Read Online The Crystal Child by Theodore Roszak - Free Book Online Page A

thought to their time together, she realized she could not pretend she had found as much pleasure with any man after Forrester — not that there had been many.  Was it peculiarly him, or was it their shared youth that touched those memories with such vividness?  If she were to judge by what Forrester had become, her recollections were little more than fantasies of first love.  He seemed to have done an efficient job of forgetting the love they had once known — as if it were something you could delete on a computer.
    At first she thought his reticence might be intended as gentlemanly discretion.  Later she realized it had another source, a change that had come over Forrester at the time he left conventional medicine.  There was now a practiced detachment about him that made it clear he had blanked out their love affair to leave more room for other, more professionally pressing things.  He had become a different man, a biologist married to his microscope and to the acclaim his professional life might bring him. Julia suspected his ambition left him with no greater warmth for the woman he finally did marry.  Once, at a party, his wife, a morose French woman who was more than a little tipsy at the time, had confided to Julia that “Kevin knows everything there is to know about sex except how-to.  Maybe if I were shaped like a double helix, we’d get it on more often.”
    After medical school, professional success, both Julia’s and Forrester’s, had taken them along steadily diverging paths.  Julia often wondered if Forrester still qualified as any sort of doctor at all.  If he did, he was a physician whose patients had dematerialized into abstract chemical formulas, numbers, diagrams, x-rays etched on film.  A veteran of the human genome project, he had helped found a small, but highly respected genetic therapy laboratory in Palo Alto, an area where the masters of biotechnology were gathering to explore the foundations of human heredity. He was the company’s junior partner, as much involved now in negotiating contracts as in pursuing research.  How did he feel about this change of roles?  He pretended it did nothing to inhibit his devotion to research, though in fact it did.  Projects that he still told himself might lead to major breakthroughs kept being put on hold.  He was working out more financial calculations though the day than chemical formulas, attending more funding banquets than professional conferences.
    His new location offered the chance to renew his friendship with Julia and so they now met every few months for lunch or dinner.  He told her nothing about the conflicts in his life; instead, he made a great show of intellectual superiority as if to justify the way he had broken off with her so many years ago.  They were back to the professional rivalry that had brought them together at school.  Still, without formally agreeing to the role, he became Julia’s consultant whenever her work impinged on his science.
    That was not often.  As Forrester reminded her at every opportunity, no matter how much vitality Julia might tease out of her aging patients, at the core of their physiology the same chemistry of life continued to do as it had done for millions of years, determining more about human survival than Julia’s medicine ever could.  In Forrester’s eyes, senescence was a disease; his goal was to trace that disease to its source and expunge it from the genetic vocabulary like a dirty word.  The things Julia took pride in achieving — keeping a few centenarians agile and good-humored, improving their skin tone or their memory — had nothing to do with their cellular machinery.  Forrester saw such changes as little more than a cosmetic cover-up, a futile holding action that was the best doctors could do until the mysteries of the organism stood fully revealed. Genetic therapy was, in his eyes, destined to replace Julia’s style of medicine as completely as antibiotics had replaced