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quieted Ester, Ruth called.
    She didn’t mention hamsters, but asked, “Have you considered the social and economic implications of immortality?”
    “You handle the bookkeeping. I’ve got my own problems.”
    “Your youth juice can bridge the generation gap, permit the dialogue to continue, person-to-person. But I’m not sure about publishing, even for a Nobel Prize. This is a military secret. Table your paper until I okay the release.”
    “Table it? I haven’t yet determined the prime factor in the system of symbols.”
    “Then go ahead on the theory, but keep your notes locked away. Have you any more liquid in the shop?”
    “Over two gallons in the store room, but it’s marked ‘cleaning fluid,’ and I’m the janitor around here.”
    “Good. But don’t mop the floor with it.”
    She hung up and Ward turned back to his blank sheet of paper.
    Somewhere there had to be a key, a prime factor, expressing the basic affinity, some obscure conversion factor which would unify all force fields, gravitational, electromagnetic, electrical and organic. With a sinking feeling he remembered that Einstein died searching for a Unified Field Theory, and Einstein had not known of organic force.
    At dinner, Ester glowed with reports of a darling little tailored blue suit and a matching hat with a sun visor for which she would have to return Wednesday for additional fittings. Ward could have easily listened for half an hour, but dawdling over coffee created no symbols and launched no metaphors. He excused himself and went to his study.
    When Ester entered at eleven for her good night kiss and to model her new mini-nightgown, he was no closer to a symbol or metaphor than before but he was grateful that the gown was pink chiffon and not police blue.
    As she swirled before him, the extreme thrust of her mammae threw the gown into billowing disarray which created ripples in the fabric that gave a liquefaction to her thighs, wholly visible on the pirouettes. She resembled a painting by Degas made animate in a style more graphic than that he had discovered in Rubens. On her final pirouette, she bowed, turned, and ran trippingly from the study with a final flirt to her bottom.
    That little twist did it.
    Squealing, Ward leaped after her. In vain she fled into the bedroom and sprang to the safety of her bed, but with a bound he caught her. In a swirling froth of pink chiffon, the Great God Pan was alive and rutting in the Ward bedroom, and strangely, Ester did not resent his animality. Before she walked in shreds to her dressing room, she said accusingly, “You’ve been taking lessons.”
    Seated beside the pile of pink fluff, taking off his shoes, Ward berated himself for his ungentleness. He got up and went to his dressing room to undress and prepare for bed, knowing his energy was depleted for the night. Anyway, he comforted himself, it could have been worse; something besides her nightgown could have caught in his zipper.
    Slipping into his silk pajama tops with the Nehru collar, Ward heard the vacuum cleaner whine. Contrite and bottomless, he rushed to lend a hand, but the last pink thread was vanishing from the counterpane. Ester, clad in a conventional nightgown, hooked up the attachment and turned to roll the cleaner back to the broom closet.
    “I’m sorry, dear,” he said, coming to take the handle.
    “Sorry!” she whirled on him. “I’m proud that you fell in love with me. You’ve got more surprises than a box of Crackerjacks.”
    Her arms were moving around his neck in an invitation to an encore which he unmistakably accepted even as he considered her expression “fell in love.”
    It was a quaint term based on Newtonian gravitation which had been modified, though not invalidated as a concept, by Einstein’s world lines. Ester’s nearness was both a curve and an attraction, a gravitational world line interlocked with his own. By extension, if space were curved and the universe finite, as the General Theory