Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Today in History

Assisted by accident, I was out of the starting block. Given the locus — a year to peg him and a special field — I retrieved everything the limited print trail held about Dr. Ressler. Three days after coming across the magazine photo, I turned up two more citations: the Science Midwest abstracts for the same year, and the coau-thored article in Journal of Molecular Biology that brought the young man his first attention. I even traced, through the dense, preserved, late-fifties paperwork, his department's involvement in varied researches as molecular genetics unfolded. One colleague made important refinements in electron microscopy. Another developed a cheap way to measure cytoplasmic protein. A third cropped the copious shady old genealogical trees beloved of textbooks.

To have been a virgin post-doc then! I exhumed the Watson-Crick paper that had touched off the wholesale gold rush. The primary sources still exhale the atmosphere of intellectual dizziness, the articles thick with a sense that someone would soon crack the complete caper and seize the ne plus ultra of the research world, the riddle of life. I knew that every era since Anaxi-mander and his vital moisture has tried to explain the ultimate contradiction: living matter. But even a hurried review of Ressler's contemporaries brought home the shock: my lifetime has seen the breakthrough moment, the first physical theory of all life grounded at entry level.

Each article, every retraction and revision recorded the heat of the exploding field. I pored over the background material — busman's holidays at the main branch — coming to know Dr. Ressler weeks before I made his acquaintance, if only a Ressler decades younger than the one I was sent to discover. How must it have felt, at twenty-five, talented but untested, to live at the same hour, perhaps even arm's length from the finishing touch, the final transcription — the first organism to explain its own axioms?

Half of what I made out about the twenty-five-year-old scientist was pure projection. I began to feel I had not lived up to my own intellect, that I'd been born too late, had taken a wrong turn, had lost my own chance to turn up the edge of the real, discover something, something hard. This child scientist, desperate with ability, somehow reduced to full-scale adult withdrawal, night shift labor, by something not explained in the literature: here was my own irreversible missed hour.

The race for the genetic code must have been wonderful torture for one of Dr. Ressler's abilities. By 1957, the search to describe all living tissue in molecular principles was halfway to unmitigated solution. The pace of revelations staggers even one habituated to permanent acceleration. Consensus that DNA was the genetic carrier had been reached only a few years before Ressler arrived in Illinois. Its structure had fallen only four years earlier. In 1957, speculation about how the giant molecule encoded heredity became open game for theoreticians. The field is littered with articles by physicists, chemists, and other inflamed amateurs. Generations of patient fly-counters had done the legwork. The mid-fifties were set for breakout, the rush of synthesizing postulates. He must have sensed that this anarchical phase would pass quickly, perhaps in months. The prize was bare, exposed for the plucking at the top of the nucleic stair.

But something else motivates the euphoric articles, something more than self-aggrandizement, more than the desire to cap the ancient monument and book passage to Stockholm, that freezing, pristine Valhalla. The compulsion to find the pattern of living translation — the way a simple, self-duplicating string of four letters inscribes an entire living being — is built into every infant who has ever learned a word, put a phrase together, discovered that phonemes might speak.

As the journal evidence accumulated, it sucked me into the craze of crosswords, pull of punch lines, addiction to anagrams, nudge of numerology, suspense of magic squares. I felt the fresh Ph.D.'s suspicion that beneath the congenital complexity of human affairs runs a generating formula so simple and elegant that redemption depended on uncovering it. Once lifting the veil and glimpsing the underlying plan, Ressler would never again surrender its attempted recovery. The desire surpassed that for food, sex, even bedtime stories, worth pursuing with convert's zeal, with the singleness of a monastic, a lost substance abuser, a true habitue: the siege of concealed meaning.

The Question Board

I put off telling Franklin Todd what my search had turned up. The trail of the sure-to-be-famous youth ended abruptly, dying out in the middle of 1958. Thumbnail biographies and professional references both dried up. A void lay between the boy of twenty-five, in the middle of the fastest-breaking biological revolution ever, and the man twice that age, an obscure computer functionary. I could do nothing but confirm the same enigma that had driven Todd to consult me in the first place. I returned to that hauntingly alien photo, "one of the new breed who will help uncover the formula—" The article bore an epigraph by Friedrich Miescher, the twenty-five-year-old who had discovered DNA in 1869:

Should one ask anybody who is undertaking a major project in science, in the heat of the fight, what drives and pushes him so relentlessly, he will never think of an external goal; it is the passion of the hunter and the soldier… the stimulus of the fight with its setbacks.

One passionate hunter had evidently been shot along the way. I would have gone on trying to determine how, even had Todd not returned. Some days after my break, I caught him hanging around the Question Board, scouring it as if nothing mattered except this discontinuous glut of fact stripped of context. As if, despite the biblical promise, the world would end in flood after all. Of information. If Todd lay in wait for me, he made no sign. "Truly amazing," he said, not even looking as I approached. "How'd you find all this stuff? You make it up?"

It distressed me to enjoy seeing him. I tried to pull my mouth out of its involuntary grin into disapproval. "Of course not. What do you take me for? This is human services. Not for profit. Bulk mail permit."

"This one, for instance." He pointed to the weeks-old question about where in the world people were best off. The outdated card was due to be removed; I took it down as Mr. Todd continued. "How did you know all that, about the two million tons of bird shit and disappearing roads and all?"

My M.L.S. cheekbones crumpled like a rear-ended economy car. "Nauru? Nauru is a reference librarian's mainstay. Smallest republic. Largest per capita income. Typical instance of List Mentality. You might as well ask any urban male over fourteen if the number three sixty-seven means anything to him." Cobb's average, which I verified every few months, meant nothing to Todd. He looked inquisitively at me, not yet daring to ask if I had results. I wasn't volunteering. I carried on with my work, pinning to the board the Q-and-A:

Q: Who is the head of the CIA and where can I reach him? This is an EXTREMELY confidential matter.

F.P. 7/3/83

A: William J. Casey, Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, DC 20505.

J. O'D., 7/5/83

Todd took two more cards from under my clasped arm, careful not to touch my side. He assisted, pinning the cards into place. It seemed we had worked together, easily and quietly, for years.

Q: What must we do to be saved?

C.R., 7/2/83

A: A tough one, but worth looking into. According to George Saville, Marquis of Halifax (1633–1695), in A Rough Draft of a New Model at Sea, "To the question, What shall we do to be saved in this World? there is no other answer but this, Look to your Moat."