Gold Bug Variations

XXVIII

The Placebo Effect

Everything she writes is borne out. Ulrich circulates a note the next day, announcing Dr. Koss's departure just before term's end. With admirable dexterity, the head of the all but annulled Cyfer manages to praise the woman's contribution to the team without once giving the reason for her leaving or mentioning her destination. For once, Ressler is left with more knowledge than information. The chief gives the note a day or two to sink in, then calls an emergency meeting. Ressler is the last to arrive. The other three are waiting for him.

"Right to it, then," Ulrich begins with more force than conviction. "Is there any point in holding this thing together?"

Ressler looks at his boss, understands. The practice of science is less about sudden shifts of insight or repetitive hours of irreproachable lab practice than it is about funding. Always a subtle parasitism on patronage. Each year's grants deadline hastens the day when the question of whether a piece of work gets done will rest exclusively with the impartial peer review.

Ulrich's poll is clear: have we still a chance to go up against the massive labs, Big Biology? Or is this curse of defection fatal? Woytowich keeps his counsel; he's ready to return to teaching, rating TV — the life of the embittered divorcer. The continuance of the project is to him a matter of immense indifference. Ressler is also tacit, ready to be dismissed. It takes Botkin's eloquent intercession on his part to recall Stuart to unfinished business. She gives the group a rundown on the state of the cell-free system, including an abstract of the conceptual breakthrough she and Ressler hashed out just days before, at the precise instant when Jeanette sat in the barracks writing her Abschied.

She does a better job presenting than Ressler could have. At last, when it is too late, Ulrich's eyes widen. He has been sitting on a resource beyond anything in the equipment catalogs. This generating idea, the means into the composition, puts them as close to the heart of the problem as anyone. "We have three vacant salary lines, and we can get more. I can book over eighty percent of the remaining supplies budget. We can get you both full release time, as far as the department is concerned. Just tell me what you need."

Ressler says: "I need a week to think."

He goes home and sits for days, projecting himself into the ideal scenario: he and Botkin set to work on the synthetic mapping, in charge of a small army of eager assistants. They scoop the world. They lay out the first, rudimentary lexicon of life's language. They complete the table. They lay the capstone of the first material model of inheritance. Then he imagines himself the recipient, six months from now, through the mail, in an envelope with smudged return address, of one of those black-and-white hospital shots. A small, hairless, closed-eye cross between a planarian and Khrushchev, ID tag illegible. Like the words of organic nature hidden in the lookup table, this infant's features grow more inscrutable upon closer identification. It has no one's features, neither father nor mother. Like that complete, mechanical explanation, this complete, clean account of Jeanette's departure explains nothing.

His thoughts during this brief sabbatical return to one image: that man, ready to disappear without issue, whether or not his choice of companion in this life chooses to accompany him in exile. Is even Herbert's gesture part of the "pollen-trick"?

Then, into his third week of passive disengagement, Ressler wakes to a morning blazing in beautiful light. He showers, puts on clothes stiff with laundry soap, discovers: I am ravenous. He walks a brisk six blocks to the pancake house, ordering the full rancher's, trucker's, bricklayer's, red-blood, high-starch, artery-clogging special, and adores every mouthful. The waitress flirts shyly with him over the check. He tells her she is lovely, then backs away, smiling affectionately, helpless in human contact.

He walks to the Biology Building, taking the longest detour that still leaves him inside the twin cities' jurisdiction. He hears, for the first time since the days of the Home Nature Museum, how different the repeated calls of a single bird are. Are these tiny perturbations in the melody random, or do they mean something? He will make a study of this. The sound of automobile tires slopping the pavement suggests a review of physics, the equations for friction. He is struck by the shape of three identical poplars: might some mathematical expression guide the branching of trees?

By the time he gets to campus, it's clear, as clear as anything will ever be in the rough translation allotted him. The self-serving, pointless duplication of giant molecules created him in its own image, set him down here with only one order: Do science. Postulate. Put together a working model. Yet the hunt for the single, substantiating thread running through all creation is just a start. It's time for science to acknowledge the heft, bruise, and hopeless muddle of the world's irreducible particulars. This field, this face, this day are not just the result of tweaking the variables, twisting the standard categories. Every alternative on the standing pattern is distinct, anomalous, a new thing requiring a separate take on what is and might yet be. And for that, theories must diverge and propagate as fast as the wonder of their subject matter.

He reaches Botkin's office, enters without knocking. He surprises her in scowling over a popular magazine with a weekly circulation greater than the population of Austria in the year of her birth. Her grin of expectation at seeing him collapses into a demure, understanding "Oh." He walks to her desk where she writes, removes the magazine. He takes her hand in his, stroking and examining it at the same time. Why should skin lose its elasticity with age? If he were to pinch hers, it would stay bunched like stiffest muslin. He holds her hand between his for a moment, and says, "I wish I'd taken more meals with you when I had the chance."

She laughs sharply. "I wish I'd gotten more into you per meal." He leans over her desk and kisses her still forehead. He glances over her desk, her dark, filled bookshelves: this room, the place of so many discoveries, bathed in the light of midday, affords him the closest thing to religious reconciliation that empiric sensibility allows.

Age does not deprive her of the responsibility of having to play the group's advocate. "But what of your work?" she says. "It can't be left undone."

"Give it a year or two," he answers, calling her bluff. The process of directed chance is inexorable. "Half a dozen people will hit on it all at once."

"It's always the numbers game with your generation. Have you ever considered taking up gambling?"

Ressler laughs; it was her generation that saddled them all with perpetual probability. "I wouldn't know a blackjack if one hit me over the head."

"Boychick. You can take this project anywhere, you know. Dr. Ulrich, myself: we can get you taken on anyplace you like. Cambridge. Cold Spring Harbor. The Institute. A real lab. Wherever is best equipped. Finish what you've started. Say the word. I will write letters, call in favors. You can name terms."

He shakes his head: she, of all people, knows the nature of the work he must finish. "I don't think another laboratory would be appropriate just now." He listens to what he has just said, and adds, "Or needed, really."

"You would make an astonishing teacher, given time."

Teaching: yes, that might almost be close. But teaching is the most perilously slow way man has yet devised for conveying a message. "The student world won't miss me."

"But what about you?" Her eyes are a peculiar, fluid mixture of maternal distress and deep, secret satisfaction that this, her star pupil, has selected to set off into the dark. For abiding is nowhere. "You will be all right?"

"Without the prizes, you mean?"

"Yes. Without your Prize."

He wonders how it would feel to be able to sit back, late in the afternoon, and bask in genuine contribution. "I'll be fine." Even as he speaks this, a door opens in front of him and he gets his first foretaste of just how long, how uncertain an existence in pursuit of an unverifiable idea must be. That slow, tooling nucleotide freight, that packet boat threading itself through his ribosomes, when named out loud, carries nothing more than a letter to Jeanette, to the Blakes, to Botkin, to the rest of his colleagues living and dead. Nothing more than a letter to the world, all along. But he must post it alone.

She feels him waver, and not for the last time. But it is the last time she'll be around to be of any help. "Mönchlein, Mönchlein. Du gehst einen schweren Gang. Can I help you in any way? Can I do anything?" she asks, regressing to an accent so impenetrable he has to infer her words from her face.

"Yes," he says. "Yes you can." He slides over to the dark leather Viennese couch and lies down one last time. He slips his hands behind his head, crosses his legs at the ankles. Now. How does one get started in this enigmatic trade? "You can play me something."

The Lookup Table

I brought Dr. Ressler the names and addresses he asked me to find. He took them with a last, chivalrous compliment of my reference skills and entered them grimly into the hit routine that now hovered invisibly over the MOL data bases the way Bles's fire quietly waits to run loose through imaginary Flanders. "I've made you an accessory," he said, half to me, half to the console where he typed.

"No, I did." From the day I had signed on. I had also taken the initiative to retrieve a different set of addresses from the archives, and when Dr. Ressler reached a pause in his work, I produced my scrap of hurriedly copied chart:

The genetic code for mRNA as determined in vitro, considered universal across all living creation. "That's the ticket," he said, his eyes on the paper, studying it for some revealing nuance that he and everyone else had so far overlooked. Without meaning to, I'd reduced him to embarrassment. He continued at that vanishing decibel. "Doesn't look like much, does it?" I told him I'd spent half an hour in the library learning how to read the thing before figuring out that it was a simple substitution in three variables. Two years would pass before I had even a rough, reflected image of what the table described.

"No question. It's an interesting time to be alive," Ressler said, tapping the sheet of paper as his documentary proof. "We have attained ancient wishes, the plan to dig all the way down, to the bottom, like little children in the backyard shooting for China. In twenty years, we've put together a comprehensive, physical explanation of life. Only, at every way station on the way down, the destination slips one landing deeper. Heredity is not only chromosomes. Then, not only genes, not only nucleotides. My generation found it was not only chemistry, not only physics. Seems life might not be only anything." He traced three rays with his fingers, verifying that UCG coded for serine. "No question. An intellectual achievement: those of us understandably prejudiced toward seeing life from chicken level, realizing that chickens are just the egg's way of perpetuating the egg."

Todd joined us in the control room, dusting his hands in a parody of manual labor well done. He came from the computer room, where he had been erasing the packs containing the old versions of the programs and data files. We had crossed the backout point. The only existing copies of the disks containing the complete financial histories of tens of thousands of people now carried the changes that Dr. Ressler and Todd had engineered into them.

Todd and I had spoken little in the handful of days since my return. The catalyst that brought me back was too pressing, Jimmy's hospitalization too real for us to waste time on private reconciliation. He offered no apologies, tried out no resolutions. We were both there to assist Dr. Ressler in getting Jimmy back under coverage. There was nothing to explain, to remedy. One night, seeing Jimmy for the first time since the stroke, returning to the offices to try to lose himself in an intransigent bit of machine code, Todd had weakened. "Would it be impossible for me to come home with you? One Day Only?"

I felt myself waver at his exhausted attempt at humor. "I don't think that would be a good idea."

"You do know that the lovely Ms. Martens and I are—"

"It's no business of mine." I did not want any news on the matter. Were what? Married? Divorced? History? It no longer concerned me. Annie too had tried to mumble something about intentions and ignorances and getting past misunderstandings. After the second blanket forgiveness I gave her, she stopped trying to approach me about anything but technical matters. In fact, none of us had much occasion to talk about anything except the specifics of our data terrorism. For the first time since I started visiting, actions ran ahead of words.

But that evening, as Dr. Ressler inserted the executive address list into place and Todd joined us in the control room, dusting his hands after putting the original, unedited disk packs to sleep, we were at last forced to sit down with each other as we used to, thrown back on the old, limited compensation of talk. Todd took my scribbled sheet of hieroglyphs from Dr. Ressler. As he looked it over, trying to catch up with the conversation, the professor slipped in his last bit of pedagogy for his only graduating class. "The spookiest thing about the code is its contingency. Some order in it, the symmetries of significance. But matter very well might have missed hitting upon even this configuration, no matter how large the reservoir of time it had to move around in. It might never have arrived at even this bootstrap translation had initial conditions been even a hundredth of a percent different. Or even exactly the same," he said, with a wicked glance at me, setting in motion the chain of idea-links that would eventually make me lose a year to the study of variation.

"But we got the sucker now," Todd said, facetious emphasis on the plural pronoun; nothing could be further from his field of expertise than this cryptic chart.

"Yes, we have it now," Ressler said, interpreting the phrase a little differently. "Perhaps other codes arose at the same moment, but this is the one that won out. It will never happen again; too much inertia now. Places we can't get to from here. Unlike what they teach in schools, the master builder can only proceed by patching onto existing patches."

"Having recently authored some pretty ugly kludges myself, I am glad to hear that."

Ressler extended the idea. "Efficiency and accuracy are not the same thing. Like it or not, life can only revise itself like a library saving or pitching books strictly on the basis of how frequently they've been checked out." He spoke obliquely to me, tailoring his metaphors to an end I could not then see. "We like to think of nature as unerring. In reality, everything it does is an approximate mistake. Its every calculation is short-term, a quick fix. 'Kludge' is right, Franklin." Under the shadow of what we were about to launch, the rules of decorum were changing.

"Take our species: the apex of engineering. We've all but completed our systematic destruction of the whole, buffered web. The evidence is there, for anyone paying attention. Even if we stopped this evening___ And yet, something in the joy of building — something in my inherited, egoistic firmware — still insists that we also possess the first, flawed, rough prototype that might, in time, take nature beyond the knee-jerk, blind short-term. You see, we can project, unlike any other postulate in nature, unlike nature itself. Model. Foresee. Think. But we have no one to help us make our projections wise."

He stubbed out a butt and checked his watch. "There is talk in the genetics community about the Human Genome Project. Sequencing, base by base, the entire five-thousand-volume DNA string. But whose string? Yours? This fine woman's here? What of the volumes for gray whales, horned toads, diatoms, four million species in all, lost by the thousands while we talk about them? Even the complete library, unattainable, will never begin to hint at the books, the stories the string might have produced."

Todd, my Todd, stood up, realizing what was at stake all around him. Life was suddenly too real to get out of alive. "Christ. What do we ask for, then?" Frantic, he asked the man he loved blindly, the woman he cared for a little, the general night — anyone who might answer. The question tore him like a marathoner's cramp, his rib trying to free itself from imprisonment in its side. I never loved him more than at that moment.

"What do you mean?" Ressler asked, elsewhere, years away.

"I mean: we have this office sewn up; the records are in our power. A Defense Department contractor, a major financial institution, a dozen municipal outfits. Five years of transactions. Half a billion dollars would vanish into a giant Mylar null if we say so. We could take a day of data, scramble it beyond all recognition. 'What's a day, one day, worth to you?' What do we ask for? A new Clean Air Act? Save the Whatever-it-is Seal?" Ressler chose his moment to say nothing. Todd looked at me, his voice wobbling into the shimmies. He assumed, all at once, the entire, terminal, toxic clot the race had laid over the place. The anguished understanding that he might, possessing these files, cut a deal, force a rescue on one bit of the botched job, was like alcohol in an incision. Todd was in real pain, drowning in causes. "An industry-free zone in the Antarctic? Ban the personal AK-47 from over-the-counter sale? Free food for the starving? Russians out of Afghanistan?"

"U.S. out of North America?" I suggested. It helped briefly to undo the urgency, to thin the tangible sickness calling on all sides for instant cure.

Ressler took my handmade chart back from Todd and gave it one more glance before answering. "Yes, the only question worth asking, now that we've all turned activist." This is the sense if not the sound of his words as he sang them: we have it now, have extracted knowledge from information, and it's not enough. We need to ask ourselves what we want to be when we grow up. We need that thing, that arithmetic of ecology that should have preceded knowledge, too easy, too obvious to bear repeating, too embarrassing and indicting to mention by name. The lookup code for care. "I suggest, seeing as how everything is already at stake, that we ask for the one essential in the triumvirate that life is too large and crucial to care about."

Todd looked at him without comprehension. "Meaning?"

The baggage of the gene, the curse of populations. "Keep to the original plan. Ask for Jimmy."

We sat in silence, reluctant to take the machine on-line, to bring up the doctored version of programs whose results, both digital and analog, we had no way of forecasting. Todd retrieved a sketchbook and began doing portraits, lightning contour studies as controlled as anything I'd ever seen him do. Dr. Ressler surprised us both by asking to keep two. We dragged our heels, postponing the launch for a few seconds, and we all three knew it. I half-jokingly suggested that we wait a few more days, until the anniversary of Morse's first public telegraphic message on the line between Washington and Baltimore. The notion tickled Dr. Ressler, but by that point he could only laugh gamely and say, "I dearly wish we could."

Delay was no longer just a question of losing time, of being outraced by the hospital collection bureaucracy. We had systematically destroyed all chance of returning to the old program. The files were gone. We could allow the vested interests no other program to fall back upon, or our changes would be quickly suppressed before they could produce their desired effect. We could run the new version or nothing at all. And running nothing at all, as Todd pointed out, would be the equivalent of performing a lobotomy on a chunk of the city's working interests large enough to create a seizure throughout the rest of the interdependent network.

"That first remote message," Dr. Ressler asked, stubbing out another butt and starting anew. "Was it really 'What hath God wrought?'"

"That's how the books report it."

Todd snorted. "Probably backstopped. Jimmied up after the fact." His inadvertent verb stopped the conversation. He fiddled with a CRT contrast button. "Sorry. The fellow must be on my mind."

We rehearsed for the last time how we would put our claim once our variant system software was in operation. Dr. Ressler said, "We haven't talked about it yet, but we ought to try to minimize prosecution, once the project has had its run."

"Ha!" Franklin discounted. "Information Age criminals never get prosecuted. They get hired on as consultants to the DOD."

Dr. Ressler smiled; that was the precedent. "All the same, I'll link your immunity to the other conditions. Should push come to blow, you two and Annie haven't the first idea of how this bug slipped into the works. As far as you are concerned, you don't know your ASCII from your ALGOL."

"What about you?" I said, indignant at the suggestion that we scatter and leave him alone, answerable to everything.

He smiled and exhaled. "They can't do anything to me," he answered. "I'm already spoken for."

Willfully or just ordinarily oblivious, we went on to other matters. "Well, as long as I still know you for another day yet," Franklin cackled, "can I ask you one thing?"

"Name it." His voice acknowledged that he still owed us an explanation. He knew what this last petition to the Question Board would be: the same question that had started us here, before love, before knowledge, before disaster.

Todd began gingerly enough, accelerating only slowly into a semblance of courage. "I understand… I can see how one might not be able to trap certain feelings off in a side panel. I mean, I can see how, if the attraction, if the need were large enough___"

He shot me an involuntary glance. "That a person might choose to go on caring, as if…"

"As if it still counted?" Dr. Ressler assisted.

Something broke in Todd, and his urgent attachment to the man, his innate need to prove that neither of their disappearances was inevitable, flooded the room. "I can understand the torch-bearing. Celibacy. Self-denial. But son of a mother.… It seems to me that the worst thing, the worst hurt anyone could possibly have inflicted on you, shouldn't have been enough to___" He trailed off, afraid at the end to ask.

But he had as much as asked already. Dr. Ressler had only to coax him to put it into words. "Enough to do what?"

"To make you give up science." Todd's eyes swam with confusion. Shouldn't you have thrown yourself into it with redoubled effort? How could you desert the one place that might have given you some comfort?

It was Dr. Ressler's turn to be surprised. This was not the phrasing, not the question, he expected. "Oh," he said, alerted into softness. "But I never quit science."

Franklin and I exchanged astonishments. Todd dismissed him bitterly. "I mean something more than keeping up with the journals."

"So do I." The professor returned a self-conscious grin. "Look. Analysis depends on breaking down complex hierarchies into understandable parts. That's indispensable to good science, and I did it for years. Even got a paper out of it, as you junior sleuths insist on reminding me. But analysis is just part of the method. When you catch a glimpse of your smallest, discrete components, and even these don't explain the pattern you are after, sometimes the situation calls out for another motion, a synthetic cycle.

"Remember John Von Neumann?" he asked. " 'Yes, it is obvious'? The sharpest systematic intellect of the century. Games theory, contributions to quantum mechanics, father of digital computer software." He gestured through the two-way mirror into the computer room, suggesting that something of those old language generations still floated around in the newest machines. "Codeveloper of the hydrogen bomb and advocate of the preemptive strike. Once told Life, 'If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at five o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?' Claimed to have invented a whole mathematical discipline while riding in a taxi cab. Wrote a pivotal book, published posthumously by my old I-state research university, called Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, in which he proves that machines can be made complex enough to copy themselves.

"Von Neumann, the cleverest product evolution has yet offered, thought that the language of the functioning brain was not the language of logic and mathematics. The only way we would ever be able to see the way the switches all assembled the messages they sent among themselves would be to create an analog to the language of the central nervous system." He fell silent, perhaps wondering whether sheer cleverness is ever enough. "The firmware language of the brain. That's what I have spent the last twenty-five years pursuing."

The revelation stunned us. Todd rubbed his temples. "I don't get it. No institution? No grant? No laboratory? What are you doing here?"

Ressler laughed. "It's not a particularly popular or accredited line of research these days." He held up a finger, holding the floor. He went to his attache case, brought it back to the table, and unzipped it. It poured forth, like a flushed warren, long, stiff, manila-colored, heavily penciled-over scores. Musical scores. "This one is a woodwind octet," he announced self-consciously. "Look here. I stole this bit from Berg. But he stole a similar bit from Bach, so I'm safe from lawsuit."

Todd flipped through the penciled staves, looking for some explanatory key. I collected myself first. "You're a composer," I said, a thrill coursing at the forbidden word.

"Yes, I guess I am." He sounded as startled by the revelation as we were. "I even went back to school awhile, although the pieces have remained hopelessly amateur."

"And?" I asked. I could not help myself, took his hand between mine. Nothing he could say or do would ever surprise me again. "Research results? Anything to write the journals about?" Could there really be another language, cleaner than math, closer to our insides than words?

He answered me figure for figure. "Precious few conclusions, so far. Soft, slow passages more effective when contrasted with loud, fast ones. Nothing much more definitive. But bear in mind, the field is still in its infancy."

Todd, recovering his wits at last, plied him with enthusiastic questions. What had he written, and how much? Lieder, chamber works, symphonic? Problems of instrumentation and registration, color, timbre. The trade-off of genre. Tonal? Serial? Aleatoric? I tried to follow this tech shoptalk but found myself hearing something else, absolutely silent: a monk, late twentieth century, working in total isolation, locked in a cell for longer than I could imagine, a lifetime, just composing, trying to emulate, recreate, variegate, state, consecrate the sound he had once heard while standing on his front porch on a spring morning, about to enter, thinking his love waited for him inside. I thought of all the experimental, heuristic, and botched compositions that kept him company over long years, and how, whatever the orchestration, form, choice of language, all pieces amounted to love songs, not just to a lost woman, but to a world whose pattern he could not help wanting to save.

What he had done, how he had chosen to spend his energies, really was science. A way of looking, reverencing. And the purpose of all science, like living, which amounts to the same thing, was not the accumulation of gnostic power, fixing of formulas for the names of God, stockpiling brutal efficiency, accomplishing the sadistic myth of progress. The purpose of science was to revive and cultivate a perpetual state of wonder. For nothing deserved wonder so much as our capacity to feel it.

I did not know the letter names yet, but I gathered that this biologist had discovered that A, T, G, and C spelled out endless variations on the old Socratic imperative in the cells. To say that the variants came from the same command was not to say they came to the same thing. Each still had to be identified in its particular texture. For that, one could only remain alert, stay flexible, keep deep down, work. All human effort now hung on the verge of revealing something unexpected, from the simplest of beginnings. The system ran undeniably toward randomness, but along the way, a steady stream of new nuances accumulated, each complete in its complexity, each incorporating the issuing theme. Dear Goldberg, play me one of my variations.

And at that moment, losing the thread of the conversation, I blurted out that colossal contemporary irrelevance: "Have you had any pieces performed?"

Dr. Ressler looked as nervously delighted as a little boy about to do his talent show number. "Opus One debuts tomorrow," he declared. "The sole work by which I hope to be remembered."

He punched up the system time on the screen, and we were struck by the work still left to do before the arrival of the day shift. "Oh Jesus," Todd let out.

The geneticist-turned-musical-recombiner threw his portfolio back together. "Sorry. My fault. That's what happens when you begin to solve the globe's problems. Before you know it, it's a quarter to six in the morning."

We fell to the cleanup tasks. I shredded the printouts of our last-minute test runs. Todd dummied up a console log, leaving no clues about the nature of the program that would soon be executing. And Dr. Ressler performed his coup de grace. He selected, at random, a string of zeroes and ones deep in the system firmware. Using it as a cryptographic key, he ran the sequence against the program code of the impostor routines, storing down the scrambled product. Then he manually single-stepped into the loading procedure a pointer back to that random sequence, so that the scrambled programs would be deciphered into intelligible code when and only when they fed into the machine at run-time. When the corporate programmers went into the packs the next day to list the files and see where the unexpected behavior came from, they would find only gibberish. The trick was not uncrackable, but would slow the reversing process down.

The self-enciphering spread across acres of digital storage. "All right," he said, when the task came up complete. He took a deep breath and lifted a significant eyebrow. "Time to collect the songbooks." Our bit of genetic engineering was done. For better or worse, Franklin brought down the last remnant of old firmware. We held our breaths like rocket scientists as he attempted to boot the complete, new system. The status indications flashed one by one across the console without producing any unexpected warnings. Up came what seemed to be the old, original cold-start screen.

Ressler, ensuring that his name would be the only one traceable to this new boot, used two fingers to type it in. The screen prompted "password: " and echoed its demure x's as he entered his. It waited an ungodly whole minute, long enough for us to realize that a crash now would leave us with Jimmy on the street, his mother without a mortgage, and the three of us plus Annie in prison. Then, having put the fear of God in us, the system at last decided to flash:

System Date and Time: 05/15/84 06:35.45

User sressler logged in.

Last user logout was 00/00/00 at 00:00.00

Command?

Uncanny. We had created a new species, registering its own day one. No previous user. Ressler had even added the humorous touch of patching in a new version number for our new animal. But when he answered the command prompt with the standard request to bring up the start of the day's on-line processing tasks, up came what cosmetically resembled in every respect the old operating system. And yet it was only a simulation.

We breathed again. At least it ran. If the wrinkles we had introduced behaved in context the way they tested out in isolation, we were in business. Ressler grinned, as if Opus One had never caused him the least stress. "Looks good on this end." He produced, from behind the CPU where he had stashed it who knows how long before, a bottle of our old favorite drugstore vintage and the requisite paper cups. "To our friend's physical therapy," he proposed. And we clinked wax rims.

"To musicians and physicians," Todd added, and we sipped again.

Two sips to the wind, it was my turn. "To the language of the central nervous system."

At the Cadence

What would I add to the list of things we did that night? How would I interpret the account, two years and a handful of evenings after the fact? We thought to engage in a very old-fashioned gesture, or one so modern as to still be, like music, in its infancy. We acted according to a new complex mathematics, one dependent on the tiniest initial tweaks. The attempt was an absurd mismatch of scale — the notion that the entire community was accountable to the infinitesimal principle of a single life.

I would say: at the same moment that we tried to bring our premise into being, we were also testing its validity, objectively, if not without passion. We worked on the same problem that had occupied Dr. Ressler from earliest adulthood. Now that he had half-unraveled it, he concluded that the bulk of the text down at ATCG level was still in the infinitive: to look, to want, to stand amazed. We simply read those verbs out loud, extending the synonym list. To try. To investigate.

On the day I heard about Dr. Ressler's death, I posted a quote, one of my last, about the God of the scientists making men in his own image and setting them here with the single command to go and figure out how everything worked. Tonight, I would sneak fugitively into the library and add a complementary quote by the same author: "Trouble throughout the modern age has as a rule started with the natural sciences__" Or better: "Everything has become perishable except perhaps the human heart."

I learned that night, as we put our last touches on the on-line replacement, that science, the chief, most miraculous project of the modern world, the source of all the trouble, was itself a self-reproducing automaton. Empirical wonder did not stop short of those forbidden infinitives, to protect, to hope, to assist. They too were embedded deep in the coding problem. In order to say "Copy me," the string had first to say "Read me." Naturally such a command would result in time in the need to do science. What else could it become?

Doing science was simply a question of getting up the courage of curiosity. But the courage that made Dr. Ressler automatically interfere on Jimmy's behalf would have paralyzed Todd and me had we recognized its source. I can't pretend I had no idea. He hinted at it — his personal immunity, his already being spoken for. It's there, obvious, in his toss-off about being remembered by posterity. But that evening, while we finished our entry for the science fair, these were just words I couldn't afford to make sense of.

Tonight, the project that enlisted me is all but ready for print. I have finished my book lookup; the self-assigned homework is done. I have retrieved from the stacks the gist, at least, of what his science thought to retrieve from the world. I can now hear, in the set of variations, the shattering process he spent a life listening to. Like the best of reductionists, I can pull it apart into base molecules that, through a circus tumbling act governed by physical law, learn how to fill every conceivable niche of sound. All this, and it hasn't even come down to the wire; by the time-honored creative method of not eating, I have enough reserves left to start the job search or finance a full-scale retreat to the blood relations in Elkhart.

In my time away, I have managed a layman's guide to nucleo-tides, a miniature map of the man who so badly wanted in. I've come to the verge of declaring that the code codes only for the desire to break it. I've managed to name everything except the one thing, that evening, that Dr. Ressler knew. The Ur-text, the certain certainty that by itself motivated him, the in vivo foster parent of empiricism.

I'd seen the glow for months, but had chalked up his gradual return to solid things, to Todd's and my company. I should have known, by how quickly Dr. Ressler threw himself into Jimmy's cause, that he followed a fuller preparation, long in motion. He felt the mass packed in his abdomen. The composer knew, weeks before any physician, that the oncogene had been triggered. Information was going back under, was about to disappear again into silence. His long apprenticeship to science was soon to be rewarded with a Name Chair in oblivion. The pattern behind the pattern, the mutation shaped into something significant, the mystery, the only muse, the built-in desire for discovery, was coming home. He knew. There was a fire loose in the landscape, in the library.