Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

While he unpacks his glassware and sets up a cot in a storage room, Jeanette Koss, the woman at Ulrich's party steeped in world polemics, passes his counter and puts a discreet hand on his. The contact startles Stuart; her touch, real skin rubbing the fur of his arm, cuts — so long has he been without — like an accusation. Dr. Koss whispers, "If Blake or Lovering catches sight of you in this condition, your year is ruined."

In the same soft confidence, she lays out that Joe Lovering, her soiree spar partner, and Tooney Blake, the pianist of less than gershwinning ways, are locked in an ideological conflict about the hazards of going outside with a wet head. The two scientists share compatible lab practices and commensurate views on the coding problem. But on this matter, they are bitterly bipolar. Dr. Koss relates how Blake has devoted himself to a systematic destruction of the old wives' hypothesis linking wet hair to open virus season. For the last month he has immersed his head twice daily, once before setting off to work and once before leaving the lab. "Just a hairsbreadth," Dr. Koss confides, "between empiric physiology and abnormal psych." Lovering, on the other hand, in horrified reaction, not only maintains bone-dry hair at all times but even now, in late July, keeps up a steady regimen of preventive tonics. "You see," Koss explains, releasing him from her touch, "they have no experimental control. If they catch you like this, you're It."

He's walked into all-out inimical politics. To date, he's lain low in the exchange between lab partners Niki and Ike. But his colleagues in deciphering have brought the Cold War home. Best avoid getting caught in the draft. Ressler thanks Dr. Koss for the caveat, but that's not sufficient. She produces a supply-room towel and insists on helping him. She wraps his head in the fabric and before he collects presence of mind to object begins rubbing him gently but briskly, businesslike, from crown to nape of neck. Buried memory shoots up through scalp: his mother preparing him for church, a wedding or funeral. The wince of somatic recall — thumb moistened with saliva, rubbing raw the skin behind his ears. The woman pinches his head into sweet pain. Woytowich walks in, salutes abstractedly, not even blinking.

Koss smoothes back his hair, combs it, smiles, and crosses the room to resume her work with the vernier scales. There she carefully measures the thickness of near-invisible growing media. In a minute, nothing out of the ordinary has happened; in two, Ressler's skin forgets the contact. He'll have to make allowances for the woman in the lab. Female scientists are still rare enough to seem as anomalous as Dr. Skinner's Ping-Pong-playing pigeons. Cyfer's employing two is a statistical violation. Toveh Botkin, the team's senior member after Ulrich, possesses an antique, clinical grace that sweeps her into the province of competent sexlessness. At the welcome party, he took to the older woman and refused all but a weak smile at the lone flash of humor to come from the evening: Joe Lovering describing her life as a series of near Mrs. Dr. Koss, on the other hand, a certified Mrs. in her spare time, is not to be completely trusted. Young, still breeding-age, somewhat better looking than germ culture: might upset the pheromone levels around here from now through the end of summer.

Yet this first afternoon, there seems little to worry about on that score. Blake, by his pianistic skills, is prematurely male-menopau-sal, Dan Woytowich too B-complex-deficient, and Ulrich too intent on cash-raising to raise any more disruptive fund drives. That leaves Lovering, who, by the time Stuart finishes unpacking, has taken up a post by a caged pair of white lab rats, apparently more mascots than experimental animals. Crew-cut, glasses, starched white coat with nub tie underneath, Joe shouts, "Mate, you suckers." Lover-ing's safe too.

The lab is well equipped. The experimental world divides into steriles and breeders. Stuart did his graduate work under a breeder, a brilliant teacher whose workplace's itinerant confusion — proliferating notebooks, apparatus, scopes, and racks of flasks whose labels had soaked into illegibility — was acute torture. Ulrich, happily enough, is a sterile. Never have supply cabinets so closely mimicked the pictures in warehouse catalogs, and the entire team, from post-doc Koss through veteran Botkin, keep their rubber-glove boxes prominently displayed.

The steriler the riper for Ressler. The only antidote to what ubiquitous radio announcers call the aches and pains of today's modern living is hair of the dog: research alone will cure a world sick on the aftereffects of discovery. Empiricism is the only way from ovum to novum. The panacea he has in mind requires only a lens with focal length long enough and a sterile place to stand.

Ulrich's note was accurate; the lab is between measurements at the moment. The day Ressler arrives the group is on extended leave from titrations, stains, and partition chromatography. They are after a transcription axiom, linguistic. For the rule linking nucleotide sequences to protein synthesis to be determined experimentally, Cyfer must first play with its shape, its inner symmetries. They are up against not so much the chemistry of biology as the math. Molecular genetics, stringing the fine line between experimental and theoretic, has a first shot at bridging the gap, grounding organic complexity in fundamental arithmetic. Ulrich has called a moratorium to consolidate the lightning results of recent months and formalize Cyfer's understanding of the symbolic logic that genetics has stumbled on. First vocabulary; then the generative grammar. Time for pure speculation. No more cigar butts, fingerprints: just, as the Belgian says, the little gray cells. Ressler's first day at school is a day to indulge in that old sworn enemy of experiment: reason.

The team was originally called the Ulrich Group, but that was impossible to say without coming to a full stop between words, which no one since Chargaff has had time for. The year before Ressler arrived, the team was rechristened the Enzyme Synthesis Identification Group. But that broke the unwritten rule of acronyms. At last Tooney Blake hit upon Cyfer, a compression of Cytology Ferment. While they weren't strictly in the wine business, the name was the catchiest in the hard sciences since Bill Haley and the Comets. The sobriquet even gives them an edge with grants.

A strange brew of personalities the name stands for. Toveh Botkin bicycles up on a machine that might have taken her on annual prewar pilgrimages to Bayreuth. Tooney Blake enters, abstractedly patting every empty pocket on his person. Karl Ulrich pulls into the Biology Building parking lot in a VW bearing the plate E COLI. Ressler has nothing against this bundle of bacterial joy so long as it stays in the intestines. But why dirty one's hands in the buggers when the problem of pure coding is at stake? All present and accounted for, Ressler joins his maiden Blue Sky session. The informal brainstorming gets underway, everyone tossing out abstracts of articles and volunteering to review others for the following week. Soon talk wanders onto topics that leave them sounding more like a clutch of cabalists or college of cardinals.

From their predecessors — pylons in the vast, incomplete suspension bridge between the inanimate atom and the world ecoweb — Cyfer inherits a list of numbers it must arrange into a magic square. They work with an alphabet of four nucleotide letters. These, if grouped as commonly believed into trinities of nucleotides, produce a vocabulary of sixty-four different words. These three-letter words translate into immense miracle-sentences in a language of twenty amino acid actants. Cyfer brainstorms, trying to weld together these incunabula into a grand, new gnosticism.

In this free association, they run the gamut of human failing. Joe Lovering races in minutes from embracing the newest fad on punctuation to discarding it wholesale in favor of a newer, improved flier. Dan Woytowich remains, incredibly, the last of the old guard to refuse to embrace the Watson-Crick model. His every static-sparking comment rejects the helical staircase. He declares, in a folksy singsong tailored to get on everyone's nerves, "Too simple to be all there is." Whenever anyone says anything remotely lucid or steers the group toward something they might at last get started on, Woyty shakes his head sadly and says, "We're overlooking something here. We're talking the big L, after all."