Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

He walks to the Biology Building, taking the longest detour that still leaves him inside the twin cities' jurisdiction. He hears, for the first time since the days of the Home Nature Museum, how different the repeated calls of a single bird are. Are these tiny perturbations in the melody random, or do they mean something? He will make a study of this. The sound of automobile tires slopping the pavement suggests a review of physics, the equations for friction. He is struck by the shape of three identical poplars: might some mathematical expression guide the branching of trees?

By the time he gets to campus, it's clear, as clear as anything will ever be in the rough translation allotted him. The self-serving, pointless duplication of giant molecules created him in its own image, set him down here with only one order: Do science. Postulate. Put together a working model. Yet the hunt for the single, substantiating thread running through all creation is just a start. It's time for science to acknowledge the heft, bruise, and hopeless muddle of the world's irreducible particulars. This field, this face, this day are not just the result of tweaking the variables, twisting the standard categories. Every alternative on the standing pattern is distinct, anomalous, a new thing requiring a separate take on what is and might yet be. And for that, theories must diverge and propagate as fast as the wonder of their subject matter.

He reaches Botkin's office, enters without knocking. He surprises her in scowling over a popular magazine with a weekly circulation greater than the population of Austria in the year of her birth. Her grin of expectation at seeing him collapses into a demure, understanding "Oh." He walks to her desk where she writes, removes the magazine. He takes her hand in his, stroking and examining it at the same time. Why should skin lose its elasticity with age? If he were to pinch hers, it would stay bunched like stiffest muslin. He holds her hand between his for a moment, and says, "I wish I'd taken more meals with you when I had the chance."

She laughs sharply. "I wish I'd gotten more into you per meal." He leans over her desk and kisses her still forehead. He glances over her desk, her dark, filled bookshelves: this room, the place of so many discoveries, bathed in the light of midday, affords him the closest thing to religious reconciliation that empiric sensibility allows.

Age does not deprive her of the responsibility of having to play the group's advocate. "But what of your work?" she says. "It can't be left undone."

"Give it a year or two," he answers, calling her bluff. The process of directed chance is inexorable. "Half a dozen people will hit on it all at once."

"It's always the numbers game with your generation. Have you ever considered taking up gambling?"

Ressler laughs; it was her generation that saddled them all with perpetual probability. "I wouldn't know a blackjack if one hit me over the head."

"Boychick. You can take this project anywhere, you know. Dr. Ulrich, myself: we can get you taken on anyplace you like. Cambridge. Cold Spring Harbor. The Institute. A real lab. Wherever is best equipped. Finish what you've started. Say the word. I will write letters, call in favors. You can name terms."

He shakes his head: she, of all people, knows the nature of the work he must finish. "I don't think another laboratory would be appropriate just now." He listens to what he has just said, and adds, "Or needed, really."

"You would make an astonishing teacher, given time."

Teaching: yes, that might almost be close. But teaching is the most perilously slow way man has yet devised for conveying a message. "The student world won't miss me."

"But what about you?" Her eyes are a peculiar, fluid mixture of maternal distress and deep, secret satisfaction that this, her star pupil, has selected to set off into the dark. For abiding is nowhere. "You will be all right?"

"Without the prizes, you mean?"

"Yes. Without your Prize."

He wonders how it would feel to be able to sit back, late in the afternoon, and bask in genuine contribution. "I'll be fine." Even as he speaks this, a door opens in front of him and he gets his first foretaste of just how long, how uncertain an existence in pursuit of an unverifiable idea must be. That slow, tooling nucleotide freight, that packet boat threading itself through his ribosomes, when named out loud, carries nothing more than a letter to Jeanette, to the Blakes, to Botkin, to the rest of his colleagues living and dead. Nothing more than a letter to the world, all along. But he must post it alone.

She feels him waver, and not for the last time. But it is the last time she'll be around to be of any help. "Mönchlein, Mönchlein. Du gehst einen schweren Gang. Can I help you in any way? Can I do anything?" she asks, regressing to an accent so impenetrable he has to infer her words from her face.

"Yes," he says. "Yes you can." He slides over to the dark leather Viennese couch and lies down one last time. He slips his hands behind his head, crosses his legs at the ankles. Now. How does one get started in this enigmatic trade? "You can play me something."

The Lookup Table

I brought Dr. Ressler the names and addresses he asked me to find. He took them with a last, chivalrous compliment of my reference skills and entered them grimly into the hit routine that now hovered invisibly over the MOL data bases the way Bles's fire quietly waits to run loose through imaginary Flanders. "I've made you an accessory," he said, half to me, half to the console where he typed.

"No, I did." From the day I had signed on. I had also taken the initiative to retrieve a different set of addresses from the archives, and when Dr. Ressler reached a pause in his work, I produced my scrap of hurriedly copied chart:

The genetic code for mRNA as determined in vitro, considered universal across all living creation. "That's the ticket," he said, his eyes on the paper, studying it for some revealing nuance that he and everyone else had so far overlooked. Without meaning to, I'd reduced him to embarrassment. He continued at that vanishing decibel. "Doesn't look like much, does it?" I told him I'd spent half an hour in the library learning how to read the thing before figuring out that it was a simple substitution in three variables. Two years would pass before I had even a rough, reflected image of what the table described.

"No question. It's an interesting time to be alive," Ressler said, tapping the sheet of paper as his documentary proof. "We have attained ancient wishes, the plan to dig all the way down, to the bottom, like little children in the backyard shooting for China. In twenty years, we've put together a comprehensive, physical explanation of life. Only, at every way station on the way down, the destination slips one landing deeper. Heredity is not only chromosomes. Then, not only genes, not only nucleotides. My generation found it was not only chemistry, not only physics. Seems life might not be only anything." He traced three rays with his fingers, verifying that UCG coded for serine. "No question. An intellectual achievement: those of us understandably prejudiced toward seeing life from chicken level, realizing that chickens are just the egg's way of perpetuating the egg."

Todd joined us in the control room, dusting his hands in a parody of manual labor well done. He came from the computer room, where he had been erasing the packs containing the old versions of the programs and data files. We had crossed the backout point. The only existing copies of the disks containing the complete financial histories of tens of thousands of people now carried the changes that Dr. Ressler and Todd had engineered into them.