Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

The news comes on, and Woytowich sits pasted to the tube. The top embalmer in the state could not have waxed the man better. His full-blown mania for current events must be linked to this other defect, free association. Ressler, his own work impaired by the electronic anesthesia, makes one last try. "Why have you brought a television into the lab?"

Woytowich mumbles, "I've some trials that need attending."

"So do I, sir." After an afternoon's glance at eyes hazel and moist enough to explain why he has been taken out and dropped in this forsaken place, the last thing Ressler needs now is Beirut. Berlin. Woyty sighs and shoots Ressler a strained smile suggesting that the youth is not seeing him at his best. Dan, Ressler knows, is a brilliant technician with every right to be alienated. The sober, classical generational studies he's produced for decades are enough to bore anyone to tears. A now ancient paper, written when Woyty was a baby post-grad, cried in the wilderness against the protein-as-gene climate. Vindication did little to rehabilitate him with the old guard he'd untimely challenged. In the early fifties, Woytowich, churning out disease patterns in fish family trees, experienced a short-lived rebirth. He reportedly combed the building for days, telling anyone who'd listen about a strange "jumping inheritance" which he could not duplicate or explain. Three years later, someone else published the complete mechanism. By then, Woyty had become an antinomian pariah, producing the barest minimum research to survive. Yet he never once violated the Lafayette Escadrille code of honor by claiming he'd almost been there.

"Were you by any chance watching last year," Woytowich wanders off irrelevantly again, bringing a blush of shame to Ressler's cheeks, when Ed Sullivan went on his Really Big Shoe and asked his audience whether they should allow Ingrid Bergman to appear on the program?"

Ressler shakes his head quickly. "No set."

"No? Of course not. Well, it was the low point of modern opinion polling. Granted the woman is controversial, leaving her husband to take up with an Italian and all. Seven years of political exile, denouncement on the Senate floor, all for falling in love with someone other than her husband." A pause sends shimmies up Ressler's spine. "I never thought of our witch hunts as anything other than pubescent acne, aberrations caused by moving too quickly into the Data Age. Now I'm not that far out of the mainstream, and I've never given the green light to extremists, and as far as I'm concerned, we ought to send nuts like Levering into Minnesota exile." He snorts a laugh when Ressler doesn't. "But imagine: 'If you want to see this adulteress on the show, write and tell me.' Not exactly a controlled survey."

Woytowich comes over to where Ressler finishes the beaker-washing he'd get a post-doc to do if he weren't the post-doc. The way Woyty picks up the electrophoresis strips and raises his eyebrows suggests that the difference between cueing an audience and confirming an experimental hunch is a question of nomenclature. "I guess I don't see how Miss Bergman's problems lead to TVs in the lab."

Woytowich turns away. "It is just for tonight."

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean___I'm just curious."

Like one of his dazed fish doing slow loop-the-loops in the tank, Woyty circles Ressler's table. "I'd like to tell you something I'm not allowed to tell anyone. That I've kept to myself until now." Ressler waits until he realizes the request wasn't rhetorical; Woytowich really wants permission to tell. Stuart nods. "Renée and I… are a Stainer family." Ressler laughs out loud to put it together. The Stainer ratings. Stainer, the national pollster, with his legendary secret sample group perfectly representing America in miniature. Woyty a Stainer voter? Ressler has never met anyone like Woytowich in his life. And yet: someone has to stand, in those endless polls of taste that run America, for every mephisto variation in existence. "I know it's ludicrous. I was selected in my late twenties, shortly after my appointment as assistant prof at Illinois. Renée became royalty by virtue of marriage."

"Couldn't you decline the nomination?"

"Can lab rats turn down their boss's NSF grant? A median citizen does not turn down nomination to median citizenship."

"It doesn't pay, does it?"

"Actually, being a responsible sample group member has cost me considerably over the years. No prestige, obviously, as we're sworn to solemn secrecy. Knowledge of Stainer names would be golden." Woyty gives a hapless look laced with irony: I've perjured myself to tell you this.

"I don't understand. Why put up with it, if it's a burden?"

"Think about it. There are only fifteen thousand Stainer members nation-wide. Only one per ten thousand. We're in the unique position of rating every televised message to enter the American home. If a show passes our chi-square, it becomes the law of the land. National sacrament. In its own peculiar way, undeniable power."

So it's more than lack of collegial support that has kept this man from realizing his potential. Woytowich's social obligations have for some time been tinged with the moral fervor of a Mormon setting out on his two-year missionary stint in the Third World. Woyty's ethical compulsion to influence the sample mean mimics the first principle: go ye therefore and replicate thyself, and may the most persuasive opinions live. His peculiar polling position has made him purposive, a thing no scientist can afford to be.

Woyty breathes deeply. "The way I see it, in an industrial democracy the size of Americorp, the vote is pretty much ceremonial privilege. Your state representative? Tribal holdover. More an after-the-fact efficiency check on mass manipulation. A ballot in the Stainer ratings, on the other hand, gives me a chance to manipulate the manipulators. When I rate, the boys on both seaboards snap to attention."

"But wait—"

Woytowich aggressively cuts him off. "I know what you're going to say. The small-denominator fallacy. Well, you're right. My proxy vote for ten thousand people has no more significance in the sample of fifteen thousand than the votes of the ten thousand Daniel W models from whom I am indistinguishable in taste in the hundred and fifty million nation at large. And yet," Woyty smiles sadly, imparting the latest unsupported dead-on prediction of his scientific career, "the world is not a linear equation. Big changes come from small initial differences. You are a good enough scientist," he accuses, "to know that all polls are, to a certain degree, self-fulfilling. Methods of inquiry create possible outcomes. The great difference between the Stainer ratings and Citizen Rule lies in the results each is after. Ike, Stassen, Truman, Stevenson? Jesus, who are these guys? Epiphenomena, emblems of the homogenation of taste, the by-products of mechanization, not the actors upon it. But ask a fellow — OK, fifteen thousand fellows — to judge Gunsmoke, and you start to zero in on the real substrata of civilization."

So this is who Dan really is. For the past several years, he has gone about in secrecy, unknown even to his team members, doing his bit for the elevation of the species. He has had to be perfectly informed, both about world events and the hydra of churned consumer culture. Somewhere last month, last year, he passed the point, without knowing it, where he no longer simply sought the up-to-the-minute. He needed it. Like enzyme-deprived mutations, Woytowich's system can no longer function without a steady source — a glut — of broadcast.

Woyty returns to the set, adjusts the aerial. "The problem with swaying the median is that I must move selectively, a blow here and there where it counts. Stay within the standard deviation. Guerrilla war. Dienbienphu of shrewdery against prevailing tastes. To use one's Stainer vote to subvert popular culture for the better, one cannot saturation-bomb. Three votes in a row for the high-foreheads — be they ever so humble — and Stainer would dump me as an aberrant ringer."