Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

After a healthy dose of vita-look-alike, I still declined to come watch the system in action, if more affectionate in my refusal. To fault Tuckwell for hypocrisy was even worse. Keith, private maniac, professional fair-haired boy of the senior partners, the perfect adaptation for steel and glass, was simply more honest about living the split than I was. The moment he walked out the door, still trying to seduce me with the ludicrous court battle, I was on the phone. By the third ring, I was about to hang up and disappear into telephonymity when he answered. "Museum?" I asked, aping his trick of plunging in in medias res.

Franklin answered, "Museum," enthusiastically on the downbeat, although sleep still coated his voice.

Hunger Moon

Even the Biology Building is lately promoted to Shelter Status. The need to imagine safe havens has become epidemic. Ressler's isolation in recent weeks — winding up his rate experiment, avoiding the distraction of his colleagues' company, exploring in the evenings that inscrutable musical code — has been so complete that he has not heard the world-changing news: the Russians have launched an artificial moon. For the first time since the first star maps, a new celestial body circles the sky. Everything at launch level is changed utterly. For a moment, the planet discovers itself on the edge of unforgiving space. Fear is electric: we've escaped the pull of the world.

Western alarm is worse, deafening. The Russian scientist's legendary backwardness is wiped out in one shocking headline. Stalinist science has produced its notorious monsters, notably the state-sponsored revival of Lamarckism. A body's ability to develop and pass on beneficial mutations was deemed ideologically appealing enough for the party to overrule the demonstrated direction of genetic translation. Forced by political dictum, Russian scientists wasted decades hunting the pangene, proof that somatic cells could alter the organism's gametes. When Uncle Joe died in '53, his Acquired Characteristics died with him.

But the West's own search for the genome might itself be biased toward a representational democracy. Ressler loves Haldane's quip about terriers growing tails despite generations of clipping: "Yes, there's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will." But on humbler days in the sophisticated West, he recalls that field evidence for the neo-Darwinian synthesis is itself equivocal. That some bump, not yet a functional eye, can be promoted for generations before it can see is at least as implausible as mo lecular-environmental feedback. Chance and necessity differ only by degree.

In labs across the country, the "What do you get when you cross Stalin with Lamarck" jokes are hushed furiously this week. A new respect for Soviet science emerges in 100-point type. They've made a satellite, while the brightest stars on our technological horizon are the exploding Vanguard and the Edsel. The blow to national pride is a mobilization call. In one night, science is promoted to unchallenged prominence. Shaman status, educational rage, patriotic and pragmatic. The once-revered business career slips to a distant second in immigrants' dreams for the perpetuation of their genes. Stuart's folks' vision is vindicated.

Where the public feels knee-jerk fright, Cyfer expresses hushed elation. Koss, usually caustic in groups, opens the first Blue Sky after the launch. "How does it feel to be alive at the first ground-break since Columbus?" We've left the planet. Now there's no stopping.

Joe Lovering, misreading her amazement, scoffs. He can explain the Soviets' beating us to space. "The same thing that got them our A-bomb so fast. And the Super, just one year after us. We let them capture too many Nazi profs."

The lurch into the Space Age will make that last jolt from Stone into Iron seem like a pothole in the road. The dazed, mismatched layman's response to the alien new place follows the second Soviet launch. Laika, first dog in space. The papers demand: Are the Communists just going to let the poor thing die out there? They forget that the ongoing experiment has already taken its every living victim, each step along the way.

Sputnik and the space race make less of an impression on Ressler than they might. He stands on the threshold of news that could rival the Russians'. After a bout of intensive lab work, sleeping little and eating less, he concludes the radioactive trials Ulrich assigned him as busywork. His results fail to support the phenomenon they were looking for. Yet — basic paradox — the unmitigated negative result reveals more than any qualified positive could. The nonre-sults tell Ressler something serendipitous, critical.

He can't quantify it yet, but certain phages remain partly functional even after mutation should have wiped out enzyme activity. This degree of mutation survival may confirm that the gene is read like a linear tape, that the gene has error tolerance built in, that the message is more flexible than anyone suspects. Suppose a codon in the base sequence mutates from GCT to GGT. If the enzyme synthesized by the new codon is still functional, then perhaps GGT and GCT code for the same amino. Those extra forty-four codons that have been troubling everyone could reduce the chance of error. Redundancy may itself be useful.

He deduces this much from his data on enzymatic persistence. But another unexpected result suggests more. As widely grasped, individual mutations — insertions, deletions, or substitutions of base pairs — garble the stretch of affected message by rearranging its letters. But as little as a single deletion near one end of the asymmetric gene can totally destroy the enzymatic function the gene codes for. Conversely, a deletion near the other end leaves the gene function largely intact. An enzyme produced by a gene with a single dropped letter at the tail end remains chemically similar to the one produced by the original gene.

Ressler infers something Cyfer until then only supposes: the code is read from head to tail. An error at the beginning of the tape throws off the remaining reading. But an error at the end is translated only after most of the enzyme has been built. The metaphor fits, substantiates the model that Ressler has been working on in mental privacy. More important, in the course of the experiment, he's come up with a technique that may help him assemble his Rosetta. He has learned to use acridine compounds in a way that lets him control more precisely just where he places the garble and what shape it takes. One of the first impediments into the codon substitution table vanishes overnight.

Three quarters of the methodology he needs must be out there in print somewhere, public knowledge. All he needs to do now is collect the leads from divergent disciplines and work them into a coherent whole. Nobody has yet assembled the pieces, although he feels the entire field teeter on the edge of the simplicity just beyond their mass conceptual block. His head spins with the immediacy of it: a simple, experimental means of inducing controlled mutations, the tool that will permit them to determine the codon/ amino assignments. Selective garbling can tell them everything. Inducing mutations, introducing bits of nonsense into the gene's message, can force the code to reveal itself in entirety.

He sits on a code mine. His mind races to the choices available should the method lead into the vein. He can keep the method in-house a little longer, surrender it to Ulrich, announce the results to the team. But as much as he'd like to, he can't keep mum for long. He must publish the results from this experiment, hastening the pace of the accelerating field. He can't refuse to testify, however much time it might buy. He feels a strange euphoria, an overwhelming sense of inevitability. The thing about to make its grand entrance surprises him by its uncanny familiarity.