies. You tell me.”
    “Hutch, you weren’t born yesterday. If we lose Gerontology, there goes ten percent of the clinic’s overall budget. For that reason alone she should not be cut.”
    At once Tom regretted what he had just said. If Hutch was told to cut a budget he did it the hard way, by firing people and selling off equipment. He knew little of the reality of administration. To him the concept of maintaining functions while cutting dollars was a contradictory impossibility.
    “You’re going to tell me we ought to cut by charging for paper cups and installing pay toilets, I suppose.” He tapped his worn class ring on the edge of Tom’s desk. “I can’t see it that way. They give me a dollar figure upstairs. I’m going to meet that figure and have done with it.” Like an aging crane he rose out of the chair. “The committee convenes at ten A.M . in the boardroom.” He sighed, suddenly wistful, betraying his own losses.
    Then he was gone, striding down the hall, a sad, fierce old warrior in the declining castle of his hopes. Tom ran his fingers through his hair. He knew how Sarah felt; he wouldn’t have minded hitting a wall himself. The Health and Hospitals Corporation was so intractable, a bureaucracy of desperation. It worried about keeping emergency rooms in business, not obscure research projects. How ironic that man’s fate, the very secret of death, would be almost found — and perhaps forever lost — in the rubble of a bureaucracy’s dissolution.
    Tom looked at his watch. Nine-thirty. It had been a hell of a long day. Outside the sky was gray-black. There were no stars. It would rain soon, the promise of spring. Tom got his jacket and turned off the lights. Maybe he would beat Sarah home and fix her a nice dinner. It was the least he could do in view of the fact that he had lost her a career. It would be years while the bureaucrats at other institutions picked over the bones of her work and waffled about taking her on.
    Meanwhile, Tom would have to watch her vegetate in the Sleep Clinic, back to her old job processing incoming patients for physical disorders before they entered the therapeutic track — if she could even be convinced to return to such work.
    The sky was lowering as Tom walked down Second Avenue toward their apartment