Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Todd and Ressler got along with their colleague, even liked him. But they couldn't help treating him as a young Walter Brennan, lost in the vast backroom poker game of the Information Age. Jimmy would sit in the lunchroom at ten to seven, eating his neglected bologna with mustard and browsing the Daily News as Todd clipped current events, waiting for the system to do the afternoon's General Ledger, which Jimmy should have finished by five. He'd limp to the computer room, punch the code into the electronic lock, rush to the printer, and discover that it had jammed at the beginning of the run. At this setback, he'd offer up an oath on the mild side of "Oh, nuts!" Todd insisted that Uncle Jim would not say shit if he had a mouth full of it. Jimmy would return to the cafeteria, throw up his hands, and half-happy, say, "I give up. Gonna quit and start that chicken farm."

He was an affable, engaging, hopeless plodder who talked in homilies. After a dozen truisms, winding up with "It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll," he'd head back to the computer room and rerun GL, bloody, but unbowed. Todd would match the man's Victoriana, remarking, "We wander between two worlds: one dead, the other on the critical list." Unimaginative, dedicated: in short, the ideal operations manager. Todd always said he would die one. Still, for all his happy ineptitude, Jimmy could point to ten fully vested years without failing to bring his machine on-line in time for the next shift. Franklin had failed twice already by sophomore season.

Other hangers-on sometimes strayed into the late show. Occasionally, an upper-middle exec in full three-piece regalia worked late, auditing some process or another. This was my cue to pretend I'd only dropped by to deliver a message. The office also employed a succession of earnest teenagers, their eyes on Wall Street, to collate and sweep up. A knot of females sometimes stayed late to offer Todd bits of their unfinished lunches. "The Frank Todd Fan Club," Uncle Jimmy enviously called it.

In the second month of my regular rounds at MOL, Dr. Ressler buzzed me in one evening. He met me at the door, as charmingly distant as ever. "Ah, a familiar face! May one presume to call you Jan, after this length of time?" I nodded enthusiastically. Although now on first-name basis, I was afraid to say anything, lest I scare him off. "What is Jan short for?"

"I'm afraid that's what's on the birth certificate." I still knew little more about him than on the day I made my photo discovery. His mystery had drawn me here in the first place. I felt shame at how easily I'd dropped pursuit, distracted by more immediate pleasures. I suppose I thought: He has taken decades to get this lost. I have time to find him at leisure.

"On the topic of birth certificates," he said, grinning in advance at his own Byzantine connection, "I suppose your expertise makes it an easy matter for you to identify what was born today, twenty-six years ago?"

I waved my hand for time, but didn't need it. "Sputnik." My pulse picked up: an event from the year that Todd and I would have given anything to hear him talk about.

"On the nose! A quarter century after the first transpacific flight. Five years before Wally Schirra. It would be tough to measure that kind of acceleration in G's, would it not, Jan?" The sound of my name in his voice froze me. Dr. Ressler took my fluster in stride. "Your friend is in the machine room, with an artificial moon of his own." He left. But not before I'd talked to him, come within a syllable of his past.

Outside the computer room, I stopped at the punch-in lock, although I knew the secret letter combination. Through the plate glass, Franker entertained a woman in her early twenties who I could not stop looking at. Frank must have been at his most charming, as the woman kept hiding her face in her hands. In a minute, he saw me and waved me in, a look of irritation asking why I was hanging around waiting for an invitation. "Bon soir, bud. Where you been?" He grabbed my hand and pumped it, as always. I was slow returning the pressure. He smiled and said, remiss, "Ms. Martens, Ms. O'Deigh, Vice versa," I don't feel especially attractive, rememberine the introduction. "Annie here is an affiliate of MOL.

A teller for the Mother Ship." The bank that was parent company of their firm. "While Jano___"

The beautiful girl cut him off. Her eyes lit up as if she had just met a celebrity. She smiled, clearly seducing me with an innocent display of unearned affection. "You're the one who discovered all about Stuart."

I shot Todd a look. He shrugged. "I wish I had," I said.

Annie Martens looked puzzled. The dazed confession of missing something — her "frog face," as Todd called it — came on her often, but never for very long. "Franklin thinks so much of you," she said, eager to start again.

I'd think highly of him, too, I thought, if I knew the first thing about him.

Pocket Score

No climate can resist colonization; the city seeped into even that remote outpost. But my MOL, the place's true state, started around nine at night when the supporting cast cleared out. (I say mine, though I won't be going back.) Only after nine did my adopted electronic cave take on the full flavor of dark. For an hour or so before I had in all conscience to return home, the deserted office bloomed.

Their work, starting when most of life was knocking off, was as aloof as a deep-space probe. The almanac says that a sixth of the employed population of industrial countries works other than standard daylight hours. But even in a city notorious for staying up around the clock, the derangement of late shift put them outside the frame. They moved about in a world after the long-expected evacuation, inhabiting one of those heavily worked mezzotint prints of vine-covered ruins, two rococo foreground figures with walking sticks.

Only people who wake in late afternoon and spend their lives in polar dark glimpse the place as it really looks. The nocturnal world disperses light's artificial still life. Dark does something to perception, baffles the rods and cones with a color-flat landscape where touch becomes the chief navigation, even in a room blazing with fluorescence. Certain mood disorders are brought on by reduced daylight; some sufferers of acute depression respond to houseplant UV. Prolonged time in the dark casts the imagination off. Everyone who lives in it ends a romantic, permanently jointless, unappeasable.

The graveyard world is as big as day, but abandoned. Inhibitions are at best irrelevant. Conversation gets strangely quaint. All earth's supervisors are in bed, narcotized. Only the outcasts are up and about, pretending production: decoupled old Belgians in the Congo after colonial withdrawal, playing squash on concrete as lichened as ruined Mayan ball courts. After nine, Todd and Ressler could choose any path they wished, providing the disk packs were processed and the reports in the bin when the morning shift punched in. The office was theirs to use as they pleased: candelabra dinners, masques, music.

And music first persuaded Dr. Ressler to open. Frank was sitting with Annie, on another of her late visits. I joined them for half an hour before heading down the hall on an uncharacteristically bold, dark-inspired whim. I found Dr. Ressler where he always spent the first hours of the shift: in the cramped control room, the closet of consoles and flickering modems. I listened at the door, although I hardly needed to: on the far side, the same music that had been playing the day I met him. I knocked, not even hoping he'd let me in.

But he did, as genteelly as ever. I'd already discovered that frontal assaults would not overcome his privacy. When I'd confronted him point-blank with the printed proof of his earlier profession, Dr. Ressler responded only with amusement. "You can't be interested in such inconsequentials." That night, I easily might have run into the same impasse. He asked with a concealed smile how the news scrapbook was going, then scowled when I told him Todd had already lost interest in the project. "Our friend's cultivated character flaw," he said, "is a refusal to finish things."