Gold Bug Variations

XI

I Sit Still and Wait for Cloudburst

Q: And after the private gallery tour?

I went home and told Tuckwell. It was eerily easy. After months convincing myself I could never go through with it, molting, when the time came, was far less traumatic than the preparation. Avoidance is always a dry run. Keith, too, had prepped for the inevitable. He met my declaration as if he'd engineered it. When I entered our apartment fresh from the museum, Keith sensed something. He said in emcee's voice, "If it isn't the Jan o' the Day." He rushed at me, hunched over in playful wrestler's crouch. I gave in to the squeeze. Then I calmly dropped my clinch-breaking clincher. A tiny, pro-tern stem of brain took over, and with a quiet final whack of the gavel, I announced I was withdrawing from the Five-Year Plan as soon as I could find a place.

Keith and I had met years ago on a downtown E that had stalled. For the dubious entertainment of the whole hostile car, this lunatic in three-piece suit began telling a story about a Beechcraft Bonanza amassing a lethal charge while passing through an electrical storm. The passengers and pilot had no idea of the potential they carried. When the plane touched down on a wet runway, they were all electrocuted. The train lumbered back to life and coughed us out at West 4th. Chance put me behind the stand-up act, and as he touched foot to the concrete platform, I goosed him in the ribs and shouted, "Fatal discharge!" He practically shot up through the sidewalk.

We had dinner together, discovering we'd been virtual neighbors before transplanting. I asked him how a good Midwestern boy triumphed over regional reticence to tap-dance for whole trains full of angry urbanites. He stuck by the story. "That's how I'll go. I know it. You're looking at a man who has a standing date with electrocution." Foreknowledge of what waited if he ever came to a full stop kept him on the continuous insulated ride. We left the restaurant, and he kept at it: everyone we passed was either a massive anode or cathode; one couldn't tell, just by looking, which. "A pasty-faced World Trade exec and a punk, spike-haired bohunk might carry the same charge. The two of them can shake without fear of instant annihilation. But you and I might be dosed with opposite capacitance. Brush shoulders, and we're a spent commodity. Null and void." No more fitting an exit than to go up in a spurt of acrid smoke in the middle of pedestrian traffic on Avenue of the Americas. But that end, however much it might have appealed to him, didn't arrive that first evening. Not until we stopped touching, grounded.

As he raced to embrace me, wanting forgiveness for the tiff that morning, I limply let him pin my limbs to my body in comic wrestling. Then I discharged. He dropped me, burned, and sat down with a look I'll never forget. It crossed our minds at the same instant — that ancient silliness neither of us had thought about for years. I'd confirmed him at last. He put a hand to his head, shook it, smiling: I always knew it would be electrocution.

It was easy. I said, "Keithy, I have to look for a new place. You know I do."

"Sure you haven't found one already?" He looked away and said, "I'm sorry." He fiddled with a piece of visual camp he'd found somewhere — a stiff cardboard print of the Virgin making a curtain call at Lourdes. He fanned himself with it. "Go on."

"I don't know how to, quite." I felt alert, autumn soaking my receptors. "We haven't been…. We haven't really liked each other very much lately."

"No."

"What do you mean, no?" I shouted. When he laughed, I felt everything I'd ever loved about him return in one instant. It had been forever since I'd dared joke. Imperceptibly over time, we'd paralyzed one another. But he was willing to laugh when I most needed. That hurt. TuckwelPs aggressive punchlines — his every affectation of mean spirit — sprang from love of human absurdity. I owed it to him to pack my bag and leave quickly.

It was automatic, once I gave it the first push. We hardly needed to hash out logistics. We agreed we were both too expert at rationalization to benefit from institutional attempts at patch-up. "It does seem somewhat presumptuous to show up at a marriage counselor without a license." In truth, there was no therapy except quitting. We both knew that trial separations are rigged — self-fulfilling equation in two unknowns. All separations were final. Our mating simply had not lasted for life, per our inner instructions. I felt the residual mammal tract, the pair bond, torn from me. But it wasn't my mate who was disappearing.

We worked out the particulars, adultly arranged the furniture deeding and cash transfers. We set a timetable of target dates. The more painful the depreciation, the more effortlessly I wrote it off. I looked for signs that Keith was relieved as well. But he remained subdued, neutral, if not unhelpful. We talked through the news hour, skipped dinner, at last called the day on account of darkness. But before we climbed into the now awkward bed, Keith revealed himself. He cut through my anesthetic, scraped the nerve he could not have gotten to deliberately. "Can I ask you one thing?" he said, lying on his back, examining the road maps in the plastering. "Let me look over any place you find before you sign anything. I don't want you to get stung."

I grabbed his shoulder, forced him to face me and accept my embrace. It had been months since my cells had felt so exhilarated. Then I saw his mouth pasted with the death smile, a sickening look of failed bravery, that amused lip-pinch of confusion when receiving news too appalling to put together. Your parents both died. Broad smirk. You have inoperable cancer. Warm grin. I'm leaving.

Q: To whom could a body turn?

We'd lived so professionally that our friends came mostly from our respective offices. Socializing with already incestuous work acquaintances is so widespread that it must be a capitalist trick to increase productivity. All jobs are surrogate families, complete with oedipal urges, sibling rivalries, and the ugly rest. To occupation and family, add primary social contact and recreational outlet. In another fifty years, we'll have returned to the medieval apprentice system, with parents selling their ten-year-olds into careers appointed by benevolent aptitude test.

Sure, Keith and I saw a few people regularly simply because we liked them. But those we saw most easily were those already in tune with who we were all day long. Keith felt no need to advertise for friends when he had friends in advertising. And I could imagine no periodic contact that would require me to cross the Wilson Line. As such, we each had to go on working inside our social circle after we separated. Neither half of our partisan friends was much help in the massacre.

I had two or three major moorings, each in her way having come, once, closer than words commonly allow. Had any of them asked, I would have hopped a jet out of La Guardia on a moment's notice. But they never asked. In fact, they called only around holidays, never with a trace of desperation. That made it impossible to call them now. I also had my share of lighter long-term friends whom I might have called for steadying: college chums similar enough for some intimacy, a cast-off amour who had stayed in touch out of decorum. I'd made these friends when young enough to risk friendship casually. I lost that ability after twenty. By thirty, acquaintance-making had become a formality with diminishing return.

I called an old girlfriend in Indiana, just to tell someone I knew how I'd smashed domesticity into little bits. In the back of my mind I had the regressive idea of talking her into coming out and sharing an apartment. She upstaged my news: "How did you know to call? I just found out I was pregnant."

Had it been death, I would have had dozens of names to contact. But no one had died, Tuckwell's smile notwithstanding. I was just clearing out. Still, I needed to tell someone closer to hand. Not for emotional support; I just wanted to go public so I couldn't back out. But who to announce to? My regular social contact consisted of checkout clerks, the muffled sadism from upstairs, and a host of cheerful, limited-time phone offers.

Q: What about the third party?

He didn't even know he was one. Franklin was more self-sufficient than I would ever be. It colored his conversation — that inappropriate bravado, the ellipses of a person too long talking to himself. I saw him charm cashiers, elicit from news vendors long stories of their boyhoods, wield phone-devotion over who knows how many fellow alums, even — how could I fail to see it? — ask anonymous librarians out to seafood breakfast. Of the scores who unrequitedly counted him among their friends, he must have had a genuine confidant or two. But Todd stuck to only one other man I knew: the only man on Manhattan more alone than he.

I was the woman who had brought him, however humble, the contents of Dr. Ressler's file. That was enough to earn me visiting privileges. And visiting, up to the moment when I had the history of art etched onto my eye with Dürer precision, sufficed to show that Franklin's days of socializing had ended with the B.A. He'd hinted as much over our first date: the look that came over him at the piped music, the defensive posture he unconsciously assumed as we stepped into the street, even his stoic suggestions for quotes. Franklin's favorite take on companionship came from Melville. While survival might force one into bedfellowship with a Queequeg or two, "truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast."

North East West South

Q: How did he respond to the news?

The same way Franklin responded to all news. He clipped my announcement and added it to his collage. After the day in Brueghel's wheatfields and night lying alongside Tuckwell's death grin, I stayed away from MOL for two weeks. After making the declaration, my conscience didn't even allow me to call. Predictably, Todd did not call me either during that period, not even to see what was up. Nor did he come to the branch, although we were just blocks away. His signal was always the rich, ambiguous, low wavelengths of silence.

I wanted to move out without profit, to get by happily alone, assuming the worst case. In fact, the prospect of solitary evening meals, putting anything I wanted on the radio, warming the linen with my own legs was all I hoped for. But after two weeks, I had to deliver my news. The more I tried to ignore my need to notify the MOL-men of my decision, the crazier I became to see them. I was consumed by outlandish fear; their suite, in which nothing had happened for years, might have gone up overnight in smoke. Or perhaps the antique bivalve elevator had snapped. Perhaps Todd, fired with dissertation at last, had given notice. Perhaps Ressler, so long in the process, had dissolved.

On the first day in November, after two weeks of determinedly not thinking about the two of them—fifteen days, to paraphrase Todd's favorite joke, but who's counting? — I could hold out no longer. I had done nothing at all that day. My contribution to the molecule's three-billion-year attempt to name itself was exactly nil. I'd had one request all afternoon, for an indifferent statistic, and had directed the questioner to the PAIS. "The what?" Pointing out the table where we kept the service was not enough. My patron looked aghast at the thought of combing the binders herself. I bit my lip and did the lookup for her. And as I flipped through the cutaway grand canyon of back issues, I remembered how arbitrarily Franklin had first descended upon me with his plea for information, a difference that might make things different. Pathetic, pitiable, wonderfully smorgasbord, his insisting that an unknown man had once done something worthy of print, on no stronger evidence than the man's face creases and his command of diction.

Remembering how furious Todd's italic name had made me, I needed so badly to see him, talk to him, tell him my irreversible step, that I did what I'd never done in all my years at the branch: I left early. I left Mr. Scott to field any residual Oscars, walked down to the warehouse, and buzzed my private signal. The door barked without a word, and I rode up in the accordioned freight hauler, blessing the winch-and-chicken-cage for still going through its paces. Jimmy Steadman greeted me at the top of the shaft, having just punched out. He shook his head sadly and said, "I sort of hoped you'd outgrown this place."

"Why, Uncle Jim?" I asked, touching him on the arm as we swapped spots. Everything made me happy — the elevator, the cartons of three-part paper, this prematurely old man.

"Because one of these days, these electronic brains are gonna launch Operation Rude Awakening." He pushed his glasses up the slope of his varicose nose. "You don't want to be around then. You won't want to admit knowing any of us." Jimmy waved good night and swung the iron lever around its semicircle. The grate swung shut, the car descended, and I was alone in a silence so great I could hear it coursing in my ears.

Franklin was in the cafeteria, taking his time before commencing his share of the GNP. Dropping to my knees like a recruit in basic training, I crawled unnoticed to where my consolation sat. Only when I lowed did Frank rock upright, surprised but not frightened by another sentience in the room. Seeing it was me and not a dazed seven-point elk wandering down from Canada, he laughed explosively, grabbed my head in his arms, drew it to him, and nuzzled my neck. This time, no crossed choreography. "I'll teach you to stay away so long," he growled, shaking me by the rib cage and sinking his teeth into my shoulder. The man was unreformable.

But from that moment, visa granted, our way of being with one another changed. From then on, we could not be in the same room without resorting to the etymology of touch.

I rabbit-punched my way out of his rib-grip and straightened. Fighting to keep the guilty triumph out of my voice, I said, "It's been an eventful two weeks. I'm making a move. Looking for my own apartment."

Todd brightened vicariously. "That's great!" he shouted, cuffing me again by the waist. Then, realizing, he whispered gingerly, "Isn't it?"

I looked at him and decided. "Yes," I said. "I think it will be."

Todd turned back to his notebook, and for a minute I thought he hadn't understood. When he spoke, I saw that he knew everything, even the part he played in my decision. "We must make sure both of you get through this all right." As if he were my agent, manager, charge d'affaires. He asked me a hundred of his patented questions that evening. Was I ready? What did I hope to get from it? Would I go on seeing Tuckwell? Did I have a bad conscience? Did it help to talk? This last, at least, I answered unequivocally. Despite the attention he lavished on me, our new intimacy, he looked at me the way he had stared at that Vermeer Head of a Girl: urgent, quizzical, separated by centuries. He listened to every detail of my last five years. And it all went into his new pet journal.

Q: What was he so intent on?

As we talked, Todd labored with colored pens, scissors, glue, and bits of postcard. The pages he made were so full of hue and texture I thought they must be visual studies. When I caught sight of reproductions of two paintings we had seen at the Met, I thought he'd at last begun the postponed apprentice piece he'd once described as the bane of a decent computer operator's existence. I imagined our private art tour had at last brought him to it. "I see I'm not the only one setting off," I said. Even as I clamped down, I couldn't hide my happiness. But Franklin looked up, confused.

"Oh, you mean this." He gestured defensively at his handiwork. "Scrap, actually. Stupid." He flipped a few pages, skeptically. "Here we are. Four weeks ago. Old enough for aesthetic distance, hmm? Well then. You explain this to me." He held the page open for examination. At the top, he'd emblazoned the date in parodic gothic. Below was no dissertation, no visual study. It was a base of news copy run into a Rauschenberg combine, one of those bric-a-brac assemblages that accumulate outside the grottos of Spanish saints. Prominent, en face, he had pasted two front-page columns, set in the same typeface: "Missile Issue: 2 Perceptions," and "America's Cup to Australia II as 132-Year U.S. Reign Ends." The two headlines were indistinguishable in emphasis, except that one had a secondary head claiming "Each Feels Other Holds the Advantage."

"Exactly how they appeared in the paper. All I've added is the paint job. We're to read them both as news, although only the boat race passes the novelty test. And look! This one was wedged in the middle, begging to be overlooked: 'Beirut Premier Offers to Resign in Truce Accord.'" He spoke in the same voice that had whispered the secrets of canvas in my ear. But the accents of incomprehension, which in front of the wheatfield had ached to take in, applied to Beirut — in light of subsequent events — registered only bitterness at being held forever in the dark. Event was clearly there only to carry the ads. He had worked other message-threads into the collage: "Slow Start for Weinberger in Peking," "Nicaraguan Rebels Fail in Effort to Seize Large Town in the North." But the text trim, now smoke screen, debased to diversion, was just the thin excuse for a profusion of visual quotes — Rembrandt, Caravaggio, his own inked labyrinth.

We sat, Todd cradling my upper arm, rubbing it gently to revive feeling. At length, he relaxed into my arms and kissed me where the collarbone turns to sternum. He came up without apology and asked, "What would it feel like to wake up to an evening edition finally announcing that something definitive had at last happened? Something real?"

No matter what my failings as a mate, woman, daughter, or friend, I've always held up my end of a conversation. I answered, "November first. Pompeii buried by Vesuvius. Lisbon destroyed by quake; sixty thousand die. First H-bomb explodes at Eniwetok. Jan O'Deigh walks out on lover, unprovoked."

"You've landed fortuitously in my lap. A woman who already knows what's happened today." He looked at the cafeteria clock. "And here we are, with two hours left." He took both my hands between his. "I've been very rude. I'm sorry. I know where you must be, just now."

He was obligated to complete something before the day shift returned. But before he set to work and I returned to what was no longer my apartment, Todd showed me one more page of that new journal, the destruction of his careful clippings under rococo stuccowork. He explained why he had given up on the text, buried it under a wedding cake of filigree. "Most people who pull apart the Times aren't looking for the millennium; they just want to explain the roundup in their corner of the panel. Everyone has his own port of entry: Business Day, Style, Science Times, the classifieds. Mine used to be page one. Quidnunc, ambulance chaser. But that was last month. You get tired of that. Look here."

He retrieved a story, buried alive under anatomical drawings so expert I was shocked to realize he had drawn them himself. This page of his belles heures carried as background "Youth Advises House on Computer Crime." Teen tells Committee on Science and Technology how he tapped into secret records stored on mainframes at Sloan-Kettering and Los Alamos. These ultrasensitive systems still used the passwords they were shipped with, unashamed log-ins like "system" and "test." I could not read the story, as it was lost in vineyard rows creeping up a craggy Rhineland cas-tlescape. Todd paraphrased, barely concealing his delight in the child's ingenuity, the celebration of American frontier. He recited half from memory, "When asked at what point he questioned the ethics of his actions, he answered, 'Once the FBI knocked on the door.'"

Todd smiled crookedly in the direction of his own mainframe. "The problem with living in the land of self-reliance is that a fellow has to do everything himself." I look at the artwork again tonight, yellowed by two years. Reportage transcribed to raw color, Franklin's latest attempt to bring newslight into the abandoned lunchroom. Shortly afterwards, this variant too broke off in favor of a new one. Operation Rude Awakening.

Todd grabbed his workbook from my hands, flipped violently through the pages. "Lots of fertile stuff here. Two hundred marines killed by truck bomb. Invasion of Caribbean nation. Big-time visual potential." Under his thumb, the illuminated calendar shot past like those children's animation tricks. "After a little time for aesthetic distance," he breathed. "Do you think," he turned casually, "there is something in the air?"

Q: Is there something in the air?

I asked him what he meant, but he took me to him again, half-tickling, half-measuring the flesh of my back. We had been on hugging terms forever; I'd never touched anyone before. He walked me to the elevator, waited, deposited me into the box, planted the softest, most fertile kiss cleanly on my lips, and pulled the grate shut as if tucking me into bed. But before I threw the lever to descend, he called out, "What day is today?"

Q: What day is today?

My answer was immediate. The day I at last left home. November first. Perpetual madness. I called out, halfway down the shaft, "All Saints'."

In the Archives

My father died when I was twelve. I remember nothing about him except my suspicion that he would have preferred that I'd been a boy. But I do remember how in every situation, he'd say that one needed "the right tools for the job." At the risk of having my old instructor in Research Methods revoke my degree ex post facto, I admit I haven't had the right tool for the job until today. I am looking for a town where he might be, a painting that might lead me to the hiding place. Until today, I've done this absurdly, museum by museum, from a handbook for art hunters making the Grand Tour. Trying to determine who lives at a certain address by using the phone book. I've willfully ignored the capstone of civilization — pointed arch, vault, flying buttress launching man's assault of the vertical — the cross-index. The higher the indexing level, the higher the civilization. From the recesses of my dusty reserve, I remember the cross-index for what I'm after. A two-volume, compact ordinance survey of the painted world.

With the right tool, the job is trivial. I look up met de Bles in the Painters volume. On demand, a complete list of everything the compilers know him to have painted: David and Bathsheba, Copper Mine, Adoration of Magi, Mountain Landscape, Village Landscape, Landscape with Iron Foundry, with Flight into Egypt, with Good Samaritan, with Banishing of Hagar— One of these landscapes must contain my conflagration. The titles give entry into the Names volume. There, amid the collections of Florence, Dresden, Belgium, I find a landscape matching my description. Even before my eyes confirm it, I know where the panel hangs. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. As in Mass. USA. Idiot! I was there when he picked the postcard out. I stood looking at the scene with him for almost half an hour.

Todd sent me the scene to elicit a very specific association. In the depths of winter, in early 1984, he badgered Dr. Ressler and me to make a trip to New England. Pivotal visit. Franklin and I, in that woods cottage, reached a pitch of intimacy that could survive every climatic catastrophe. Dr. Ressler, coerced into the adventure, trapped with the two of us, at last told us the details of how he had fallen through the biographical safety net. Two timeless days together, isolated in the solitude only snow can bring on, tracking, talking, singing, solving mysteries late into the night. A community of three. For a moment it seemed we would never return to the city to need.

On the route up, we'd stopped in Boston, the Fine Arts, expressly so that Franker could see the panel. A research stop, he called it. He must have thought I would recognize it at once, a telegram of nostalgia held at arm's distance. Cursed with my visual illiteracy, I never connected the two images. He must have carried the artifact with him across the Atlantic and posted this emigrant Herri back from its native Flanders. It certainly came from the Low Countries; not even a draftsman of his skill could have forged that stamp and cancellation.

Now no cross-reference in the world will give me his coordinates or tell me what he's up to. I'm thrown back on that synthetic task of building the index. But how? In one of his few unguarded moments, Dr. Ressler confirmed my father on this one: one simply needs the right tool for the job.

"In the case of science," he told me, "the brief euphoria of slipping confusion's straitjacket reconciles you to a life spent washing beakers and sweeping up rat feces. Read the accounts," he urged, trying unsuccessfully to look grim. "Twelve milligrams of estradiol from one point five tons of mashed hog ovaries. Neurochemicals extracted from ten years' work on five hundred thousand cows' brains, at six cents per. Imagine. Someone carries each one of those lumps up three flights to the lab, enters them into the tedious ledger." In the end, that's why I loved him. Ressler knew how incalculably unlikely it was that a molecular duplication trick could hit upon a structure complex enough to probe its own improbability, willing to spend a life of profound tedium toward that end. To live the dull thrill of indexing.

I stayed in today, no leads on Todd's whereabouts, no tools for attacking the mound of scientific treatises that get harder and take me nowhere. I would give it up, were it not for the pain inside, remembering Ressler's dazed acceptance of long odds. "I have nothing now to give up, of course. But I would give everything for the chance to work a little longer."

The Polling Problem

She is a natural history, a sovereign kingdom, a theory about her environment, a virtuoso pedal-point performance. She follows a curve, a cadence, an animal locomotion he cannot help but lose himself to. Jeanette Koss is her own phylum. He admits it at last. No sense saving dignity in the face of onslaught. The moment the woman slips into the lab, everything Ressler is after — all careful simulation — is enveloped. He can attend to nothing, nor concentrate. She displaces with her texture, the frank affront of her skin, the arpeggiated toss of her hair. Dr. Koss walks across the lab to the dissection table, her legs inscribing a counterrhythm, the high arc of her collarbone floating in contrary motion. He is hypnotized by her approach, his pinch of chromatic pain enhanced to ecstasy at just being able to see her, look at her, taste without touching.

How can he remain impassive, give this woman no clue that she throws out his method, corrupts his buffer rates, soaks his equilibrium with a wash of chemical maydays? He has spent weeks ignoring her, but extended indifference only obsesses him further, ensilkens her smooth fur, enriches her odor. He probes, fascinated, cannot help but palpate the pain, the ulcered place. Oh, the blot is there, and not at all deep: the animal inkstain.

She gives no sign that she has guessed. But how could she not? The bend of her limbs, her least motion, her mere presence is paralyzing. All he can do as she enters the room is look away, keep busy, breathe quietly. Press his informant hands against the Formica. He examines her secretly, minutely along her entire length, to see if he might not have made some mistake, some enhancement of memory belied by empirical fact. But searching for repulsive detail and finding none fixates him further. He watches her gingerly pour the chloroform, pick up the stainless recurve blade as if puzzled by how knowledge always requires this preliminary killing.

Jeanette, all in white lab coat, a cat burglar working the day shift, is utterly altered from that irreverent sass he met at Ulrich's soiree. Could she always have walked like this? Is that her same sweep of cheeks, nape, thigh? He cannot imagine when the new signal has taken her over. With a subtle muscular refraction, an imperceptible lip-twinge not directed at him but still returning his, she gives him the slightest, recursive suggestion of mutual cueing, letting him know she knows. There; it is out. She concedes. For an instant, she looks back. His silhouette is under examination. There, clear: she examines him for trace imperfections that will save them.

Or did he project that glance, erased in an instant? He can no longer distinguish prey, no longer say precisely who titillates whom. In the tag, the tangled affinities, her every labcoat adjustment, her avoiding friendly greeting is tacit admission of complicity. Their each move changes the other's. He studies her technique, indifferent to how the lines between them separate, oblivious to which of them is tagger, which taggee.

Dr. Koss puts the injected, virally mauled animal out of its misery according to procedures. With smooth filleting swatch, she removes the skin and bares the soft tissue. She locates the organ she is after, removes it, makes a light mash, centrifuges, titrates it with reagent from a burette. At stopwatch intervals, she prepares a time series and labels each slide. What is she up to with this experimental detour into higher animals? Does work in autosomal inheritance truly necessitate such efficient rodent murder? Her method springs from facility.

When she turns to leave the lab, he can't help himself, doesn't even want to. He's compelled to turn his head a fraction, glimpse her lovely leave-taking. Dr. Koss chooses precisely that instant to pause, turn her own wide eyes in time to catch him in the act of looking. She turns at the lab door — unforgettable! — inquiring, challenging, yet timid. They turn simultaneously to inspect each other. Undeniable public confession: he heats and distresses her as much as she does him. There, the guilty exchange, admitted in her eyes: he opens analogous gateways in her senses, awakes her longing to travel beyond the courtyard, to recite the words that will throw off this walking trance, the sleeping-spell of mind.

Then she is gone, leaving him alone in the lab with the apparatus he has been bludgeoning incoherently for the last hour. His viscera hold the impression — her turning pertly on that strategic threshold to announce that, yes, they are together in a hopeless impasse. He circles the recalcitrant fact. The woman is married; she made her selection long before he arrived on the scene, chose the display plumage of the man who finally got breakfast cereal to talk when you pour on milk. Herbert Koss: dependable, well-off, patient, kind — all those desirable qualities of mate- and fatherhood Ressler himself lacks. He can beat the man nowhere; he has no caught creature to lay at her den door as dowry. None except — it gives him a guilty rush — a crack at the secret of life.

He slows, tries once more to back down into the reasonable. He is happy with lab bachelorhood. She has every reason for sticking to her field-tested bond. There is no forgivable reason to tamper with what isn't broken, no possible attraction to exercise over one another. And yet, there is. Is one. It alleviates nothing to call it enzymes. Obscene cat-and-mouse, one that, if they can just this once transcend the way of the race, ought to remain cat-and-mouse forever, never developing into the thing it is surrogate for. Hot, gratifying confirmation fills him to recollect her hurried, questioning eyes. It maddens him, the extent of pleasure in this prolonged fiction, swarmed with all the alarm of the event it must never indulge in.

She leaves him alone in the lab, abandons him to the old detective story, the sober mystification of the bug. Yet Jeanette— fawn legs, down-scaped neck — has clearly announced a catalog more inscrutable than the sixty-four codons. Nature's ciphers are at least objective, potentially solvable. But Koss is a thing apart. What the two of them do to one another may be no more than a complex-carbohydrate tease, cybernetic systems feeding back into each other, an infinite Do-loop, a sentence grammatical but out of syntactical control, whom looping around to subject subject who. The moment arrests him all afternoon: Jeanette, arched, aroused, frozen at the door in fight-or-flight, scared nocturnal mammal caught in the light. What frightened her? It could only have been him, his own cross-hands panic, his broadcast desire.

The marathon sessions with the rate trials are over; he has verified them with all possible precision. He must now present his findings — the survival-value enzymes — at the next Blue Sky. Cyfer will appreciate the implications: a colinear, unidirectional, non-overlapping, redundant triplet code. They've suspected, but he has demonstrated it, assembling the facts in a configuration not entirely anticipated by anyone. He has checked and rechecked for coherence, consistency with the literature. The model is airtight, obvious in retrospect. His bit of crucial synthesis will in a few days become public currency.

He has delayed, savored the edge his extra lucid pieces give him. By month's end, the world will have everything he has, all the cards down. He must lay out his technique for controlled point mutations, selective garbling. But is he ethically compelled to point out that this technique, even more than the nonresults, holds the possibility of wrapping up the rest of the puzzle? Is he honor-bound to harp on a hunch, tip them off to his own intuitive certainty?

He looks up to see Dan Woytowich lugging unusual equipment into the lab. "You know, they bill this as a portable, but the damn thing's twice as bulky as a sewing machine." He sets up the TV in a lab corner, where it blends into the background instruments. The tube is the size of the Svedberg centrifuge and chromatography equipment combined.

"Dr. Double-U. What's new? How's the wife?"

"Renée's fine. Almost done with the dissertation. She's blotted more than nine hundred lines of Shakespeare to date."

"Great. Just a hundred to go. Has she tried Titus Andronicus?" Woyty adjusts the dials, fiddles with the rabbit ears, and in a flurry of static (residual background radiation from the Big Bang), Ed Murrow springs On the Air. The invasion of outside news seems a violation of laboratory controls. The two of them sit entranced, Seeing It Now, Person to Person. Ressler must at least ask. "Not your ordinary piece of test apparatus, Dan. Are you working on something arcane?"

Woyty doesn't hear. He is submerged, watching Dulles announce that he won't give Eleanor Roosevelt a visa to visit China because China doesn't exist. He surfaces long enough to unload out of left field. "I think we ought to quit calling what we're doing here 'decoding.' Technically, 'decoding' is restoring a coded message to plaintext by someone who already has the key. What we're doing is 'cryptanalysis,' since the genetic code is probably not a code at all, but a cipher. Distort the description, and you distort the thing you try to describe."

Ressler listens to this impassioned plea for linguistic purity. He may be witnessing the first stages of total organic dissolution here. Woyty doesn't blink; he gestures at the set, where the You Bet Your Life birdie descends on its wire like a dove ciborium, bearing a piece of paper around its neck reading "Grace." "You know, I dreamt I was a contestant on What's My Line? From the studio wings, I could see the panelists put their blindfolds on. I went up to the chalkboard to sign in, but instead of writing 'Research Biologist,' I wrote, 'Crypt Analyst.' Then the panelists grilled me about my profession. Get this: their questions were in code."

The news comes on, and Woytowich sits pasted to the tube. The top embalmer in the state could not have waxed the man better. His full-blown mania for current events must be linked to this other defect, free association. Ressler, his own work impaired by the electronic anesthesia, makes one last try. "Why have you brought a television into the lab?"

Woytowich mumbles, "I've some trials that need attending."

"So do I, sir." After an afternoon's glance at eyes hazel and moist enough to explain why he has been taken out and dropped in this forsaken place, the last thing Ressler needs now is Beirut. Berlin. Woyty sighs and shoots Ressler a strained smile suggesting that the youth is not seeing him at his best. Dan, Ressler knows, is a brilliant technician with every right to be alienated. The sober, classical generational studies he's produced for decades are enough to bore anyone to tears. A now ancient paper, written when Woyty was a baby post-grad, cried in the wilderness against the protein-as-gene climate. Vindication did little to rehabilitate him with the old guard he'd untimely challenged. In the early fifties, Woytowich, churning out disease patterns in fish family trees, experienced a short-lived rebirth. He reportedly combed the building for days, telling anyone who'd listen about a strange "jumping inheritance" which he could not duplicate or explain. Three years later, someone else published the complete mechanism. By then, Woyty had become an antinomian pariah, producing the barest minimum research to survive. Yet he never once violated the Lafayette Escadrille code of honor by claiming he'd almost been there.

"Were you by any chance watching last year," Woytowich wanders off irrelevantly again, bringing a blush of shame to Ressler's cheeks, when Ed Sullivan went on his Really Big Shoe and asked his audience whether they should allow Ingrid Bergman to appear on the program?"

Ressler shakes his head quickly. "No set."

"No? Of course not. Well, it was the low point of modern opinion polling. Granted the woman is controversial, leaving her husband to take up with an Italian and all. Seven years of political exile, denouncement on the Senate floor, all for falling in love with someone other than her husband." A pause sends shimmies up Ressler's spine. "I never thought of our witch hunts as anything other than pubescent acne, aberrations caused by moving too quickly into the Data Age. Now I'm not that far out of the mainstream, and I've never given the green light to extremists, and as far as I'm concerned, we ought to send nuts like Levering into Minnesota exile." He snorts a laugh when Ressler doesn't. "But imagine: 'If you want to see this adulteress on the show, write and tell me.' Not exactly a controlled survey."

Woytowich comes over to where Ressler finishes the beaker-washing he'd get a post-doc to do if he weren't the post-doc. The way Woyty picks up the electrophoresis strips and raises his eyebrows suggests that the difference between cueing an audience and confirming an experimental hunch is a question of nomenclature. "I guess I don't see how Miss Bergman's problems lead to TVs in the lab."

Woytowich turns away. "It is just for tonight."

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean___I'm just curious."

Like one of his dazed fish doing slow loop-the-loops in the tank, Woyty circles Ressler's table. "I'd like to tell you something I'm not allowed to tell anyone. That I've kept to myself until now." Ressler waits until he realizes the request wasn't rhetorical; Woytowich really wants permission to tell. Stuart nods. "Renée and I… are a Stainer family." Ressler laughs out loud to put it together. The Stainer ratings. Stainer, the national pollster, with his legendary secret sample group perfectly representing America in miniature. Woyty a Stainer voter? Ressler has never met anyone like Woytowich in his life. And yet: someone has to stand, in those endless polls of taste that run America, for every mephisto variation in existence. "I know it's ludicrous. I was selected in my late twenties, shortly after my appointment as assistant prof at Illinois. Renée became royalty by virtue of marriage."

"Couldn't you decline the nomination?"

"Can lab rats turn down their boss's NSF grant? A median citizen does not turn down nomination to median citizenship."

"It doesn't pay, does it?"

"Actually, being a responsible sample group member has cost me considerably over the years. No prestige, obviously, as we're sworn to solemn secrecy. Knowledge of Stainer names would be golden." Woyty gives a hapless look laced with irony: I've perjured myself to tell you this.

"I don't understand. Why put up with it, if it's a burden?"

"Think about it. There are only fifteen thousand Stainer members nation-wide. Only one per ten thousand. We're in the unique position of rating every televised message to enter the American home. If a show passes our chi-square, it becomes the law of the land. National sacrament. In its own peculiar way, undeniable power."

So it's more than lack of collegial support that has kept this man from realizing his potential. Woytowich's social obligations have for some time been tinged with the moral fervor of a Mormon setting out on his two-year missionary stint in the Third World. Woyty's ethical compulsion to influence the sample mean mimics the first principle: go ye therefore and replicate thyself, and may the most persuasive opinions live. His peculiar polling position has made him purposive, a thing no scientist can afford to be.

Woyty breathes deeply. "The way I see it, in an industrial democracy the size of Americorp, the vote is pretty much ceremonial privilege. Your state representative? Tribal holdover. More an after-the-fact efficiency check on mass manipulation. A ballot in the Stainer ratings, on the other hand, gives me a chance to manipulate the manipulators. When I rate, the boys on both seaboards snap to attention."

"But wait—"

Woytowich aggressively cuts him off. "I know what you're going to say. The small-denominator fallacy. Well, you're right. My proxy vote for ten thousand people has no more significance in the sample of fifteen thousand than the votes of the ten thousand Daniel W models from whom I am indistinguishable in taste in the hundred and fifty million nation at large. And yet," Woyty smiles sadly, imparting the latest unsupported dead-on prediction of his scientific career, "the world is not a linear equation. Big changes come from small initial differences. You are a good enough scientist," he accuses, "to know that all polls are, to a certain degree, self-fulfilling. Methods of inquiry create possible outcomes. The great difference between the Stainer ratings and Citizen Rule lies in the results each is after. Ike, Stassen, Truman, Stevenson? Jesus, who are these guys? Epiphenomena, emblems of the homogenation of taste, the by-products of mechanization, not the actors upon it. But ask a fellow — OK, fifteen thousand fellows — to judge Gunsmoke, and you start to zero in on the real substrata of civilization."

So this is who Dan really is. For the past several years, he has gone about in secrecy, unknown even to his team members, doing his bit for the elevation of the species. He has had to be perfectly informed, both about world events and the hydra of churned consumer culture. Somewhere last month, last year, he passed the point, without knowing it, where he no longer simply sought the up-to-the-minute. He needed it. Like enzyme-deprived mutations, Woytowich's system can no longer function without a steady source — a glut — of broadcast.

Woyty returns to the set, adjusts the aerial. "The problem with swaying the median is that I must move selectively, a blow here and there where it counts. Stay within the standard deviation. Guerrilla war. Dienbienphu of shrewdery against prevailing tastes. To use one's Stainer vote to subvert popular culture for the better, one cannot saturation-bomb. Three votes in a row for the high-foreheads — be they ever so humble — and Stainer would dump me as an aberrant ringer."

"Dan, I had no idea. What's the battlefield tonight? This Is Your Life? Queen for a Day?" Two doozies of terminal civilization built on the premise that sadism is simply loving attention to one's neighbor's masochism. Both trace case histories of individual agony and ecstasy in tortuous detail, elevating the home audience through the triple intercession of identification, catharsis, and aesthetic distance.

Woyty's elbows jerk as if struck by the examiner's rubber tomahawk. "Not exactly. I did those two, months ago. My first urge was frontal assault, pan them both. I see no redeeming civilizing value in the public audit of a guy who is forced to relive through audiovisual aids his divorce, a bankruptcy suit, and two years in Sing Sing. But rating them was problematic. Whatever their faults, Queen and Life are at least tenuously nonfiction. Healthy counterbalance to Lucy, where the end of the episode always reveals the world to be everybody's favorite crazy uncle. So let the woman who in one week accidentally poisons her kid and contracts leukemia wear a fake crown and scepter on network TV. I gave the shows a four point five and a four point two. Low enough to show I hate them, but high enough to indicate that I prefer them to the alternatives. Coincidentally, those were close to the Stainer norm. The more I strike against the status quo, the closer I fit the mode."

Woyty gives the set a palm-slap, tuning it in. "No. Tonight, we've something a shade more significant." Just then, the familiar features of Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb, emerge from the electromagnetic gray scan. Teller, brilliant, mad Hungarian emigre, tes-tifier against Oppenheimer at the government's This Is Your Life, argues heatedly with another world-class mind whose face Ressler recognizes: Linus Pauling, Nobel laureate, supreme figure of American chemistry, he of vitamin C and the covalent bond, structural elucidator of any number of organic molecules, and nip-and-tuck runner-up to the three-dimensional solution of DNA.

The two sit in a San Francisco studio, battling toe to toe on the feasibility — no, the desirability — of a comprehensive nuclear test ban. "For those of you out in the home audience," Woyty editorializes, "these men are not paid actors. They are two giants of modern science, delay-broadcast, of course. Any hair-tearing or tossed water glasses long since edited out."

Ressler wants the man to shut up so he can hear; he can't believe it's happening. The scientists both smile disarmingly. There's a lot of heavy eyebrow work going on, and a good deal of finger-pointing as well. Teller's deep, black eye sockets versus Pauling's shiny pate. Incredulous, Ressler looks from combatant to combatant, trying to follow their reasoning. Teller seems to say that there would be no way of knowing how effective or reliable a device would be if testing were eliminated. Pauling shouts that that is precisely the point.

Ressler studies the hook-nosed Hungarian. Like everyone else in science, Teller has recently tried his hand at the coding problem. Ressler read the paper, and concluded that the moonlighter ought not to give up the megaton day job. He wonders how this man can be a devotee of the same crystalline bracer that has recently awakened him to the uses of music. Teller's adoration of Bach is legendary; he reportedly forced fellow members of the Manhattan Project to listen to poor recordings and passable personal renditions in labs ranging from Columbia to that New Mexico mesa.

How can these men, researchers of the first rank, no matter what their politics, take the debate of so nebulous an issue out into the public forum? It violates positivism, the ban on discussing things one can't know. Their sinking to the fallacies of politicians horrifies Ressler, grates against his belief that "is" and "ought to be" are and ought to be separate. He follows the debate, a glutton for revulsion. But before he can name the nausea in this public screech of intellect, Woytowich intrudes. "Stainer is canvassing this event heavily. In addition to figuring out who and how many are watching, they want an evaluation from any family that does tune in. They've sent out that favorite soft-science tool, a questionnaire.

Seems they're trying to determine if there's a market for reality. If there's any future for world-saving debate on television."

"World-saving?" Another defection. "You too…?"

Woyty fails to notice Ressler's crisis of conviction. "Of course. This is the Big One. The one I'm been rotting my mind on countless years of Wells Fargos to preserve."

Ressler watches aghast as the two debate safety, flipping the hot potato between their four hands as if the quarrel is just its subject matter. It's agony to see Pauling, agent of so many discoveries, talking with such passion about so messy and unqualifiable a term as morality. It hurts the way a sports hero's sellout to soft-drink vending hits a ten-year-old. Even Ressler can see that verifiability isn't the real issue. If we can build the things, we can find a way of telling whether or not they're being tested. The issue is, once set in motion, whether we want to rein the incredible apparatus in. What'll it be? Turn back or get on with it?

In disgust, he feels a gut-tug toward Teller. We're condemned to test, to develop. How else can we know the desirability of an experiment unless we've run it? No ignorant constraints on knowledge. Yet something deeper swings him toward Pauling, the better scientist: aren't we graced with some degree of foresight? Is what we can do always what we must?

"We've got a problem here," Woyty says. "Do I do my ineffectual bit for history? Pull out the stops tonight? Give my all to the cause? Slap the show solid nines across the board and risk instant ejection from Stainerhood? Or appease the testors' expectations by turning in scores only a little above normal, seven point one or thereabouts?"

Ressler's problem is worse. Until this moment, he was certain that the highest obligation of science was to describe objectively, to reveal the purpose-free domain. But here are Teller and Pauling, carrying on on national TV as if some things were more urgent than truth, as if we're condemned always to fall back on the blind viewpoint of need. As if observation — the dismissal of final causes necessary for any solution of the physical world — can solve everything except ethics. As if exploration without ethics were no better than data without theory.

Woytowich runs on. "The secret word for tonight is seven point seven. A rough mean between what I want to give it and what I can afford to. Hover around a plausible pip, win an all-expenses-paid reprieve from responsibility. Escape a near-brush with commitment this time around, live to fight another way. What do you say, friend? Pick a number. Vote for me."

At that moment, rasped by this unexpected irritant, the next piece in Ressler's maturing experimental procedure falls into place. Something's been missing from his model of chemical inheritance. Obvious, now that it's here: the coding problem is de facto a polling problem. Nucleotide triplets, wrapped in a supercoiled string, are, not inert, static, informational bits. They are a referendum, a chorus of self-serving, purposive voices, a proliferation of experiment whose electoral outcome of enzyme behaviors decides their fates.

If he can't read the impossibly complex code directly, he can at least poll the encoder, map the mechanism by submitting it to ballot. Ressler walks quickly out of the room. Another word will jeopardize the fragile, crystallizing notion. Woytowich, looking up from the set, sees his junior partner disappearing down the hall. He misinterprets the flight. "Abstaining is still voting," Woyty calls out to the vanishing back. "No vote is still a vote, A man's gotta vote."

Ressler, not yet out of earshot, ignores him. He converges rapidly on an idea so beautiful that it needs his full attention. He can't foster the notion alone. He needs to speak it to someone who can follow his thought, add to it. He races down the Georgian corridors to his office. He fumbles with keys, throws open the door, a sea of Lovering's papers scattering in the gust. He blesses Joe for choosing that moment not to be around.

He sits at the phone, runs a shaking finger down the names in the staff directory, picks up the receiver and dials. When the voice connects, pastel and alive, it shocks him to hear who he has called. He cannot talk, so amazing is the spectrum of composite pitches in that voice at the other end of the wire. "Hello? Is someone there?" As he places the handset back in its cradle, Ressler distinctly hears her catch her breath, whisper, "Is that you?"