The Hunger by Whitley Strieber

— to concentrate on the spectacle being replayed on the videotape.
    “Effective age thirty-five years at this point,” Phyllis Rockler said. She was hoarse with exhaustion, she had been at work a long, long time.
    “The curve starts accelerating now,” Charlie Humphries added.
    Charlie himself appeared on the tape and drew a sample of blood. The ape’s protest was violent, but weak with age. “Effective forty,” Phyllis said. “It’s been seven minutes.”
    “That’s a rate of one point four years a minute.”
    The ape’s mouth began to work. First one, then another, then a cascade of teeth fell out. Its face was a study in black fury.
    “Effective age fifty-five.”
    “What’s the human equivalent of a fifty-five-year-old rhesus?” Sarah asked. They had logged the equivalences only as far as thirty years. Older apes of the species were unknown.
    “I figured it at about ninety-two if the scale is a straight linear regression,” Phyllis replied. “That would mean he gets to a hundred and thirty-seven equivalent age before death.”
    Long gray hairs were falling like rain around his head and off his shoulders. Slowly, a hand came up to touch the sinking lips. As the hand moved, the fingers grew disfiguring arthritic knobs. The monkey began to sway, and his body started curving to the right.
    “That’s scoliosis of aging,” Phyllis said.
    There came a heartrending, infuriated howl. All three of the viewers stirred. Sarah wondered if the feeling that they were intruding into something forbidden affected the others as well. The ape had been a good and loving friend to the whole lab. Had those he loved the right to bring him such suffering? And yet . . . and yet — Sarah wondered if death was such a certainty, if the gates of Eden were really locked forever. It was simple, wasn’t it? A matter of finding the key. Once the gates swung open, man’s ancient, lost war with death would be won. ‘We need not die,’ Sarah thought. She folded her arms and looked with cold determination at Methuselah’s remarkable destruction. His life was a fair price for such an enormous gain to humanity.
    “Effective age seventy. Rate one point nine five years per minute. Equivalent age one hundred twenty-one.” A last, despairing grimace of defiance crossed his face.
    Then it happened on tape just as it had in reality two hours ago. Methuselah fell onto his side, a terrible look in his eyes. His mouth worked, his arms slashed the air.
    Wrinkles and fissures raced through his skin. The face withered like a drying apple. The eyes glazed over with layers of cataracts and then closed to slits. Hands and feet balled to fists. The skin began slackening on the bones.
    The whole skeleton, slowly moving, was visible beneath the loose skin.
    “Effective age eighty-five. Rate two point four zero years per minute. Equivalent age one hundred twenty-nine.”
    There was a long, rattling sigh.
    “Life signs terminate,” Phyllis said.
    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