Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Botkin smiles sadly. "Half the NSF collaborated."

The lid of her centenarian rolltop desk, long stuck closed, renders the piece ornamental. Dr. Botkin now employs it only for stacking; piles of print, heaps of paper of all religious persuasions, welded into inseparable masses, ski down the desktop slope into further piles scattered about the floor. And yet, the room is meticulous, tidy. A Viennese overstuffed chair, faded but impeccable, flanges in ornate wings at the top; armrests flourish fruits and vines, and the stitchery on the back, though ghostly now, still shows the trace of a pastoral scene. The right armrest bears stains smelling of anisette, temporary storage spot for candy when the bone-handled phone demands answering. Botkin sits there for hours while Ressler lies flat out on a tooled Moroccan leather couch, as if for regression analysis. Botkin abstractly considers the skin on the back of her hand, which has gone slack and no longer snaps back when pinched. "And what is our lesson for today?"

Ressler, prostrate, grins at the ceiling. "The surface shape of the split helix. Its transcription to RNA. Energy considerations against assembling protein chains directly on the strand. The possibility of the peptide chain peeling from the RNA surface as it forms."

"If you insist," she sighs. But her imagination has come alive after a dormant winter. She once more reads voraciously, devising tests, learning, freeing herself from dead preconceptions, leaping for the first time since the war.

The room, curtained for minimum sunlight, smells of tea, rose water, hair oil, napthalene — nonspecific aromas of the past. Its scent encapsulates a forgotten ghetto — Danzig, perhaps, or Prague, though it would take a hopelessly sensitive nose to tell. Ressler can concentrate here. What's more, he can think out loud. Botkin has the intellectual chops to keep him honest. Something about the place makes it perfect for guided associating. Oriental richness, dark and full, despite a paucity of decorations. Only two ornaments grace the walls, two framed photographic prints, one of Mahler and one of the chemist Kekulé. The latter dreamt one night of a snake rolling its tail in its mouth, and woke with the structure of the benzene ring. The former composed, in already antiquated idiom, a staggeringly beautiful song cycle on the death of a child from scarlet fever, losing his own to the disease shortly thereafter. The two contemporaries hang side by side, a semblance of a shrine. Near them, mounted under glass, hangs a tiny, inexplicable object that could only be a gold filling.

Gradually Ressler ventures farther afield. Dan Woytowich has him over for a nervous evening. The group's classical geneticist, Woytowich has spent his professional life raising fish and plotting their susceptibility to disease against their number of stripes. Full of promise once, by all accounts. No one knows exactly what happened. Recently, alarmed by the advanced hour and suddenly aware that his generational studies have been all talk and no action, Woyty has married a grad student in English literature half his age, a woman both stripeless and disease-free. Despite the late discovery that he would even now like to father a real family, Woyty's only child to date is wife Renée's emerging dissertation.

Renée describes her project in detail, after the get-acquainted conversation falls into autism: "You know Ben Jonson? O Rare Ben Jonson?" Ressler nods before she starts singing "Drink to Me Only." "Someone once told Jonson that Shakespeare never blotted a line. Jonson replied, 'Would that he had blotted a thousand.'" Renée explains; Ressler drifts, loses the thread. Something to do with her determining exactly which thousand lines Jonson wanted Shakespeare to blot.

Woytowich is reluctant to talk shop. Stuart could learn endless classical genetics from the man; he slighted macroheredity in school, in the heat of molecular excitement. But Woyty just sits taciturn throughout the evening. When Ressler catches Dan looking at his watch, he apologizes for overstaying and gets up to go. "Oh, no," Woyty laughs anxiously. " Tain't that. Only… would you mind very much if we…?" He gestures embarrassedly at the color set, one of the first quarter million to grace an American home. "It's news time."

Ressler defers with pleasure. He watches attentively, not the new technology or today's current events, but the behavior of his colleague, a genuine habitue of headlines. Woyty sighs. "I'm absolutely dependent. Jesus; even quiz shows bind me for hours. But the news; God. I'm terrified of missing something. Ever since Khrushchev did his CBS interview___Christ Almighty. The news is the most gratifying thing life has to offer. Think of it; we can know within hours, things all over the globe actually happening now."

They watch in silence, the first comfortable moment all evening. The danger of the nightly You Are There. Partly developmental, like the soaps: today's police action is tomorrow's outbreak, so stay tuned. Only the stories change faster and more wildly than soaps. "Catch the broadcast about the Saigon stabbing of the Canadian armistice supervisor?" Woytowich asks during the commercial. "A real whodunit. But what happens next? Always the question. Catch Diem's visit, the great scenes of Dwight personally meeting the man at D.C. airport? Bloody hell, you know? Gets to be a problem. I mean, I could sit until the world ends before they give the wrap-up."

At the next break, fearing for the man's well-being, Ressler tries to change the topic. He describes his last twenty-four-hour shift manning the rate experiment, the isotope readings on his cultures. But the elder partner is unseducible. "Ain't that the kicker? They fail to tell you in Bio 110 just how much science amounts to jacking a knob every hour for three years and jotting it down in a journal. You ought to look into one of those portables. Pick one up on payments. Put it in your office. Go anywhere with one. Never have to miss an update."

"There's always the next day's newspapers, Dan."

"Not the same, reading about Yemen after the fact. Like listening to a tape of a ballgame. What difference does it make if Mays gets a clutch hit when the affair's a done deed? Give me live broadcast, the announcer muffing his words, the station disclaiming the views of third parties. Give me simultaneous report." That's it, the reason Woytowich has sunk into information dependence: if he hears an event while it's still going on, he has an infinitesimal chance to alter the outcome. Not to watch tonight's segment, even to entertain a junior researcher, is to commit a sin of omission. He's Horace Wells all over again, the man who, altruistically pursuing proper anesthetic dosages, discovered, instead, addiction and squalor.

Summer's almost gone, winter's coming on when K-53-C gets its first knock on the door. Given his utter anonymity, Ressler assumes some terrible mistake. It's the NSA, confusing him with some other Stuart Ressler of the same name, or Veep Dick Nixon on search-and-destroy committee work. What's he done recently to run afoul of the authorities? Growing radioactive microorganisms without a permit.

The visitor is Tooney Blake. Although they've worked in proximity all summer, the two men are still strangers. Blake is a solid biochemist who has taken up partition chromatography, a six-year-old technique that, given patience and precision, reveals the amino acid sequence in a protein. He has never voiced anything but irrefutable clarities at the Blue Sky sessions. Neither brilliant nor erratic, Blake is the sort of steady lexicographer Ressler will need to pull off any coup de grâce. Here Tooney stands, inexplicably in the doorway on the last Friday evening ever in August '57. He has his arm around an attractive woman in her mid-thirties. Ressler can only greet the couple warmly, as if they've been expected.