Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Tonight, at the old sticking point, I hear another voice in the bass, below the love duet. However entwined the upper lines, another figure informs them, insists on singing along. All two-part voice separation harbors a secret trio in dense fretwork. Three in nature is always a crowd. A chord. A code. If science was that man's perpetual third party, the scientist himself was mine.

Today in History

Inappropriately exhilarating to be in the stacks today, now that I'm a short-term impostor. Still, work continues until the last check. This morning, as if nothing has happened to routine, I posted for the Event Calendar:

June 28

Half a year before the United States' entry into World War II, Roosevelt establishes the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Vannevar Bush, designer of one of the earliest computers, becomes director. The OSRD coordinates U.S. scientific work with military concerns. It presides over the development of radar and sonar, mass-produced sulfa drugs and penicillin, mechanical computing, and the atomic bomb. The contributions of science to the war effort are widely appreciated. But the effects war has had on subsequent scientific research are more difficult to state.

Posting, I'd already made my break with the branch. My thoughts were no longer on work, but on that other today, twenty-five years ago, when Stuart Ressler, newly minted Doctor of Biological Science, nine years old when the OSRD was born, arrived in the Midwest to commence adult life and make his crucial if subsequently forgotten contribution to progress. His bid for the Who's Who.

We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder

From the window of a wandering Greyhound, Stuart Ressler gets his first look at unmistakable I-state phenotype: unvarying horizon, Siberian grain-wastes, endless acres of bread in embryo. The most absent landscape imaginable, it calls to him like home. Schooled in the reductionist's golden rule, he sees in this Occam's razor-edge of emptiness a place at last vacant enough to provide the perfect control, a vast mat of maize and peas, Mendel's recovered Garden. Green at twenty-five, with new Ph.D., he leaves the lab to enter the literal field.

The tedious bus haul catches him up on the literature. The Journal of Molecular Biology takes him into Indiana, where he acquires a seatmate whose disease of choice, obesity, spills provinces over the armrest into Ressler's seat. Three articles into the National Academy Proceedings, Ressler must listen to the huge stranger's invective on the perils of reading. "My father could put away a Zane Grey in one afternoon, and it got him nowhere. Never touch the stuff. You'd be wise to go easy on it." Ressler nods and twists his lips. Not recognizing the dialect, his seatmate persists. "What do?"

Quick decoding eliminates Gesundbeit as appropriate. "I'm a geneticist."

"Oh, rich! You fix women trouble? What I wouldn't do to trade places with you. Oh brother. What I wouldn't do. Heaven on earth for you fellas, init?"

Ressler inspects his shoes. "Never touch the stuff." This too cracks up his fellow traveler. Fortune extracts the man at Indianapolis, and the plague of companionship passes over. Safely into Illinois, a half hour from his new life, organics lays a last ambush. A stream of tortoises possessed of mass migratory instinct crawl over the highway in the twilight. Bottlenecked cars take turns gunning, crunching over the shells. The tortoise-trickle does not even waver. Ressler stares out the rear window as long as he can stomach it. For a hundred yards, he can make out the horror. The insane persistence of the parade holds him in fascinated disgust.

Chelonia has nothing over primates re the processional urge. Ressler weighs the similar drive that brought him out here. Four years earlier, a fellow first-year grad stormed into his dorm room waving the legendary Watson-Crick article in Nature. A new threshold torn open for the leaping. The awesome, aperiodic double helix — with its seductive suggestion of encoded information assembling an entire organism — spread before him at twenty-one, wider than the American Wilderness. The next day, he dropped his four-year investment in physiology to rush the frontier.

To his astonished adviser, he pointed out how much solid prep he already had for the curriculum change, how much carried over into molecular. He'd concentrated on chemistry, so the scale change would be a snap. Besides: all significant breakthroughs were made by novices free from preconceptions or vested interests. In six months of ferocious precocity, he'd made believers of everyone. Research schools singled him out as a future player, recruiting him even as he put the last touches on his thesis. He accepted the post-doc at Urbana-Champaign, guided exclusively by heroic impatience. Illinois could get him started the fastest. From the stack of invitations he selected theirs, scribbled a ballpoint signature at the bottom, and dropped the reply in the nearest box. The game was afoot; a lab was a lab so long as it was antiseptic. Hunch, induction, and technique could put even an I-state on the map.

At twenty-five with no major contributions yet, he's under the gun. Miescher was twenty-five when he discovered DNA ninety years before. Watson was twenty-four. If the symptoms of breakthrough don't show by thirty, forget it: throw in the lab coat, get an industry job. Research — America in '57—is no country for old men. Sure, his dissertation was a minor tour de force, but just juggled ideas evident to anyone paying attention. Quickness and insight, both necessary, won't suffice to take him where he's headed. Now he must mint, in the crucible of his new lab, hard currency. He packs two changes of clothes and comes to this outpost Eden.

He acclimates instantly to the box houses, orthogonal blocks, and infinite corn in parallel plowcuts running clear to the horizon. Urbana, at twenty thousand, is just what he needs. Stagnant backwaters are the most fecund. He needs only a steady supply of pipettes and a place to spread his bed. Stepping off the bus into the greasy station, he parses the downtown, shoos off a soliciting cab, walks to campus. All significant discoveries are made on foot. The straightedge streets of his adopted town bear ingenious names: numbers, states, presidents, and the trees slaughtered to make way for them. They swell with whitewood houses, diners, five-and-dimes. A church pokes Pentecostal finger at the nimbus of clean linen laid over it, its promotional postboard announcing Sunday's sermon: "Can the Guests Morn When the Bridegroom Be with Them?" — the "u" deleted in point mutation. The rows lining each lane seem so many complementary, self-replicating pairs — the fifties' fastest-breaking metaphor. In minutes, Ressler forgets the seaboard, the flattened Eastern affect of his childhood. He settles into this emptiness, a symbiotic bacterium in the belly of his host.

On campus, he discovers there is no room at the inn. A superannuated department secretary, predating fruit flies, scrapes him up a place in the old army barracks reprieved from destruction until veterans stop pouring back to school on the G.I. Bill. Stuart, who missed the world crisis by enough years to think that G.I. bills come from internists for services rendered, also scabbed out of Korea on dissertation deferral. His thesis drafts him into another campaign, a magic bullet as explosive as any gunner's. Fitting then, military digs: vicarious enlistment. He takes possession of one end of a single-story tar-paper triplex in a shanty called Stadium Terrace. The row huts line the colonnaded shadow of Memorial Stadium, one of the country's largest collegiate football coliseums. He delights in discovering that his cell number, K-53-C, encodes his precise locus within the village.