The Gorgon Festival Read Online Free PDF Page A

for her.”
    “How?”
    “Get in there and take a sitz bath. No sense letting it go to waste.”
    “I have no arthritis. You volunteered as guinea pig, and I…”
    “I’m neither a guinea nor a pig, and you can check that with Ester when she gets back from San Francisco.”
    Intuition had pointed Ruth to Ester’s current lover, and Ward veered from the subject. “I haven’t observed you long enough to determine side effects.”
    “If you’re waiting for me to die, Alex, I can tell you now that death is not a side effect… You’re happy, but I want you to be happier. So get in there and take your sitz bath. It won’t hurt you. All it does is correct the random error process, which I’ll explain how after you’ve taken your bath.”
    He did as he was told, partly from habit and partly from curiosity about the theory of random error. He felt sheepish in the bathroom as he stripped and dipped into the tub. It was a waste of electricity, and sitting in used bath water made him feel squeamish.
    After five minutes, his squeamishness passed. Ruth had honored him by permitting him to use her bath water. If he had been a true friend, he would have watched over her as she bathed. She would have understood if he had felt a residual kickback from his childhood fantasizing. Even now he could feel impulses from his memory, so he focused his attention on another slight mystery.
    He had to ask her why she had called a cure for cancer “bush league.”
    After ten minutes, she called him. He got out, dried, and dressed. Back in the kitchen, he found the table set with a dish of his favorite home-baked macaroons placed in the center of the table, not six or seven, but at least a dozen.
    “Feel any different?” she asked.
    “Not particularly,” he answered honestly. “But I’m anxious to hear about this random error theory.”
    She seated him and brought the chocolate, sitting across from him.
    “Random error is an accumulation of defective DNA in non-dividing cells which impairs performance of the cell—the aging process. Your solution plus my absorbent plus an electric current adds enough missing rungs to our broken ladders to repair the damage from this process, almost instantaneously.”
    “How does this affect Ester?”
    “Alex, you theorist! Don’t you realize that bathtub in there is the Fountain of Youth? You now have the genitourinary tract of a sixteen-year-old boy.”
    His first thought was that she had gone dotty, but fear for himself and loyalty to her canceled the thought. In her desperation and pain, she had become vulnerable to nostrums and was practicing faith healing on herself.
    Then he thought of Ester’s problem, Ruth’s really, since it had never bothered Ester.
    “How will this help Ester?”
    “Biologically the ideal mate of a thirty-two-year-old woman is a sixteen-year-old boy. Ester’s three years over the hump, and you’re back in prime.”
    Ward munched a macaroon and thought.
    “Within any group,” he reminded Ruth, “there are individual variations, and I was a virgin until I was sixteen.”
    “Nonsense. You lacked inspiration earlier. You had outgrown your mother; and Ester, at that time, I suppose, was breastless.”
    All this emphasis on breasts upset him. A normal man didn’t love a woman for her bosom any more than he loved her for her earlobes. Ruth seemed to have the fixation, not he.
    “Ruth, I’d better head home. Ester always calls at midnight to see if I’m safe.”
    She glanced at her watch. “It’s only a little past nine. You can help with the dishes.”
    “Thanks for the macaroons and chocolate. They really hit the spot.”
    “Hit the spot, huh?” she said, rising to take the dishes. “I can tell by your innuendos you’re feeling peppier already. Grab a towel, boy, and lend a hand.”
    It was a delight to watch her clear the table with such ease after her halting movements before. Whether healed by faith or by the solution, she flowed and rippled with the