The Fountain of Age Read Free Page B

Erdmann, but she’d get Marie to swap schedules.
    “Wonderful. Please call me Jake.” He smiled at her, and something turned over in Carrie’s chest. It wasn’t just that he was so handsome, with his black hair and gray eyes and nice shoulders, but also that he had masculine confidence and an easy way with him and no ring on his left hand . . . idiot . There was no particular warmth in his smile; it was completely professional. Was she always going to assess every man she met as a possible boyfriend? Was she really that needy?
    Yes. But this one wasn’t interested. And anyway, he was an educated scientist and she worked a minimum-wage job. She was an idiot.
    She got Dr. Erdmann up to his apartment and said good-night. He seemed distant, preoccupied. Going down in the elevator, a mood of desolation came over her. What she really wanted was to stay and watch Henry Erdmann’s TV, sleep on his sofa, wake up to fix his coffee and have someone to talk to while she did it. Not go back to her shabby apartment, bolted securely against Jim but never secure enough that she felt really safe. She’d rather stay here, in a home for failing old people, and how perverted and sad was that?
    And what had happened to Dr. Erdmann on the way home from the college?

    THREE
    Twice now. Henry lay awake, wondering what the hell was going on in his brain. He was accustomed to relying on that organ. His knees had succumbed to arthritis, his hearing aid required constant adjustment, and his prostate housed a slow-growing cancer that, the doctor said, wouldn’t kill him until long after something else did—the medical profession’s idea of cheerful news. But his brain remained clear, and using it well had always been his greatest pleasure. Greater even than sex, greater than food, greater than marriage to Ida, much as he had loved her.
    God, the things that age let you admit.
    Which were the best years? No question there: Los Alamos, working on Operation Ivy with Ulam and Teller and Carson Mark and the rest. The excitement and frustration and awe of developing the “Sausage,” the first test of staged radiation implosion. The day it was detonated at Eniwetok. Henry, a junior member of the team, hadn’t of course been present at the atoll, but he’d waited breathlessly for the results from Bogon. He’d cheered when Teller, picking up the shock waves on a seismometer in California, had sent his three-word telegram to Los Alamos: “It’s a boy.” Harry Truman himself had requested that bomb—”to see to it that our country is able to defend itself against any possible aggressor”—and Henry was proud of his work on it.
    Shock waves. Yes, that was what today’s two incidents had felt like: shock waves to the brain. A small wave in his apartment, a larger one in Carrie’s car. But from what? It could only be some failure of his nervous system, the thing he dreaded most of all, far more than he dreaded death. Granted, teaching physics to graduate students was a long way from Los Alamos or Livermore, and most of the students were dolts—although not Haldane—but Henry enjoyed it. Teaching, plus reading the journals and following the online listservs, were his connection with physics. If some neurological “shock wave” disturbed his brain . . .
    It was a long time before he could sleep.
    “Oh my Lord, dear, what happened to your eye?”
    Evelyn Krenchnoted sat with her friend Gina Somebody in the tiny waiting room outside Dr. O’Kane’s office. Henry scowled at her. Just like Evelyn to blurt out like that, embarrassing poor Carrie. The Krenchnoted woman was the most tactless busybody Henry had ever met, and he’d known a lot of physicists, a group not noted for tact. But at least the physicists hadn’t been busybodies.
    “I’m fine,” Carrie said, trying to smile. “I walked into a door.”
    “Oh, dear, how did that happen? You should tell the doctor. I’m sure he could make a few minutes to see you, even though he must be