The Gorgon Festival (6 page)

He was scribbling a few tentative equations on his pad when a voice asked, “Are you Doctor Alexander Ward?”

Glancing up, he saw a girl in the doorway outlined against the purple of the jacaranda; the resonance of her voice vibrated with the sound of bees in fields of summer. Her pullover cashmere sweater matched the bouffancy and color of her ash-blond hair, her blue skirt matched her eyes, and the starched white collar of her blouse, folded back over her sweater, her bobby sox and saddle oxfords were of a fashion he had not seen at Stanford since the late Forties.

Ward was surprised. His laboratory was an annex behind the school of biology away from the main campus. With luck he might go for days without seeing a student.

“I’m he, but what bright whim of chance has brought you here?”

“At the registrar’s they told me where to find you. I do hope I’m not intruding, but you’re the only biology professor on the campus. All the offices were closed. I wanted to enroll as a freshman, next fall, and I though you might suggest preparatory courses I might take this summer.”

Poised in the doorway, she was ready to turn at his dismissal or enter at his invitation and to do either with dignity. Her beauty, modesty, and poise diffused an aura of a more gracious era, a time of picnics in the park, boating, and serenades from summer pavilions. She projected into him a sense… Of what? Of belonging?

“You need a student counselor, miss.” He smiled. “This is a research laboratory.”

“Oh, dear. I’m always interrupting something important. Please forgive me.”

She turned to go, rippling with a reminder of green leaves shimmering over mossy dells. Some weird nostalgia in her loveliness affected him, arranged his thoughts into iambic pentameter.

“Wait, miss. Forgive me if I seemed aloof, but students always frighten me at first. I fear they’ll ask me questions I can’t answer. So when I saw a girl materializing from a purple haze of jacaranda, like someone stepping through a door from summer, I had to shift my thoughts from mathematics and in the lag I lost myself in silence. Please do come in and have a seat, Miss… Miss?”

“Aphrodite. Diana Aphrodite,” she said.

She turned to his sofa beside the door, and he was happy because he wanted her to stay awhile. In her presence, his S sub-sixteen was dropping closer to the sub-four range and limning more precise boundaries to his love concept. Her P factor operated with compelling force.

“The name means huntress, does it not, of love?”

Seated, her torso balanced at the waist, her knees together, her manner suggested stays and taffeta and high-buttoned shoes.

“Don’t you think we all seek love, Doctor Ward?”

“So I’ve heard said, by poets and by saints, but love may be a gentler name for lust, since both lead lovers to the self-same end.”

“Semantics apart,” Diana asked, suddenly intent, “have you found love?”

“Well, I am working on the problem.” He tapped the equations on his desk. “But I can t truly say I’ve found an answer. Love seems to be a curve that climbs beyond the bounds of my graph paper. Of course, it’s motherhood that’s chief offender in a geometry of curving space.”

She interrupted him with a laugh which tinkled with cowslip bells. “If it’s fertility you’re speaking of, then fatherhood is equally offensive. If you could find some devastating lure to draw men to the arms of older women… But then you’re tricking nature.”

“I’m not expert in such matters,” he smiled, “but I sincerely doubt that there’s a Gresham’s Law of Love which states that better drives out good. Still, I must compliment you. I’ve never met a girl so young and yet so practical.”

“Oh, I’m not practical at all, Doctor Ward.” She glanced through the doorway. “I’ve fallen hopelessly in love with your jacaranda tree. May I spread my sleeping bag beneath 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 beyond statistical doubt. Normal human beings would never participate in such an experiment, which would demand resources of money, subjects, and space beyond the reach of an impoverished Ruth Gordon.

His mental skitterings slowed. She couldn’t set up such an experiment, and she knew however feasible and personally desirable, practical human immortality was more dangerous than a nuclear holocaust.

Fingering the note he held before him, he wondered why she had called him Luke Havergal.

Of course! She wanted him to follow her. Luke Havergal was the character in Robinson’s poem who had been summoned to his grave by the ghost of the girl he had betrayed. In the symbolic language of the poem, the dead girl had beckoned her lover “to the western gate.”

A vision of the young Ruth Gordon floated into his mind’s eye. Her grace, her loveliness, her many-faceted mind opened vistas of high romance to his imagination, possibilities of a human love no legend could approach. But such thoughts, he realized, originated in his genitourinary tract.

He owed Ester something, and with his wife so eager to handle his in-fighting for him, he could not leave his cloister and go back to a youth he had barely escaped from alive. Ruth knew this.

Besides, she had taken all of his solution, and it would take him three weeks to process another batch. She had not told him what absorbent she had used, and she had not told him where she had gone.

Oppressed by a sense of loss aggravated by guilt feelings, he tossed the note into the wastebasket. He had loved her and lost her, but he would not go back and there was nothing she could do to make him go.

Friday morning, Detective Lieutenant Joseph Cabroni arrived at his office and checked his mail. There were the usual follow-ups from incoming all-points bulletins for fugitives who might be heading for San Francisco. And he read the first paragraph of a letter from a Mexican girl pleading the innocence of her jailed boyfriend. He tossed the letter into the wastebasket. She had spelled his name “Cabrone.”

A plain postcard typewritten from Palo Alto held his attention.

Lieutenant Cabroni, it may interest you to know that Doctor Ruth Diane Gordon, professor emeritus of gerontology, Stanford University, failed to attend the Sunday meeting of the Three-B club and the Tuesday meeting of the San Jose Rose Growers Association.

Obviously written by an educated person, it was no crank note, and the implication was clear; Ruth Gordon was missing. He remembered her as the old woman under the grape arbor with Ward looking at pornographic pictures during the cocktail party before he got the brush-off from Ester. If Ruth Gordon would stay missing a little longer, Ward might be held as a material witness and Cabroni would have a clear shot at Ester. Since she had gotten so damned loyal and faithful, she might be willing to contribute a little something to her husband’s release.

Cabroni’s ordinary procedure would have been to call the Palo Alto police and have them check out the report. Instead, he called a newspaper editor he knew and asked the editor to check all information in the morgue on Doctor Ruth Gordon and Doctor Alexander Ward.

In a few minutes, the newsman called back. “Joe, we got a volume on Ruth Gordon, an egghead with business brains. She bought into nursing homes right after Medicare and made a killing on her specialty, old age. Besides seventeen homes for the aged up and down the coast, she’s got a beauty ranch near Malibu, a topless bar in Inglewood, three boarding houses in Haight-Ashbury, two drive-in theaters…”

“Send her file over,” Cabroni interrupted. “What about Ward?”

“Nothing, but there’s a reference to his doctoral thesis in an article on the random error theory of aging Ruth Gordon wrote for our science editor.”

“What’s his thesis?”

“
The Conductive Effect of Electromagnetic Attraction in the Hydrocarbon Bonding of Unstable Protein Molecules with an Emphasis on Ribonucleic and Deoxynucleic Helical Configurations
.”

“Where can I find a copy, and what subject would it be filed under?”

Cabroni found Ward’s thesis in the science library at San Francisco State and spent all of Saturday and most of Sunday, with a science dictionary by his side, reading it. By midnight Sunday, Cabroni was as well versed as any officer in the SFPD on DNA, RNA, and the random error theory of aging.

Saturday evening in his study, Ward ran through his day’s mail and came across a picture postcard advertising a discotheque on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, the Electric Daisy Chain. On the back, typewritten, was a line:

Some prankish colleague whose education in mythology was lacking had sent it, he first thought, because there was no Roman Venus. He had turned his attention back to a set of calculations beginning with SA
⁽²⁾
× P + St = 0, where St represented the sterility factor and the zero was a cipher of chilling implications, when it occurred to him that the Roman equivalent of the Grecian Venus was Aphrodite.

He tossed the postcard into his wastebasket.

Monday afternoon, on his way to Palo Alto, Cabroni picked up a no-knock warrant from a justice of the peace in Belmont and went directly to the house on Pinyon Verde Lane. Observing the letter of the law, he lunged at the front door with his shoulder and almost fell into the hallway. The door was unlocked.

Inside, on Ruth’s desk he found her release of Ward for any responsibility in her death, which he photographed. In the desk he found no documents indicating her financial holdings but he found a peculiar album of family snapshots. In the bathroom he took shots of the bathtub with the electrodes still in place. All hamster pens in the laboratory were empty. Outside in the rose garden, drawn to the spot by a spade leaning against the fence, he found a plot of freshly dug loam three feet wide by six feet long.

Cabroni scooped a shovel of the dirt and his spade hit adobe hardpan six inches below the surface. For a moment he leaned on the shovel. Of all the frame-ups he had spotted in his fifteen years on the force, this was the most amateurish. Yet, there was enough circumstantial evidence here to send Ward to the gas chamber if an investigator didn’t probe too deeply. Whether Cabroni fitted the frame around Ward or not would depend on Ester.

At the moment, the investigator was more perplexed by Ruth Gordon’s motives.