Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

The girl giggles. "I'm already married."

"Do you expect your husband to live very long?" At length, Ressler makes a few dietary concessions, the most important being his agreement to dine with her at least once a week. "I will introduce you to the clarity of thinking brought on by baked lamb, and you can bring me up to date on molecular mechanisms. I think I understand the part about the tall pea plants and the short, but beyond that…?" Botkin shrugs, reverence for the engine of skepticism. They arrive at the checkout behind a woman giving herself whiplash by watching the bagging and the register at the same time. What a very strange place he has been set down in, this world. He ought to get out more often.

Botkin, whatever her gifts as a conversationist, is almost as old as the rediscovery of Mendel. The other extreme in age, Joe Lovering, beat a time-honored path out of pure math into muddy population statistics. Ressler has seen the guy potting about in the lab, although exactly what the excitable kid does is anybody's guess. He looks decidedly gumfooted holding any equipment more corporeal than a chi-square. Stuart takes him to the Y for lunch, part of a court-your-resources campaign. He has the sub, Levering the congealed mac and cheese. Hardly are they seated when Joe whips out a napkin and begins sketching proofs. He argues that the genetic code, as an algorithmic formal system, is subject to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. "That would mean the symbolic language of the code can't be both consistent and complete. Wouldn't that be a kick in the head?"

Kid talk, competitive showing off, intellectual fantasy. But Ressler knows what Joe is driving at. He's toyed with similar ideas, cast in less abstruse terms. We are the by-product of the mechanism in there. So it must be more ingenious than us. Anything complex enough to create consciousness may be too complex for consciousness to understand. Yet the ultimate paradox is Lovering, crouched over his table napkin, using proofs to demonstrate proof's limits. Lovering laughs off recursion and takes up another tack: the key is to find some formal symmetry folded in this four-base chaos. Stuart distrusts this approach even more. He picks up the tab for their two untouched lunches, thanking Lovering politely for the insight.

In mid-month, a departmental review committee spot-checks the lab, sits through a free-association session where Lovering shows the group that the translation scheme under consideration can't map sequences of four linear bases into twenty amino acids and still indicate where a gene message starts and breaks off. Since the last few weeks have been devoted exclusively to this scheme, Cyfer disbands that afternoon knowing less than it did a month ago. The review panel is sympathetic to the need for experimental interludes. Fact-gathering without theoretic guidance is mere noise. But theory without fact, the review suggests, is not science. Incriminatingly large amounts of glassware in the lab carry that See-Yourself Shine. They urge Ulrich to produce some activity, reduce the Blue Skies, begin investigating something.

So in midsummer, a dozen weeks into his tenure, Ressler volunteers to help set up a showpiece, tracing the incorporation of traits through daughter cells. He'll use the elegant Hershey-Chase trick of radioactively labeling microorganisms to study how certain tagged strings are passed to the next generation. His first chance to do hard science since hitting the I-states.

Ressler devises a variant on the now notorious Waring Blendor technique to test the supposition that DNA information is transcribed and read like a linear tape. But the day he goes in to set up the growth cultures for his first run is a bad one for experiment. He smells aggression in the lab air, walks into the middle of a fight. He looks around but sees nothing departing from the status quo. Ulrich and Lovering are by the basins, the only two people in the room. Their conversation is subdued, their postures unthreatening. Ressler heads to his work area, lights a burner, and begins rudimentary sterilization.

Soon, however, Ulrich's and Lovering's raised voices filter into the public domain. Their words are lost in the flare of his gas jet. He assumes that the two are hashing out a labor dispute, currently in vogue. The McClellan committee investigates Beck, Brewster, and Hoffa, and suddenly everyone puts away his Monopoly set and joins the Mine Workers. It's demeaning for a scientist to argue over cash; Ressler has always solved budget problems by spending Saturday nights in the lab instead of at Murphy's — exactly the sort of chump that management loves to have in the rank and file.

A few escaping words and Ressler hears that matters are actually reversed. Joe is being called on the carpet, or the linoleum in this case. "You are forcing me to practice black magic, Dr. Ulrich. Pure popular hysteria plain and simple."

"Black magic? That's what you call a century of cumulative research, Dr. Lovering? Maybe you'd better give us your definition of science."

"What in the hell does Salk have to do with science?" Ressler shuts off the Bunsen. This one's a to-the-canvas brawl.

"Salk is the most systematic mind in today's laboratories. If we had half his thoroughness, we'd have the code out by now."

"Salk's a technician. An administrator. 'Thoroughness' is a euphemism."

Ressler strains to see without attracting notice. But he can't catch either man's face from where he stands, and he can't move without getting drawn into the fray.

"You're suggesting that science is only science provided it never turns up anything practical? That's not especially rational, is it, Dr. Lovering?"

Ulrich infuses "rational" with so much hiss that Ressler slips and contaminates a petri. He looks around the lab to see who else is in calling distance. Botkin's in her office down the hall, but an old woman wouldn't be much help in pulling bucks off each other. Lovering looks about to bolt from his corner and tackle his adversary. "This is a witch hunt. You've singled me out because of my politics."

"I'm doing no such thing. You've singled yourself out, by refusing to take a proven vaccine."

"Proven my ass. Read the field trials. Where are the controls? Polio reduction in heavily dosed areas; so what? The disease moves in epidemics. It's erratic by definition."

Ulrich becomes cool, compensatory to his junior's frenzy. "Joe, you're the only one in this lab who refused the vaccine."

"You want me to take the doses and cross myself like everybody else? What's the paranoia? You've had your three slugs; I can't hurt you."

"You can hurt me plenty. If word got out that a scientist refused readily available precautions this late, when we're finally moving towards eradication…."

"Oh! So funding is the issue. That's not especially rational, is it, Dr. Ulrich?"

Ressler can't believe this: the kid spits out words that could cost him everything. And the old man lets him. Ulrich grows gentler than Ressler has ever seen him. "Joseph," he says, almost singing. "Just tell me why you refuse it."

A look comes over Lovering's face: able to rationalize forever, when asked outright, he will not misrepresent. "Because my mother's a Christian Scientist. That's why." Lovering dashes from the lab, leaving Ulrich to nurse his victory. Ressler returns to experimental prep, but his heart is no longer in it. He lays out the first trial and organizes the notebook. Then he knocks off for the day. The lab is suddenly infected with labeled belief. The charm has temporarily fled the whole inheritance question.

Back at the barracks, with nothing to protect him from night's humidity except his lawn chair and tomato juice, Ressler involuntarily recalls a painful joke he himself helped propagate in grad school days: A Jew, a Catholic, and a Christian Scientist sit in the anteroom to Hell. The Catholic turns to the Jew and asks, "Why are you here?" The Jew replies, "Well, God help me, but I couldn't keep from nibbling ham now and then. Why are you here?" The Catholic answers, "I had a little trouble touching myself where I go to the bathroom." The two of them turn to the Christian Scientist. "And you? Why are you here?" The Christian Scientist replies firmly, "I'm not."