Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

"Dan, I had no idea. What's the battlefield tonight? This Is Your Life? Queen for a Day?" Two doozies of terminal civilization built on the premise that sadism is simply loving attention to one's neighbor's masochism. Both trace case histories of individual agony and ecstasy in tortuous detail, elevating the home audience through the triple intercession of identification, catharsis, and aesthetic distance.

Woyty's elbows jerk as if struck by the examiner's rubber tomahawk. "Not exactly. I did those two, months ago. My first urge was frontal assault, pan them both. I see no redeeming civilizing value in the public audit of a guy who is forced to relive through audiovisual aids his divorce, a bankruptcy suit, and two years in Sing Sing. But rating them was problematic. Whatever their faults, Queen and Life are at least tenuously nonfiction. Healthy counterbalance to Lucy, where the end of the episode always reveals the world to be everybody's favorite crazy uncle. So let the woman who in one week accidentally poisons her kid and contracts leukemia wear a fake crown and scepter on network TV. I gave the shows a four point five and a four point two. Low enough to show I hate them, but high enough to indicate that I prefer them to the alternatives. Coincidentally, those were close to the Stainer norm. The more I strike against the status quo, the closer I fit the mode."

Woyty gives the set a palm-slap, tuning it in. "No. Tonight, we've something a shade more significant." Just then, the familiar features of Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb, emerge from the electromagnetic gray scan. Teller, brilliant, mad Hungarian emigre, tes-tifier against Oppenheimer at the government's This Is Your Life, argues heatedly with another world-class mind whose face Ressler recognizes: Linus Pauling, Nobel laureate, supreme figure of American chemistry, he of vitamin C and the covalent bond, structural elucidator of any number of organic molecules, and nip-and-tuck runner-up to the three-dimensional solution of DNA.

The two sit in a San Francisco studio, battling toe to toe on the feasibility — no, the desirability — of a comprehensive nuclear test ban. "For those of you out in the home audience," Woyty editorializes, "these men are not paid actors. They are two giants of modern science, delay-broadcast, of course. Any hair-tearing or tossed water glasses long since edited out."

Ressler wants the man to shut up so he can hear; he can't believe it's happening. The scientists both smile disarmingly. There's a lot of heavy eyebrow work going on, and a good deal of finger-pointing as well. Teller's deep, black eye sockets versus Pauling's shiny pate. Incredulous, Ressler looks from combatant to combatant, trying to follow their reasoning. Teller seems to say that there would be no way of knowing how effective or reliable a device would be if testing were eliminated. Pauling shouts that that is precisely the point.

Ressler studies the hook-nosed Hungarian. Like everyone else in science, Teller has recently tried his hand at the coding problem. Ressler read the paper, and concluded that the moonlighter ought not to give up the megaton day job. He wonders how this man can be a devotee of the same crystalline bracer that has recently awakened him to the uses of music. Teller's adoration of Bach is legendary; he reportedly forced fellow members of the Manhattan Project to listen to poor recordings and passable personal renditions in labs ranging from Columbia to that New Mexico mesa.

How can these men, researchers of the first rank, no matter what their politics, take the debate of so nebulous an issue out into the public forum? It violates positivism, the ban on discussing things one can't know. Their sinking to the fallacies of politicians horrifies Ressler, grates against his belief that "is" and "ought to be" are and ought to be separate. He follows the debate, a glutton for revulsion. But before he can name the nausea in this public screech of intellect, Woytowich intrudes. "Stainer is canvassing this event heavily. In addition to figuring out who and how many are watching, they want an evaluation from any family that does tune in. They've sent out that favorite soft-science tool, a questionnaire.

Seems they're trying to determine if there's a market for reality. If there's any future for world-saving debate on television."

"World-saving?" Another defection. "You too…?"

Woyty fails to notice Ressler's crisis of conviction. "Of course. This is the Big One. The one I'm been rotting my mind on countless years of Wells Fargos to preserve."

Ressler watches aghast as the two debate safety, flipping the hot potato between their four hands as if the quarrel is just its subject matter. It's agony to see Pauling, agent of so many discoveries, talking with such passion about so messy and unqualifiable a term as morality. It hurts the way a sports hero's sellout to soft-drink vending hits a ten-year-old. Even Ressler can see that verifiability isn't the real issue. If w e can build the things, we can find a way of telling whether or not they're being tested. The issue is, once set in motion, whether we want to rein the incredible apparatus in. What'll it be? Turn back or get on with it?

In disgust, he feels a gut-tug toward Teller. We're condemned to test, to develop. How else can we know the desirability of an experiment unless we've run it? No ignorant constraints on knowledge. Yet something deeper swings him toward Pauling, the better scientist: aren't we graced with some degree of foresight? Is what we can do always what we must?

"We've got a problem here," Woyty says. "Do I do my ineffectual bit for history? Pull out the stops tonight? Give my all to the cause? Slap the show solid nines across the board and risk instant ejection from Stainerhood? Or appease the testors' expectations by turning in scores only a little above normal, seven point one or thereabouts?"

Ressler's problem is worse. Until this moment, he was certain that the highest obligation of science was to describe objectively, to reveal the purpose-free domain. But here are Teller and Pauling, carrying on on national TV as if some things were more urgent than truth, as if we're condemned always to fall back on the blind viewpoint of need. As if observation — the dismissal of final causes necessary for any solution of the physical world — can solve everything except ethics. As if exploration without ethics were no better than data without theory.

Woytowich runs on. "The secret word for tonight is seven point seven. A rough mean between what I want to give it and what I can afford to. Hover around a plausible pip, win an all-expenses-paid reprieve from responsibility. Escape a near-brush with commitment this time around, live to fight another way. What do you say, friend? Pick a number. Vote for me."

At that moment, rasped by this unexpected irritant, the next piece in Ressler's maturing experimental procedure falls into place. Something's been missing from his model of chemical inheritance. Obvious, now that it's here: the coding problem is de facto a polling problem. Nucleotide triplets, wrapped in a supercoiled string, are, not inert, static, informational bits. They are a referendum, a chorus of self-serving, purposive voices, a proliferation of experiment whose electoral outcome of enzyme behaviors decides their fates.

If he can't read the impossibly complex code directly, he can at least poll the encoder, map the mechanism by submitting it to ballot. Ressler walks quickly out of the room. Another word will jeopardize the fragile, crystallizing notion. Woytowich, looking up from the set, sees his junior partner disappearing down the hall. He misinterprets the flight. "Abstaining is still voting," Woyty calls out to the vanishing back. "No vote is still a vote, A man's gotta vote."