Gold Bug Variations

V

The Quote Board

For all knowledge and wonder (which is the seed of knowledge) is an impression of pleasure in itself. — Francis Bacon

"I only ask for information." — Rosa Dartle, in David Copperfield

Transcription and Translation

In those weeks when we were happiest, and well into that nightmare period when he learned what was coming, Dr. Ressler's theme was always the same: the world was awash in messages, every living thing a unique signal. We were all cub interpreters at a babble-built UN, obligated to convert the covert metaphor, tweak the tuner, read the mechanism by actively attacking its surface. The catch to this elaborate Wissenschaft was the active obligation to extract cache from courier. I managed to avoid that imperative, ignore the mess in his message, until Frank left, Ressler died. Now time forces the issue. Time, as the Bacon entry says, just below the quote linking knowledge to pleasure, is the author of authors. Time to start my cub translation, to learn the place, as I'm likely to be here a little longer.

The whole day free, hours without end. How hard to make anything of unbudgeted time. In my remaining free days, I've decided to learn something, become expert, exchange fact for feeling, reverse what I've done with my life to date. A needy soul once asked me, through the anonymous three-by-five, what old film had an important state secret transported across Europe via musical code. Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes, 1938: a banner year for secret European messages. I remembered the question this morning, listening to that other musical code whose message our circle carried through a similar plague year. I could whistle that melody in the dark, its pleasure returned permanently to school by grief. The tune of my new career.

My chief problem is what to study. Something empirical, something hard! My prospect of success depends on where in the hierarchy I attach myself. I start with top magnification, fix my lens on cosmology. If that level remains abstract, I could drop to the step below, stop down an order of magnitude, make due with astronomy. A working knowledge of galaxies must be of some use in naming the place where I'm left.

But the light-year is too long for me to get my bearing. I must reduce the magnification another exponent, start my study with the earth under my lens. A geologist I suppose, or oceanographer. But the explanations of this critical niche are still too large. I am after not earth science but its underwriting specific. Down another order. The search for a starting point begins to resemble that painful process of elimination from freshman year, spent in the university clinic, a knot across my abdomen from having to choose which million disciplines I would exclude myself from forever.

This time I narrow ruthlessly. I sharpen my focus to the raw component populations inhabiting this planet. Zoologist, anthropologist? Neither would yet clamp down on the why I'm after. I go a finer gauge, assuming that understanding can be best arrived at by isolating terms. That means downshifting again to the vocabulary of political science. The first limb of the hierarchy that speaks human dialect: what do we need, and how best to get it? The question is powerful, but as I zoom in on the increasingly precise concern, explanations recede, grow fuzzy and qualified. A faction of me secedes, insists that political science can be understood only in terms of constituent economics. But the study of goods, services, and distribution produces more problems than prescriptions.

Herds, it seems, are hundreds of individuals. Feeling no edge, I scale myself down into psychology. Here my lens reaches that cusp magnification: one-to-one. But a complete explanation of behavior requires somatic cause. Focal ratio flips, increases again, now in the microscopic direction. Psych shades over the bio threshold. The gradients, the gauges are continuous. Fields of study, like spectral bands, differ only in wavelength. No discrete moment when red ends and orange begins. Yet every constituent bent from white has its precise and particular name.

The final gloss hovers always one frame beneath. Physiology. Biophysics. Biochemistry. More light. Molecular biology, the transitional rung where Dr. Ressler hung. Downwards toward delineation, I consider studying chemistry. Unsatisfied, I pass another strangeness barrier, into quantum physics, beyond conceptual modeling. A push for terminal detail takes me into the statistics of perhaps. Here, in the domain of sub-subatomics, where I expect to butt up at last against fundamental phenomena, I find, instead, a field veering startlingly philosophical: eleven dimensions, su-perstrings, the eightfold way. Like a Klein bottle, insides twisting seamlessly onto out, small-scale physics drops off the edge of formal knowledge back into cosmology.

The whole hierarchical range up and down the slide rule of science shares one aim: to write the universe's User's Manual, to bring moonlight into a chamber. But what scale to choose? I'm thrown back on Lewis Carroll's information theory fable, the map paradox. A kingdom undertakes a marvelous cartographic project. They know that an inch to a thousand miles is too gross, giving only rough orientation of the largest places. The royal cartographers improve steadily over the years: at a hundred miles to the inch, true roads take shape. At ten per, the map navigates from village to village. At a mile to a map inch, individual structures become visible. The more exact the scale, the more useful the map. The kingdom's surveyors launch the supremely ambitious project of mapping the region at an inch to an inch — a map every bit as detailed as the represented terrain. The apotheosis of encapsulation, the supermap has only one drawback: the user can't unroll it without covering the landscape in question.

This is my problem in choosing a field to fill the ten months my savings leave me. The whole hierarchy spreads in front of me in imbedded frames. But each rung, cross-referenced, reads, "For more information, see below." Hinduism says the world rests on the back of a tortoise standing on the back of tortoise, etc. One of those terrapins must reach bottom. Where can I break in? What discipline will put me closest to knowing him? A year ago, when Dr. Ressler received the verdict of his cells (but not yet the sentence), the three of us met for a last evening before pulling the switch. Franklin asked if he felt any regrets about straying from his training, losing his career. "What would I be if I could start over?" Todd nodded furiously at his succinct rephrasing, so much more accurate than what he'd asked. Dr. Ressler thought in the white waterfall hum of the computer installation. At last he said, "There are really only two careers that might be of any help. One can either be a surgeon or a musician."

I set my magnification, choose my lens. Since surgery arrives too late, I'll be a musician. I'll spend what remains of my life savings studying music. First, I must tackle theory. And for a good grounding in tonal fundamentals, I must first learn everything I can about the genetic code.

On the strength of that late-afternoon decision, I rode the D over to the main reading room. There I drew up a preliminary reading list. This evening, back home, I sit armed with a stack of texts on two-week loan. I toy with this pointless bookwork as if training for a genuine career change, a way of making a living after my bank account runs out. It wouldn't be too late for such an overhaul. The field is rife with refugees, immigrants from sister disciplines and distant relations. I come across a man who began in physics and earned an undergraduate degree at the ripe age of twenty-two. Global war sidetracked his studies, stripping him of seven years in military science. After the war, he again postponed an already alarmingly delayed career to spend two years retraining in another discipline. Only at the ancient age of thirty-three did he finally enroll in a Ph.D. program in his new field. Four years later, luxuriously older than I am now, he at last filed his dissertation. But a few months before, Francis Crick had also cowritten the Nobel Prize-winning paper revealing the structure of DNA.

I set off, late, to make myself expert, with no pretense of adding to the dizzy swell, simply wanting to swim it myself. I need to know exactly what happened to Stuart Ressler between 1957 and 1983. And only a sense of the tonal variations hidden in self-replicating molecules will lead me there. Having spent my life distributing fact, it was odd to sit this evening in front of reference books, see them take on a different complexion. In my years at the branch, these works were the final destination.

Now their pages seem more like customs clearance prior to departure, the last port before incognita. With Bacon still open in the quote book, I go to the well again: if a woman will be content to begin in uncertainty, she might end by drawing provocative maps indeed.

The scope of the stuff I have set myself is utterly draining. But I feel a certain excitement at the volume and novelty of material I must get through before any of it starts to cohere. A thrill at wondering whether coherence will come in the ten months left to my cash stockpile. I set my scale at the only gauge I have ever had firsthand experience of. For my attack on the life molecule, I fall back on that fine old obsolete mode of sightsinging: historiography. Tonight — the overviews, the outlines. Tomorrow, next week, a month from now — the big leap, that evolutionary giant step dear to saltationists. The jump from information to knowledge.

The Law of Segregation

Dr. Ressler and Cyfer were no spontaneous generation. The more I read of the first twentieth-century science, the clearer the chain of ideas about heredity stretches continuously back through speculation to the start of thought. The scenic overview leaves me nursing a metaphor: the idea of chemical heredity is itself an evolving organism, subject to the laws it. is after. Or better: the field grows as a living population, a varying pool of proposals constantly weeded, altered by selection. Theories duplicate or die by feasibility. Every article floating in the journal-sea on the day Dr. Ressler began life's work was an inheritable idea-gene vying for survival.

I sift the birth records of consecutive generations. Pleasant, to disassemble this random assortment and rebuild it into a body of thought. The principal names return from college biology, supplemented by professional searches from my last ten years. I see for the first time what an undertaking the thing is, how stunning the setbacks and solutions. I begin to view it from the air. Dr. Ressler assisted in the final push to join three islands. Mendel on one, observing that characteristics in intricate organisms were preserved in patterns. Mendeleyev, with his atomic construction set on another. On the third remote tip, Darwin, whose species-mad pageant was a continuous thread, a diversifying alluvial fan. Heredity, chemistry, and evolution, about to be spanned by a simple, magnificent triple-suspension more remarkable than anyone imagined.

For all its necessity after the fact, genetics advanced on the mark as shakily as nature toward fur. Every step of the way is littered with missed discoveries, untransmitted truth. Research, a poor parallel parker, needs several passes. Ressler's distant ancestor is case in point. Mendel toiled obscurely in the peapatch vineyard a hundred years before Cyfer. Devout Augustinian, hungry observer, agriculturalist, meteorologist, philosopher: variants on surgery and singing, Ressler's careers of choice. The father of inheritance, a celibate priest. Celibacy mysteriously preserves itself, passed on by paradoxical means. It should have died out long ago. But I've seen, face to beautiful face, another Augustinian pass celibacy on.

Mendel, a failure as a priest, was put to work as a schoolteacher. Capable but untrained, he twice failed the staff qualifying exam. He began research on the garden pea at thirty-four, devoting ten years to his hobby before promotion to abbot curtailed it. By then, drudgework and rare synthetic ability had led him to one of science's great insights. He delivered his results to an indifferent regional society in 1865 and published them in its proceedings. Distributed to a hundred scientific communities, his conclusions promptly sank like an oil-slicked bird, lost until 1900, when independent researchers reannounced them.

In the span of ten years, Darwin published Origin of Species, Mendel produced his inheritance paper, and Miescher discovered DNA. But it took a century to braid these three. Mendel's undeniable demonstration lay forgotten for thirty-five years, delayed by something dark and surreptitious. The monk's first giant step toward proving Darwin at the mechanical level was another human takedown, this time reducing us from monkey to molecule. Darwin was instant controversy; why total oblivion for the monk? Because of the revulsion produced by mentioning the fecundity of biology in the same breath as inert mathematics.

In Mendel, every characteristic derives from discreet, inheritable factors — his law of segregation, the philosophical implication lost on me until this minute. Seven years' labor in the garden overthrew Aristotle's notion of blended inheritance. Offspring of blond and brunette are not simply sandy. Rather, pairs of independent commands from each parent remain separate in the offspring, passing unchanged to grandchildren. Wildly counterintuitive: all immeasurable diversity deriving from rigid, paired packets. This Augustinian's God was more grossly architectural than the Deists'. For each indivisible characteristic we inherit two paired factors, with an equal chance of getting either half of each parent's paired set. The tune accompanying inheritance's barn dance is aleatoric, more Cage than Brahms. Individuality lies in the die's toss. The language of life is luck.

Mendel rescues living variety by noting that each gene comes in more than one tune. Some alleles for any trait dominate others. The visible result of a gene pair shows only part of the underwriting package. A person's genotype, the internal packet, is not fully revealed by phenotype, the outward form. Blond may lie hidden for generations, erupting again in unknown great-granddaughters.

I picture Dr. Ressler in his first weeks in the lab, wondering about the delicately turned nose of the woman who will nonchalantly waste him. The allele giving her bridge that innocent flip floated detached in either or both her parents. Her Myrna Loy allele might hide a matched half that codes for Irish pug: a half-breed, heterozygous. Or she might need identical alleles from each parent to achieve that cycloid dip — homozygous for profile. The same holds for the hazel eyes. The woman's daughter — I picture him wondering if she has one — might revert to any number of recessive traits: square nose, eyes drab brown. Yet even so prosaic a child could go through life a secret carrier of mother's mystery.

Mendel's Law of Segregation, not to be confused with the Little Rock affair, is itself a shade un-American. You can't tell by looking at a thing what ticks underneath. Two pea plants, both tall in phenotype, might have different genotypes — one homozygous tall and the other heterozygous. Violation of truth in advertising. The language of life is not only laced with luck. It also refuses to say just what it means. The generation of geneticists who rediscovered Mendel devised a way to determine a plant's hidden makeup. If tall allele is dominant over short, then a tall plant might be either Tall/Tall or Tall/Short. Crossbreeding against a known homozygous recessive produces four possible first filials:

Descendants of the homozygous plant all appear tall, while half of the heterozygous descendants will be short. The test cross. Ressler referred to his abandoned profession by a name both sardonic and nostalgic — the irony of one no longer in the inner circle. To Frank and me, he always called geneticists soldiers of the cross.

First filial generation after Mendel had to find where these abstract inheritance packets resided. From the beginning, men hoped that genes would prove chemical, tangible. The coordinated effort reads like the greatest whodunit ever written. Blundering with desire toward fruition, as poet-scientist Goethe says. While geneticists made their gross observations, cytologists began to elucidate the microscopic ecosystem of the cell. As early as mid-nineteenth century, researchers described dark threads in the cell nucleus. Improvements in staining and microscopy revealed that the rods came in mixed doubles. During the choreography of cell division, these chromosome pairs split and moved toward opposite poles. Each daughter cell wound up with a full chromosome complement. Chromosome behavior suspiciously resembled Mendel's combining and separating pairs.

The gene factor somehow lay inside the chromosome, a segment of the thread: a tie bordering on magic. It must have been pure fear, to isolate the physical chunk embodying the ethereal plan, the seed distilling the idea of organism. The first link in the chain from Word to flesh, philosopher's stone, talisman, elixir, incantation, the old myth of knowledge incorporated in things. I can't imagine the excitement of living at the moment when the pieces began to fall into place: living design located in matter. On second thought, I can imagine. This morning's papers carried another update.

Traits didn't behave as cleanly as theory would have them. Morgan and team spent seventeen years in massive, spirit-breaking effort, counting two thousand gene factors in endless generations of Drosophila. Mendel's predicted ratios for second-generation dihybrids did not always occur. Experiment, recalcitrant, gave different numbers than pattern dictated. First temptation must have been to squash the aberrant gnats, take no prisoners. Morgan, not yet believing the chromosome theory, found that certain characteristics always occurred together. Such linkage supported the notion that groups of genes lay along shared chromosome threads. Linked traits lay on the same thread, passed through generations as a unit.

But Morgan's team also turned up incomplete linkage. Occasionally in the chaos of meiosis, paired chromosomes from separate parents cross over, break at equivalent points, and exchange parts. Half a linked group might thus be sent packing. Leverage into the unobservable: the odds of linked traits being split must vary with their distance on the chromosome. The chance of a break falling between two adjacent genes is very small, whereas any split in the chromosome separates the genes at opposite ends of a thread. Frequencies of separation thus mapped relative distance between genes.

The chemistry was still lacking. But chemistry would come. Ressler himself would join in the cartographic project of ever-improving scale. Inexorable, but full of halting dead ends, overlooked insights, reversals. Morgan's work too was resisted by the scientific community, while Levene's incorrect tetranucleotide hypothesis was embraced disastrously for years. Researchers have made every possible mistake along the way. Reject the Moravian monk; doubt Morgan; ignore Avery's 1944 identification of the genetic substance. Fits and starts, endless backtracking, limited less by technique than by the ability to conceive. How do you get moonlight into a chamber? Dress someone up as the moon.

Mendel's laws have since become more complex. Linkage, multiple alleles, epistasis, collaboration, and modifiers enhance his metaphor. But by the time Ressler took orders, neo-Mendelism was forever in place. Cyfer had inherited the idea that all of an organism's characteristics were written in a somatic language, generated by a grammar that produced outward sentences distinct but derivable from deep structure.

I live at the moment of synthesis, sense the work that is almost written, watch the structure complete its span, register for the first time how strewn with mistake and hope the path has been. This place, this night, a lamp, a typing machine, my books, my chromosomal map: I grope for my technique, my leverage into Dr. Ressler's world. The test cross that will spring the hidden, recessive gene. How he blundered with desire toward fruition. How in fruition, pining for desire.

Public Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestic

My private life began to accelerate. Before Todd, I never thought of myself as having a private life, let alone one with a brisk plot. Opening the door a crack on that stray, I found my after-hours hinting at a first etude, a study in unmitigated motion. Within minutes of returning from what I still refused to think of as a date, I was back on the phone, arranging to meet Todd again. I rationalized the secrecy, the closed door: I didn't want to confuse Tuck-well with transactions that weren't what they seemed. Not that I knew what they were, or could pick out from my old life the complicating new accompaniment.

I'm not built for change. I work at cultivating habit. Pull out tonight's meal to defrost before leaving; turn right at third stoplight; issue the collegial, automatic greeting. Habit is an index, a compromise with irreversibles, a hedge against auto wreck or disease. The arbitrary day requires a pretense of a priori. But defenses atrophy in quarantine. When I felt that first symptom, I slaughtered routine before it could dissolve on me. Crazy schemes — one day deciding to knock out the living-room wall. The instant the sledgehammer splattered plaster, I knew what I'd done. But a sickening sense of relief too: I'd never again have to worry about the wall caving in.

I was sick in my stomach pit, enough to extinguish a satisfactory existence. Tuckwell and I began to fall apart, wrecked in event. We'd committed no offense except the habit of living together. But all habit ends by presiding over its obsolescence. Even as I closed the door to the bedroom to arrange my next date, I felt I wouldn't be strong enough to end my old life cleanly. If I deliberately killed the old arrangement, everything would be killable. Escape rendered escapable whatever might follow.

Everything about Tuckwell — our apartment, shopping together, our trivial exchanges — grew horribly beautiful. I'd never treated him well. We'd failed to do the things we'd always talked about. I got nostalgic about the most bizarre items: shared wine bottles, accidental tears in the bed linen, utility bills. Even before I started seeing Todd in earnest, I sank into the death-denying compulsion of the collector. Countless times at the library, confronted by a perpetual crisis of shelf space, I've argued with Holdings that thirty-year-old sourcebooks ought not necessarily be pitched just because nobody had ruffled them since publication. Yet even as my heart clamped down to protect a life that had become as habitual as circulation, I knew that the place had already gone bloodless.

Deep in humid summer I felt the shameful excitement of spring cleaning, the sensory alertness brought on by an impending death. Explosion of taste, touch, sight: colors grew subtler, smells more variegated, more exciting because of their morbid source. I profited by another's agony. Three sick weeks, laced with the flavor of discovery, loss restoring the insight that recovery subsequently buries: however much I made love to it, I detested habit with everything in me.

For three weeks, my composure rode an explosive rush. The novelty of Franklin saw me through; I could not have gone it alone. How did I accomplish those leaps, the terrible intervals of those days? All done cross-hands. Independent lines somehow crossing over. Pain and elation in a linkage group. Departure anxiety, the promise of new places intensifying the ache. Disasters stand out: an excursion Tuckwell and I made to Central Park Zoo. We'd planned the trip for one of our rare simultaneous days off. Once there, in front of the cages, we couldn't for the life of us recall why we'd come.

Committed to a formal outing, Keith and I made the rounds, although we knew in the first minute it was an awful mistake. The zoo was grayer, more decrepit than either of us remembered. As everyplace else, it had succumbed to creeping graffiti fungus, the surreal, urgently illegible signatures of the buried. Animals lay neglected in cages, sick, overfed, deflated. The few that moved traced out tight, psychotic circles. A pack of safety-pinned twenty-year-olds (although given our infatuation with extended adolescence, they could have been thirty) bounced marshmallows off the open mouth of a panting sea lion, ridiculing the beast for being too stupid to bite. "Sick, the whole lot," I whispered violently.

"It's your generation made us torturers," Tuckwell joked, steering me on. I couldn't keep from attaching myself to each pen, a mission of pointless distress. Why was the zoo still standing? Why this irrelevant park in the first place? Certainly not for solace. Gruesome ornament, tribute to the sadistic housebreaking of a force that long ago ceased to command fear. The cages proved that plumbing and shag were best, after all. The worst civilized annoyance was superior to the dead end of animals. I waved at the insults tailored to each genus. "What's the point? No beauty we can't humiliate?"

"Serves them right. Lower forms of evolution. They've had just as much geologic time to get evolved as we have. And look at them. Just look at them. Pitiful." But seeing that his patter only irritated me, Keith resorted to logical blundering. "You're mad, woman. So the place is on the decayed side. That's a problem with the tax base, not humanity." Pragmatics failing, he tried compassion. The animals did not know their suffering. And at least here they were kept alive.

We tried to salvage the afternoon by eating out, but fell into a fight over where to go. Keith had made reservations at the Chinese place in the 50s where we'd first had dinner together. He dropped the announcement on me with a now-for-what-you've-all-been-waiting-for flair. "Can't you hear the wontons calling?" I didn't even fake my usual diplomacy. "No? I was pretty sure I could hear a won-ton calling. Something was calling, anyway. High-pitched, squeaky. Maybe it was an egg roll that thought it was a___" Making no headway, he gave up. We began walking crosstown. After a grizzly block, he stopped and caught my arm. "I thought you liked the place."

"I like the place. I'm glad we're going there, OK?" But every concession was a refusal.

"We don't have to go there, you know. So they sue us for the canceled reservation. Take us for everything. I can get a second job—"I laughed, if through my teeth. Feeling the victory, Keith chose his cadence. "Is it those punks? Forget them. Beatniks. Greasers. Whooodlums."

"It's our generation made them torturers."

"Oh. That's it. Sorry. You're not old enough to be their mother. Maybe a very much older spinster sister—"

"Thanks, ass. That's not it."

"The animals, then? Look, you can't do anything about them. Lost cause. The least offensive of our sins. You want anxiety? Zoo animals are the last thing to get morally outraged over, at this late a date." I was still refusing to incriminate myself when we drew up outside the restaurant. Keith was near distraction. "Listen. It's obvious, even to me, that you're trying to tell me something. What's the secret word this time, Jan? I've got to guess, evidently. One assumes it's bigger than the proverbial breadbox, or we wouldn't have killed a decent day over it. Damn it, woman. Look around. We're standing in front of a fine establishment; we can saunter in and make them wait on us hand and foot. The best goddamn mu shu this side of Confucius Plaza. We're more than reasonably well off, given world per capita___" Feeling himself on dangerous ground, he dropped a decibel. "We're both doing exactly what we want in life. You realize the odds against that? Look around, woman. It's your day off. We can do anything you want. Get a room uptown tonight, if you like. Anything. Condemned to freedom, as the Frogs like to say. A perfect day, if you make it. Unlike any other that has ever happened."

Ridiculous, I thought, even as he got the sentence out. Seven August, one of an endless series. Ten days earlier, I had passed over, without ripple, that landscape with conflagration, the 1976 quake in Tangshan, China, 8.2 on the Richter, killing a surreal 655,235. I'd passed it by for the Event Calendar for no other reason than my deciding that history had to serve some other cause than ungraspable tragedy. In contrast, two days before this outing, I'd posted the Mayflower and Speedwell setting sail for the New World. Honesty compelled me to add how the Pilgrims were forced to return to England and ditch the Speedwell as unseaworthy. Yet the abortive first run seemed the one needing commemorating. The uncelebrated cost of leaving. My own life was about to modulate to exploration, and it made me morose. Had I known the first thing about being alive, I would have made my last weeks with Keith affectionate, funny. But I've never known anything. I didn't even know what he knew: I was already gone.

After dinner, I lifted again. The sides of the absurd Woolworth Building, in low light, grew oppressively beautiful. I wanted to save all those horrid skyboxes, paint and carve them. We walked back east, and the stone and glass took on the dusk-shades of Morandi bottles glowing subtly in a chalk-and-sand rainbow. We skirted the panorama of Wall Street, the Battery, Chinatown. We walked back over the bridge, taut cables pulling the span up in the middle, a woman arching her back in animal ecstasy as her mate bit her gently by the neck. The city sat in the ocean, practically drifted out, afloat on the water. I could smell the brine and hear the surf above the traffic, as if this were not the densest collection of refugees in the world but only a summer resort, breakers and gradations of late-summer light visible from every window of the great beachfront hotel.

Night had dropped over the buildingscape, but every structure burned — cubist crystal palaces, technological Oz of local urgencies, with nobody manning the controls. I turned in mid-bridge and looked back where we had walked, saw the miles of fossil-fuel blazing, the millennia of buried plant beds going up in smoke in an endless point-tapestry of yellows and fire-blue greens and incandescent whites — a rush of unstoppable, jarring intervals. No matter how I moved or where I stood, I seemed plunged dead-set in the middle of the known world.

Today in History

Cyfer is not what it advertises itself to be. The four senior scientists and three apprentices form not so much a real research team as a loose specialist confederation. Each member pursues a personal line aside from the coding question. A cross section of disparate disciplines, they have been brought together by Ulrich for communication that could produce the hoped-for experimental avenue, give them a bead on the big picture.

Assembling such a band of crossovers initially struck Ressler as half-baked. How dare they jump headlong into the hottest topic now going, a field already filled with skilled investigators? Yet the more he mulls it over, the shrewder Ulrich's move seems. Molecular genetics, precisely because it is rapidly converging on a cross-disciplinary synthesis, requires exactly this assorted band, technically adept but without the retarding lead.

The field is dense with DPs: Gamow, Avery, Franklin, Chargaff, Griffith, Hershey, Luria, Pauling. The purebred geneticist among them is the rarest of blood groups. The coding problem can be approached from any angle: math, physics, stereochemistry. The problem in this moment of synthesis is that the mathematicians, physicists, chemists, and biologists don't all speak the same language. It's all interlingual patois. Ulrich's assembling a few native speakers of the various dialects to meet weekly increasingly seems a master stroke. The group has built into it all the expertise it needs. Ressler himself is to play a lead role: state-of-the-art liaison. The only one of them young enough to have grown up speaking molecular. Hell of a burden to place on a kid just out of school.

So be it. However disarrayed the sessions, they give Ressler the unique opportunity to pick the brains of experts in fields he has only rudimentary exposure to. The first four weeks of group barn-burning remain theoretical. Experimental progress must wait for the recent flurry of development to clear. The same thing that makes the coding problem the most exciting project going also makes it the most opaque. Theory permits a bewildering array of possible codes, while DNA sequence data provide no hint of regularity of pattern. This proliferation of too many possibilities gives Ressler hope that Cyfer has as much chance as any to receive the capricious break that will catapult them to the fore. The twist, always unanticipated, like the arrival of a startling bird one morning at the feeder outside the breakfast window, may pay its fragile visit at any moment. Ressler posts, by his office window, Delbruck's words: "It seems to me that Genetics is definitely loosening up and maybe we will live to see the day when we know something about inheritance__"

On an obnoxiously hot August day that melts the streets of Stadium Terrace into La Brea tar, Ressler takes time out to do a rudimentary milk run. He hits the futuristic supermarket with no shopping list except necessity. Pushing a cart with one oscillating wheel, he genuflects in aisle four toward Battle Creek, Michigan, for making survival possible. The daily cereal, consumed each evening over journals, if failing to carry him inexorably toward athleticism, has at least kept him from scurvy. Likewise, frozen juice concentrate takes one fifth the space of a mixed pitcher and requires no maintenance aside from rinsing the spoon. He ignores the taste, even enjoys it. Processed foods write the species' insatiable advance in miniature: freed from the overhead of care to get on with the real matter.

He chooses a meal that promises "Ready in One Minute," figuring he can eat it in two. Thus recovering four hours a week for his own pursuit, he swings his cart leisurely around the corner smack into none other than Toveh Botkin. The elderly Western war prize, whose protein chemistry work Ressler has studied, keeps cool in the mangle of metal. "I understand that the auto accident is a national obsession with Americans, Dr. Ressler. But don't you think this a bit extreme?" He grins and waves the curlered housewife traffic around the wreck. The two empiricists step forward to inspect the damages. The fronts of both carts are mauled. "Are you insured?" she asks.

Together they restore a pyramid of soap boxes their wreck has upended. "How wonderful!" Botkin exclaims, holding one up for Ressler to see. A green explosion on the soap box advertises the obligatory miracle ingredient, Delta-X Sub-2, dirt-bursting enzyme. "Here our little group racks its brains to get enzymes out of nucleic acids, while the rest of the world is busy figuring out how to get them into laundry powder."

They dust themselves off, shift effortlessly into a notes session. They compare the relative merits of direct templating of protein chains on the surface of the split DNA string to some form of intermediating sequence reader. The conversation breaks off when Botkin catches sight of the contents of Ressler's cart. "My young friend. Convenience taken to its logical extreme is cowardice." She looks personally wounded. "If the universe were as convenience-minded as you, it would never have proposed so inefficient an aggregate as life."

Ressler loves this woman's speech. Worth the dressing-down to hear her perform. "Dr. Botkin," he counters. "It's impossible to cook for one."

"Nonsense. I've cooked for one for half a century, occasional dinner party aside. But if it is the motivation of pair bonding you need__" She hooks a passing young thing in white anklets and coos at her, "My dear. Would you love, honor, and obey this decent-looking young man so that he can get a reasonable meal in the evenings?"

The girl giggles. "I'm already married."

"Do you expect your husband to live very long?" At length, Ressler makes a few dietary concessions, the most important being his agreement to dine with her at least once a week. "I will introduce you to the clarity of thinking brought on by baked lamb, and you can bring me up to date on molecular mechanisms. I think I understand the part about the tall pea plants and the short, but beyond that…?" Botkin shrugs, reverence for the engine of skepticism. They arrive at the checkout behind a woman giving herself whiplash by watching the bagging and the register at the same time. What a very strange place he has been set down in, this world. He ought to get out more often.

Botkin, whatever her gifts as a conversationist, is almost as old as the rediscovery of Mendel. The other extreme in age, Joe Lovering, beat a time-honored path out of pure math into muddy population statistics. Ressler has seen the guy potting about in the lab, although exactly what the excitable kid does is anybody's guess. He looks decidedly gumfooted holding any equipment more corporeal than a chi-square. Stuart takes him to the Y for lunch, part of a court-your-resources campaign. He has the sub, Levering the congealed mac and cheese. Hardly are they seated when Joe whips out a napkin and begins sketching proofs. He argues that the genetic code, as an algorithmic formal system, is subject to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. "That would mean the symbolic language of the code can't be both consistent and complete. Wouldn't that be a kick in the head?"

Kid talk, competitive showing off, intellectual fantasy. But Ressler knows what Joe is driving at. He's toyed with similar ideas, cast in less abstruse terms. We are the by-product of the mechanism in there. So it must be more ingenious than us. Anything complex enough to create consciousness may be too complex for consciousness to understand. Yet the ultimate paradox is Lovering, crouched over his table napkin, using proofs to demonstrate proof's limits. Lovering laughs off recursion and takes up another tack: the key is to find some formal symmetry folded in this four-base chaos. Stuart distrusts this approach even more. He picks up the tab for their two untouched lunches, thanking Lovering politely for the insight.

In mid-month, a departmental review committee spot-checks the lab, sits through a free-association session where Lovering shows the group that the translation scheme under consideration can't map sequences of four linear bases into twenty amino acids and still indicate where a gene message starts and breaks off. Since the last few weeks have been devoted exclusively to this scheme, Cyfer disbands that afternoon knowing less than it did a month ago. The review panel is sympathetic to the need for experimental interludes. Fact-gathering without theoretic guidance is mere noise. But theory without fact, the review suggests, is not science. Incriminatingly large amounts of glassware in the lab carry that See-Yourself Shine. They urge Ulrich to produce some activity, reduce the Blue Skies, begin investigating something.

So in midsummer, a dozen weeks into his tenure, Ressler volunteers to help set up a showpiece, tracing the incorporation of traits through daughter cells. He'll use the elegant Hershey-Chase trick of radioactively labeling microorganisms to study how certain tagged strings are passed to the next generation. His first chance to do hard science since hitting the I-states.

Ressler devises a variant on the now notorious Waring Blendor technique to test the supposition that DNA information is transcribed and read like a linear tape. But the day he goes in to set up the growth cultures for his first run is a bad one for experiment. He smells aggression in the lab air, walks into the middle of a fight. He looks around but sees nothing departing from the status quo. Ulrich and Lovering are by the basins, the only two people in the room. Their conversation is subdued, their postures unthreatening. Ressler heads to his work area, lights a burner, and begins rudimentary sterilization.

Soon, however, Ulrich's and Lovering's raised voices filter into the public domain. Their words are lost in the flare of his gas jet. He assumes that the two are hashing out a labor dispute, currently in vogue. The McClellan committee investigates Beck, Brewster, and Hoffa, and suddenly everyone puts away his Monopoly set and joins the Mine Workers. It's demeaning for a scientist to argue over cash; Ressler has always solved budget problems by spending Saturday nights in the lab instead of at Murphy's — exactly the sort of chump that management loves to have in the rank and file.

A few escaping words and Ressler hears that matters are actually reversed. Joe is being called on the carpet, or the linoleum in this case. "You are forcing me to practice black magic, Dr. Ulrich. Pure popular hysteria plain and simple."

"Black magic? That's what you call a century of cumulative research, Dr. Lovering? Maybe you'd better give us your definition of science."

"What in the hell does Salk have to do with science?" Ressler shuts off the Bunsen. This one's a to-the-canvas brawl.

"Salk is the most systematic mind in today's laboratories. If we had half his thoroughness, we'd have the code out by now."

"Salk's a technician. An administrator. 'Thoroughness' is a euphemism."

Ressler strains to see without attracting notice. But he can't catch either man's face from where he stands, and he can't move without getting drawn into the fray.

"You're suggesting that science is only science provided it never turns up anything practical? That's not especially rational, is it, Dr. Lovering?"

Ulrich infuses "rational" with so much hiss that Ressler slips and contaminates a petri. He looks around the lab to see who else is in calling distance. Botkin's in her office down the hall, but an old woman wouldn't be much help in pulling bucks off each other. Lovering looks about to bolt from his corner and tackle his adversary. "This is a witch hunt. You've singled me out because of my politics."

"I'm doing no such thing. You've singled yourself out, by refusing to take a proven vaccine."

"Proven my ass. Read the field trials. Where are the controls? Polio reduction in heavily dosed areas; so what? The disease moves in epidemics. It's erratic by definition."

Ulrich becomes cool, compensatory to his junior's frenzy. "Joe, you're the only one in this lab who refused the vaccine."

"You want me to take the doses and cross myself like everybody else? What's the paranoia? You've had your three slugs; I can't hurt you."

"You can hurt me plenty. If word got out that a scientist refused readily available precautions this late, when we're finally moving towards eradication…."

"Oh! So funding is the issue. That's not especially rational, is it, Dr. Ulrich?"

Ressler can't believe this: the kid spits out words that could cost him everything. And the old man lets him. Ulrich grows gentler than Ressler has ever seen him. "Joseph," he says, almost singing. "Just tell me why you refuse it."

A look comes over Lovering's face: able to rationalize forever, when asked outright, he will not misrepresent. "Because my mother's a Christian Scientist. That's why." Lovering dashes from the lab, leaving Ulrich to nurse his victory. Ressler returns to experimental prep, but his heart is no longer in it. He lays out the first trial and organizes the notebook. Then he knocks off for the day. The lab is suddenly infected with labeled belief. The charm has temporarily fled the whole inheritance question.

Back at the barracks, with nothing to protect him from night's humidity except his lawn chair and tomato juice, Ressler involuntarily recalls a painful joke he himself helped propagate in grad school days: A Jew, a Catholic, and a Christian Scientist sit in the anteroom to Hell. The Catholic turns to the Jew and asks, "Why are you here?" The Jew replies, "Well, God help me, but I couldn't keep from nibbling ham now and then. Why are you here?" The Catholic answers, "I had a little trouble touching myself where I go to the bathroom." The two of them turn to the Christian Scientist. "And you? Why are you here?" The Christian Scientist replies firmly, "I'm not."

The joke incriminates him. Hypocrite: how did he fail to see in himself the same persuasion, the old blessed are those who have not seen?