Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

I set the scrap down with exaggerated care. "Could you please be a little more vague?" I pride myself on working impartially, even for those whose sole purpose on earth is to propagate ravaging inanity. But this man was clearly too bright to be forgiven such a time waster. Bright enough to register facetiousness, in any case.

"Perhaps I ought to narrow the scale a mite. It's just that you're such a mind reader over the phone."

"Sir, we have several librarians on staff, and any one of them…" I tried to catch the eye of the security guard, just coming around the periodicals.

"Oh, no. We've spoken a couple times. The text of Luther's 95. Fast Fourier transforms. How much IBM to buy. Names of the flying reindeer."

I cleared my throat; we were not yet amused. But he had proved himself at least marginally safe, unlikely to tote handguns down into the subway. "All right. I'll help you, so long as you pay your taxes. This name: animal, vegetable…?"

"Funny you should ask." He turned his face away, hiding. When he looked back, his boyish clarity had changed barometrically. "I'm certain he did important work once."

The catch in his voice revealed that this wasn't a simple round of Botticelli. "All right. You believe he's in the records. I'll trust you. What was the man's line of work?"

My client grinned. "Don't know for sure." Sheepish, tickled. "Something hard. Something objective, I mean."

His odd adjective reminded me of a quote I'd once identified: Who seeks hard things, to him is the way hard. That one had fallen trivially at the push of a concordance. But this: qualitatively different. Why associate difficulty with objective disciplines? Certainly the subjective morass is harder. "We can eliminate professional sports?" He laughed in agreement. "You don't know the man's field, but you're sure he's well-known. What were his dates?"

"Oh." My question flushed the amusement from his eyes. "He's still alive. And I didn't say well-known. I said I was sure he'd done something important. Some real work once." He spoke precisely if incoherently, sure that intelligibility would eventually, as with the current administration's promised economic prosperity, trickle down.

"I see." I hid my irritation by taking sparse notes. "Still living. Born…?" I finally prompted, "When?"

He thought long. Breaking through triumphantly, he said, "He is about twice as old as me. I know that for a fact. That means we can start in the early thirties, huh?"

I suggested he start a little higher, in the low forties, Fortieth to Forty-second, to be exact. "Sir. We're just a neighborhood branch. If this person is as obscure as you make him out, you'll have to go over to midtown."

He sensed my shame in referring him to a higher authority. "You kidding? They'd laugh me off Manhattan."

"Why shouldn't we do the same?"

"Heard you don't laugh as much here." At which, I did.

Even as I tried to palm him off, I knew I wouldn't let him go without first testing my skill. His softheaded question had a difficulty that hooked me. Solving it would be at least as valuable to the long-term survival of the race as determining Dorothy's shoe size or supplying a six-letter word for a vehicle ending in U. "All right. What great thing, broadly speaking of course, do you think he did? How did you hear of him?"

"I work with him."

It took no intuition to hear the warning buzzers. Those who want to get the drop on another — from term-papering schoolchildren to businessmen steeped in interoffice sabotage — outnumber all my other clients. I would not be party to spying on a coworker. But just about to hand back the paper scrap, I recalled how, at the moment when this man had joked about his acquaintance straddling animal and vegetable, he had hidden his hazel-and-bark face. Rather than return the name, I stiffened and held it, implicating myself for good.

Had I paid attention, I might have been quicker in drawing connections in the days ahead. But as in most informational work, content evaporates completely before the end of the shift. Specifics disappear, leaving just the trace of categories, methods. Archivists aren't wellsprings of fact; they are search algorithms. The unfolding subway, the byzantine network of accumulating particulars — our Pyramid, Great Wall, St. Peter's, the largest engineering feat of all time — daily runs a nip-and-tuck footrace between the facts worth saving and the technology for managing the explosion. A single day produces more print than centuries of antiquity. Magazines, newspapers, fliers, pamphlets, brochures: fifty thousand volumes annually in English alone, ten times what a person can read in a lifetime. Six new books every hour, each one the potential wave-tip that will put the whole retrieval system under. Dictionaries of dictionaries, encyclopedias of indices, compression tables into microfilm windows onto text bases. Even my sleepy branch has its desktop computer — a genus nonexistent ten years ago — that scans years of periodicals by subject, title, or author, in seconds returning a cartridge that plugs into a reader that zooms to the complete article in question, assuming the high schoolers haven't wedged Slurpee cups into the mechanism. In summer '83, I had every confidence in the power of my tools to crack the script. Two years of even more spectacular advances in retrieval, and I'm guttering in the dark.

One night not long ago Ressler, Todd, and I — contents, carrier, and cracker of that first ID — sat together in the hum of the computer room, its gigabytes of sensitive data in the sole care of these two vagrants, over stale bread, grocery-store Camembert, and Moselle. Expansive in the combination of tastes, Dr. Ressler remarked that people of last century could look at a musical score and hear the piece in their heads. "Name the work; they could hum the principal motifs. We've traded that for the ability to lay hands on a recording in five minutes, or your tax contribution back." Affectionate burlesque of my trade, the one that for a moment recovered him from the heap of lost scores.

In that professional capacity, I didn't for an instant doubt I'd be able to find the nub-penned name. Even without any contribution, Stuart Ressler was somewhere in the permanent files, many times, in immense Orwellian lists. Time, resources, and brute research could extract him. I needed only decide how much effort this other man, in his twenties, with the Bonnard coloration, was worth.

I try not to second-guess the social value of my daily assignments. From each according to his critical needs, to each according to my best retrieving abilities. I must believe that my clients are the best judge of what information they require. My colleague Mr. Scott, advanced degrees in anthro and philology as well as library science, hovering on the brink of eternally threatened retirement, pulling volumes to prove to this year's perpetual motioneer that the latest ingenious scheme once again violates the Second Law, likes to sing the couplet:

They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round,

They all laughed when Edison recorded sound.

Skepticism sweetens Mr. Scott's countertenor: all that sad, misdirected, highly trained skill, with only a once-an-epoch useful solution preventing his whole career from degenerating into a waste of shame. Scott, like everyone who looks things up for a living, prefers Gershwin to admitting that progress has destroyed our ability to tell which facts of the runaway file are worth recalling. Value is the one thing that can't be looked up. I myself am sometimes shamefully pragmatic, cutting losses on a goose-chase, bowing out on diminishing returns: the awful ethical calculus that forces politicians to cut a deal, surgeons to choose which of three dying people to repair My first impulse was to give this college boy a list of biographical dictionaries and ditch him until he'd run the legwork, by which point I would be safely over the informational border, joining Mr. Scott in retirement haven. Defensible, given the opacity of the question. But pride made me give it a preliminary nudge. However ill-defined, the ID was at least as diverting as rock stars' birthdays.