She paused and looked at me to judge my reactions. "I have begun to research love," she added most earnestly. "Nothing is more crucial to human life. Our civilization, as primitive as it still is, and riddled with turmoil, would not exist without love, and as a consequence neither would we, at lest not many of us would be living."

      "You are serious about that," I said astonished. I couldn't argue her point. It struck me that she could be right about this, too. The apartment buildings that lined the street, the street lantern at the corner, the stores that faced the sidewalk, the pub on the other side of the street, all were manifests of people working together in some fashion to enrich one-another's life. The driving force was clearly an element of love, though it is barely ever defined as such. Perhaps she was correct in calling it that. I asked her about it.

      "Actually, Peter, I have taken it deeper than that," was her answer. "At the absolute level I recognize love to be a fundamental standard, to be God's standard, if you will accept that. God is Love. If you take away love, there is very little left that defines our humanity. I am concerned that if love dies in the human heart, civilization disintegrates, and most of us die with it. That is why I must research love more than anything else, and yes, in this respect, this day has been a grand day."



      She smiled at me while she waited for a reaction.

      I pondered what she said. "God's standard is Love!" What did she mean by that? Eventually I nodded.

      "It has also been a grand day for me as a woman," she added moments later, as in response to my uncertainty. "But that is not so important," she said, "even though the two aspects go hand in hand."

      "Why would you say that?" I asked.

      "I think, Peter, love is more important at the universal level than at the personal level," said Erica. "If love unfolds at the universal level it pervades all, including our personal lives."

      "I can see that, Erica."

      "Can you really, Peter? Take AIDS, for instance. AIDS would not exist if the kind of research that I am doing had been done sooner and by the global society."

      "AIDS?" I replied. I stopped the car. "You are not talking about yourself?" I asked.

      "No, Peter! It's not that." She began to laugh momentarily at my reaction. "AIDS is the outcome of artificially created poverty. They wanted to destroy the population of Africa to a large degree. So they did...."

      "Who did what?" I interrupted.

      "Your people did that, your own government, Peter. They created the conditions for the kind of poverty that virtually assured a biological holocaust. They are not stupid, you know. The interrelationship between poverty and the potential for a biological holocaust is well understood. Poverty is the most potent mass killer there is. AIDS is your people's creation, Peter, by means of policy. Your government may not have financed biological labs to create the AIDS virus, as some people insist. They didn't have to do that. They did it by policy, gradually, step by step. On the other hand one mustn't forget that the whole world stood idly by and did nothing while the holocaust was set up and finally unfolded on schedule. Nobody gave a damn, as if love was already dead in the human heart."

      I shook my head. "How did you come to know all that? You couldn't possibly have had access to US National Security Memorandum 200 that had laid the groundwork for what you just described. Are your secret service spies that good?"

      Almost before I had those words spoken she put her hand over my mouth. "Do you want to have a beer?" she asked.

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Stories about  Love from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche