Gold Bug Variations

XX

The Wife's Message

Writing was bad enough. Posting the thing felt like killing a baby. The unreal address and Franker's dreamy prose freed me to say things I'd never have written had I for a minute believed he might read them. He'll be reading them in days.

The incurable Todd denial of time drips from his every sentence, worse than his long-distance admission of love. I loved his time-indifference once, believed in it. Now I see that he doesn't even realize his infuriating, seductive residence in the eternal present. Nothing happens to anyone; no one changes or ages or dies. Everything exists, static; now is a standing wave. One just moves about inside the gallery, changing vantage, tilting an eyebrow, unbothered by closing hour.

Once, making fun of my three-by-five tone, he accused me of being thirty going on thirty centuries. But he was twenty-six going on twenty-six. When I first asked his age, he improvised: "I was born in St. Paul's Maternity Hospital on June 18,1957, and instantly fell into a deep sleep from which I have since awakened only fifteen hours a day." Funny at the time.

When he was obsessed with transferring each day's Times, baroquely illustrated, into his spiral books, I thought here was a fellow intent on knowing his narrow sliver instant. Just the opposite: he meant to freeze solid the world's blood bank. Full compilation of everything that has happened would at last provide a place where nothing still did. Had he possessed the sticking power, his books would have swelled, not widthwise across the shelf but downwards, mine-shaft-style. In time — for one could always be sure of more time, somewhere in an eternally spacious future— he would have gone back to pick up the missing pieces from the vertical file: first UN disarmament conference, Reagan slips surviving marines out of Beirut, haircut ($9.50), breast of chicken again. February repeats; so does the 3rd: why not the year as well?

His letter plasters over unaccountable cracks in chronology. Days spent nosing about in collections no longer pass. His Hemelvaartsdag trip to the Middle Ages: Ascension, a good half year before he wrote. Yet he lays out the detail as if last week. He has grown so cavalier with the calendar that he postdated the letter; no other explanation for how it arrived so quickly. When he bothers mentioning Dr. Ressler at all, it's a Ressler his own age, pre-disappearance, present tense.

If he came to my doorstep and petitioned in person, I would not be able to help myself, although the thing he cannot abide in me remains unchangeable. But this—this nostalgic declaration of attachment, a connection that continues in his mind just because he chanced recently to remember that it was ongoing once: impossible. Not now or ever.

Return Trip

We called our distress message back to the city. Jimmy groaned. "You two know you aren't supposed to travel together." A case of closing the disk file after the bytes escaped.

We borrowed a pound of oatmeal, a packet of coffee, and an ancient grain scoop from the contemptuous local whose phone we had hiked to. Sleepless, deliciously starved, we dug out. Late the next day, the plows sliced open the access road, clearing our umbilical. But before we were freed, we heard, in meticulous detail, how Dr. Ressler left microbiology. He narrated in open monotone, feeling the pull of those way stations again in proportion to their distance. Todd got his answer to how a person might descend into moratorium and never reemerge. And I learned that the man I'd researched was not who he was at all.

Not reticent, not demure, not this neutralized retreat behind grace and syntax. The effacing fifty-year-old was a detour, not Ressler by nature, not who he was slated to become. I began to see what had done it: circumstance and a certain turn of mind had conspired to give him violent proof that the individual organism was a lie. Thoughtful, precise, romantic, driven, needy: the a la carte traits were all phantom, paper bookkeeping. The self was wedged between two far more real antagonists — the genes it was designed to haul around and the running average of a population statistically indifferent, even hostile, to it.

What possible response was there, upon discovering that all responses were embarrassing, misrepresentative semaphores? Laughter was after something; even kindness had ulterior motives. Character was composed of processes intent on short-term results. The molecule, eternally rolling its repertoire against the monster-generating numbers, cared as little for a trait as for its polar opposite. Life was not the polite venture it seemed at eye level. One step up or down the hierarchy and the project grew sweeping, terrible, so indirect in means that it made him, the best part of his nature, seem a self-duping, shady junior partner in a fly-by-night mail-order scheme.

Even pure science — the most advanced display of living potential — was not approved by either gene or population, both indifferent to any but practical knowledge. The one was a stupid, sniffing truffle hound rooting out instant gain, the other a totalitarian juggler, insatiable for accuracy. As unsavory as that left things, the linkup between molecule and mob was still so brute-beautiful that Ressler might well have lived on curiosity alone, even manipulated, puppet curiosity, were it not for one implication in the unified theory. Life proceeded not by survival of the fittest, but by differential reproduction. It was enough simply to make more than you lost. There was no Jacob's Ladder leading higher and higher. There was only breeding, faster, hungrier, until speed, appetite, and success did you in.

Yet life in theory (more beautiful because more crystal-cold) didn't do him in; life as lived did, the twist existence laid at his door. He could not erase his traits without erasing himself — a choice he stopped just short of. But he could swear off the self-serving bouquet of characteristics in abject humility. Monasticism. The night shift.

Snow-sprung, we headed south along the fastest route. Todd drove; Ressler rode shotgun. I studied this passenger in the front seat who, for no good reason except that we'd half guessed, had just told us his life story. His eyes had become reanimated, too hopeful, too alive to possibilities to bear looking at.

A 443

A slight sharp in the middle brass, teeth-freezing, three beats fast: masked quickly, yet more conspicuous in being virtually home, but missed.

Near-hit dissonance is a shout:

someone whom love, in the darkening yard

held at arm's length, kept almost.

Always the choice: there or close,

the sharp catch of near miss

or the oblivion of concert pitch.

Return Trip (continued)

We reached MOL in the middle of the night. The waiting chaos was worse than I'd imagined. The computer room's fluorescent composure had been shattered into a parody of flyblown Jugendstil. Tables were stacked with slopped printouts, riffled listings, and unraveling tape bands. The rack-bound operations manual that usually sat regal as an OED was pulled apart into signatures, spread all over the linoleum. Disk packs, dangerously uncovered, were scattered everywhere, piled in model babels on top of spindles. The smooth metal chitin of the CPU had been detached, revealing a mass of printed circuit cards. Seated on the floor in front of the bared cage, his back to the door where we entered, a dazed Uncle Jimmy stared listlessly at the diagnostic LEDs. "James," Ressler greeted him, between amusement and anguish.

Jimmy turned around slowly, as if the cavalry's arrival no longer made any difference. "Don't even ask."

From behind the aisle of drives came Annie's excited treble. "Is it really them?" She crept out, tape spools running up each slender arm like Cleopatra's bracelets. Her hair had fallen in a flaxen heap around her neck. She was rumpled and white from lack of sleep. "I've been helping tide things over."

Franker began frantically inspecting the damage. "Don't tell me it's been just the two of you here since___"

"I Wish it had been," Jimmy said, hoisting himself wearily off the floor. "They've been parading in and out for the last forty-eight hours. My people. Bank people. Hardware repairmen. Outside advisers. Everyone staying just long enough to screw up another thing before heading home for the wife and kids."

"I have no wife and kids," Annie said.

"You've been a brick, woman. A lifesaver. Not that we've managed to salvage anything."

Ressler sat at the console, leaned forward to read the screen full of error messages. He managed a remarkably calming voice. "How bad is it, Jimmy?"

"I haven't been home to see my mother since___Damn you both." Even the man's anger was ludicrously devoid of hostility.

Ressler scanned the console log and asked, "What are you running at the moment?"

"Running? You jest. See those packs over there? Those are tonight's work. Those in the corner are from last night. Monday's packs are still up on the spindles."

Todd whistled. Jimmy nodded grimly. Dr. Ressler took off his coat and glanced around the room, looking for the best angle to approach the catastrophe. Then the two of them set into motion, like the mythic ants called in to carry off the chaff. Todd sorted reports, cumulating pages. He held out a sheaf toward me, turning his head. "Take these away. I'm not privy to them."

"But I don't know the code to the listings room."

"Me neither," he said woodenly, then whispered it in my ear.

Ressler went over to the Operations Manager, still paralyzed by the CPU. "Jim, we're sorry. We owe you. Now get home to bed. We'll see you on the day shift tomorrow, when you get here. Go. You're no good to us in your current condition."

Jimmy nodded dumbly and gathered to go. Annie, still pretty in raggedness, bleated out heroically, "What can I do?"

Ressler had already turned his back and was busy swapping the board that had failed. "You'd better go home too."

Annie only smiled: whatever he said was right. It hit me that she too adored the man, in her fashion. "I'll pray for the three of you."

"She'll do what?" I whispered to Todd, after they left.

He was unrolling the console log on a cleared swatch of floor, digging back into the transcript of the last three days for clues to reversing the disaster. His lips curled at my incredulous tone. "You didn't know?"

"Know what?" I began collating, punching emergency job cards, doing what little I could to help clean up.

His answer shocked me. "She's a fighting Fundy from Spiritus Mundi." Todd spoke more to his pencil ticks on the log than to me.

"But that's impossible."

"Why? Because she likes us?"

"Because she works for a DP firm. Because she graduated from a university."

Todd snorted. "Lots of religious folks graduated from university. Abelard. Luther. Jonathan Edwards. Oral Roberts. Everybody who ever graduated from Oral Roberts —"

"Stupid. You know what I mean. Really fundamentalist?"

"Literal, noninterpretable truth of every word in the Good Book. I'm not sure if that's King James or Revised Standard."

"And she's going to pray for us? Heaven will expedite the data backlog you two have unleashed?"

"Don't be cynical. It's not becoming. Besides: what Bible truths are you able to refute beyond all doubt?"

"Joshua commanding the sun to stand still?"

"This was before Newtonian mechanics."

"Methuselah living to be nine hundred and sixty-nine?"

"They had more ozone layer back then." He looked up suspiciously. "How, may I ask, did you remember that number exactly? You practice closet religion?"

"Please. Don't talk to me about closets and religion. I used to stay awake nights as a girl, terrified that the Blessed Virgin was going to pop out of mine. I used to pray not to be granted a vision."

"A Catholic!"

"Very apostate, thank you."

"Once a Catholic___Did you know that if you summed the letters in all the popes' names and divided by four thousand four that you get six sixty-six?" He drew red circles around telltale spots in the console timeline. Annie's faith was burlesque counterpoint, incidental to the real metaphysical question of whether there was life after the death of his firm. I continued to help fetch things and enter keyboard codes. But the idea that someone I was friendly with believed that exactly 144,000 people were going to be saved come the Rapture wrecked me. I could not help harping on the point. "Do you suppose God put all those animal fossils deep in solid rock to test our faith?"

Todd laughed aggressively. "See all this?" He swept his hands over the chaos of the hermetic room. "God planted the seed for all this in—" He paused to do the simple product. "In one hundred and forty-four hours."

Across the room, from inside the crippled CPU, Ressler said, "That's less time than it's going to take us to clean it up."

I stayed the night, gophering, watching as they returned the machines to the state they'd been in at derailment. By the time the day shift filtered in, they had managed, by superhuman effort and suspect shortcut, to get the Monday processing underway. That left two and a half days of backlog, with Thursday's transactions about to come in. As I left, Ressler shook his head in disbelief. He smiled his old, demure smile — but with a hint that the disguise wouldn't wash anymore — kissed me on the cheek, thanked me for the trip, and said that perhaps praying was the proper algorithm in the circumstances after all.

I went straight from the warehouse to the branch, looking as rumpled as my friend the creationist had when she left to intercede with the creator. Back at work, greeted by Mr. Scott's sardonic eyebrow at my having at last deigned to return from extended vacation, I got down to addressing my own backlog — the public sector's most urgent questions.

The Question Board

How many dimples on a golf ball? My neighbor refuses to turn his stereo down; what legal recourse do I have? Is intelligence inherited? Where did goose-stepping originate? Can we afford to stand idly by? A farmer has a fox, a chicken, and a bag of feed; how…? What is the highest form of life that can be cloned? Why 'Big Apple'? What happened to Amelia Earhart? What's the most fundamental particle in nature? Does acupuncture work? What causes inflation? Who are the eleven thousand Virgins and where can I meet one? What can I do but move from sorrow to defeat? Why sixty seconds in a minute? Why not 5,380? Who made those statues in the South Pacific? Which weighs more, a pound of feathers or a pound of lead? What is the name of the projecting blocks supporting a roof beam? "Croatoan"? How many people in this century have died for political reasons? How many were going to St. Ives? When did the Age of Enlightenment end? Who calls so loud? Or se' tu quel Virgilio? Is it possible to service domestic debt by adjusting foreign exchange rates? Which is better, Harvard or Yale? How many secretaries of state has this country had? What child is this who laid to rest on Mary's lap is sleeping? Where is the oldest-known surface on earth? Can one still join the French Foreign Legion? What was the name of that Eisenhower aide who got in trouble over a coat? What kind of coat? What's the difference between the United States and a carton of yogurt? Kennst du das Land? Kennst du es wohl? What is the common name for the family Chrysomelidae? Will machines ever think? Is my tap water poison? What about radon? Acid rain? The greenhouse effect? DES? Dioxins? The ozone? What the hand dare seize the fire? Did he smile his work to see? Is it true blondes have more fun? What's your sign? Will you still love me tomorrow? What causes cancer? Who turned out the lights? What is this world? What asketh man to have? Who told you you were naked? When will it suffice? What's a heaven for?

The Coding Problem

Todd woke me the next night. I rolled over and answered the phone without coming conscious. "Hello, Reference Desk."

"Hello, Reference Desk. Frank here. Did you see? We made the papers."

"The what?" Swifter than smelling salts.

"You know: today in history? All the News That Fits? Well, we're on Section A, page thirteen, column four, line number…"

"What did we do?"

"Nothing less than impede the March of Progress. 'Digital But Ripples Through System.' Special to the Times. 'A rash of electronic funds transfer problems have propagated through the banking networks in the last several days, causing serious delays throughout___'"

"Good God."

"Now, now. Let's not turn theistic under pressure. That's the first signal. From there, it's just a small step to frogs, hail, bread, and fishes."

"Shut up. Do they mention you by name? Do they say MOL?"

" 'Those most familiar with the increasingly integrated computerized transfer routes admit the difficulty in identifying one specific node where delays begin. "That's like trying to pull the culprit from a fifty-car expressway pile up," says systems analyst…'"

"So you're not sure it's really your outfit?"

"Our outfit, lady," he snickered; having come along for the vacation, I couldn't weasel out now. "I'm sure it's us. Ressler is sure. The president of MOL is sure. But nobody's suggesting as much to the Times until we've doctored all the logs."

"Don't be ridiculous. Your whole office can't be larger than twenty thousand square feet. Even the day shift only employs a couple dozen people. How much weight can you possibly swing?"

"How big is a bit?" he replied. He went on, against regulations, to list clients of the firm — credit unions and financial outfits for half a dozen Fortune 500 companies, including two productless conglomerates whose names perpetually pop up in defense bidding.

"By itself, all our screw-up did was mess up these folks' books for a week, delay a few checks, block the flow of transactions. Big deal: they shell out excuses, we get slapped with a fine, and everybody waits till the status byte returns to quo. Problem is, no CPU is an island. Listen: "The minor crisis, which industry analysts hope is now over, reveals the vulnerability of increasingly interdependent fiscal networks. Particularly sensitive are same-day overdrafts, when institutions transfer massive amounts of money they do not have, under the assumption that they will receive similar transfers to cover them in the immediate future. Any interruption along the line…'"

"Paraphrase, please."

"What do you mean, paraphrase? The thing already is a paraphrase. Every cell has to be in place for the lung to pump properly. Small inputs run up big outputs. A single snowfall in New Hampshire…"

"… can bring the entire post-Bretton Woods banking system to a standstill?"

I meant the crack facetiously, but I heard him doing the recursive algebra in his head at the other end. "Yes," he said. "With a few well-placed shoves from basic ineptitude."

I went by the first chance I had. They were still shoveling out; the place needed only the stink of manure to be the Augean stables. They had been on continuous surgical call since I'd left. Todd was as punch-drunk as he'd sounded over the phone. Dr. Ressler looked unflustered, alert, well-rested. He'd even managed to slip back into a pressed suit, thinking to intimidate the crisis into submission by proper dress. Taped to the edge of a CRT was the clipping from the Times. All other evidence was extinguished. That evening they processed the previous day's transactions, submitting alongside the standard decks supplementary bug inoculations. "Do you know what a 'fix' is?" Todd asked.

"I know you're in one."

"Spoiled my punchline. A fix is when you patch a tag to a program reading, 'Amendment 12: Amendment 11 hereafter invalid.' "

"What are you repealing, exactly?"

"History. We have to settle the Master File's nerves. Convince it the trauma it's just been through never happened."

"How do you do that?"

"Much the way Stalin edited the textbooks until Lamarck became viable," Ressler said.

Todd chuckled. "All the data are backed up. That's what these tape drives are for. Transcriptions of every day for the last six years. We went back to the last uncorrupt day and fed in the duplicate transaction files all over again, doctored to look as if they were just coming in. The professor's footwork, of course. It worked, except for a few tumors, which we are now in the process of postdating and zapping with microlasers."

"No four-day delay? No same-day overdraft foul-ups?"

"Never happened."

Ressler explained, "Electronic records, unlike organisms, aren't compelled to drag around the trace of everything their ancestors ever lived through. We can rewrite them, assign them any past at any moment. We, by contrast, are trapped in every stopgap success our bases have ever come up with, the running average of our every then."

"But how can a little flypaper dive like this cause a quake in High Finance?"

"You surprise me. I would have thought that you, of all people your age, would have picked up on the emerging, central fact of modern existence."

"Namely?"

"The smaller the thread, the tighter the weave."

"Don't get him riled up," Todd cautioned from across the room. "We still have two evenings of work to finish tonight."

But it was too late. Dr. Ressler sat me down at the console.

"What would you like to know? What wing of this incredible house of cards would you like to visit?" To hear him talk, the keyboard was, in knowledgeable hands, an index into all embraceable space — gazetteer, thesaurus, almanac, anatomy, Britannica annual all ready to respond to the least finger nudge. "Let's start in our own backyard," he said. Where all inquisitive children begin exploration. He stroked the keys, cross-hands, answering system prompts faster than I could read them. A string of coded digits snaked in front of us:

53 6F 6D 65 74 69 6D 65 73 20 66 72 6F 6D 20 68 65 72 20 65 79 65 73 20 49 20 64 69 64 20 72 65 63 65 69 76 65 20 66 61 69 72 20 73 70 65 65 63 68 6C 65 73 73 20 6D 65 73 73 61 67 65 73 00 00

"Here we are," he said. "A little fragment of the master text. This could stand for anything in creation. Bank account, tech blueprint, love letter, combination of all three. All we see is a systematic disorder."

Todd sighed, "A systematic disorder in the dress kindles in me a wantonness."

"This says nothing in its present form, but it clearly possesses the irregular regularity needed to mean something more than it says. So which do you think this scrap is," Dr. Ressler quizzed, inclining his head. "Data or instruction?"

I hadn't the slightest idea. But on second look, with encouraging nods from Todd, I noticed two features that made the choice obvious. "Data," I said quickly, once I'd caught on.

"Good woman." He knew I'd get it before I did. He hit another key and the gibberish turned into fair speechless messages.

"Shakespeare," said Todd, leaning over our shoulders. "What do I win? I recently saw French literature defined as English literature sans the Bard." Ressler did not pause from file manipulation to reply. Todd cleared his voice ironically, persisting. "Who said, 'The French for London is Paris'? Think he said it in French, originally."

"Je ne sais pas," I said. "I'm off duty." To my amazement, I found I was following Ressler's walking tour through the system. Just by long association with these two exiles, I had picked up the rudiments of programming.

He showed us how to disassemble a program, how the machine-readable switchs can be turned — by means of another program— back into the logical operators that had generated them. He spoke of a colored oil drop in a cylinder of water, spun slowly until it dispersed, colorless, throughout the fluid. Spinning the fluid carefully in reverse can bring the oil drop miraculously back out of nothing. "The process is not entirely reversible. We can't get from the driving bits all the way back up to the high-level source language. But we can begin to see the programmer's design."

He demonstrated some structures. While condition Y applies, do X. Do this if these conditions are met, otherwise do that. For all values in the list L, run routine R. Go here. Test that. Change the other thing. When done, return. He showed me how to build a patch: save down all current values that must remain the same. Change a byte or two so that it branches to a space in the program left blank for that purpose. Write your appended routine there, and then pop back, restoring all previously saved values.

These generic commands, he explained, were the meat and potatoes of procedural languages. Procedural languages — those that mapped out every route the machine could take — were the lingua franca of business computing. Business, Ressler showed me, as he pulled up the skeleton keys to the programs they used to process their hundred thousand clients' health, education, finance, and welfare, was nearing its finest hour. "The logical conduits on silicon have done to the ebb and flow of capital what the Dutch waterworks did to the Zuider Zee."

"Speaking of the Dutch," Todd interrupted, growing desperate, "I'd love to get caught up tonight. Wooden Shoe?"

Ressler sent him out for grocery-store wine. By the time Todd came back, we were navigating through the Federal Reserve via MOL's linkup with a battalion of bank mainframes. Under his ar-peggiating fingers, portals opened, rabbit holes that we disappeared down before they closed over us. I could no longer keep track of imbedded levels, just whose system prompts we were responding to. We tunneled deep into the web, far from home.

"I had no idea," I said. "When you make the link, it's just as if you were sitting in front of the other machine in some other office?"

"With semiconductors, physical locations become arbitrary. Half our work takes place at remote sites. That's why this suite can be so small."

"These machines talk to one another? Without chaperon?"

He Smiled. "Under the supervision of procedural languages."

"Can you get anywhere from anywhere else?"

"Not yet. Think of the U.S. highway system in the twenties. Lots of the local infrastructure, but the expressways still going in. Still, one can swing quite a distance along existing vines." He got us onto a system that allowed us entry to yet another nested net; in no time we were browsing machines in Washington, Oak Ridge, San Francisco. The effect was dizzying. For a man who'd stayed home for twenty years, he got out a lot.

For my benefit, he pulled up a sampler of bibliographic services, retrieval banks now creating the largest revolution in my discipline since Alexandria burned. Our branch had not yet entered the future, and I had yet to play personally with the first generation of living Reference Desks. Christmas all over again. "Go ahead," he said. "Ask it anything."

I typed: "MACHINE; INTELLIGENCE," and got back a bibliography as long as a Mannerist Madonna's neck. I highlighted one of the titles and got the full text. The strangest sensation came over me — the recovery of a lost domain, the bafflement of childhood, a displaced hope older than memory. What might we yet see, name, feel?

"In the future, you'll be able to type, 'What happens to nuclein when it's boiled in water for forty hours?' and the thing will come back, 'According to a study by Albrecht Hessel in 18___' The next step will be getting it to print articles that haven't been written yet."

I couldn't tell how serious he was. "All of this is assembled with only Ifs, Thens, Gosubs, and Elses?"

"No. These make ingenious use of tools that a person can really love." And he described, in tantalizing sketch, the new declarative languages. He made them sound like returns to the Ur-tongue. They relied not on rules but on simple assertions about the nature of things in the defined world. They blurred the distinction between data and instruction, set the machine free to serve as inference engine.

"Which is DNA, procedural or declarative?"

Dr. Ressler smiled soundlessly and looked at his watch. "Short answer or long?"

I felt what had been tearing at my heart the last several weeks, why it hurt progressively worse each time I saw him. He had grown ready to teach, undertake again, discover. Something in Todd's and my blundering, slow courtship had tricked him into thinking this time it could go right. I sensed in the way his eyes grabbed at every word thrown his way that he had recovered a capacity for application. But there was nothing for him to apply himself to. He had awakened for nothing, for a wrong number. A roof-gardener, harvest brought in for the year, receiving unsolicited seed catalogs in the depths of winter.

"It's a grim irony," he said, waving toward the screen, "that just as we are closing in on the perfect taxonomy we've always been after, we may already have spoiled the data beyond recognition. And yet, our effort to bring it on-line is beautiful. Beautiful in the way that a child's first book, all folded and crayoned over, is beautiful." He tilted his head oddly, and I realized he had in mind one particular child, whose conspicuous absence at last informed him, here at the end of the day, that he had never had a real home.

We were still at the bibliographic prompt that for the last several minutes had kept me as rapt as a toy chemistry set. Abstractedly, he typed a woman's name — last name, comma, first. After a pause just longer than anguish, the system responded, "6 Match(es)." He turned away. When he could speak again, his voice was controlled. "See what one can find? And the first integrated circuit was invented just twenty-five years ago." The year I left the game, he didn't add. He hit a few stop-key combinations, backing us out of binary pontoons, dropping all carriers until we returned to the dingy suite.

When I left, sad beyond provocation, I gave Todd a duplicate key to my place. "Come tonight. Anytime. Move in if you can."

He woke me up when he came in. We had a few unreal hours before I had to go to work. Ice had paisleyed over the panes with a second, opaque window. In hard February, I paid the price for my place's turn-of-the-century quaintness. Fuel ran a hundred-meter hurdle up through the Victorian insulation into the freezing night. We held one another, wanting the relieving friction but not daring to rub — like a retriever trained to carry the shot bird back in its jaws without salivating. "Do you think…?" I tried to ask, still glazed in sleep. "Is it possible… he still loves this woman?" For the first time since fullness had taken me, I thought of Tuckwell, alone in our old place, in front of that breathtaking view of skyline.

Todd answered me with such an answer. I never knew him. I never had the first idea of what men were. "Love is a pyramiding scheme," he said, and pressed my hands together until they hurt. "He never loved her more than tonight."

Frailty and Other Fixed Constants

The world churns out a tune Ressler just now learns to hear. The U.S. at last lifts Explorer I into orbit. It begins testing at Eniwetok and rejects a Polish proposal to make Central Europe nuclear-free. The Sixth Fleet doubles its presence in the Middle East; by summer's end, American troops will land there. Emergency forces will be in the Caribbean by spring. Veep Nixon's goodwill tour in Latin America will provoke open hostility. The army announces the STRAC, a 150,000-troop acronym committed to winning limited war "anywhere in the world."

One, frail fermata in that dissonant strain: Van Cliburn wins the Tschaikovsky competition, making him the most popular Texan in Georgia. Vaughan Williams dies just after the debut of his final symphony, a last holdout against Boulez and Berio. "Jailhouse Rock," "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands," and "Purple People Eater" (thinly disguised political allegory) top the pops. To the casual listener, the synthesized bass is lost in a ravishing circle of chords, lovely terror, a broken horizontal stream rushing toward greater complication. Sheer counterpoint is loosed upon the world.

The quizz-show scandal breaks. Jack Benny admits to being forty. A leading manufacturer brings out a nontoxic floor wax, to save infants that lick their way across the kitchen. According to Time, eleven thousand new "citizen-consumers" are born every day in the U.S., adding a city the size of Norfolk, Virginia, every thirty days. "A new wave of opportunity coming."

Science too can't help but join the footrace. The accidental clarity that Ressler and his love stumbled upon over the phone remains solid, even in the unforgiving light of following days. Botkin declares the proposed angle as right as an inevitable passacaglia. They sit in her office listening to Fauré, Franck, drawing up the apparatus needed to confirm his serendipitous insight.

In barely controlled excitement, Ressler does the week's summary for Cyfer. He begins all the way back in the uncontestable: the double helix. Not even Woytowich holds out against the model any longer. He has just become a father — an architectural marvel named Ivy. The impossible reprieve leaves him open to even the most outlandish proposals about life's generating plan. Taylor's radiographs, too, transcend disagreement, proving that DNA replicates by that classic postwar cure-all, political partition. One message splits into two; two halves each restore the one message. The simplest form of molecular baby-making: divide and regenerate.

Adding a demonstration of Mendelian inheritance for mutations, Ressler presses up against the last unequivocal certainty. This double-twined ribbon pastes up, from its internal library, the army of proteins that pump, breathe, inflame, hoist the whole organism. The rest is tentative, beyond the limits of current, territorial waters.

"Our own work," Ressler casts a cold eye at Ulrich, "elaborates the decoding parameters: triplet, colinear nonoverlapping, unpunctuated bases. We know that DNA never leaves the nucleus. I submit that it sends out a courier, a single-strand RNA molecule templated on its surface, a plaster-cast of the recipe. This messenger strand carries its transcription of a base sequence — call it a gene, for old times' sake — to the ribosomes, where protein synthesis takes place." He draws a freehand philosopher's stone on the blackboard:

"OK," says Ulrich. "Two separate processes. One directly templated, one read and assembled. Ribosomal RNA promoted to translator, not message. Valuable," the chief concedes. "But does it get us any closer to reading the bugger?"

Introducing a new, ephemeral, RNA messenger — itself a single-ribboned series of four bases, with uracil substituting for the thy-mine in DNA — doesn't change the informational nature of the problem. From a cryptographic vantage, it makes no difference whether the code word is the RNA simulation or its DNA original. They still track the old, elusive pattern. So despite the opportunity staring him in the face, Ulrich insists that codon assignment is more a symbolic problem than a chemical one. He fails to see that Ressler's clarification gives them an experimental wedge, a way of simulating nature's own mechanism, letting the cell solve the problem for them. Instead, Ulrich is preoccupied with his own pronouncement: the discovery of a way of juggling the letters to produce a pattern so satisfying that it must be correct.

Ulrich announces, in competition with Stuart's unsubstantiated diagram, that he, Lovering, and new conscript Woytowich may be in a position to land the Big One. "The closer we get, the better it looks. DNA splits loose along the inside seam to present the base sequence. Either edge might code for the protein, so any codon and its complement on the anti-gene would stand for the same amino. The triplet AGU thus codes for the same thing as its Chargaff anticodon UCA on the other strand. Two chains, two directions, so to the synonyms AGU and UCA, we can add UGA and ACU. Four words under the same thesaurus heading."

"Treatment by retrograde and inversion," Toveh Botkin mumbles, troubled. "Bach was fond of putting fugue subjects through both." So was this fellow Schoenberg, thinks Ressler, who's done his homework on the matter. But that proves nothing. He's nonplussed and can do nothing but keep still and follow the working-out.

Ulrich lists the sixty-four-codon catalog according to groups of shared degeneracy, the plan growing increasingly obvious:

"All sixty-four permutations. The set contains twelve fourfold synonyms and eight twofold synonyms." With a touch of showman's pause, Ulrich says, "Twelve plus eight equals our magic number." The pattern is stunning in its own, horrific way. The rationale for construction seems at least reasonable, and the numerology is perfect. That Ulrich has leapfrogged empirical constraints to get there seems temporarily defensible.

"But it's all wrong," Ressler whispers, glancing at Botkin for support. He's afraid to appeal to Koss, afraid to look at her in public for fear that her ephemeral face might make the day's pragmatics too much to bear. But it's Koss who comes to his aid. She objects, grounded in the best literature, to the idea that the complementary strands are being read equivalently. For all her substantiated accuracy, the facts wash up impotently against perfect pattern.

That Ulrich's subdivision of sixty-four triplets uncannily produces a hidden number equal to that of the essential amino acids carries the surprise significance of arithmetic. He is under the spell of physics, where the pursuit of fundamentals pares back a mass of data to simple, elegant expressions. It seems safe to assume that cellular mechanisms, carded back to their core, are also driven by symmetry. But it's not safe; safety and life science are incommensurate. That one can derive twenty from sixty-four with pretty, reciprocal twists may be nature's sheer perversity.

Botkin lowers herself into the line of fire. "Grammars are not usually so clean." Her cheeks contract bittersweetly: don't we always mean more than we say? Why not the we within us?

But the objection of one senior member is offset by another. Woytowich, revived by infant Ivy, wanting to be worthy of her when she is old enough to evaluate fathers, throws his hopes in with Ulrich's dash for the cymbal crash. "It's not evidence, of course; but the fit's attractive enough to do some stat analysis on those groups we think might be equivalents."

Lovering's vote is a foregone conclusion. There's only one way Ulrich can run that sort of analysis: through ILLIAC. And Lovering has proved so skilled at programming that he has replaced Stuart as Cyfer's fair-haired boy. All Ulrich's hopes are now pinned to numeric confirmation of his simple table. Ressler tries again to interest them in in vitro, but these three refuse to concede that the codon catalog is arbitrary, devoid of internal order. The debate comes down to temperament, individual hobby horses. What each feels ought to be true. The team splits down the middle — gnostics versus nominalists, formalists against functionalists. They forget the first article of scientific skepticism: meaning always reveals pattern, but pattern does not necessarily imply meaning.

Ressler cannot fault Ulrich for leaping to the beautiful conclusion. Would Stuart have begun in science if he wasn't predisposed to believing that what lay behind common sense was more beautiful because more objectively indifferent, dense, feverishly specific? Ulrich sends them off with his blessing: "Both parties' results to be continuously exchanged, of course." Yet Ressler knows he will be out a fellowship come spring. He is resigned, for his own sake, to losing everything, every professional advantage, for a glimpse of the demonstrable. Only now, he has dragged Botkin and Koss into the breach with him. Against their careers, he has only a vague plan: learn the trick of the cell-free system.

They now know the tube must include synthesis-active RNA messenger chains as well as ribosomes. They'll also need an energy source, ATP, and the raw amino building blocks. Their technique is still crude: throw them together; see what you get. On evidence, he is no less culpable than Ulrich, perhaps even more stained by faith, hope, and love — the old triumverate keeping life perpetually on the trail of its own suspected order.

But he is not ready to tell Botkin or Koss the wildest of his suspicions: the double helix somehow codes not only for its own messenger, but also for the elusive adaptor, the ribosome assembly line, and all the enzymes needed to recognize the adaptor, affix the amino acids, promote the growing chain, and trim the finished proteins. Enzyme-trimming enzymes. Ribosome-building ribosomes. Synthesis must itself be synthesized. The machine is as self-bootstrapping, as self-selfing as consciousness itself. Why not? Consciousness, the thirst for exchange and research, is just the self-selfing chain writ large, considering, synthesizing itself.

Why so complex a path? Why so many intermediaries? And how can everything come from four simple bases? Ressler, even now, closing in on tendering a first, tentative model of the arrangement, is blocked by his own unspeakable desire to ambush the experiment, wreak the control by introducing the irreducible variable of personality. He hears it in the deep cell's core, lapping at the heart of comprehension. Despite the danger, he cannot help it. He must make a little room in himself for himself, for the same mistaken guide that now leads half of Cyfer astray, for that terrible Pauline triplet. And of those three, most of all love.

Self Help

Each passing day has payoffs. Ressler, Koss, and Botkin daily refine the bottled-synthesis technique. He sees one perhaps uncrossable barrier in front of them. On that day when they can finally drop a stretch of active RNA into the chemical mix and have it produce its isomorphic protein, the resulting sequence will still be beyond direct chemical correlation with its source; they might still require Ulrich's ILLIAC bulldozing for any hope at analysis.

Fat chance that Levering will be forthcoming with his do-loops for the competition's sake. Ressler learned programming as a tyro undergrad — how to octal-toggle machine code directly into Core an instruction at a time. Worse than annihilating on the nerves; not surprising that the average software cowboy ran into a breakpoint at thirty-two, sent home with smoke steaming from the circuitry. Even punching cumbersome codes into Hollerith columns seemed small improvement. While it did save wear on the neural nodes, coding remained hell and debugging impossible.

It was with the zeal of a convert that he welcomed the work of Von Neumann and others, who lumped common machine instructions together and made them available as macro commands. Assemblers — programs that take macros and generate machine-executable code — still strike him as miraculous kludges, like the first wind-catching membrane stealing upon those lizards that had been hopping about in trees. Released, the analogy spread like disease. Full-fledged compilers were upon him before he finished graduate school. Compilers, of course, are themselves written in assembly language, giving the whole tower of Boolean babel more than a facade's resemblance to the House That Jack Built. Code-writing code. Program-designing programs. Uncomfortably like the thing they built this tool to help examine. Why stop there? Why not assembler-assemblers? Application-generating applications? Jacob's Ladders off and runging, climbing themselves; tools that turn the trick of replication. Among the projects that the Lovering-Ulrich-Woytowich pattern-matching program time-shares ILLIAC with is one to write a high-level ALGOL language compiler. In ALGOL.

Without further refinement of their cell-free system, Ressler, Koss, and Botkin will have to stay on good terms with Joe, something that grows increasingly difficult with the man's expanding personal triumphs. Lovering, finding his vocation in programming, is on the ascendant. His well-being is consolidated by the devotion of the much-touted Sandy. Ressler has still not met the woman, but to hear Joe speak of her, she is all sweet surprise and variety personified.

The accounts Lovering sprinkles liberally over his office mate are ludicrously effusive. The woman lisps in numbers. She's built like a shit brickhouse, although Joe produces no photos to substantiate. She plays Mozart with the proper smidgen of rubato. And she understands Lovering's own abstruse work, without his yet conceding to bring her around the lab. "I explained the gist of the coding problem to her the other night. Granted, she didn't take in all its particulars. Who can? But in her own words — without any formal training — she came up with this beautifully intuitive formulation of framing."

"How does she feel about code degeneracy?" Ressler asks. The man's adoration of the woman grates on him. He wants to shake him violently until the blathering stops. But for reasons Ressler's reason more than comprehends, the most he can level against the self-deceiving fellow is gentle kidding.

"Go on, laugh. She anticipated the proof against overlap."

"Jesus, Joe. You'd better go nuptial. When's the date?"

"Just after yours, Dr. Ressler." Miffed, Lovering addresses his card-punch forms.

"Seriously. With a woman like this falling into your hands, you ought to cleave, be fruitful, and multiply. If they let Dr. and Mrs. Woytowich do it, surely…"

"Who says we ain't cleaving?" Lovering looks up slyly. "I told you, Sandy doesn't believe in licensing love. We've talked it over, and neither of us sees why we have to pander to the boojwah by going through with dress-ups. That's a socializing trick, all that paper signing. The only party to profit from marriage as it is currently defined in middle-class America is the State. We've drawn up our own contract."

"Joey, I can't help thinking that you've chosen the wrong moment in history to make an experiment in alternative mores. Just yesterday I read about this minister who was defrocked for using the word 'sex' when preaching the seventh commandment."

"How can they hurt us? We've just put a payment down on a house. We move this weekend. It has a room for her piano, and a garden plot, and…"

Botkin knocks softly and enters. Hearing the conversation she unwittingly walks into, she sits by Ressler's desk like a frightened undergraduate. Ressler says, "A house. That's nice, Joe. But how are you going to go about making babies?"

"Stuart! And you claim to be a biologist. Historically speaking, there have been some very impressive genomes born out of wedlock."

"Who you calling a bastard?" Woyty calls from the doorway. He enters, evening the gnostics and nominalists in the room. He has come hunting down Lovering with more sequences to key in. But he capitalizes on the opportunity to sentence the party to baby pictures. Seven-pound Ivy Woytowich looks to Ressler exactly the way every newborn looks: a hive of tube worms attacking a soft-boiled beet.

"Sandy's already made it plain that I'm free to sample other women, so long as all my offspring are with her."

" 'A miss for pleasure and a wife for breed,'" Botkin supplies. "As far as I have ever heard, we are the only species who seek out nonprocreative liaisons. Who get distressed when the surrogates accidentally do the job they substitute for. Do you suppose we succeed in tricking our genes into irrelevant pleasure? Or do they still get the surreptitious last laugh?"

"What is this woman talking about?" Lovering asks the other men. Ressler knows. Botkin looks so sadly at him that she must certainly have guessed everything there is to guess about who is fooling whom.

In the following days, the shame of that look drives Ressler to force the equilibrium of aroused danger he lives in. He will push at the precarious spot, get to know his enemy, the rightful husband. The man she sleeps with every night in abject intimacy. He cannot invite himself to their home, sit on their settee, run a semantic differential on Herbert Koss as she looks on. His trial must be isolate, valid. Life, as always, supplies its own contrivance: the Local Industries Trade Show at the Champaign Holiday Inn. This year's theme is "1983: How We Will Live a Quarter Century On." Every east-central Illinois entrepreneur in the book has banded together to reassure the consuming public that the future will continue to present no end of new things to buy. The roster of participants lists Herbert Koss as a principal. Booth 112: "Better Food in a Fuller Tomorrow." Ressler locates him on the newsprint map amidst a forest of voice-activated appliances, vibrating soap, self-regulating lawn grass, and power-driven exercise cycles.

Ressler catches the food technologist manning the booth alone. Herbert and his outfit have taken a conservative stance compared to the antigravity, space-station approach of other vendors. His predictions are modest. Hexagonal steaks for efficient storage. Vegetable applique that cooks on the stove top. Plastic wrap at once spoil-retardant, clingy, and edible. Herbert's brave new delivery systems attract a continuous lull. Ressler wonders if he need introduce himself; he has met the man only casually, half a minute at a time. But Herbert greets him at once, friendlily, his color deepening to rose under the convention-hall neon.

"Dr. Ressler," he blusters. "Ha! You would have to catch me in my finest hour." They shake quickly. "My wife said you were likable, but coming to say hello to a neglected huckster is beyond the call of duty." He spreads his hands over his display, deeply embarrassed. "I assume you have no genuine interest in how the future bodes for edible goods."

The man's no fool. Just an engineer making a living. His self-deprecation fills Ressler with shame for the daily transgressions of thought, word, and everything up to and all but including deed against this man, whose carriage and speech embody a quality promoting him beyond contempt: good-natured humility. Ressler has for weeks enjoyed the self-congratulatory belief that disinterested tinkering with nature was somehow more virtuous than retail. Now he stands in front of the man, quietly accepting indictment in the lines of this fortyish, kind face. His failure to pick up the conversational gambit only makes Mr. Koss more graciously awkward.

"It's generous of you to pretend to really want the spiel. This peculiar gadget seems to be garnering the most attention at this year's show." He picks up a sealed can outfitted with metal nozzle. "Believe it or not, we've injected this full of cheese that has, alas, been pasteurized until it has become virtually eternal. It is probably also flame-resistant and impervious to radiation." Herbert bites a nail, but Ressler assures him with approving silence: The humiliation is all mine.

"The nozzle is still a little rickety. But in twenty-five years, I hope someone can bring this prototype into production. The long-term goal is to shoot cheese out in a controlled spray." He looks up from the device: I'm sorry; it's what I do. Whatever work your hands can find to do, do now.

"No," Stuart objects. "Go on. Please. It looks as if it will be very… useful." Herbert thanks him in silence. A look of complicity passes between them: Ah! But what's the use of use?

"Our main problem may not be the nozzle, however, but the plate presentation. As you see, the product at present bears an unfortunate resemblance to something you might scoop up after a Great Dane." Chuckling forlornly. In a moment, both men are laughing at a puerile species that can never stop ludicrous ingenuity, can't see what a fool it makes of itself in this world. Only invention's source, the loneliness longer than life, prevents the evidence from condemning the lot of them.

Ressler stops first. "Herbert, your wife is… wonderful."

Koss beams, proud without pride. "I envy you both, really."

Ressler's head snaps back. "What do you mean?"

"I would have liked to be a scientist." He shrugs at the spin-offs all around him in the booth, the garden he wound up in.

Ressler dismisses him with a wipe in the air. "No difference. You've heard that Congress is deciding whether actors in white coats have to identify themselves as simulations? If they do, we'll all be undertitled." They kick around that topic: Truth in Nomenclature. Herbert contributes his nemesis — a Western senator with a touch of religious mania and a mission to legislate the labels on synthetic foods. The law would prevent manufacturers from selling juice as "Juice" unless it contains a given percentage of real fruit sap. Others would require a suitable euphemism.

"Our outlandish creation here would be forced to go forth into the world under the ignominious name of 'Artificial Pasteurized Processed Cheeselike Food — Stick Drink — Spread Mix Spray.' It simply isn't fair to the entrepreneur."

Ressler laughs. He can't help himself. He likes this man, as much as he's liked any man since Tooney left. "Our legislators would be shocked to hear that evolution's greatest successes deliberately misrepresent appearances. Nature has never abided by truth in advertising." Your wife can attest to that.

"Jeanette's convinced me that your splinter group is on the right track." Ressler smiles, wincing. "Jeannie brings the journals into bed with her, and reads them out loud. We share a great deal." Herbert asks him his opinion of the possibility that cancer is gene-induced. The man may not have become a scientist, but no failure of curiosity, attention, or temperament prevented him. He is more current on this topic than Ressler, but Stuart takes a stab at the challenge. "A stretch of nucleic acid could code for a tumor-inducing enzyme, but a mutator gene is more likely, or a faulty feedback that causes other genes to run amok. All speculation, but I can at least conceive of an oncogene."

The comeback arrives from over his shoulder. "I had an Onco Gene, once."

Ressler sees her reflection in Herbert Koss's face: the painter in the convex mirror behind the subjects. The creases in Herbert's face swell like a succulent after flash flood. Even the cadence of his voice picks up conviction as he cracks back, "I remember him! Your Onco Gene and your Anti Body."

With a single-finger signal upon Ressler's back, Jeanette springs to her husband and kisses him behind the ear. The married couple exchange a few tokens of their idioglossia, the most natural thing in the world. Ressler is stunned: the husband is hopelessly in love, and the wife accepts his ministrations with a marvelous insistence on the ordinary.

"Wife, you must invite this fine fellow to have dinner with us." Herbert touches her upper arm in a way suggesting, circumspectly, that he may have found a friend.

"Feüow, you heard the man." Jeanette, perfectly modulated, relishes the idea. Ressler barely manages to mumble a transparent excuse, blanching at the look of hurt confusion coming over Herbert's face. The Know,Your Enemy campaign retreats from the field in disarray, Ressler smiling but routed.

For the next several days, he avoids her. He frequents the lab at night or when she is busy teaching. When they must be there together, he makes sure it's in the company of others. She touches his upper arm as she passes — familial, furtive, questioning. But she knows the source of his silence, and neither of them cares to put it in words. She leaves him gentle and absurd gifts as apology— currants, offprints, lozenges at the first hint of a cough. She moves through the day visibly holding her breath. She sheds all trace of public sarcasm. Lovering continues to give her ample opportunity to deliver the quick cut, but the woman contritely declines the kill. One of those creatures with two-stage life cycles, having metamorphosed in front of his eyes from sylph back into cipher, she wants nothing but another chance to return to the pupa and re-emerge with all the chestnut innocence she last week lost for him.

He finds it impossible to concentrate on the empirical work. His desire to perfect the cell-free system stalls against Jeanette's opacity, more cryptic than when she was a stranger to him. Curiosity has gone, leaving in its place a fatalistic homesickness opposed to investigation of any sort. He does not love her now. And yet, a keener coveting: she is more intensely beautiful for having so far declined to confirm him. Beauty, as Botkin once read to him during their joint listening sessions, Schubert's Winter's Journey, is just the beginning of a terror he might not be able to endure.

He is taken by absurd urges to plead with her, to demand explanations. Of course, he cannot, even if the explanations were his to demand. He will lose her the moment his feigned self-possession admits to need. No begging. Self-preservation now depends on a deadly competition: can he escape faster than she? He slips into the lab late one afternoon, safe for the thirty seconds he needs. But immediately, tailed to this one injudicious half-minute, he is cornered by a lab-coated, dissimulating apparition.

"May I come over and play?" She walks slowly toward him, then stops, hovering near where he stands, not daring to come flush to him. She wears her lab coat, a soft, brushed olive skirt, an organdy blouse sweetly fatigued. Dark stockings hold her legs heartstop-pingly limber. She is less clinical than reckless, frightened, precariously still. She pushes back a loose forelock, then holds the nervous forearm in her other hand, to keep it from straying. She just looks, beseechingly, too uncertain to say anything. At last, she shakes her head, giving in: "You really are a beautiful boy."

Her simple, head-down, sole-scuffing benign capitulation betrays her. Passion now would be powerless against him, but soft, dependent admission of hurt calms him before he can run. She holds his gaze, opaline, opalescent. When she finally smiles, it is with relief, as if he has favored her already with his inevitable return. "Stuart. Friend. We have to talk."

He chills without missing a beat. Pith me mercifully, then. "Don't worry," he says, suppressing the trace betrayal. "We stay on the project together. In vitro is as much your province as mine. We'll just have to find a way of working in close quarters without pulling the pin."

She stares at him, slapped down, laughing through choked throat at the frailty just revealed. She looks at him, shaking her head: Boy-o, how could you think it? Don't you realize: we can't get out now, except together. "You said you loved me," she says quietly, courage enough for both. "I've been thinking of nothing else since you admitted it."

"Nothing else?" One lie and we drown in atmosphere.

She gives him a bashful overbite that would disarm the coolest Geneva negotiator. "I won't tell you what else has gone through my head since then. Not yet, anyway." She steps toward him, a supplicant. Only believe. He does not step back. He fixes on her teeth: how can even her incisors incite him? They ought to seem more like tetanus hooks than pretty advertisements. She does not stop until they touch thighs, here in the open. She does not care who sees them.

"How could you…? You're so natural with him. You're…"

Her sweet undertones flatten into a quick cat's hiss. "What were you doing tracking him down? Spying? Big buck showdown? Imagine how / felt, seeing you talking with him behind my back."

Her anger releases him. She might fake everything else, but not this surpassing flash of hatred. "Jeanette," he says, loving her so acutely his chest feels the phantom pain of amputation. Names he never wished to be saddled with — the photo of a luminous child who died just after the lens opened. "Jeannie. Your husband is great. Kind, bright, funny." He, in comparison: ambitious, hungry, vain. Even were he in the man's league, any trade would invalidate everything.

"Yes," she admits harshly, the tear of the barbed gaff.

He takes her at the waist, knowing even as he does it that it is the worst possible gesture. "You two love each other. I've seen it."

"He's a good man. We get along. We know one another."

"But you're not…?" He stops short of the ridiculous semantic distinction. Her nervous lock falls again, obscuring her lowered face. He reaches, brushes it back. "Something in your marriage is not working?" Temporarily reprieved by that indifference he could not rouse earlier, when he needed it.

But his detachment lasts only until her next words. Her cheeks crumple horribly. Blood rushes into her soft tissue, and she chokes for air. "We can't have children." A day later, Ressler will not remember the precise next sequence. Jeannie falls into his shirt, dry-heaving, hyperventilating sobs. Water everywhere — eyes, nose, throat. Her vulnerability, her flood is at last her, one that he recognizes, recalls from internal phylogeny — cave life or earlier, arboreal, forest floor, or gilled, underwater. It pitches Ressler into the passion of animals. He begins to kiss her everywhere across the unrecognizable bruise her face has become. She kisses back. She bites, trying to break the skin. "Help me," she says, as if he were the only one who could. "What's wrong with me?"