it, tonight?”
“I’d feel safer if you’d unroll your bag inside. You still can see the tree through the window.”
“For your peace of mind, Doctor Ward, I agree.”
He helped bring her gear from the car, a white Porsche with a California license plate parked in the students’ area, and encouraged her talk merely to hear her voice. She was from the East, originally, and she was interested in biology, mostly as a science. Inside he showed her the refrigerator, in case she wanted a sandwich during the night.
Before he left, he promised to take her to breakfast in the morning.
Driving home, Ward contemplated his encounter. Perhaps he had seen prettier girls on the campus, and there might be ballet dancers who moved with more grace, but Diana Aphrodite overwhelmed his imagination with a sense of lost summers, of furbelows and parasols, of fecundity and ripening. Odd, he thought, but a girl Diana’s age should have reminded him of springtime, a time of sowing. And there had been the timeless sense of belonging he felt in her presence.
Somewhere along the curve of time he might have loved Diana Aphrodite. In a circular universe with a limited number of patterns to reality, powerful affinities would cluster and repeat. If his intuition was correct, he might have been her lover as late as the 1890s, probably during some church picnic in the park.
Suddenly it occurred to him that his sense of belonging might have been a sense of familiarity. If Diana’s ash-blond hair had lacked the gloss and resilience of youth, if her eyes had lacked their sparkle, her voice its fiber…
Ward was pulling into his drive when the parallels struck him, and he backed out, returning to the lab and driving with a haste that almost exceeded the speed limit.
Diana Aphrodite was the young Ruth Gordon.
Ruth had submerged herself in the electrolytic bath and returned to her youth, and her question about his loves had been a test which he had failed. He had given a theoretical reply to her query when she sought a personal answer.
Forty minutes after his departure, he re-entered the lab office to find her gone. All that remained of her was a hand-printed note atop his working papers.
THANKS FOR EVERYTHING , LUKE HAVERGAL.
Stunned by his sense of loss, he still alerted to the underlined word and went to the broom closet. His two gallons of sugar phosphate were gone.
Ward sat at his desk, wondering.
What madcap scheme had prompted her to take enough solution to renew her DNA for ten thousand years? None but a maniac would grunt and sweat under such a load of life. Of course, she realized the molecules were unstable and she could end it all with reversed electrolysis, but why had she undertaken the journey in the first place?
If she had done it out of pique over his imagined rejection of her love, she was not making her punishment fit his crime. Or perhaps she intended to continue her self-styled dialogue with the young on a face-to-face basis.
“Fatherhood’s equally offensive.”
Her sentence popped into his mind and with a revelation.
An inveterate pragmatist, Ruth was taking this method to prove to him that biological controls could be applied to human population. Using older females as a lure, she was going to work Knipling’s experiment on the screw-worm flies of Curaçao in reverse.
As a theoretician he was prepared to accept her thesis. Her grace and beauty still lingered in his mind, the first ever to inspire him to speak in iambic pentameters. But, still, it would take at least one hundred thousand females, nubile but infertile, with the enthusiasm of youth plus the skills of experience, seeded throughout the country to flatten the population curve. She had only enough solution for five hundred.
Besides, a control group of five hundred rejuvenated females would demand an equal number of competitive young women and perhaps three times that many young men to establish the superiority of infertile nubiles in open competition
“I’d feel safer if you’d unroll your bag inside. You still can see the tree through the window.”
“For your peace of mind, Doctor Ward, I agree.”
He helped bring her gear from the car, a white Porsche with a California license plate parked in the students’ area, and encouraged her talk merely to hear her voice. She was from the East, originally, and she was interested in biology, mostly as a science. Inside he showed her the refrigerator, in case she wanted a sandwich during the night.
Before he left, he promised to take her to breakfast in the morning.
Driving home, Ward contemplated his encounter. Perhaps he had seen prettier girls on the campus, and there might be ballet dancers who moved with more grace, but Diana Aphrodite overwhelmed his imagination with a sense of lost summers, of furbelows and parasols, of fecundity and ripening. Odd, he thought, but a girl Diana’s age should have reminded him of springtime, a time of sowing. And there had been the timeless sense of belonging he felt in her presence.
Somewhere along the curve of time he might have loved Diana Aphrodite. In a circular universe with a limited number of patterns to reality, powerful affinities would cluster and repeat. If his intuition was correct, he might have been her lover as late as the 1890s, probably during some church picnic in the park.
Suddenly it occurred to him that his sense of belonging might have been a sense of familiarity. If Diana’s ash-blond hair had lacked the gloss and resilience of youth, if her eyes had lacked their sparkle, her voice its fiber…
Ward was pulling into his drive when the parallels struck him, and he backed out, returning to the lab and driving with a haste that almost exceeded the speed limit.
Diana Aphrodite was the young Ruth Gordon.
Ruth had submerged herself in the electrolytic bath and returned to her youth, and her question about his loves had been a test which he had failed. He had given a theoretical reply to her query when she sought a personal answer.
Forty minutes after his departure, he re-entered the lab office to find her gone. All that remained of her was a hand-printed note atop his working papers.
THANKS FOR EVERYTHING , LUKE HAVERGAL.
Stunned by his sense of loss, he still alerted to the underlined word and went to the broom closet. His two gallons of sugar phosphate were gone.
Ward sat at his desk, wondering.
What madcap scheme had prompted her to take enough solution to renew her DNA for ten thousand years? None but a maniac would grunt and sweat under such a load of life. Of course, she realized the molecules were unstable and she could end it all with reversed electrolysis, but why had she undertaken the journey in the first place?
If she had done it out of pique over his imagined rejection of her love, she was not making her punishment fit his crime. Or perhaps she intended to continue her self-styled dialogue with the young on a face-to-face basis.
“Fatherhood’s equally offensive.”
Her sentence popped into his mind and with a revelation.
An inveterate pragmatist, Ruth was taking this method to prove to him that biological controls could be applied to human population. Using older females as a lure, she was going to work Knipling’s experiment on the screw-worm flies of Curaçao in reverse.
As a theoretician he was prepared to accept her thesis. Her grace and beauty still lingered in his mind, the first ever to inspire him to speak in iambic pentameters. But, still, it would take at least one hundred thousand females, nubile but infertile, with the enthusiasm of youth plus the skills of experience, seeded throughout the country to flatten the population curve. She had only enough solution for five hundred.
Besides, a control group of five hundred rejuvenated females would demand an equal number of competitive young women and perhaps three times that many young men to establish the superiority of infertile nubiles in open competition
Similar Books
