Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Ridiculous, I thought, even as he got the sentence out. Seven August, one of an endless series. Ten days earlier, I had passed over, without ripple, that landscape with conflagration, the 1976 quake in Tangshan, China, 8.2 on the Richter, killing a surreal 655,235. I'd passed it by for the Event Calendar for no other reason than my deciding that history had to serve some other cause than ungraspable tragedy. In contrast, two days before this outing, I'd posted the Mayflower and Speedwell setting sail for the New World. Honesty compelled me to add how the Pilgrims were forced to return to England and ditch the Speedwell as unseaworthy. Yet the abortive first run seemed the one needing commemorating. The uncelebrated cost of leaving. My own life was about to modulate to exploration, and it made me morose. Had I known the first thing about being alive, I would have made my last weeks with Keith affectionate, funny. But I've never known anything. I didn't even know what he knew: I was already gone.

After dinner, I lifted again. The sides of the absurd Woolworth Building, in low light, grew oppressively beautiful. I wanted to save all those horrid skyboxes, paint and carve them. We walked back east, and the stone and glass took on the dusk-shades of Morandi bottles glowing subtly in a chalk-and-sand rainbow. We skirted the panorama of Wall Street, the Battery, Chinatown. We walked back over the bridge, taut cables pulling the span up in the middle, a woman arching her back in animal ecstasy as her mate bit her gently by the neck. The city sat in the ocean, practically drifted out, afloat on the water. I could smell the brine and hear the surf above the traffic, as if this were not the densest collection of refugees in the world but only a summer resort, breakers and gradations of late-summer light visible from every window of the great beachfront hotel.

Night had dropped over the buildingscape, but every structure burned — cubist crystal palaces, technological Oz of local urgencies, with nobody manning the controls. I turned in mid-bridge and looked back where we had walked, saw the miles of fossil-fuel blazing, the millennia of buried plant beds going up in smoke in an endless point-tapestry of yellows and fire-blue greens and incandescent whites — a rush of unstoppable, jarring intervals. No matter how I moved or where I stood, I seemed plunged dead-set in the middle of the known world.

Today in History

Cyfer is not what it advertises itself to be. The four senior scientists and three apprentices form not so much a real research team as a loose specialist confederation. Each member pursues a personal line aside from the coding question. A cross section of disparate disciplines, they have been brought together by Ulrich for communication that could produce the hoped-for experimental avenue, give them a bead on the big picture.

Assembling such a band of crossovers initially struck Ressler as half-baked. How dare they jump headlong into the hottest topic now going, a field already filled with skilled investigators? Yet the more he mulls it over, the shrewder Ulrich's move seems. Molecular genetics, precisely because it is rapidly converging on a cross-disciplinary synthesis, requires exactly this assorted band, technically adept but without the retarding lead.

The field is dense with DPs: Gamow, Avery, Franklin, Chargaff, Griffith, Hershey, Luria, Pauling. The purebred geneticist among them is the rarest of blood groups. The coding problem can be approached from any angle: math, physics, stereochemistry. The problem in this moment of synthesis is that the mathematicians, physicists, chemists, and biologists don't all speak the same language. It's all interlingual patois. Ulrich's assembling a few native speakers of the various dialects to meet weekly increasingly seems a master stroke. The group has built into it all the expertise it needs. Ressler himself is to play a lead role: state-of-the-art liaison. The only one of them young enough to have grown up speaking molecular. Hell of a burden to place on a kid just out of school.

So be it. However disarrayed the sessions, they give Ressler the unique opportunity to pick the brains of experts in fields he has only rudimentary exposure to. The first four weeks of group barn-burning remain theoretical. Experimental progress must wait for the recent flurry of development to clear. The same thing that makes the coding problem the most exciting project going also makes it the most opaque. Theory permits a bewildering array of possible codes, while DNA sequence data provide no hint of regularity of pattern. This proliferation of too many possibilities gives Ressler hope that Cyfer has as much chance as any to receive the capricious break that will catapult them to the fore. The twist, always unanticipated, like the arrival of a startling bird one morning at the feeder outside the breakfast window, may pay its fragile visit at any moment. Ressler posts, by his office window, Delbruck's words: "It seems to me that Genetics is definitely loosening up and maybe we will live to see the day when we know something about inheritance__"

On an obnoxiously hot August day that melts the streets of Stadium Terrace into La Brea tar, Ressler takes time out to do a rudimentary milk run. He hits the futuristic supermarket with no shopping list except necessity. Pushing a cart with one oscillating wheel, he genuflects in aisle four toward Battle Creek, Michigan, for making survival possible. The daily cereal, consumed each evening over journals, if failing to carry him inexorably toward athleticism, has at least kept him from scurvy. Likewise, frozen juice concentrate takes one fifth the space of a mixed pitcher and requires no maintenance aside from rinsing the spoon. He ignores the taste, even enjoys it. Processed foods write the species' insatiable advance in miniature: freed from the overhead of care to get on with the real matter.

He chooses a meal that promises "Ready in One Minute," figuring he can eat it in two. Thus recovering four hours a week for his own pursuit, he swings his cart leisurely around the corner smack into none other than Toveh Botkin. The elderly Western war prize, whose protein chemistry work Ressler has studied, keeps cool in the mangle of metal. "I understand that the auto accident is a national obsession with Americans, Dr. Ressler. But don't you think this a bit extreme?" He grins and waves the curlered housewife traffic around the wreck. The two empiricists step forward to inspect the damages. The fronts of both carts are mauled. "Are you insured?" she asks.

Together they restore a pyramid of soap boxes their wreck has upended. "How wonderful!" Botkin exclaims, holding one up for Ressler to see. A green explosion on the soap box advertises the obligatory miracle ingredient, Delta-X Sub-2, dirt-bursting enzyme. "Here our little group racks its brains to get enzymes out of nucleic acids, while the rest of the world is busy figuring out how to get them into laundry powder."

They dust themselves off, shift effortlessly into a notes session. They compare the relative merits of direct templating of protein chains on the surface of the split DNA string to some form of intermediating sequence reader. The conversation breaks off when Botkin catches sight of the contents of Ressler's cart. "My young friend. Convenience taken to its logical extreme is cowardice." She looks personally wounded. "If the universe were as convenience-minded as you, it would never have proposed so inefficient an aggregate as life."

Ressler loves this woman's speech. Worth the dressing-down to hear her perform. "Dr. Botkin," he counters. "It's impossible to cook for one."

"Nonsense. I've cooked for one for half a century, occasional dinner party aside. But if it is the motivation of pair bonding you need__" She hooks a passing young thing in white anklets and coos at her, "My dear. Would you love, honor, and obey this decent-looking young man so that he can get a reasonable meal in the evenings?"