Gold Bug Variations

VII

Breakthroughs in Science

The daily papers have never been kind to his field. They cover the developments well enough, in an Ike's coronary kind of way. They lay out in lay terms the birth pangs of the science, but wind up promising a bevy of mail-order life forms by the end of the decade. The subject matter itself isn't beyond reporters. The logic of inheritance is straightforward. Beadle and Tatum are more coherent than the Mideast. However complex science becomes, it remains at least internally consistent.

The trouble with science journalism lies in time scale. The average news story wraps up in a week to ten days. News confuses significant with novel. I was shocked to discover, at twenty, that news carefully culled not the day's most important events but the most alarming and unusual. Lingering separatist movements are not news, except to today's corpse. Species extinction is too mundane to report. Every "event" in molecular genetics is made out to be a fast-breaking story, conspiring toward an end. A sneak preview of a biological revolution on Monday implies that the derivative consumer good will hit the shelves by week's end.

His science has done its share to aggravate expectations. Genetics has evolved more in the three decades since Ressler worked it than in the previous three millennia. It's easy to think that discoveries will continue to pour out in saturation patterns. But journalism errs in equating development with advance. A new postulate is no more news than a new poem. What news reports as fundamental progress in knowing the world may be only a subtle rearrangement of best analogies.

A new relation is not conquistador's plunder. Science is not about control. That is technology, another urge altogether. The pursuit of living pattern that possessed Ressler has nothing to do with this year's apotheosis of bioengineering. He once remarked that mistaking science for technology deprived the nonscientist of one of the greatest sources of awe, replacing it with diet as filling as Tantalus's fruit. I had only to hear the man talk for fifteen minutes to realize that science had no purpose. The purpose of science, if one must, was the purpose of being alive: not efficiency or mastery, but the revival of appropriate surprise.

Separately, the three of us relearned that truth more times than I thought a body capable. If Dr. Ressler lamented the commercialization of science, he despaired even more over the science of commerce. He told us of legislation that had come before the 85th Congress in the wake of the Civil Rights Bill — the White Coat Ruling. In the few years that it took sponsors to bail out of radio's Official Detective in favor of TV's Name That Tune they'd developed a trick that threatened the public's ability to discriminate. Advertisers found they could dramatically boost sales of just about anything by having a man in glasses and white coat hold it up for view. Weed killer, rubber tires, lipstick: a few Erlenmeyer flasks in the background, and a sales pitch became news.

A well-meaning legislator decided that blind trust was, like Robeson and Oppenheimer, a national security risk. He introduced a measure that would require every televised commercial where someone held up anything that bubbled or doodled anything resembling trig on a chalkboard to bear the caption "A Simulation." The difficulty in the bill lay in the shadiness of implication in the first place. Commercials worked because actors never came out and said, "I'm a scientist." Credentials were left to the audience to infer. If the bill passed, opponents reasoned, any endorsers who donned a smock of any kind would have to prove they weren't simulating. "It's one thing to legislate on poultry, race relations, and atomic energy," Ressler said, with that tightening of mouth muscles that passed for irony. "But legislating inference is another matter. Simulation beats legislation nine falls out of ten."

He remembered the insignificant bill with the precision that locked his half century into his brain. As he tossed off thirty-year-old details with accuracy, I felt I'd gladly suffer aphasia at fifty for a few decades of that memory. "They passed an invitation around Illinois, asking for expert witnesses to fly to Washington. They wanted white coats to sell the bill to the legislators! None of us volunteered, of course. I imagine your generation is too sophisticated to realize what a betrayal of calling it would have been then to attempt to legislate thinking. The bill eventually passed, but did nothing to stop the human mind from reifying every conceivable sales pitch." All things must be possible. And all possible things are real.

It hurt, listening to him, to think he never wrote anything but that little sampler, that one article giving so little glimmer of who he could be in speech. Starting with a Resslerism, I would search for a simulation for my day's quote:

If we saw as much of the world as we do not see, we should be aware, in all probability, of a perpetual multiplication and variation of forms.

I used Montaigne to obliquely acknowledge that Ressler aphorism, from deep in a night's simulated conversation, too disturbing to post publicly as news, about how we differ more from ourselves than we do from one another.

Countercheck Quarrelsome

In weeks, he has struck an acquaintance with everyone on the team. Only Ulrich, like all effective leaders, remains aloof. Strange: Ressler actually enjoys the person he becomes in the company of his colleagues. He drops without thinking into a different personality with each — sardonic father to Lovering's brashness, clowning younger brother to Blake and Eva, sympathetic cousin to Woyty's low-grade paralysis, and child craftsman to Botkin's omnivorous intellect. With Cyfer's last member, Jeanette Koss, he somehow falls into awkward reserve. Not his ordinary, comfortable quiet, but incapacitating self-consciousness. Irritating to him and certainly confusing to the woman, who has gone out of her way to be pleasant.

It isn't her attractiveness that puts him off. Jeanette's features are not the sort that have ever threatened him. Her curves tend toward a topographical fullness he associates with varsity cheerleaders and nursing mothers. Those women who came closest to causing his own college coursework to suffer typically ran toward the homeless waif: You Can Save This Girl or You Can Turn the Page. The taste may be consanguine, but was certainly in place before his mother was reduced to terminal spindliness by her 6.6.

To date, he has chosen to turn the page rather than save, although nights in the bunk in Stadium Terrace, in half-sleep, he regrets not having run the proffered experiment with a meager waif or two. These private nostalgias of desire reassure him that the clumsy cadences he suffers in random lab encounters with Dr. Koss are neither ugly nor unnecessarily indicting. He can't be hot for her. Not in so many words.

Yet it burns him to know nothing, to be in the dark about her except for the public-domain data that she is married and a few years his senior. He spends the first weekend in September raking up something substantive on her. Pickings are slim. He begs the superannuated department secretary on invented pretext to let him browse the staff files, but she will release no information without triplicate request from God.

He runs into Dr. Koss in the staff lunchroom. She smiles awkwardly at him over her coffee cup. "Keeping the head dry?" To collect himself, he smiles back, pretends to be looking for someone, and leaves. Shortly after, at a colloquium where she delivers a lucid contribution on punctuation theory, he thinks to address her in the hall, ask for clarification. But he falls back instead on skepticism: she could reveal nothing that experiment wouldn't expose more fully. He collars Blake, the closest thing he has to a confidant in the Midwest. "Dr. Toon. What do you make of the Koss comma-free code?"

"First-rate," Blake answers, grinning quizzically. "You?"

Too obvious an audit trail. Ressler swears off direct questioning and takes to the stacks. By summer's end, he has gotten adept at caterwauling down the catwalks, and the stink of binding paste no longer distracts him. He digs up her dissertation: "Simple Non-pathogenic Autosomal Mutations." He settles in for an evening with her apprentice piece. The woman describes some interesting mutagen manipulation. But the paper, while professional, contains little further interest beyond her education (Wesleyan and Cornell) and date of birth, February 14, 1929—St. Valentine's Day massacre.

A thorough search of the journals turns up references to her as coauthor on those Illinois publications Ressler already read before hitting campus. He falls back on the biographical compilations in the Reference Room, but turns up only her sterile university profile. By chance, he finds a mention of her husband in the Local Interest area: a praise-laden entry on Koss, Herbert, in a chapbook, Who's Who Around and About C-U.

The fellow is a chemical engineer, a leader in local food technology. His chief contribution to the spiral of ingestibility: a superior method of getting the barbecue powder to stick to potato chips. The chapbook reports his guarded optimism on work toward a chip that will always come out of the bag intact. Their typical dinner conversation is too bizarre to consider. Battle Creek, the spoonful of frozen OJ, will never be the same.

Printed matter alone will not solve his Koss-word puzzle. As a result of killing a day and a half reading her thesis, he is unprepared to report on the article he's been assigned for the next Blue Sky. Ulrich calls on him to deliver. Ressler sputters; for the first time ever — as far back as first grade, when his teacher let him take over her abortive lesson on the language of bee dancing — he has come to class unprepared. He can admit to not having read the article, blowing his short-term credibility and profiting the team nothing. Or, knowing what he does about the authors' previously published research, the state of the art, and the article abstract, he can extrapolate a reasonable opinion. Not intellectual fraud, just the increasingly necessary short cut up the print mountain.

In the critical minute under the arc lights, Ressler decides that, Schrödinger notwithstanding, not talking about what he can't know doesn't in this instance preclude his talking about what he doesn't. He'll take a closer look at the article later that afternoon; if it should turn out that he's off base, he can give out his reconsidered opinion at the next session. Science is about reconsidering, revising one's position in the light of more light. He takes a breath. The description comes out easier than he thought. "I would say, tentatively, that we don't have to concern ourselves too much here with the Litner group's angle. It's ingenious in making the magic numbers fit; they get twenty out of four all right, but___ Well, I think they may be overlooking a few stereochemical constraints."

"For instance?" Ulrich looks up from scribbling, suddenly interested, choosing the worst possible moment to sit up and take notice. That's why Ulrich's in charge. Not because of the importance of his early work, but because of his intellectual aggression. Attentive, noisy, blunt: all dominant genes. The team leader hasn't shown half so much interest in Ressler's rate experiment as he shows in this almost irrelevant paper.

Ressler goes into a controlled stall. "I'd like another look at the piece before I commit, but—" The whole team's attention is now alerted by that most expressive musical device, the rest. "Well, for instance… the article seems to me to be sidetracked on a code that isn't even colinear."

"Really?" An unexpected vocal timbre chimes in. "That's not how I read the principal thrust at all." A voice as mellifluous as a mortician's. He turns from his lame chalkboard illustration to see who could be so intent on sautéing him in public. The ID is more confirmation than discovery.

"Of course, if Dr. Koss can translate Litner's prose back into English, she's a better man than I."

The room, at a cusp of embarrassment, finds outlet in that remnant of violence, laughter. Lovering, nervous as the day Ulrich threw Salk in his stigmata, leads the way, letting loose a full-blooded cackle. Toveh Botkin, on the other hand, purses the notch above her lip crease, grim but forgiving the entire catalog of human failings. The deep-set, brown amusement of Dr. Koss's eyes flashes explicit warning: forced the issue? Gotten what you want?

Despite narrow escape, the incident humiliates him. In a few sentences, he has fallen monumentally in his own sight, if not in peer estimation. He wants only to quit this place, escape everyone, go punish himself. Succumbed to ridiculous, avoidable boy's self-deception. It disgusts him to replay the incident. Shame is not acid enough to eradicate it. Work is ruined for the remainder of the day. He smells his own unmistakable animal odor. Yes, those most capable of making some noise in the world are precisely those with the greatest capacity for shrugging off sin, for distributing their felonies sympathetically across the whole hinged circumstance of shameful existence. But in the face of his own weakness, he cannot see how to do it. The shame of false witness mars his perfect record, debases his currency. Misrepresentation of the facts: no more forgivable for being mundane. An indelible blot on the transcript: a Fail, invalidating all good faith.

Even by evening, he cannot shake the afternoon libel. He probes the ugly truth compulsively, unable to keep from picking at the wound. Far from salved by knowing how little consequence his minor lie carries, he is doubly appalled by how little it took to make him lose his head. How little it would have taken to come clean, to ask for an absolution it would now shame him worse to go after.

Forgiveness requires not that he forget the crime but that he remember every other shame from his swelling past: the shoplifted library book, the violated confidence of a friend, the broken crockery deceptively reassembled and left to break again at the next, innocent touch. Seamy little mazes of shame, not even respectably bourgeois, more disgusting for their avoidable pettiness. He nurses the catalog, above all, this afternoon's grubby appendix. Contemptible desire to represent himself well. How much easier it would be to preempt the lie, come clean. And yet — the heart of the shame — he still could not, even now, if the whole scenario were his to correct, bring himself to reveal the real reason for his lack of preparation: I was digging up the goods on Mrs. Koss. Not even a matter of momentarily fouling the facts. He can't even bring himself to look at his motive in mucking about, much less confess it to others in good faith. He has shit on the truth.

An even more indicting memory reveals his betrayal. He recalls, with sick precision, that day almost twenty years ago: first landmark of childhood, his seventh birthday. He awoke that morning with excitement that doubled when his father explained that his present would arrive by parcel express. His parents' anxiety outstripped his own. Then, producing emotion difficult for a seven-year-old to grasp — awe, disappointment, alarm, thrill, and, even then, shame — the ruinously expensive set of encyclopedias arrived.

Stuart, with child's intuition, knew at once his parents' sacrifice in securing this gift. He understood the enormity the minute the delivery man arrived at the flat with four unliftable cases. He wanted to plead with them, "Oh, no, no thank you. You mustn't." Thirty inexhaustible volumes, a yearbook, and an index. His father calls to him in a voice that never rid itself of the scratch of factories, "Look here, the Ivory Coast. Isaac Newton. Phloem and Xylem. Everything worth knowing, in these pages. Alphabetical, too." Mother, father, and he sit together on the floor and unpack the treasure cases, poring over exotic entries the rest of the afternoon, the rest of remembered childhood.

An earlier edition had been heavily discounted, but Stuart's father had resolved on the most recent human understanding or none at all. His father never used the incurred debt, the years of resulting belt-tightening, against the boy. Stuart never gave him cause. The spines on every volume were broken within two years. The atlas of creases that formed along the binding — proof that the boy's precocity exceeded even his parents' guess — became his father's favorite feature of the set. He would run his fingers down the prematurely worn bindings on domestic evenings, saying, "It's all in there. Everything we've put together. Only a matter of learning how to get to it."

This is the ingenuous faith in accountability that Ressler has betrayed. For what? To keep himself from looking foolish in front of a woman for whom he cannot even plead the aberration of desire. Spirit-numbing memories follow one on another until he resurrects the summit agony. He was then twelve; the folks, years after purchase, still paying off the last encyclopedia installment. They had moved to Pittsburgh, "relocated," Dad explained, "for the War Effort." They were vacationing, camping in Maine, driving up the coast, when his father, at the wheel, in the middle of "Does Your Mother Know You're Out, Cecilia," slumped over in his seat. Stuart thought it a joke, laughed at the old man's slapstick.

But his father had suffered a massive myocardial infarction. Stuart's mother went instantly to pieces, as she could be counted on to do in the pinch of horror, the descent of real event. His father superhumanly managed to guide the car to the roadside. Stuart's mother could not have driven then even if she'd had a license. They were stranded in a remote stretch; hours might pass before they could flag a passerby. It fell to the twelve-year-old to drive them to hospital, while his mother flailed at her man's chest in a pointless effort to revive him.

From long afternoons browsing the encyclopedia paragraphs and plates, Stuart knew that the clutch was on the left and the accelerator on the right. Miraculously, from recall, he taught himself how to drive, covering the fifty miles to the hospital in two hours. Next to him on the front seat his mother huddled over the body, a perfect parody of the Michelangelo Pietà illustrating the article on Classical Sculpture. All the while, his father stupidly tried to get out last advice for the boy. Stuart repeatedly shouted at him to shut up, to save his strength.

He knows now what the man killed himself trying unsuccessfully to get out: How wonderful, to have had a child who might add to the endeavor. What a piece of work it all was. No sacrifice at all! Thirty volumes, a supplement, and an index. And all alphabetical.

This is what he's perjured. The world has grown another summer evening, one that seems the end of all summer evenings. He puts the Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra on the grinder. But neither the musical primer nor Olga's spinning convey anything to his leaden ear. Music fails him at the moment when he needs its compassion most. Autumn is here, an autumn that will spell the end of his front-lawn vigils. In town over two months; the pieces that hung so tantalizingly close to falling in place are farther now from linking than the day he arrived.

Already smelling the mixture of cold air and burning leaves that will mark the change of seasons, Ressler assigns himself penance, the only possible contrition. If one, clean, unimpeachable nugget lies anywhere within his ability to explicate, he will surrender it to Cyfer. First, the busywork rate experiment Ulrich has assigned him. Then, if chance favors, the simple laboratory technique for determining codon assignments, the leverage so agonizingly close that he can close his eyes and see it in the phosphene tracers on his lids. And not one discovery will be his.

However close he feels, he may never be any closer to the method than he is now, no closer than the baying kitchen mutt to the invading moon. His only means, not of adding his name to the volumes but of partially recovering perjured good faith, lies in returning to the puzzle, redoubling his efforts with focus so intense as to shame all effort he has yet made. He must place himself inside the isolated problem, feel its full, unrelenting force, cut himself off from rest, attach himself to the chance of not coming out, of never emerging from the search.

Another summer evening's knock at the door and Ressler assumes it is Tooney and Eva, through empathy of unpremeditated friendship, knowing to come and sit with him in his moment. The knock is them; humans are the only species that condition after one event. He stands, ready for companionship. He opens the door, jokingly asking Eva, "So what's the code for sickle-cell anemia?"

But it is not Blake or his remarkable Civil Service wife. In the doorframe stands the woman who set off this string of self-Contempt. Out where the welcome mat should be, incomprehensible, stands short-sleeved, full-bodiced Dr. Koss.

Facts on File

I believe it because it's absurd: the entire Britannica—not to mention the stacks of my old branch as well as the entire Library of Congress — can in theory be encoded by a single notch on a rod. The whole human reservoir can be condensed to a single information-bearing groove with no loss of meaning. A trillion pages, the complete journey from Aardvark to Zygote and back, enpacked, retrievable, in a flick of a nick on a stick.

No high tech, no microengraving or fantastic manipulation of silicon. Just a twig, a pocket knife, and a grade-school ability with numbers. Any text, however long and complex, is a linear stream of characters. Letters, punctuation marks, typograhic symbols: fewer than a hundred types. Each of these hundred can be replaced by a unique three-digit number. Simple substitution cipher, the sort even small children use for urgent communications. Montaigne's brutal truth "If we saw as much of the world as we do not see…" becomes 131 006 222 023 005 222 019 001 023 222 001 019 222…

So far, even the mathless boy I loved with all my plaintext heart could take this message and, in minutes, reverse-engineer the meaning from the emotionless series. Digitization is now a commonplace, long since the stuff of grocery-line conversation. As goes Montaigne, so goes the whole Britannica: the entire set now represented by a huge stream of codon digits, a giant, linear, ma-cromolecular, information-rich number.

Now the remarkable twist. If I run the triplets together and put a decimal point in front of the number, the result is a rational fraction running to millions of decimal places. But a fraction represents, and is represented by, a portion of any distance, say from one end of a stick to the other. My Montaigne number, 131006222023005222019001023222001019222…, along with my complete card box of quotes of the day for every day of the year attached to its tail, can now be committed to infinitesimally compact storage. I can incorporate my box of sayings in a discrete point a little farther than 13/100 of the way from tip to base. I might look at the mark from time to time, delighting in knowing that it encased the cycle of every famous saying ever to flesh out my calendar.

Alien, unnatural, counterintuitive. But analogous simplicity encodes a far more complex catalog. The map key, the compression that put life's Britannica, information intact, squarely in the palm of Ressler's hand, sweetly resembles that long, linear decimal.

Ressler himself worked out the math back in 1954, when the cell's translation game was fast becoming obvious. The math itself was easy: anyone with a little algebra could do it. DNA — a long, irregular decimal with A, T, G, and C as digits — consisted of innumerable bases lying in line on the inside twist of the helix. He had first to determine the width of the coding unit— how many digits of A, T, G, and C stood for one amino acid. This codon obviously had to be wider than one base. Codons one base wide could stand for only four different amino acids, and proteins required twenty. Two-base width allowed sixteen different codons:

AA AT AG AC TA TT TG TC GA GT GG GC CA CT CG CC

A vocabulary of sixteen was still four words shorter than required. Three successive rungs of the DNA ladder — sixty-four different combinations — at last produced enough codons to name all twenty aminos, with enough left over for start and stop codes or any other special symbols that protein-building might require. The triplet codon suffered an embarrassment of riches: forty-four more codons than amino acids. What to do with the extras became the sixty-four-codon-dollar question. More than one codon might stand for the same amino acid. Such code degeneracy might even carry potential survival value, as Ressler intuited early on.

In 1957, researchers learned how much easier it was to encode the Britannica than to experimentally extract from a given notched stick the particular Britannica it encoded. The giant informational molecule was the protein-constructing blueprint. The DNA base-pair sequences mapped out enzyme polypeptide chains. Ressler needed only intercept the map key. The unit word was a clump of at least three bases running along the half-DNA helix. No evidence strictly ruled out a larger codon, but most researchers applied the rule of parsimony. The next step was to determine exactly which triplet codon linked which amino acid to the enzyme under construction. Pure pattern-breaking attracted the lion's share of fascination: secret-message reading, ingenuity impeded by no encumbrance greater than paper and pencil.

The fearful symmetry of this structure gave a first glimpse of living logic. Ressler described to us the days on the threshold, poised on the brink of cracking the supreme philosophical crime novel. His voice rarely straying over the surrounding machine hum, he imparted his urgency for resolution. He compared his anxiety then to that anecdote about Bach entering a party where the harpsichordist broke off in terror at his arrival. The composer had to rush past his host to resolve the suspension with appropriate cadence before making his formal greeting.

"There had to be a surprising aha, a way we could get the cell to crack the code for us. That was my bias. It's pure torment to know that revolutionary, self-evident connections might be anywhere but here. We had no idea if a reliable method for determining codon assignments even existed. Some of us tried to tackle the problem theoretically, in ignorance of the data. On the other side of the tracks, retort heaters went about gathering data without grasping the formal problem. Like Brussels, Balzano: traffic signs so bilingually cluttered that neither camp could read them. My only advantage was that, fresh from school, I spoke just enough of both to put together something dangerous." He smiled weakly, at all that fluency hadn't prepared him for.

He told the story of a friend's short-lived glory. "Tooney Blake had been killing fifteen minutes before teaching his seminar. Doodling, he stumbled onto a stunning twist. How many one-base triplets were there? Four: AAA, CCC, GGG, and TTT. How many had only two identical bases? Four doubles times three in the last slot makes twelve. Triplets of three different bases produced four more combinations, ignoring order. He did the sum a dozen times: four plus twelve plus four, refusing to believe it added up to the magic number.

"Our chief immediately put him up for promotion. Others told him to save his scrap of work paper. Even interest in his piano playing revived. We were all so intoxicated by the dead-on simple fit that we overlooked, for weeks, the fact that Toon-ey's model treated the codons AGG, GAG, and GGA identically. At last one of us came to his senses and pointed out that such codons could not possibly be read the same. Tooney took the setback in stride, but others wanted to pursue the prettiness, even in the face of evidence."

Parsing was all-important. If the codons in the string

ACGGATCTAGACCT…

did not overlap, then the triplets separated:

ACG GAT CTA GAC…

But if every codon shared two bases with each neighbor, the same string would group into entirely different words:

ACG CGG GGA GAT ATC TCT CTA TAG…

This Ml overlap packed more information into each DNA half-strand but attached restrictions on the ordering of code words. The beauty of Gamow's diamond code lent early favor to overlap models. When his scheme failed to comply with experiment, Ga-mow withdrew it but suggested another full overlap in its place. But by 1957, such schemes had been all but discarded. In full overlap, every individual base appears in two adjacent codons:

CGAT → CGA GAT → x-y

A mutation altering the single base G would change both codon words, and thus both amino acids x and y in the synthesized enzyme. Even single mutations would then produce at least two amino acid divergences. Yet Ingram's famous sickle-cell hemoglobin structure differed from normal hemoglobin by only one amino. This argument damning full overlap contained the germ of an elegant and overlooked idea. A mutation, traced from nucleic acid to that text's observable protein translation, might be the leverage needed to manufacture a rosetta. The code could be cracked by tracing how it read its message's errors. One of the most powerful ideas in the infant science: the power of the traceable, testable blit. If the string itself was too complex to read, a small mistake in it might nevertheless show up as a discernible, translated difference.

Error lay at the source of all change, all species experiment. It was the author of all the still emerging, undesignable variations on life. Ressler's gift lay in understanding that he stood on the threshold not just of uniting chemistry with inheritance, but of joining these both to the grandiose Darwinian mutation. Tiny, cumulated, field-tested errors were all that accounted for the change from one species to another — a half-dozen chromosomal inversions between us and the nearest ape. Advance by analogy: induce a small alteration, note what value the process assigns that one ripple. The most baldly obvious idea imaginable. Yet as that most quotable biologist J. B. S. Haldane, instrumental in linking population genetics to evolution, who attributed all sonnet-writing to the microscopic speck of sex chromosome, once said: "It is, in my opinion, worth while devoting some energy to proving the obvious."

Today in History

Although I still lived in the height of summer, the days had already gone into gradual decline, at first unfelt, then undeniable, shuttling back to their opposite number. The longest day of the year is also the day diminishing sets in. In 1983, I lagged behind the official sunset posted in the almanac. As late as September, I felt the expectation brought on by sky remaining light late into evening.

Like the student who in the course of a perfunctory thesis finds a remarkable, forgotten book, I took possession of my discovery. Dr. Ressler worked his way into my daily conversation. In a slow period at the Reference Desk, I asked my colleague Mr. Scott what he knew about mutation dating. He had a master's in anthro, which suddenly seemed to me a half brother to genetics by incest. He put his fatherly arm around me and said, "Dear, I'm afraid M.S. in my case stands for Mostly Sketchy." He proposed that general imbecility might be reduced if people had to renew their diplomas the way they had to renew driver's licenses. "It wouldn't make anybody smarter. But it might slow the nonsense glut."

Not even Mr. Scott's cynicism checked my new rhythm. For events, I turned with increasing frequency to breakthroughs in science. The Question Board tracked an influx of interest in patented life. An anonymous submission of a simple penny-flipping brain teaser launched me into an aside on evolutionary statistics. A question about regional dialect differences between sodas, tonics, floats, milk shakes, frappes, jimmies, and sprinkles led me into linguistic drift and a sketch of the Sapir/Whorf hypothesis that regional word-tools predispose ways of thought.

I'd caught a salubrious dose of curiosity about the live-in puzzle from nothing more than meeting a man who had retreated from it. I must have been waiting for the slightest push, for when it came, I jumped. A dozen visits to the night hermitage and the human program took on conspiratorial beauty. The science of inherited characteristics was only my jumping-off metaphor, an entree into what until then had been neutral material. I felt the air of a new planet, the hint of unexpected links leading somewhere, things about to be revealed. I shed the curatorial, began to sense the impenetrable mechanism of mystery. Plainly put, when I woke up each morning, I knew where I wanted to be.

I had no idea whether my enthusiasm for their company was returned any way but politely. I only knew that when I visited MOL, in the presence of those two, I discovered my own powers of talk, undetected all these years. Real work was still in front of me. I had been only been resting, gathering strength for an act of connection about to become clear.

The rush of anticipation of those days lent even the most prosaic routine an edge I had forgotten. My exhilaration began to overstep propriety, at least by librarian's standards. In answering a three-by-five barely able to mask its terror about whether "secular humanism" wasn't a textbook-poisoning of the six-day wonder, I summarized the Supreme Court majority opinion, followed with Religio Medici, the Doctor's religion, and wound up with Haldane: asked what his work in life science had taught him about God, he'd replied that the Creator showed an inordinate fondness for beetles.

I received a formal reprimand. Unable to take the matter seriously, I replied that my answer contained no intended cheek. I was notified by committee that nihilism was out of line. I couldn't believe my ears. Haldane's beetle sass, so far from the opposite of nihilism, reveled in the force and grandeur of accidental creation, a creation following rules more remarkable than we ever assigned any Maker. The incident blew over, leaving invisible scar tissue; the hurt of misconstrual left me a little more eager for that somewhere else that MOL began to open up for me.

Within a few weeks I became a fixture in the deserted office suite. In the first throes of addiction, I saw that converted warehouse as the last endangered habitat left in my part of the world. Magic visits left me impatient when I wasn't there. And when I was, the lost digital domain filled me with anticipation. Something was at last about to happen. Something not in the least expected.

Inexplicable: how a room of indifferently calculating machines and two men on the beau geste shift keeping watch over nocturnal computations could stir in me anticipation profound enough to derail a life that had worked comfortably for years. I didn't know what reservoir they tapped in me, what primitive string vibrated in sympathetic resonance. And I didn't care to know.

There was the obvious explanation, of course. But an objective female jury would waffle between Todd and Tuckwell for raw desirability. Todd had the undeniable advantage of being new: his hair fell an unusual way across his temples, and I could watch for hours while his eyes modulated. Even level-headed women are programmed to spread themselves through every available backwater of the gene pool. At thirty, though, lust is no longer the giddy-maker it once was. Hormones will have the upper hand over me until their manufacture stops. But Todd's appeal — the reason I began to watch the library clock — was something else as well. From the moment I arrived at the MOL intercom to be buzzed in, he would pay steady flirtation. "What did we answer today? Wait, let me guess: the name for the plastic end-seals on shoe laces. No, no: how many wheelbarrows of Weimar marks it took to buy a loaf of bread." Tuckwell's manic humor made me laugh out loud. Todd's jokes, always sotto voce, made me ache with wanting.

He ran a continuous interrogation; I stood between him and the world. Frank's questions had nothing to do with empirical fact. His were amorphous, soft around the edges. We would sit in the corporate cafeteria while he, with a favorite skillet ported from his apartment, grilled an omelette with mace and cardamom for 9:00 p.m. early brunch. Out of the blue, he would ask, "Did you get along well with your parents?"

I'd do my best to look abashed, but he refused to let me off. Whether I answered in earnest or replied, "What's it to ya, Bud?" he would smile, ply me with requests for intimate details, and then reveal the hidden association. "These eggs, this aroma: my father's Saturday-morning ritual. Complex man, my father. Invested thirty-two hundred dollars — half his life's savings — when I was born, so there'd be something to send me to college on. When I came of age, through amazing business acumen, he had nursed the investment to a grand total of twenty-nine hundred dollars. Every Saturday of conscious existence, he woke us up with the aroma of omelette. All we need is a little Coleman Hawkins. Loved music, my father. Brought me up to play the accordion. 'You can always make a living with one of these.'" Then, quick key change: "Could you fall for a man who played the accordion in his youth?"

The hopeless second question was indistinguishable from the misplaced, expansive first. He did not ask whether / could fall for him. He asked me to savor a sad hypothetical, a current of circumstantial strangeness. He carried on like this — questions, stories, self-absorbed silences — nothing to lose and everything to gain; pushing past the normal politeness of terms. His constant word-wayfaring was all the more romantic because it never struck him as anything but ordinary. He read wildly, at random. Dostoyevsky one weekend and Little Women the next. "Have you read this? God, it's beautiful! Let me read you one passage." And one passage would inevitably grow into a chapter and more, Todd reading on expressively, obliviously, for forty minutes, stopping only to feed a punched-card deck into the hopper. I didn't mind; I could spend all evening watching the further hope and hurt that all manner of words registered in his reading face. I had forgotten how one could live on just words.

Manhattan On-Line was my enclave, safe haven in the middle of nowhere. I could walk into the warehouse, summon the rickety, trapezoidal elevator, ride to an upper room where all the windows were silvered over, showing nothing of the outside but a crystal diffraction pattern of night lights — the sparkle of Whistler's nocturne. To drop out of the inescapable city from a trapdoor in its middle was like discovering a geothermal jungle at the pole that had somehow evaded all the search algorithms of man, even the ridiculously detailed eye-in-the-sky satellite maps.

MOL took me temporarily through the forgotten gate to a platform outside, a fulcrum. Todd became an oasis of companionship, refuting and strange. His thought was profoundly different, but not so foreign that I required an interpreter. He was capable of endless inventive talk about any subject. "You know what Nietzsche says? He says, 'Oy, this headache!' No, really. He says: if two people are going to get married, they ought above all to be able to talk well to one another. Because everything else disappears."

But Tuckwell and I could talk too, before I killed our conversation. Keith was very bright, peripherally alert. If he had lost the ability to surprise me, he could still keep me honest. But his job, his view of people, his life in the city had cut a rift between us, a gulf of getting and spending. Tuckwell was an adman, I a librarian. Should never have happened In the first place. However implausibly long our contract had lasted, all I had left to give Tuckwell was my departure. But on ambivalent days, when I remembered the woo we two too had started with, even that idea seemed rationalization.

The man I lived with, well-adjusted ambassador of urban neu-roticism, used sardonic salesmanship to rouge the bruise of living here. Todd, Keith's maladjusted obverse, was sick at heart from believing that men could live in this grisly grid system as they once lived in Bruges. And yet that sad, protective urge — his coming to me to save a man already beyond repair — drew me out. I thought — incredible vanity! — I might keep him company.

"So what do all these boxes do?" I asked one night after we had solved the crossword together. We had been sitting for some time in the hum that passed for silence when I realized I still didn't know what all the equipment was.

Todd looked affectionately around the room. "My babies? Bookkeeping, mainly. Hey. Might that be the only word in English with three consecutive double letters?"

"How should I know? Stick to the point." But he was already on the phone to Dr. Ressler in the control room. Todd waved to his superior, although we could not see through the one-way glass whether the other waved back.

"The professor'll write a search routine for other triple doubles and run it on the dictionary file. Where were we?"

'Tour babies."

"I call them that? Perverse. In any case, we, if I can use first person plural for a group I've only seen assembled once in my life, are what are obnoxiously called Information Brokers. A fuzzy concept. Close as I can tell, it means we provide data and services to other folks — some permanent clients, some steady customers, and a few one-shot users. I'm forbidden by Scout's honor to tell you their names, but I could spell out initials. Alternately, you could infer them through Twenty Questions."

"That's OK. I get the idea. What data do you sell?"

"Who wants to know?" He looked around furtively. "Well, we have two general categories up for auction. First, the standard numbers racket. Big-time data processing. Receivables, Payables, Ledgers, and Payrolls for a dozen credit unions, even a state office." I gathered this was the daily, repetitive processing that made up the bulk of his evening. "Second, the piece sales. Our list-crunching spins off information that either these clients, or others by the same name, are willing to spend major world currencies for. Anything from mailing lists to—" He shrugged, suggesting that no enumeration could catch all the categories, cross-references, or calculations someone somewhere might find useful.

"The truth is, I'm not supposed to know myself who we render what services to. This whole outfit is run on distributed ignorance. A little like civics. Day and night shifts work in separate memory partitions. Analysts aren't allowed in programmers' area. Programmers are locked out of Operations. The hardware guys are not permitted in the listings library. The software guys can't touch the machines. As an Operator, I'm not even supposed to know how to program. Barefoot, preggers, and harmless. But the professor has taught me a little." His face reflected that truism about the danger of a little knowledge. "COBOL's a piece of cake. No conjugations, no cases, no inflections. Fortunately for me, I didn't mention language skills on my application."

"Officially, then, what do you do?"

"As little as possible, as you must have noticed." He took me on a second tour, one that made more sense to me now that I had visited the place a few times. "Think of us as pure functionaries. Wednesday's core routine never changes from week to week. We check the chart, any special jobs left by the day shift, drop the right card deck in the hopper, answer the questions on the screen___" He smiled empathetically. "At certain places during the run, we have to change the printer to multipart or forms. You know all those financial statements you get every day instead of letters from friends? Well, now you can think of them as personal communiques." I wanted all of a sudden to wrap him in my arms, but because we had not yet jumped that threshold, I contented myself with pinching his shoulder.

"Then, we have to swap out packs on the drive spindles." He let me have another look into the locked bakery of magnetic layer cakes. "Each of these contains a whole shelf full of your pitiful excuse for a library. A group of programs or a set of data files. 'The Clients.' A hundred thousand names, but it's easy to fall into the singular. 'Put that Client up on spindle three.' Almost as ridiculous as using 'Washington' or 'Moscow' to stand for a quarter billion."

Nor was metonymy his only professional figure of speech. He called up files, spoke to the console, shook hands with peripherals, woke or retired a system partition. Programs ran and processors crunched. Names were fields and fields made up records and records were data and data came in streams, packets, or blocks. An unassuming word like "overlay" served as noun, verb, adjective, adverb, and probably preposition on a good day. The whole sport made Shakespeare's functional shifts seem like small-time word processing. Up time and down time, hot, warm, and cold boots, and the apocalyptic-sounding full system crash.

"If the runner stumbles or falls… then the fun starts. We're just supposed to check the hardware and resubmit the aborted job. If it aborts again, and we're sure it's not a paper jam or the wrong pack or something equally imbecilic, we're supposed to dial the field service men — the Green Berets. Big salaries, twenty-four-hour beepers. But those guys are obnoxious, and in hexadecimal to boot. So Dr. Ressler and I have gone in for a little underground education in differential diagnosis.

"Every job we submit, every command we issue, is written into a console log. Fortunately, nobody reads them. They hang in the listings library, gathering digital dust. If anybody took half a look at some of the operations we've performed to keep things running at night, we'd be in a heap of hot floppies." He shrugged. "I work. I follow the list, the flowchart. The key to the entire process, from beginning to end, even the exception handling is specifiable by exact rules. One need only know the context. Not unlike choreography, I suppose. 'Two pas-de-bourrées, a ball-change.' But the bit of chenille fluff in the chorus never gets to see what all that spinning is all about. It'll be Robo City in here in another few years," he said, with serve-them-right enthusiasm at the prospect. "The only thing that's prevented their introduction until now is the superstition that humans are still the only thing capable of surviving the system crash. Also, the Doctor and I are still cheaper, for the time being."

We sat in front of the console and stared at the equipment, now completely changed. The phone rang, disturbing the empty hiss. I thought: Here is one of the few places where a phone call late at night doesn't automatically mean someone has died. Todd answered. "That was Dr. Ressler. 'Bookkeeper' is unique. And so, my friend, is your face." I smiled, already skilled at letting his moments of confrontatory zeal fall away without crisis. "What do I do for a living? I'm not sure the question has an answer anymore. Everyone, no matter what he does, is kept in the dark about the clients."

This was the moment of expansiveness that brought me compulsively to Manhattan On-Line to sit with this stranger after my own shift was over. "Do you know Ben Shahn's great answer to that question? I take a guilty pleasure in the man's paintings, knowing his whole pastel, representational aesthetic has been on the outs for a decade. But his essays need no excuse. He tells a story of an itinerant wanderer traveling over country roads in thirteenth-century France who comes across a man exhaustedly pushing a wheelbarrow full of rubble. He asks what the man is doing. 'God only knows. I push these damn stones around from sunup to sundown, and in return, they pay me barely enough to keep a roof over my head.'

"Farther down the road, the traveler meets another man, just as exhausted, pushing another filled barrow. In reply to the same question, the second man says, 'I was out of work for a long time. My wife and children were starving. Now I have this. It's killing, but I'm grateftil for it all the same.'

"Just before nightfall, the traveler meets a third exploited stone-hauler. When asked what he is doing, the fellow replies, 'I'm building Chartres Cathedral.""

Home Fires

We weren't involved. I simply wanted to spend my free minutes in Franklin's company. Sitting with him while he worked felt like repatriation. Franklin, remarkably, found nothing unusual in my overnight fixation with this place. He treated both my forwardness and reserve with the same easy touch. His intimacy could go on at arm's length forever.

I felt so awake, so ready to resurrect old steps and learn new ones I'd given up on. Remorse only came when I felt how blameless I was feeling. Guilt worked its way in, however. Romance at thirty is shot through with ambivalence. I was too old to think that my liberating happiness with Todd justified putting Keithy to the torch. The pleasure I felt in Frank's company was already compromised, and I could calculate no future payoff worth the surcharge needed to reach it. But bad conscience is one of those parasites that makes its host hungrier.

The evenings when I took the detour home produced a chunk of hours I had to account for. Tuckwell's and my relationship always pretended to place no bind on one another. But even Keith's cultivated obliviousness soon gave in to curiosity. For a while I got by on transparent excuses. The irregularity of my work covered somewhat, made Keith lose track of when I would ordinarily have come home.

Hard to confess anything when I had nothing yet to confess. I had no hope of explaining to Keith a fascination I didn't understand myself. Keeping quiet, on the other hand, was evasion, and I never could skulk for long. Crawling into bed one night after my embarrassingly late return, Keith and I outdoing the other in liberal tolerance, I resolved to come clean, although I still didn't know what that meant. Copying Todd's blunt trust in words, I stoked up to make a clean break. "I've made a few friends." I thought once I got going, I could imitate Frank's easy jig. But after those six quavers, I softened the contour of the line. "Eccentrics," I added, choosing the perfect word to render them harmless. It suddenly seemed self-indulgent to concern Tuckwell with exaggeration.

My time with Keith, if increasingly infringed on, remained unchanged in all respects but the important one. We still lazed together in the front room with the panoramic vista over the river. We still watched the nightly news together. We still needled one another with need. One early September evening, out of remorse and nostalgic love, I decided to stay home. Tuckwell lay spread across the floor with a portfolio, testing out jingles on me while I did my next day's homework. Keith was building a truly bizarre strategy for selling microwave gourmet meals, using an ad I had discovered in the September 18, 1939, issue of Time: "Hitler Threatens Europe — but Betty Havens's Husband's Boss Is Coming to Dinner and That's What Really Counts." I had shown it to him to make him laugh, something I'd done precious little of lately. But he'd latched onto it as the perfect piece of camp with which to run a retro sales pitch. "Sick sells," he lay on his back repeating. "Not a pretty fact. But then, persuasion is not a pretty business."

I wrapped up a few loose questions. I'd chosen, for tomorrow's event, the September 3 in that year when there was no September 3: in 1752, when Britain and colonies at last adopted the Gregorian calendar. By official decree, September 3 became September 14— correcting the eleven-day disparity that had accumulated between man-made time and the seasons. As had happened elsewhere in Europe as days disappeared into nothing, the reform was met by rioting. People's already too-short lives were cheated of yet another eleven days: vanished anniversaries, lost evenings at the pub, almost a dozen nights of potential pleasure. Paid by the hour but debited by the month, tenants paid thirty days of rent on nineteen.

The nightly news was over, the set turned off, but the evening's sound track — Bartok's Piano Music for Children—still hobbled over fourths and minor seconds, relating strange Hungarian folktales. I closed my eyes: the music was about a forest deep in Eastern Europe where night had fallen for several hundred years. I opened them again to find Tuckwell still sprawled across the throw rug, happily destroying the evening paper. I loved the man, stayed with him because, for a manic narcissist with a fierce death wish, Keith was relatively sedate and regular in habits.

Tuckwell stood, stretched, groaned like a compromised banshee, and went and pestered the human being nearest at hand. He came over to the makeshift typing table where I worked, lifted the hair off the nape of my neck, and bit the revealed skin. Choosing not to notice how wrong the moment had become, he asked, " "Sappening?"

I pulled the first card off of the unanswered pile. Not daring to look at him, I pitched my voice into soprano and inhaled. " 'Why did the Russians shoot down that airliner? Hundreds of innocent people killed. Will somebody please explain this to me?' Signed, 'A.N., 9/14.'" Facing the far wall, I monotoned, "What you got on Flight 007 today, Chet?"

"Not a whole hell of a goddamn lot, David," Tuckwell replied, but returned to the papers to see what he could dig up. I drafted answers in my head, one filled with accounts of warning shots and tape transcripts, one beginning "Discrepancies in what the interceptor saw and what the liner did persist," still another urging the questioner to read everything printed on the incident. Not one reply satisfied.

I was cut by a sharp grief, not for the 269 latest casualties in the perpetual war, but for A.N., who didn't have a chance in creation of getting a simple explanation for what was going on. It was a reasonable question, but as with the tacit prices on Upper East Side menus, if you had to ask, you couldn't afford the answer. The horrible full-color spreads, the antiseptic seal torn off of the usually restrained AP reports, the resulting global knee-jerk calling for a full accounting on the part of anonymous trigger-pullers everywhere: and then the veil of routine slamming back, once more condemning A.N. to the bewilderment of local life, while Here and Now squidded off in a cloud of ink until the next liner was downed.

Sadness doesn't capture it. I need a meatier, nineteenth-century word. Sorrow; the sorrow of press secretaries failing to explain away nations. When I looked at Tuckwell, news scrap over his lap, my sorrow grew. For the two of us — our last, ordinary evening at home. I whispered, "What in the hell am I supposed to tell this guy?" Alarming Keith more than I had in all our years of living together, I burst out in violent crying. I let Keith comfort me, talk me into giving up on answering, calling it a day. He led me into our bedroom, where he pried the typed card out of my hand and laid it to rest on the night table. It still sat there unanswered days later, on the equinox. The first day of autumn in anyone's calendar.