The Gorgon Festival Read Free Page B

work,” she evaded. “He is putting rungs back in broken ladders.”
    “Fixing ladders, eh? Warped world lines? Maybe Alex has a problem… Well, I’d certainly like to meet you Wednesday.”
    Nervously, Carrick clinched and unclinched his hand.
    “You do that, Fred. I might help you firm up some of your weak areas, realign your staff.”
    Ester looked away, inwardly troubled. She had been careful not to operate on campus. Some men were indiscreet, and she didn’t want Alex’s colleagues to think she was married to a cuckold. But Alex wanted the Nobel Prize, and there was no sacrifice she wouldn’t make for her husband.
    “I swear, Ester,” Carrick breathed above her, “you have the most beautiful geraniums in the world.”
    “Somebody wants you, Doctor Carrick,” Joe Cabroni called from the doorway, “way back in the rear of the patio.”
    “I’ll see you later, Ester, and thanks for showing them to me.”
    Cabroni was obviously angry as he walked up.
    “What did he mean by I’ll see you later’?”
    “At the buffet table, Joe. It’s almost time to be served.”
    “What were you showing him?”
    “My geraniums,” she pointed to the flower box. “Has someone given you a bad time, Joe?”
    “Not me, but your husband’s about to get lynched while you’re out here flirting with that geranium-loving pansy.”
    “Are you telling me the barrel-chested Doctor Carrick is a pansy?”
    “That’s no barrel chest. That’s his bosoms. We learn a lot about perverts down at headquarters and believe me, Ester, he’s a morphadyke.”
    She would have to ask Alex what a morphadyke was, she thought, as she took Cabroni’s arm and steered him back toward the house. Fifteen years with Alex had aroused in her a bemused curiosity as well as an awareness of inconsistencies in logic.
    “Should you fear for my virtue around a pansy, Joe?”
    “He’s got fingers,” Cabroni muttered. “I could tell by the way he kept moving his fingers, his female half’s a Lesbian.”
    Ester’s duties as a hostess kept her from reporting to Ward immediately, but after she started the guests on the buffet, she managed a word with him.
    “I don’t know where we stand with Carrick, yet. Joe got jealous and broke up our conversation. Joe says Carrick’s a morphadyke.”
    “The word is ‘hermaphrodite,’ ” Ward told her. “It means one who is half a man and half a woman.”
    “That would make for a cozy arrangement.” Ester spoke lightly, but she was troubled. With only half a man to work with, and that half impotent, she had a problem with Carrick.

CHAPTER TWO
    Late Saturday afternoon under jacarandas arching purple over Pinyon Verde Lane, Ward nursed his VW up the hill to Ruth Gordon’s house, but he was less concerned about weak car batteries than about yesterday’s conversation with Ruth. She planned to use only one hamster for the experiment.
    Although in later years she had grown crochety and frank in speech, Ward had never suspected Ruth of mental disintegration even when she turned her experimental animals into pets, and he considered multiple pets the last infirmity of a failing sentimentalist. Yet, however devoted to hamsters she might be, as a scientist she should know one animal did not constitute a control group.
    High above Palo Alto, in a modified Gothic house flanked by groves of pines, Ruth lived in such isolation Ward feared for her safety. She seldom locked her doors. Inside was nothing worth stealing, she averred.
    As Ward pulled up into her circular driveway at the end of the lane, he had to admit that some indices pointed toward Ruth’s senility. Since she was completely alone except for him, eventually he would have to consider her his responsibility, morally and financially.
    Ward parked the car headed down the incline, set its brakes, and took his carpenter’s kit containing his electrolysis equipment and a pint of sugar phosphate from the back seat. At the doorway, with both hands full, he