Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Cursory inspection turns up ratty bunk, gas stove, half a black-and-white print of James Dean with head on steering wheel, several septic razor blades, and a box of cereal with both flakes and enclosed coupon devoured by red ants. He needs nothing more. He unpacks his worldly belongings — a tartan suitcase of second hand clothes and a tote bag crammed with journals. Social rounds, town exploration can wait. After a perfunctory trip to the convenience grocery, he holes up in the barracks. Days he toys with the coding problem and evenings he sits on a lawn chair staring at the pie-wedged fallout-shelter signs plastered over the stadium across the way. For dinner, tomato juice minus gin: alcohol is a trace mutagen and destroys brain cells. The department must wonder why he hasn't come by to introduce himself. That's all right; wonder is the trump of the twenty-three-pair chromosome set.

He remains horizontal for days, boning up, resisting the temptation to indulge in premature cracking. Feverish, unleashed vistas tempt him with fat feasibility. He must first consolidate, gather strength, quiet his mind, assemble the tools, await, without expecting, that rare, most skittish visit. Yet before insight can alight, the outside world flank-attacks him through the mail. A letter appears in his box, his first communique since hitting Illinois:

July 16, 1957 Dear Stu,

Heard you're in town and hope you're not waiting for official commencement of the fellowship to drop by the lab. We could use you in the Blue Sky sessions if nowhere else. No one's doing much biology at the moment, as you might imagine. Too much excitement in the air. Right now we're all thinking math and language. How are you at combinatorials? Oh for a spark of Aha! By the way, Charlene and I are having the team over for dinner and cards or something next Thursday. Do come. We'll even have the get-together in your honor, if that's what it takes.

Yours, Karl Ulrich

P.S. Review Adv Biol 4:23 if you haven't done so recently, and let me know Thursday if you think Gamow's right in discarding the diamond code. I never liked the layout: too pretty; too much the work of a physicist. But too convenient if the whole pattern just coiled up and blew away.

Ressler has met his new boss only through the professional journals. A prolific writer, the man is to trees what Bill Cody was to buffalo. Ulrich, at fifty-two (Ressler's age transposed), is Illinois's grand old molecular man, guiding spirit behind Cyfer, the team of microbiologists, chemists, and geneticists who induct Ressler as new recruit. Stuart ingests the assignment in place of lunch, tracking the article down to the university library. The stacks, third-läfgest in the country, are, like Memorial Stadium, decorated passim with orange-and-black Civil Defense pies. Ressler doubts the pragmatics of the motif. Four floors of masonry are not likely to survive an airburst. Brick and poured concrete do reduce rad passage, but story-height blown-out glass does not. And using the library as shelter until the renovated landscape returned to safe levels would require keeping survivors alive for weeks on cellulose alone.

Nevertheless, this homage to Dewey Decimal is the most impressive monument America's Breadbasket has yet shown him. Several million volumes colonize ten floors of catwalks and twisting alleys. Every deck contains, in its hectares, plumbing and facilities for long-term residents. If the stink of binding paste didn't offend, he'd go AWOL from the barracks and set up his two pieces of luggage here. A sadly vindicating tour reveals an 824 untouched since Henry James died. Humanities have clearly slid into the terminally curatorial, forsaking claim to knowledge. Ressler finds his niche-to-be, 575, by cytotropic sixth sense, tucked away in a grotto deep in the cavernous recesses, incandescence lending it appropriate spelunker's air. This rarefied branch of a specialized discipline, barely extant a decade back, now rates several shelves, swelling by the hour.

At any other time, he'd be hopelessly waylaid by 1930s unemployment lists, turn-of-the-century novels, hundred-season sets of symphony programs. A comprehensively dense map striving for perfect isomorphism with the outside world provokes his browser's awe. But commissioned, Stuart goes straight to the target periodical without cracking a spine. He's read Gamow's views on the code — one of the first formal attacks on how DNA might embed its protein-plans. But best review the physicist's retraction; its details are likely to be of more use at Dr. Ulrich's soiree than the latest Elvis or Fats Domino. Advanced Biology 4:23 comes off the shelf suspiciously easily, plops open to the piece in question, a penciled scrawl near the title:

JHB SZI HVA OLP GVX IKZ XHO DBN ZRU ALW WKH TVI HQQ BTI VSR EP

Disguised messages hook him by the brain stem. The cold lure of this adept's sport, text trapped in nonsense: a face-slap, tapping impulses fiercer than the urge to pile up cars or cure the forbidding loneliness of women. The sanctioned desires of twenty-five — Warm breasts and cold chrome — are mere substitutes, garbled misread-ings of the real pull. All longing converges on this mystery: revelation, unraveling secret spaces, the suggestion that the world's valence lies just behind a scrambled facade, where only the limits of ingenuity stand between him and sunken gardens. Cryptography alone slips beneath the cheat of surface. Yes, test adrenaline, the attempt to justify the teacher's faith, contributes to this nonsense string's siren song. But this puzzle — clearly planted for his benefit — this chase, this unscrambling, waiting, working, worrying the moment when simple, irrefutable plaintext explanation descends: this (the cadence of his thought straying dangerously close to Protestant hymnody) is the reason why awareness itself first evolved out of inert earth.

Experiment per se has never carried any special appeal; rare steak aside, Ressler has never enjoyed cutting into any genus higher than Anura. But the driving design___He forgets the article and sets to work on the pencil smudges. "EP," the closing, sole couplet: the initials of his antagonist, KU? He tries a few relations before hitting on a simple one. P to U is a jump of five letters; E to K, a jump of six. An incremental substitution cipher — a good, reversible garbling scheme. Seven to the final "R" yields "Y." Eight to the "S," going around the horn, arrives at "A." The last triplet comes out "day: " paydirt. The rest of the reconstruction is brute counting. Soon shell cracks and sense seeps through:

IFY OUC ANR EAD THI STH ENT HEP ART YIS REA LLY WED NES DAY

Back to native tongue. Grouping by threes is Ulrich's hat tip to the prevailing idea that the unit in the genetic code is a triplet of bases. Regrouping reveals all.

He passes the rite of hidden passages, wins his first glimpse of the new boss. The path from discovery to tinkering to inspiration to solution takes place outside time. Returning to deck entrance, he discovers that he has narrowly missed being locked in the stacks overnight. Only when he is safely back at the barracks, flat out on the bunk in K-53-C, sipping tomatoes and savoring his victory, does he realize that he's forgotten even to glance at the article Dr. Ulrich asked him to review.

Stuart arrives at the Ulrich doorstoop on the revealed Wednesday, groomed for the occasion. The chief ushers him into the party with only a "Good job." Ressler, the last guest to arrive, uncomfortable in newly purchased suit, presents host and hostess with a box of after-dinner chocolates filled with greenish fungi. Suit and gift are both wild miscalculations; soon he'll be unable to go out in public at all, so completely has he botched the social code in his haste to crack the genetic. He makes the rounds, meets his future labmates. Tooney Blake, dark, mid-height, a youthful forty, is at the piano doing a terrifyingly down-tempo version of "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off." Only he's missed the point of the song: "Potato, potato, tomato, tomato," all pronounced exactly the same. A gracious woman with an uncanny Eleanor Roosevelt impersonation, Dr. Toveh Botkin, stands by in great pain, waiting for the promised formal feeling to come. Her accent reveals her as one of those brilliant Central European scientists lured away from the Russians in '45 by democracy and cash. Musically illiterate, Ressler can nevertheless tell by Dr. Botkin's bearing that the soiree is soul-toughening purgatory for her. She says as much in her first sentence to him, declaring with convoluted tact that the machine responsible for the apotheosis of Beethoven's Diabelli, not to mention the transcendent Opus 109 set, had been a sacred instrument to her until a few moments before. He nods, without a clue to what she's talking about.