Gold Bug Variations

VI

Cook's Tour

On August 20 I committed myself to leaving, putting together a portfolio of the day's restlessness. I began my travelogue in 1597: Dutch East India Company ships return to Europe with word of a remarkable voyage. Germ cell of the modern world, its commerce craze, engine of expansion. I added Bering's arrival in Alaska in 1741, precisely the moment — bizarre anachronism — when Bach unravels his Goldbergs. Another 173 years later, the Panama Canal's first week of business opens a short cut between worlds. The day of exploration seemed a cornucopia expressly for my use.

In fact, the date was nothing special. On any calendar page, exploration rolls out anniversaries on demand: take every location on the globe that produced a recorded first encounter and divide by 365. Each day approximates what it means to need to be forever someplace other than here. Faces pressed to the glass of cabs, a summer freight's lapsed, transfigured blast, autumn attic-rattling, the furious slam of screens in back-door disappearance. Departure was easy, commonplace, everyday.

I'd signed on for the full ride. August 20, after my shift was done and the foreign legion was just punching in, I showed up on the doorstep of the converted warehouse and buzzed to be let in. I'd discovered no more about Dr. Ressler in the interim. Harder to prove a thing's absence than its existence. But in the run of time, the evidence adds up. His work had clearly come to nothing. He had produced nothing of consequence that had entered the permanent record, at least the record I wasted weeks sifting.

His non-work began to infect mine. Life science made raids on events of the day, colored my choice of quotes. He and self-appointed sidekick Todd used my Question Board to settle running disputes — everything from that calculation about the degree of our isolation in deep space to "How far did Goebbels get with Katherine Anne Porter when they dated in the thirties?" They used the forum to communicate with each other, with me, and with a public that never wrote them, put it to work for everything from Todd's private joke about making the catch to Ressler's request for the name, lost to one of the rare failings of his memory, of the tendency of languages to become simpler — to drop inflectional cases and consolidate. I proudly produced, without revealing my footwork: A: Syncretism. The board became their private tin-can telephone, although I never saw Ressler inside the branch. He must have been by regularly, but either he calculated his visits to avoid my shift or he perfected invisibility in public.

As I learned his story, I continued to steal his quotes for my own use. Even as we set in motion our own small act of code-breaking, I posted extracts from that Poe story, the one that marked for him the bewildering human propensity for metaphor. "Circumstances and a certain bias of mind," says the cryptographer of "The Gold Bug," a coded persona of his inventor, "have led me to take interest in such riddles, and it may well be doubted whether human ingenuity can construct an enigma of the kind that human ingenuity may not, by proper application, resolve." I posted this on August 21, the day after meeting Dr. Ressler for real. Although we had exchanged only a few paragraphs, my head still spun on his long, periodic sentences, the sense underneath.

I told Tuckwell I was going out that evening with a couple of friends who were in town. The old rot about half-truth being better than whole lies. Keith was so relieved at not having to throw our apartment open to a night of reminiscence that he didn't even ask who the friends were. He gave me a blank check for the evening. I had the warehouse address and a standing invitation. I needed only walk a few streets from the branch and satisfy my curiosity, answer my questions for once. The nondescript reddish-brown building was flanked by two sooty, brick, cliff walls, gullies where sunlight would not shine again until all buildings fell. It was fronted on the alley side by loading docks. On the street, story-length stone-trimmed windows filled with uncooperative darkness. From the outside, it was one of those mildewed, permanently For Let places, countless late-nineteenth-century brick rectangles that I no longer noticed after my second day in the city. I thought: They've lost the deed to this place. No one owns it. A forgotten tract squeezed between forgotten tracts, stuffed floor to ceiling with wooden files from a hundred years ago, papers slowly ammoniat-ing. Nothing could have been further from the truth. In bland buildings with concrete cornices, everything is decided.

I peeked inside the first-floor turret. I could see nothing through the smoky quartz and iron bars. In front of the main door, I scoured the buttons until I found the suitably corporate monogram MOL— Manhattan On-Line. "You can remember the name," Todd had told me over the phone, "because we're not in Manhattan and we're not on-line." I debated a last time and pressed the bell. After a second, a tinny transcription of Todd's voice came over the intercom. "Friend or foe?"

"Do I have a choice?" I heard either static or his laugh, followed by the magic buzz. I grabbed the door at the tone's order, and climbed the stairs in the half-dark. At the top of the first flight, following the quaintest layout imaginable, the stairs petered out and presented an accordion-grated service-elevator shaft, the only way higher. It violated all zoning ordinances. I pressed what passed for a summons button. Cables tensed like a surprised nest of bush-masters and a counterweight sluggishly unwound. Several seconds later, the elevator — little more than an open cage with forty-watt bulb strung through the ceiling — sallied down into sight.

The antiquated grate made a noise like an enraged myna. I took my life in my hands and entered. On the way up, I had to yank a cast-iron dial crank back and forth in its semicircle to keep the lurching car in ascent. Just as I was sure a cable was about to snap, a man's voice echoed down the shaft telling me to stop at the next landing. I eased the throttle and cruised to a halt. I'd entered the car from the north. The box's exit, however, lay to the east. To leave the deathtrap, I had to open a perpendicular grate, revealing a period-piece, dented, lead-alloy door with frosted chicken-wire glass — the non-windows once ubiquitous in office buildings. Todd's silhouette on the other side called out, "Ya gotta kick it." I did. The door swung open on a turn-of-the-century anthology of alcoves, now a functionless reception area, Manhattan On-Line being one of those businesses that never received. The dozen subdivided walls were of assorted glass, multicolored brick, and an afterthought of stucco.

"Ms. O'Deigh," Todd greeted me with a formality that might have been mock. He shook my hand as if we were execs meeting over power brunch. Every time out with this fellow was starting from scratch. "Terrific you've come. I've got so much to show you." Absolutely unreadable. He led us down the hall to a restraining door. He punched a code into the electronic lock, and we entered a blazing fluorescence reminiscent of fifties science fiction. Behind massive plate safety glass, several thousand square feet of room stood in the pallid postindustrial shimmer of night shift. The space, once tall, was now wedged between false floor and drop ceiling. The room shone as bright as daylight but with minute, maddening, near-imperceptible flickers.

Machines took hold in every niche of the place, devices in no way mechanical-looking. Beautiful expanses of metal and plastic, each enclosed in seductively homogeneous chitin of earth tones and ochers, formed a ring around the room as secret and monolithic as Stonehenge. Todd conducted a Grand Tour, mapping the layout. The world outside this nineteenth-century masonry held no sway here, so self-defining was this fluorescent, windowless aura. Todd took me to a console, where he issued a command to a keyboard, the rites of an inner circle closed to the uninitiated.

"Don't be taken in by the bells and whistles. We're engaged here in one of the most tediously repetitive routines known to man. The assembly line of the digital info set." He punched a few more acronyms into his CRT and hit ENTER. Behind us, discharging pneumatic libido, a punched-card reader came to life. Todd removed a rubber band from a card deck and dropped the packet in the hopper. "Antique input method," he apologized. The device sucked up the instructions, spat them out, and fell into cogitative silence.

I tried to study his face without staring. He was different on his own turf, but I couldn't say how. His melodic voice showed no surprise at my being here. "I get in early every evening. Kick these beasts around until two, three a.m. An hour for lunch." He smiled faintly. "Procedure for keeping the wheels grinding is absolutely axiomatic. Let me show you." He tapped a pen-and-ink flowchart taped to the side of a nearby cabinet. "We go in this funnel here. We follow these arrows. Human intervention at the diamonds. We get pissed out here at the bottom. Then it's time to go home." He meditated on the flow of control. He pointed at a spot on the chart and said, "You are Here."

He showed me the storage devices — waist-high spindles with removable packs resembling layer cakes under cover. "These boys will take an entire thirty-volume encyclopedia each. I hate to use the word 'gigabyte' in mixed company, but there seems no way around it." He showed me the industrial printer, screaming under its sound hood. He opened the card cage of the CPU. "When this little electroluminescent display flashes 'Help me, I'm melting,' you're in for a long night." He introduced me to a dozen other devices whose functions I instantly lost. Decollators; sequencers. Like one of those five-language bus travelogues through Rome— never quite sure where the guide's English leaves off and his German begins.

When Todd at last fell quiet I noticed the hum of the metal, hard at work on calculations that never ruffled the silky surface. Constant, low-level drone permeated the room. Noticing, he dropped to his knees and spread supplicant-style across the floor. He put his ear to the acoustical tile and tugged on my pant leg for me to do the same. Amazed at myself, I crawled down with him and did the Native American trick of listening to the ground. Sound rushed into my ear, a rumbling chorus somewhere between Hoist's Planets and Aristophanes' Frogs. He gestured me to lift my head. "Know what they're humming? 'Wake up, wake up, wake up you— Get up, get up, get up, get out of….' Synthetically, of course."

We left the computer room, the alphabet-lock door swinging shut behind us. The sudden cutoff of noise reminded me of Midwest childhood, the abrupt end of a cicada-storm outside my window on a summer's night waking me from deep sleep with its roar of silence. The suite extended in the other direction. "This is the storeroom. These are the day-shift offices. Here's the software vault: Authorized Programmers Only." Indeed, a check-in desk blocked a door affixed with the same punch-code lock that had allowed us grudging access to the machine room. Hidden in this hierarchy of offices, the rift between information-rich and information-poor.

"Here's the lunchroom," he sighed at length. We entered a twilit cubicle containing sink, refrigerator, table with plastic chairs, and microwave. He pointed to a sign on this last device reading No Metal. "Obscure political protest, I guess." He made me coffee and yogurt without asking if I wanted it. "You see," he wound up. "Not exactly the glamour of high tech I used to dream about in art school. I could teach you to do what I do in two nights, so come back at your own risk. We are not so much this monster's brain as its arms and legs."

"Speaking of 'we'…." The first substantial thing I'd said since arriving. The sound of my voice surprised me.

"Of course! The man you came here to meet." I protested that meeting wasn't necessary. I just wanted to see the man the reference works hinted at but couldn't identify, the man that could elicit concern from these otherwise self-possessed features. Todd led us down a hall that doubled back behind the main computer room and dead-ended in a fire door. He gripped the knob, looked back at me over his shoulder, and asked, "Ready?" I wasn't in the slightest.

But there was no backing out. Forcing entry, we fell forward into a black cinematic cavern blazing with point lights. Cathode rays, a glowing halo of meters, and a tower of heavily cabled boxes twinkled a Christmas of continuous bit-streams being transmitted and received. Against the opposite wall was a pane of one-way glass that revealed the computer room with its gigabyte drums and its silk-smooth calculating cases. Todd and I had not done our surveying alone. I felt spied upon, violated, caught in the act of eavesdropping.

Above the hum, as the door swung shut, I heard another sound altogether. Todd had warned me, in the seafood-and-sawdust dive. And yet, each time I'd imagined these two lost boys serving their abandoned-warehouse night shift, I never once gave their isolation so ravishing a soundtrack. Aural obsession, in such astringent surroundings, was too fantastic. The music, ground from a cheap stereo that hid its low tech in a corner, was that same crotchety keyboard exploring that same eighteenth-century glaze, testing the keys' tentative possibilities. Imitative voices chased and cascaded over one another, interleaving, pausing at pivots, only to tag-team pratfall down the scale in close-interval clashes. In the dark, this finger-probing was the most perfect sound I had ever heard.

Like a shepherd's on breaking into a buried tomb, my eyes adjusted to local dark. I made out a figure, tipped forward in a tilt-and-swivel chair behind a desk littered with electronic instruments, liquid-crystal readouts, and a vast, rack-mounted technical manual that would have been the envy of Diderot and his Encyclopedic henchmen. I knew my man right away, although I'd seen him only once the year before and once in a magazine photo at twenty-five. We surprised him in the act of turning over pages in the massive manual, not so much looking up an error fix as reading though the entire yard-wide spine from cover to cover.

As we entered the confined space and stepped toward him, he stood and unfolded himself. He was thinner and shorter than I remembered; his features, not classic, by the glow of the machine diodes possessed a resignation that, like the ambient piano trickle, was consummately beautiful. In contrast to Todd's collegiate slovenliness, he dressed in coat and tie, as if some sentient presence in all this mass of integrated chips cared how he looked. Not just presentable; immaculate. Natty.

Before Todd could do formal introductions, Dr. Ressler, with a charming outdated gesture, offered me his hand. "You know who I am. But aside from the fact that you work for the public library, once considered becoming a professional dancer, and are called Jan, I know absolutely nothing about you." You've-been-in-Afghanistan-I-perceive. It came off hilariously. That slight, dry, upward curl of his thin lips convinced me that here was the last cultivated enclave in the forsaken world. I loved being in the man's presence from the first minute.

We left the control room and stepped back into the hall where we could see and hear one another. We might have been business associates who met frequently in London or Tokyo, acting together in silent consensus. On the far side of the fire door, Dr. Ressler paid me gallant attention: "You have exactly the sort of complexion required of the quintessential wronged heroine of Victorian pornographic fiction. I regret having to be the one to offer the observation, but Franklin's reading may not yet be broad enough to allow him to do likewise." This rolled out of him intact, with only the slightest ironic hint.

Todd rushed to assure me, "That's the nicest thing I've ever heard this old man say to anyone." But I wasn't at all embarrassed. And neither, it seemed, was the old man.

The instant we assembled in the hall, as if counting the seconds since his last, Dr. Ressler offered us cigarettes, which we both refused. "Am I the only one of this suspect group with an oral fixation?" He smoked, inhaling pensively and catching the ashes in a fastidiously cupped hand. It was by then the middle of the night. No one seemed in any hurry to ruin the rare visit with something so inexact as conversation. At last Dr. Ressler smiled at me. I can recreate that grin perfectly: laconic, amused, mixing its passive enjoyment with a particle of despair. The smile of a mathematician who cannot decide if his latest calculation presents him with a near-tautology of has plunged him into the heart of the enigma. "So how do you two come to know one another?"

I didn't dare look at Todd. Half a dozen near-truths passed through my head, but I missed the beat necessary to pull off a plausible lie. "He came to me and asked me to look you up."

Ressler's already high hairline moved higher as he smiled. "So the fellow said himself, although not nearly so forthrightly." He finished his smoke and motioned for us to wait while he discarded the remains in a nearby commode. As he returned, the shrunken figure was picking lint off of his suit coat. "I'm not sure what anyone could possibly find to be interested in. I've had no historical import." It seemed the wrong place to argue the point, yet something in my reading had convinced me that the world of scientific research was one continuous, shifting, interdependent event, an event still encompassing him.

I can't remember exactly how I phrased the question; I probably bungled it. I was unable to make a decent sentence in his company, so self-conscious did his parts of speech jumping through hoops make me. But hook or crook, standing in the deserted hall, the Goldbergs no longer audible through the control-room door, I asked what had happened to strand him here. He pulled at the skin around his eyes; maybe I'd miscalculated in believing the admiration for bluntness he professed. But when he answered, it was again with that look of bemused pleasure. "Science lost its calm." He extended an arm, palm up, in a gesture indicating the renovated warehouse, Brooklyn, the entire maze of current events the meek were condemned to inherit. "And as Poe long ago pointed out, cryptography begins at home."

With that, he excused himself; the machines were calling. He hoped I would drop by again. "He doesn't deserve it, but give this young man the benefit of the doubt." Ressler: if anything, more mysterious in person than in the elliptical accounts. The riddle the young scientist had once faced — how a four-letter chemical language could describe all life — was more opaque now than when it had sent him empty away. The only thing the visit told me was why Todd so urgently wanted to turn up this man.

By next morning I'd checked out Poe. I too wondered whether human ingenuity could construct an enigma that human ingenuity could not resolve. Yet the detective in me, a hardcover strain crossbred with hardy paperback perennial, was stumped by Ressler's ingenuity in displaying himself to us without revealing a thing. I rephrased Poe'S dictum: It may well be doubted if genetic ingenuity can construct an enigma that genetic ingenuity may not resolve. His genetic code, the gradual accretion of living molecular language, had created itself out of free association. Everything derived from it, all successive mutations, recombinations, crossings over— fish in the ocean, eels in the sea, a thousand Darwinian finches, every researcher, Todd and I, Ressler himself, all natural history were elaborate permutations on an original four-base message. The young scientist left in this gaunt body was himself a product of the code he'd been after, the code that couldn't keep itself hidden from itself.

I took his paradox apart from every direction. Against my policy of not repeating sources, I hit "The Gold Bug" twice over:

In the present case — indeed in all cases of secret writing — the first question regards the language of the cipher…. In general, there is no alternative but experiment (directed by probabilities) of every tongue known to him who attempts the solution, until the true one can be obtained.

There lay the rub; the language of Ressler's enigma was the genetic code, organic chemistry, well-understood forces. Ressler had known all that; the work of generations of whitecoats had identified the idiom the secret writing was written in. But there the man was, at the end of his working life, empty-handed, high and dry, alone at night in a dark room lit only by CRTs requiring as much attention as wetting infants.

The code he was after was not so much a message written in a language as all grammar itself. I felt that with my first good look at his wasted face, his intelligent eyes that resigned themselves to courteous elegance. The old vocabulary of research and exploration, the whole poetics of science still poured from the man's mouth in rolling, perfect paragraphs.

At work, the routine that had taken me into adulthood came up short. I did not want my life. I wanted another thing, an analogy. I wanted to read Poe, all Poe. I wanted to read science, the history of science. I wanted to be back with those two men, listening to the language of isolation they spoke to one another. Half a dozen sentences, and I was fixed. Was any grammar sufficiently strong to translate the inner grammar of another? Did anything in the cell, in the code itself, actually know the code? I needed to win this man's confidence, to ask him as much. To ask him how he had guessed I'd wanted, once, to be a dancer.

Todd had said to call him anytime. I did, in the middle of the afternoon a few days later. "Oh God, I forgot. I woke you."

"No, no," he lied groggily. "There's something I've been wanting to ask you forever."

"We answer anything."

"What is the origin of the phrase 'Make the catch'?" Half-conscious silliness: repeating the question, reproducing the round he pretended to ask about. Clear dalliance, an open invitation to come again, that evening if I wanted. I had passed the audition. I needed no further lure. I could sit in that soundproof control room behind the one-way glass, savoring the banter of people who understood the scary unlikelihood of speech. I laughed something back at Franklin; hard to say which of us led the flirtation walk. A step-ladder catch, second voice identical, only higher. He chases her until she catches him.

The Nightly News

Ressler accepts Botkin's standing invitation to eat with her. Food's gone by the boards too long. Over venison or Duck a l'Orange, they might even make headway on a coding angle. The elder woman's mind is first-rate; if her science isn't up to the minute, it's the fault of the discipline's runaway proliferation, not her ability to grasp essentials. He himself can't understand more than three of five articles, even in those journals devoted to his narrow specialty. He becomes a regular at her table, benefiting more than just nutritionally. Botkin too seems fond of the chance for conversation. Odd thing: talk's no good alone.

By day he frequents her office, the single place on campus providing that balance between attention and escape necessary to concentrate. Over decades, Botkin has perfected her digs. A heavy oak panel obscures the pea-green steam pipes, and lace curtains, white embroidery on white, meliorate the industrial frosted glass. University-issue khaki bookcases against one wall house journal indexes, meticulously aligned, going back into forties antiquity. Across from these shelves stands another case, a varnished turn-of-the-century hardwood masterpiece. It holds editions of Werfel, Mann, Musil, essays by Benjamin and Adorno, and other suspect tomes from the soft sciences. The spines alone qualify some as minor triumphs of decorative art. Ressler likes to heft these, examine the marbled paper. He is entranced, too, by other items on the shelf: molding Furtwängler platters older than he is, pressed, to his delight, on one side only. "So did this man collaborate?"

Botkin smiles sadly. "Half the NSF collaborated."

The lid of her centenarian rolltop desk, long stuck closed, renders the piece ornamental. Dr. Botkin now employs it only for stacking; piles of print, heaps of paper of all religious persuasions, welded into inseparable masses, ski down the desktop slope into further piles scattered about the floor. And yet, the room is meticulous, tidy. A Viennese overstuffed chair, faded but impeccable, flanges in ornate wings at the top; armrests flourish fruits and vines, and the stitchery on the back, though ghostly now, still shows the trace of a pastoral scene. The right armrest bears stains smelling of anisette, temporary storage spot for candy when the bone-handled phone demands answering. Botkin sits there for hours while Ressler lies flat out on a tooled Moroccan leather couch, as if for regression analysis. Botkin abstractly considers the skin on the back of her hand, which has gone slack and no longer snaps back when pinched. "And what is our lesson for today?"

Ressler, prostrate, grins at the ceiling. "The surface shape of the split helix. Its transcription to RNA. Energy considerations against assembling protein chains directly on the strand. The possibility of the peptide chain peeling from the RNA surface as it forms."

"If you insist," she sighs. But her imagination has come alive after a dormant winter. She once more reads voraciously, devising tests, learning, freeing herself from dead preconceptions, leaping for the first time since the war.

The room, curtained for minimum sunlight, smells of tea, rose water, hair oil, napthalene — nonspecific aromas of the past. Its scent encapsulates a forgotten ghetto — Danzig, perhaps, or Prague, though it would take a hopelessly sensitive nose to tell. Ressler can concentrate here. What's more, he can think out loud. Botkin has the intellectual chops to keep him honest. Something about the place makes it perfect for guided associating. Oriental richness, dark and full, despite a paucity of decorations. Only two ornaments grace the walls, two framed photographic prints, one of Mahler and one of the chemist Kekulé. The latter dreamt one night of a snake rolling its tail in its mouth, and woke with the structure of the benzene ring. The former composed, in already antiquated idiom, a staggeringly beautiful song cycle on the death of a child from scarlet fever, losing his own to the disease shortly thereafter. The two contemporaries hang side by side, a semblance of a shrine. Near them, mounted under glass, hangs a tiny, inexplicable object that could only be a gold filling.

Gradually Ressler ventures farther afield. Dan Woytowich has him over for a nervous evening. The group's classical geneticist, Woytowich has spent his professional life raising fish and plotting their susceptibility to disease against their number of stripes. Full of promise once, by all accounts. No one knows exactly what happened. Recently, alarmed by the advanced hour and suddenly aware that his generational studies have been all talk and no action, Woyty has married a grad student in English literature half his age, a woman both stripeless and disease-free. Despite the late discovery that he would even now like to father a real family, Woyty's only child to date is wife Renée's emerging dissertation.

Renée describes her project in detail, after the get-acquainted conversation falls into autism: "You know Ben Jonson? O Rare Ben Jonson?" Ressler nods before she starts singing "Drink to Me Only." "Someone once told Jonson that Shakespeare never blotted a line. Jonson replied, 'Would that he had blotted a thousand.'" Renée explains; Ressler drifts, loses the thread. Something to do with her determining exactly which thousand lines Jonson wanted Shakespeare to blot.

Woytowich is reluctant to talk shop. Stuart could learn endless classical genetics from the man; he slighted macroheredity in school, in the heat of molecular excitement. But Woyty just sits taciturn throughout the evening. When Ressler catches Dan looking at his watch, he apologizes for overstaying and gets up to go. "Oh, no," Woyty laughs anxiously. " Tain't that. Only… would you mind very much if we…?" He gestures embarrassedly at the color set, one of the first quarter million to grace an American home. "It's news time."

Ressler defers with pleasure. He watches attentively, not the new technology or today's current events, but the behavior of his colleague, a genuine habitue of headlines. Woyty sighs. "I'm absolutely dependent. Jesus; even quiz shows bind me for hours. But the news; God. I'm terrified of missing something. Ever since Khrushchev did his CBS interview___Christ Almighty. The news is the most gratifying thing life has to offer. Think of it; we can know within hours, things all over the globe actually happening now."

They watch in silence, the first comfortable moment all evening. The danger of the nightly You Are There. Partly developmental, like the soaps: today's police action is tomorrow's outbreak, so stay tuned. Only the stories change faster and more wildly than soaps. "Catch the broadcast about the Saigon stabbing of the Canadian armistice supervisor?" Woytowich asks during the commercial. "A real whodunit. But what happens next? Always the question. Catch Diem's visit, the great scenes of Dwight personally meeting the man at D.C. airport? Bloody hell, you know? Gets to be a problem. I mean, I could sit until the world ends before they give the wrap-up."

At the next break, fearing for the man's well-being, Ressler tries to change the topic. He describes his last twenty-four-hour shift manning the rate experiment, the isotope readings on his cultures. But the elder partner is unseducible. "Ain't that the kicker? They fail to tell you in Bio 110 just how much science amounts to jacking a knob every hour for three years and jotting it down in a journal. You ought to look into one of those portables. Pick one up on payments. Put it in your office. Go anywhere with one. Never have to miss an update."

"There's always the next day's newspapers, Dan."

"Not the same, reading about Yemen after the fact. Like listening to a tape of a ballgame. What difference does it make if Mays gets a clutch hit when the affair's a done deed? Give me live broadcast, the announcer muffing his words, the station disclaiming the views of third parties. Give me simultaneous report." That's it, the reason Woytowich has sunk into information dependence: if he hears an event while it's still going on, he has an infinitesimal chance to alter the outcome. Not to watch tonight's segment, even to entertain a junior researcher, is to commit a sin of omission. He's Horace Wells all over again, the man who, altruistically pursuing proper anesthetic dosages, discovered, instead, addiction and squalor.

Summer's almost gone, winter's coming on when K-53-C gets its first knock on the door. Given his utter anonymity, Ressler assumes some terrible mistake. It's the NSA, confusing him with some other Stuart Ressler of the same name, or Veep Dick Nixon on search-and-destroy committee work. What's he done recently to run afoul of the authorities? Growing radioactive microorganisms without a permit.

The visitor is Tooney Blake. Although they've worked in proximity all summer, the two men are still strangers. Blake is a solid biochemist who has taken up partition chromatography, a six-year-old technique that, given patience and precision, reveals the amino acid sequence in a protein. He has never voiced anything but irrefutable clarities at the Blue Sky sessions. Neither brilliant nor erratic, Blake is the sort of steady lexicographer Ressler will need to pull off any coup de grâce. Here Tooney stands, inexplicably in the doorway on the last Friday evening ever in August '57. He has his arm around an attractive woman in her mid-thirties. Ressler can only greet the couple warmly, as if they've been expected.

"You know my lovely wife Eva." Ressler wobbles his neck. "You've met," Blake insists. "Ulrich's. Stuart, you'll never believe this. We just discovered it ourselves, in fact. We live under the same damn roof."

Ressler is lost in the vistas of figurative speech. Eva explains, "You know, K-53-A? The other end of the triplex?"

Blake takes up the slack. "Luck of the draw, huh? So Evie and I found this here bottle___" He holds it up, as if the label might persuade the fellow to let them in.

Stuart pulls himself together. "I'm afraid I haven't bought a welcome mat yet, so you'll have to take my word for it." This the Blakes do, with easy style.

Within minutes, Tooney has the Summer Slumber Party on the player, watching in fascination as Eva does a wonderful one-step imitation of Olga, the plastic spindle ballerina. In no time, the two of them have done Stuart's week of dirty dishes, singing descant to those teenage death songs the whole while, even getting the boy to kick in on the choruses. They graduate to the Wagner excerpts. "Ah, the hero's motif," Tooney says. "Just the tune to welcome young geniuses to town." Ressler reads the text on his tennis shoes. Inspired by the musical Siegfried line, the Blakes crack open the Riesling. Tooney proposes a toast: "May your stay here be filled with significant insights."

Noticing the empty space in the living room where a sofa should be, Eva protests. "You poor boy. Have you been sitting on the floor all this time? We've an extra one, don't we, Toon?" Shamefaced at being caught with more sofas than her share. "Don't say anything! It's yours on permanent loan."

Pointless for him to protest. Something in Eva's extreme generosity toward a total stranger — pointless, pathetically trusting— moves him to accept. Before he knows what's happening, the three of them dash down the barrack row and begin moving furniture in the Blakes' parlor. "Shhh," they giggle. "Don't wake the kid." They spring the spare sofa, trundle it across the lawns of K-53 in the middle of the night, laughing hilariously and daring all Stadium Terrace to mistake them for sofa burglars.

As they lever the beast through his door, Ressler realizes he will be twenty-six in a few days, too old for discoveries of consequence. He has done nothing to advance the project, to locate the approach that will systematically decipher nucleic acid. The three of them, gasping for breath, position the sofa to fill up as much empty space as possible and then plunk themselves down on it, exhausted. A failure, he is forced back on the compromise of companionship.

They find a deck of cards hiding in the crack between the back and cushions. "Little Margaret's been playing hide-the-folks'-stuff again." Tooney and Eva teach him to play pinochle, a game whose payoff matrices would soon addict him but for one shortcoming: the play of the cards contains no progression, no development. Each hand, no matter the outcome, leaves the play of the next unchanged.

Eva, giddy with wine and aces around, waxes astonished over the playing cards. "These things are amazing. Glossy, washable, every one different. There's a miracle for you. What are these made out of? Not paper, surely. Soybeans? You scientists are always making things out of soybeans."

Ressler cannot resist these two. He talks with Tooney, the only other human capable of conversing about RNA templates while the Valkyries skip their way up the slopes of Valhalla. Eva fascinates Ressler as well. Undeniably attractive, Eva possesses skills that can only be called freakish. The three of them sit outside in Ressler's favorite spot; the Blakes instantly adapt to the lawn-chair routine. The couple drink their wine and Ressler his tomato juice, with just a smidgin — make that two-thirds of a dollop — of wine at Eva's insistence. On the lawn, Blake pressures his wife to roll out her mental arsenal.

He asks Ressler to supply two pieces of paper and two pens. "Now, talk to her about anything you want, and I'll do the same." Ressler describes an article on partial overlap he has just read. At the same time, Blake babbles in her other ear about the weather, Wagner, how fine a neighbor they've discovered. Eva, a pen per hand, takes simultaneous dictation on separate sheets, without garbling a word. Right-ear stream with left hand and vice versa.

Knocked out already, Ressler learns there is more. "Give her a sentence," Blake urges. "Nice and long." Ressler reaches back, performs a mental feat of his own, and pulls up from God knows where a favorite quote. Flaubert, from days when he could still afford belles lettres: "Some fatal attraction draws me into the abyss of thought, down into those innermost recesses which never cease to fascinate the strong."

Without a pause, Eva responds, "Strong the fascinate to cease never which recesses innermost…." It takes him a moment to figure out what is going on. The whole stream, backwards.

Unbelievable. A living palindromist. "We could use you in codon transcription." For all they know, the gene might be read in either direction, both at once, for that matter. Who knows what golden patterns this woman could mine?

Eva laughs, fetchingly shy again after her bravura feat. "I've already got a job."

"Who could possibly make proper use of you?"

Tooney breaks out laughing. Eva joins him, managing to explain, "I work for the Civil Service. Processing job applications. You two think you have a coding problem on your hands. You ought to see ours."

"Let 'er rip," Blake chuckles. "What's the code for 'Changed Jobs'?"

"Let's see….Applicant Changed Jobs — five point seven E."

"How about 'Retired'?"

"Easy one. That'd be five point eight I."

"Now then. How about illness?"

"Terminal?"

"Heck, why not. Live it up."

"Name your disease."

"Try cancer."

"More specific, please."

"Leukemia."

"We give that a six point six Q."

"Q? How in hell do they get Q from 'leukemia'?"

"My dear husband. There is no wherefore to the Service."

"Radiation sickness?"

"Still in committee. We lump that into seven point oh, your basic 'Deceased.'" The Blakes break off their vaudeville, noticing the unintended effect on the audience. Ressler has gone silent, the glow of the corner streetlight unmistakably glinting off his ambushed cheeks. He feels, for the first time, his mother's status, something in the 6.6 range. She died three years back, while he was in grad school. The details of the woman's decline are intact in memory; only the nightmare of not being able to name what was happening remained lost until this evening, the evening the U.S. fires its first rocket-powered atomic warhead due west of this improvised lawn party, in the empty sands of Nevada.

Only five months between diagnosis and death. He took a leave from studies to go home and sit with her through a pain that she preferred to the alternative bouts of annihilating fatigue. His role was to sit and assure her of the great strides medicine was making at that moment. He would tell her, day after day, as her hips wasted to grotesque ripples, that the most important thing was to fight the malignancy and live for the outside shot. Mind as medicine: no other course. Deny the numbers. Cancer lives for the onset of common sense. Reconcile yourself to it, and it wins.

A nursing more for his sake than the dying woman's, obsessed, all the way up to the final metastasis, with proving that mental function did not altogether dissipate, was not dispersed by illness and treatment. That she was preserved inside somewhere. "Read anything today, Mom?" he would lead. "Well, yes I have," she would answer, with a weak smile hinting at the miracle of deception. He never asked for specifics.

He does not hear the Blakes stop their routine. He is elsewhere, thinking how he used to sit with her on the front porch, just like this, late in the evening, not daring to hold her hand, while she said unexplainable things about the effects of her illness on perception. "Who would believe what this place sounds like? I had no idea nature made so much noise."

She talked for the first time about her father, the third child from the right in front of the shaft entrance in a famous photo of child mine workers. Now Ressler has never harbored closet Lamarckism; social traumas experienced by the forefathers are not visited upon the sons. But his grandfather's life underground left its imprint — the dream of meliorism that child laborers impart rose up from his mother's lungs on the warm tufts of her disease. Suffering, her last looks said to him, must be the precursor to greater things. Every rung goes higher and higher.

She died ten days after his return to school. In a misguided final tribute to her son, she left her body to medical science," meaning, Stuart knew, that third-year premeds lopped her organs off in anatomy lab. Because he never saw her body again, she did not die until this evening, when Evie Blake assigns her a number. He always knew the world would one day be like this: a night of no temperature, sitting outside with no one there any longer to call him in. Free to sit forever in the company of strangers, in the belly of a cold, formless waiting.

The Blakes, seeing they have accidentally sent their host off alone, call it a night and take their leave back to K-53-A. But they read him wrong. Ressler comes back to the lawn party, wanting them to resume the careless evening, extend it, stretch out the mixed blessing of companionship until morning. But searching, he cannot find the pointer to the words "Don't go yet." The Blakes disappear, waving, across the lawn. He cannot even find those two syllables for a departing greeting. Minutes later he remembers it: "Good night." Come back. Good night.

Landscape with Conflagration

I've reached a sticking point in my homework, the background reading that must take me inside the man. Not a barrier to comprehension: I remember, flexing my intellect again this season, that given time, I have the capacity to tackle anything, however formidable. And I have more than enough time — time spreading from sunny sahara mornings alone over onion bagels and oranges to arctic nights, postponing sleep as long as possible, armed with only thick books and a headboard lamp. I've hit a barrier not to comprehension but to credulity. How can an assortment of invisible threads inside one germ cell record and pass along the construction plans of the whole organism, let alone the cell housing the threads themselves? I've grasped the common metaphor: the blueprint gene somehow encodes a syntactic message, an entire encyclopedia of chemical engineering projects. I feel the thrill of attaching abstract gene to physical chromosome. But it remains analogy, lost in intermediary words.

The task Dr. Ressler set himself was merely — and only he could have thought "merely" — to capture the enigma machine that tweaks this chromosomal message into readability. Did he believe that nothing was lost in translation as signals percolated up from molecules in the thread into him, that brain, those limbs, that hurt, alert face? Searching for his own lexicon required faith that the chemical semaphore could serve as its own rosetta, faith that biology too could be revealed through its particulars. Faith that demonstration could replace faith.

It grows like a crystal, this odd synthesis of evolution, chemistry, and faith, spreads in all directions at once, regular but aperiodic. By Ressler's birth, enzymes — catalysts driving the chemical reactions of metabolism — were identified as proteins. The structure of proteins — responsible for everything from the taste of sole to the toughness of a toenail — strikes me as ridiculously simple: linear, crumpled necklaces of organic pearls called amino acids. What's more, the protein necklaces directing all cell processes consist of series of only twenty different amino acid beads.

It seems impossible: twenty can't be sufficient word-hoard to engineer the tens of thousands of complex chemical reactions required to make a thing live. But lying in bed under my arctic nightlight, carrying out the simple arithmetic, I see how the abject simplicity of protein produces more potential than mind can penetrate. A necklace of only two beads, each in one of twenty colors, can assume any of four hundred different combinations. A third bead increases this twenty times — eight thousand possible necklaces. I learn that the average protein necklace floating in the body weighs in at hundreds of beads. At that length, the possible string combinations exceed the printed sentences in man-made creation. Room to grow, in other words.

The protein bead string folds up, forms secondary structures determined by its amino acid sequence. The shape of these fantastic landscapes, fuzz-motes as convoluted as the string is simple, gives them their specific, chemical power. Their jungle of surface protrusions provides — like so many dough forms — niches for other chemicals to assemble and react.

But if these cookie cutters — in countless possible fantastically complex shapes — build the body, what builds the builders? The answer appalls me. The formula for the builder molecules as well as its implementation are contained in another long, linear molecule. This time the beads come in only four colors. It says something about my progress in scientific faith that I accept the calculation showing that the possible combinations in one such foursquare informational molecule exceed the total number of atoms in the universe.

But I hang up on the idea of such a linear molecule encoding a breathing, hoping, straining, failing, aging, dying scientist. I find as I read that I'm in good company. If I still ran the Quote Board, I'd use tomorrow that gem of Einstein's when meeting Morgan and hearing of his project to mechanize biology:

No, this trick won't work— How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?

But I no longer run the Quote Board. I run nothing now except the Jan O'Deigh Continuing Education Project. And for that, I have only more history. When counting aminos fails to put me to sleep, I charm insomnia by reading Beadle and Tatum's 1940 work on the bread mold Neurospora. Only seventeen years old when Ressler got his brainstorm, it must have read like a classic to a student raised on it. While the world once more indulged its favorite occupation, Beadle and Tatum dosed mold with X-rays to induce mutations. Raising thousands of test-tube strains, they produced mutants that could no longer manufacture required nutrients. Mutated chromosomes failed to produce necessary enzymes.

With an excitement that penetrates even the sober journal account, they crossed a mutant that could no longer make enzyme E with its normal counterpart. Half the offspring had the mutation and half did not. Enzyme production precisely mirrored Mendelian inheritance. One gene, one enzyme. Each time I read the conclusion, I hear his perverse question: "What could be simpler?"

A unique gene, coding for a unique enzyme: Cyfer inherited as dogma what actually arose only through recent, bitter debate. The limited informational content of DNA — the four bases adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine — did not seem adequate to build the fantastically varied amino acid necklaces. For some time, the size of DNA was underestimated, and even after the enormous molecular weight was correctly determined, many scientists believed that the four bases followed one another in repeating order. Redundant series carry no more information than a news program repeating, "Earlier today, earlier today__"

DNA was long rejected as the chromosomal message carrier. Some researchers believed that proteins themselves were the master blueprint, even though every protein would require others to build it. Avery blazed the trail out of confusion. His 1944 paper showed that the substance transforming one bacterial strain to another was not protein but DNA. Inheritance was rapidly being reduced from metaphor to physical construct. DNA was a plan that somehow threaded raw amino acid beads into proteins. These protein chains in turn catalyzed all biological process. Cyfer's question — the coding problem — was how a long string of four types of things stood for thousands of shorter, twenty-thing strings.

Before the problem could even be posed, scientists had first to determine a structure for DNA that fit the evidence. The structure fell the year Ressler attained legal adulthood, one of the most celebrated solutions in science. X-ray diffractions of crystalline nucleic acid suggested a helix. The beautiful Chargaff Ratios demanded the amount of adenine equal that of thymine, guanine equal cytosine, and G + A equal C + T. DNA presented too many structural possibilities to be cracked by standard organic analysis. By starting with the constraints in Franklin's and Wilkins's data, Watson and Crick tinkered with cutouts until the shoe dropped. They hit upon the double helix, where complementary base pairs — G pairing always with C, A always with T — form the spiral rungs.

Temperament, coded in long strings of base pairs, plays a big part in any interpretation of data. The full ramifications of the model were not quickly grasped. It followed neatly that chromosomes were just supercoiled filaments of DNA. Mendel's genes were simply sections of chromosome, a length of spiral staircase— say ten thousand base-pair rungs spelling out auburn hair. But using four letters to convey the content of all living things seemed like transmitting every Who's Who of this century in staticky dots and dashes across a copper filament.

How was the message read? How to determine the language of the cipher? Understand that question and I've understood him. Dr. Ressler, receiving intact the work of the structurists, trained his temperament on the smallest end of the genetic spectrum, the connecting link. The task given him was to determine how twin-helical sequences of four bases

strung amino acids into enfolded protein:

… threonine-valine-tryptophan…

Dr. Ressler's question was not primarily cytological or chemical or even genetic, although it was all these. Heredity's big hookup lay in information, pure form. It floated agonizingly close in the air, an all-expenses-paid trip to Stockholm taped to the bottom of some chair in the lecture hall. Yet prestige played no more than ironically in Ressler's mind. His was a drive deeper than recognition, a need to cross that hierarchical border, that edge, that isomorph, that metaphor, to get to the thing itself, to arrive at the enigma machine, reach it on pattern alone, reach down and take into his hands the first word, name it, that string of base-pairs coding for all inheritance, desire, ambition, the naming need itself — first love, forgiveness, frailty.

Canon at the Second

I know that need. It keeps me up late, reading. It ruins the best hours of the day, as I run downstairs every fifteen minutes to check the mail. But no further word from Franklin. Only that northern scene, the lovely, faraway village with the fire forever frozen in gesso, proves to me the man ever existed. The painter known only to him, me, and a dozen experts in esoterica: Herri met de Bles, Frank Todd's coding problem. How to find, in the work of a forgotten artist, evidence of that same message Dr. Ressler looked for, the same link, only from the other end, writ large in the outside world.

Frank's problem from the start was convincing himself that skill of hand and eye was its own best excuse for using it. He was temperamentally incapable of believing his own ingenious proofs. He was already in danger of disappearing before I met him. The pointless proliferation of voices, dispersed over the map, shouting, conjugating, declining, declaring nothing except look at me, look at all this, lost and leading nowhere except to their own noise, led him to a place where I can't trace him.

Already too long out of training, I remember I own a book that might be good for something besides proving that people I once worked with actually liked me. I go to my private reserves and pull out the Times Atlas, goodbye gift from my old life. I flip through the maps and locate the pages corresponding to his landscape: Dinant, the Meuse, Namur province, Wallonia, Belgium. I slip my finger up an inch, over the language line into Flanders:

Leuven, Mechelen, Antwerp, a world away. What does it tell, the geometrical isomorph, the representations drawn impeccably to scale? Does it help to know that Franklin, on 7/6/85, by the postmark, was near the tip of my fingernail?

I need more. I return to the shelves, pull out a bit of esoterica of my own. I fish about in my two-volume historical atlas for that contradiction in terms, the same place at a different time. I find the cartoons — Low Countries, Burgundy, Hapsburg Sphere. I follow the ebb and flow of colored lines, picture Herri moving through this Gobelin tapestry of economic confusion and geopolitics. But I can't recover the place, realize it in imagination. I sidetrack myself on imagining Franker in his self-described liberation of new words. I studied French for four years in school, during which time I never met a native speaker. All my classes were taught in English, and all I can remember is the cheat of making a sound intermediate between "le" and "la" and the insistence of the texts that one uses the formal form with everyone except intimates, small children, and animals.

Yet I must have retained some spark of the secret life of words, Franker's excuse for more study. Because I also remember being able to translate, fluently and without prompting, the one French sentence Dr. Ressler claimed to know. He rolled it out wistfully as early as the second visit I made to their mechanical hideaway, and he repeated it at odd moments in the course of the year I was his friend. Je ne fais aucun mal en restant ici. I do no harm by remaining here.

He claimed only one other standing bit of foreign-language repertoire, Bach's favorite saying: Es muss alles möglich zu machen seyn. All things must be possible. Tenuous assertion at best. Both Dr. Ressler and Todd sacrificed themselves to a corollary translation: All things that are possible are real.