Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Tuning in the radio strikes him as superfluous. He stares at the sky creeping toward yellow, making a break for infrared. The long-expected airburst, most likely Chicago or old Midwestern rival, St. Louis. At 150–200 miles, a midsized device, as the papers like to call them, would kick up enough dust to discolor the atmosphere, give it this early, dramatic sunset. He goes heavy at the waist; his knees fold involuntarily. He crumbles onto his stoop, watching the refugee crowd fanning toward Memorial Stadium for an unscheduled game. Some amazing instinct has gotten it into these heads to try to save their possessions: scrapbooks, chairs, an antique doll, blendors, anything arms can drag or shove. He considers calling out to the lady hauling the home tanning lamp not to bother; she's getting a healthy dose of rays already.

For thirty seconds it hails, but cuts off abruptly. The violence of the wind, the backlash of pressure electrifies his skin, returns him to a child's awe at one-time forces. He watches the sky slip to a silver gray and calculates the airspeed by timing a scrap of paper tearing across the lawn. A ten-year-old boy breaks from beside his hysterical mother in the file and waves his arms like a crane, shouting: "Run from the funnel!" His clutching mother snatches him back, yelling at Ressler as if he were an abductor. So the cause is natural, not induced. It makes no difference: correction will eventually have its out. But spreading his fingers across the violet grass, he does feel something, the bulb of skin flaring after a failed immunity test: gratitude that he may have a chance to see Jeannie again.

The stream of evacuees drains to a trickle. The wind whips to such craziness that he cannot keep from laughing. In the cusp moment, he sees the vertical cloud on the horizon feeling its way, prehensile, across the harvested fields. He calculates the number of steps to the relative safety of the stadium. Even if he'd dedicated his youth to distance sprinting, the protection of colonnades wouldn't warrant that open-field gallop. It's all over except the virtuosity. He spreads himself on the ground, facedown, head to the side so he can view this performance from the edge of the pit. He sees the outlines of groundbound things tossed about where they oughtn't be going. On all sides of the cross hairs where he lies, physical law defers to easy chaos.

When it's safe to sit up, he does, slowly. Stadium Terrace is overhauled with scrub, branches, trash, furniture, pieces of wall— no longer the center of the biggest plain in the world, but a tidal zone of flotsam. Astonishingly, his tarshack and most of K block have escaped. He succumbs to childish disappointment, the one he felt years ago on seeing the picture of that domed structure that obstinately survived Ground Zero. Can't even violence accomplish something unmitigated?

He dusts off, grinning at how good his clothes feel, how wonderful the wrinkles. He takes himself back inside. He tunes in an emergency report, running only minutes behind the event itself. The twisters leave ten dead across Illinois: a misleadingly small toll, not indicating the power of the thing, the lightest flick of Coriolis effect that chose, this once, to pass over. The tornado failed to take him by only the narrowest swirl of turbulence. When the information repeats, he shuts off the radio. He picks at random from his new reference set a disk to return to. Brahms's number comes up: the Second Piano Concerto. The sound so transfixes him that he rises to place the unprecedented phone call: to Botkin, to verify her safety after the storm. The gesture moves her out of proportion to its facility. He hangs up, hands fused momentarily to the phone. No: he cannot call that other, whose safety means more than meaning.

He returns to a piercing, slow 'cello solo, music too beautiful even to listen to in this century with a clean conscience. But he listens. The homecoming of the piano, demure soloist, is punctuated by pounding on the door. Outside, it is pitch-black; near the solstice, that could mean any time after 4:00 p.m. Eva and Margaret Blake stand shivering together under a quilt feathertick in the dark. He quickly lets them in.

"Is Tooney here? Have you heard from him?" Evie asks, looking about, a timid meter reader looking for the main. "It's late," she adds, rebuking not her husband but puerile nightfall. "He never came home." Ressler settles her and gives Margaret a can of orange juice concentrate and a spoon, sufficient to delight her. He and Mrs. Blake begin the systematic round of phone calls, first to everyone on the team, all negative. Then they try the lab, every office at the Biology Building where someone might still be around to pick up phones. No one does. Only then do they resort to the finality of police, who reassure them that the twin cities have reported no fatalities. Last, the hospitals, who cannot match any injured to Tooney's description.

Eva has worked herself into a state. She's reluctant to return to K-53-A alone with the child. He insists that they stay with him. Over Eve's ennervated refusals, he makes up the bed for them, apologizing for the brutality of bachelorhood. Margaret is across the mattress and asleep before he can turn out the light. He returns to the front room and his journal pile, prepared to sit up all night, a trick that has become almost easy. He has just hit upon an article in a 1955 Nature —one that, for an instant, seems as catalytic as Watson and Crick's piece two years earlier — when Eva pads in, still wrapped in the quilt. "Can I sit out here with you? I'll be quiet."

"You don't have to be quiet."

"Good. Nature again, I see. You men are all alike." She takes the volume from him, thumbs through its thickness, and drops it back into Ressler's hands. "OK. Ask me anything."

Before he can smile, she coils up and follows the book into his lap. She collapses like a cut tree, lets out a bleat of anguish, and balls herself up against him. She is uncannily cold; he wraps her in his forearms to try to trap what little warmth is left in her. "He must be somewhere," he offers.

Evie stifles a vowel. "Keep talking." She digs into his leg, a breeding sea turtle scooping deeper into the beach.

Ressler pops the clutch for a moment before he can locate his deep sentence structures. He begins talking about Tooney and the tornadoes, the likely scenarios accounting for his absence. Paralleling in rough analogy the series turning electrical current into magnet pulse into paper motion into air wave into earbone disturbance into neural network into Brahms, his words of coded comfort drive Evie's muscles into slack acceptance. When he runs out of explication, he goes on filling up empty space. He talks about how essential Blake's sensibilities are to Cyfer, his lucid, first-rate spoiling of half-baked ideas. Tooney is the one person liked by everyone on the team. Eva acknowledges this praise with a muffled sigh. Ressler goes on, explaining how Cyfer has squared off against the coding problem, just what difficulties still lie between them and a map of the nucleotide grammar. As the details are lost on her and therefore safe, he lays out the theory of an in vitro solution just weeks away from gelling: submit the simplest imaginable message to the coding mechanism, and see what the enciphered text looks like. Crack the system by standing over the encoder's shoulder.

He stops, struck by the beauty of the thing he touches. His hands keep working, rubbing warmth into Eva in ways they would not dare with the other woman now. Eva has lost her agitation. He can stop the invented monologue. But for this perfect audience, asleep, unable to hear, he recites, "I'm in love with a colleague of your husband's. She's as married as you are. Nothing to do about it. No point." He checks each mark off, brutally succinct, but he stops short of the worst: She is a locking template I cannot shake.