Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

"What did this fellow ask you?"

"Almost nothing about my work. He wouldn't have been able to follow even the Music for Millions version. He wanted the usual color: twists, eccentricities. Was I a child prodigy? Did I keep my lunch bag in the dissection freezer? Did knowing the chemical nature of humanity keep me from favoring certain eye color? Did I have any words of wisdom for the generation of molecular geneticists then cutting their teeth in school labs?" "Did you?"

"I told them to read from the bottom of the meniscus." Having bludgeoned my way through college chemistry with limited success despite the opposable thumb, I laughed. Annie, the picture of Sunday-school patience, blurted out, "Life magazine? You were famous once?"

Lovering snags him outside the interview, unable to wait until he gets back to the office. "So. Big Time. The coffee tables of America."

"Listen, Joey. I had nothing to do with this. I wouldn't even have talked to them, except they were already here. They just want a photo for the gallery. It could have been anybody. Could have been you."

"Thanks."

"That's not what I meant. I mean that the press hasn't the slightest notion of what we're working on."

"Do you?"

"Touché. " Happy to give Lovering the hit if it will help put the ridiculous issue behind them.

"I heard Ulrich hasn't renewed your fellowship. Sounds like the prophet-without-honor syndrome."

The bombshell he's been expecting these last weeks. "Ah," he says, false-pitched. "I'm out of the running for next year?"

"So I've heard. Formal decision won't be posted for another few days. Department's eager to squirrel away cash for the big push." Meaning Lovering's hunt-and-peck methods on ILLIAC.

His year has been appraised and found lacking. Preferment denied, not because of the quality of his science but because Stuart has shown himself not to be a team player. The vicissitudes of funding cannot afford the solo worker. The population geneticists have had the right gauge all along. Ulrich has every right to apply his limited research funds to a post-doc who'll do better by Cyfer. But the calculation embitters Ressler, and he cannot suppress a smiling accusation. "You people are wrong, wrong, wrong."

Lovering, twitched by bad conscience, reassures him. "Oh, they want to keep you around. You're hot stuff. Ask any coffee table." The joke goes flatly aromatic. "But the freebie is over. You'll have to teach or something."

He can't teach — not yet, perhaps not ever. To stand up in front of students and make definitive statements is unthinkable. Every definitive statement is false. Whenever he addresses a room of eager notebooks, he begins to shuffle at the lectern, cloak himself in qualifications. It's useless to explain this to Lovering, one of those surehanded lecturers who forget that skepticism is at the bottom of scientific method. Ressler adopts an obsequious tone. "I don't imagine my classroom presentation is likely to be especially stellar."

"No, I wouldn't think so."

Ressler feels an urge to smash his colleague to the wall, watch his head loll against the brick. The forbidden appeal fills him: nothing to prevent it. He is more powerful in the upper chest than Lovering, although the comparison hasn't occurred to him until this moment. Violence forever in the serum. Jacob's Ladder does not ascend; it coils forever around the same four rungs. "Joseph, I've never said 'boo' to you. What's going on here? What do you have against me?"

"What do you have against Ulrich?"

"Against…? Nothing! I just want to do my work."

"You are a very unpleasant fellow, you know. I can't think of anyone in the department who's especially taken with you:"

The casual hallway conversation, at the flick of a switch, becomes puerile. He doesn't have a clue to what the switch is, let alone how to flick it off. "Listen, Joe. I don't know what to say. Is this over the interview? That's crazy. It's a puff piece. The magazine pulled my name out of a hat. They hadn't even seen my article, let alone…"

"Screw the magazine." Lovering's voice is steady. "Sandy and I don't even subscribe." His joke strews the path with shrapnel. "And screw your article, too. Sandy says you dangle too many participles, by the way."

"I don't understand this. I've never bad-mouthed you. I'm quiet in the office. I keep the glassware clean___"

Lovering wags his head, shedding these possibilities as beneath consideration. "If you haven't figured it out by now, I ain't gonna lay it out for you."

Ressler walks away, shaken. For days, he cannot put the weird run-in behind him. He cedes the office to Joe, abdicates out of shame and inability to look at the man. He doesn't go to Ulrich to confirm the loss of fellowship; he'll hear soon enough. He must assume good faith. Difference of opinion, even divorce, must all be in good faith.

On a late-February evening he passes the closed door of Toveh Botkin's office, from which issue the dampened strains of the gallows march from that old war-horse the Symphonic Fantastique. He freezes in the hall — dark, drafty, and full of the smothered scent of lacquer, hair oil, methane, generations of forgotten undergraduate odors — freezes at the tentative probes of this progression. He is thrown back to the previous year, to Summer Slumber Party, when he did not know flat from sharp, let alone Neapolitan sixth from French overture. He is nowhere close to breaking into the inner circle of repertoire, the mysteries of tone hidden even from program-note readers and devotees. But with the help of the woman on the other side of this door, he has gone from utter illiteracy to the point where he can name this tune without ever having heard it before. He recognizes the Berlioz exclusively from the physiognomic description given in the literature.

Standing in the hall, taut with eerie last-century intervals counterpointed by clattering steam pipes, he feels the quick slip of deliverance. No matter what happens — should he be barred from the intellectual cloister, never publish fresh research again — academic year '57—'58 will in any light remain the great watershed adventure of his life: the year he intuited the rough, sole appropriate method for cracking chemical inheritance, the year he fell irreversibly in love, and, most intangible, most intense of all, the year he learned to hear. He knocks, lets himself in, walking euphorically against the harmonic wind. He lies down in his old place on the leather couch. At the movement's end, he lifts his torso and greets his old friend. "Not two flutes, you scoundrels! Two piccolos!"

Botkin needs no gloss. Her eyes brim viscous at his visit. She shakes her head, tsking. "What a student we've turned out to be."

"Dr. Botkin, do you find me unpleasant?"

"Don't flirt with an old woman. There isn't one of us who couldn't rise to make a fool of ourselves under pressure."

He thanks her obliquely but gratefully by consulting her on the adaptor notion. "We have set everything up perfectly in our tube— plaintext message, scissors, paste, paper, pen — everything except the code book itself. If we slip that in, we ought to get synthesis such as no one has seen yet."

"What, in this extended metaphor, does 'code book' stand for?"

Ressler explains: a bilingual molecule, with specific amino acid at one locus and corresponding anticodon at another. Where the messenger reads ACG, the strip on the translator reads UGC. They fit; the amino is held in position, glued to the growing polypeptide chain. He glances up from the couch when he finishes. Botkin smiles at him, but queerly. "Is there something wrong?" he asks. "Have I committed the usual bona fide blunder?"

"My friend," Botkin laments, "you have been working too hard. You have been picking over too many back issues of periodicals and not enough front." She lifts, fresh from the place of honor on her desk, a reprint of a recent article, hands it to him. He accepts the piece, a paper Crick delivered last fall to the Society for Experimental Biology, with the amalgam of trepidation and excitement of asking a pretty wallflower for a dance. Crick is coherent, gorgeous. From beginning to end, he throws open the casements and floods the place with conceptual clarity. In a few pages, the man crystallizes everything Cyfer and Ressler have struggled so fitfully to consolidate. And before it is all over, Crick hints at the same construct, even employing the term "adaptor": an RNA strain shaped to encode both reading stencil and written amino.