Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

The words that might tell me who the fellow was are no longer the words of the original. A coat of metaphor between me and the life I want to write. Words are a treacherous sextant, a poor stand-in for the thing they lay out. But they're all I have — memory, letters, this language institute. Translation would be impossible, self-contradicting at the etymological core: there would be no translation were it not for the fact that there is only translation. Nothing means what its shorthand pattern says it does. Everything ever uttered requires cracking. So I keep busy, travel, learn some words__"I will call the world a school instituted for the purpose of teaching little children how to read." Full marks for identifying.

You may find it as hopeful as I did to discover that the Dutch for weather" and "again" are the same. Let me say at least that I love you, and all other untranslatables.

FTODD

P.S. If I were you, I would write me back quickly and affectionately, an irrefusable letter from home. Something along the lines of "The age of Europe is past. That of America is ending. Get back fast before it's all over." In the meantime: Waarom hangt je was niet op de Siegfried Lijn? Roughly ported over: Why not hang your wash out on the Siegfried Line?

Halcyon Days

Ressler's write-up is accepted by the Journal of Molecular Biology. He will appear as second author after Ulrich. Standard practice: the glass-washer takes second billing to team leader. Ulrich edits his summary liberally. Ressler initially concluded, "It has been demonstrated that hereditary information is arranged in unidirectional, nonoverlapping nucleotide triplets, each determining a single amino acid in protein synthesis. Code redundancy may favor an in vitro method of determining codon assignments over analyses of base and polypetide sequences." Ulrich softens this to "Our results further substantiate the hypothesis of a linear arrangement, perhaps with a triplet reading frame." He strikes the crucial second sentence altogether. When the red-penned draft comes back to Ressler, he springs up and walks the paper back down the hall to the old man's office, using the distance to suppress the spontaneous fight mechanism sprung in his body.

Ulrich shifts in his chair and drops into placid register. "The write-up is first-rate. But we don't want to overstate the results." Ressler volleys halfheartedly: his conclusion makes no assertion that isn't supported. "Perhaps," Ulrich holds firm. "But what counts is not what you claim for your results, but what they claim for themselves. You don't want to dictate how to run follow-ups. That would be…" The veteran breaks into a conspiratorial grin. "That would be leading trump."

Ressler leaves, rebuked but pleased. Ulrich's tacit advice to play things close to the chest unwittingly exonerates Stuart for not yet announcing his even more sweeping line of thought. In the premature evening of his office he follows a bibliographical trail, searching down another experiment from a pair of years ago. He dimly recalls a paper with similar elliptical conclusion that could vaporize the intractable barrier between him and the last lab step. His concentration for work is shaken by the hierarchy of ethics. Ulrich's edit can in no stretch of the term be called fraud, or even suppression. Yet aggregate reticence shades imperceptibly into misrepresentation.

He has not, under grant or tenure pressure, recreated results without resubmitting them to the experimental apparatus. No; his data are beyond reproach. He's not even on the hazier ground of corner-cutting in the name of efficiency. In school, he worked for a big-name researcher who occasionally whipped up extra runs, substantiating more careful trails but skimping on controls. The accusation's been made against Mendel himself: the smooth-versus-wrinkled ratio is too perfect. But that was something else altogether — the unconscious influence of conviction. Another, more troubling imputation against the monk asks why he studied only traits that all reside on independent chromosomes. Did he examine and fail to report inheritance patterns complicated by inexplicable linkage that would have thrown the infant theory in doubt?

Simplification, paring back the variables, far from invalidating results, is indeed required by the foundations of empirical design. The success of reductionism depends on measuring and reporting only that bit of the cloth that can be understood and tested piecemeal. Ulrich's advice partakes of the same reductionist pragmatism: let's establish the part beyond the slightest doubt, before we speculate on the whole's make and model.

Ressler releases this work — insignificant compared to the catch he now angles for — from safekeeping. But the question nags at him. The question of just what he is or isn't obliged to telegraph to the competing scientific community masks a deeper ethical issue, his secret competitive motive. Easier to tell all, free himself from the advantage of insight. He hoards the self-sabotage urge the way his fellow children of the Depression hoard tinfoil.

He lets Ulrich strike the summary and does not press his own extrapolation. Demurring is worlds away from the most defensible fraud. It doesn't begin to flirt with falsification. Even in the continuum between subjectivity and chicanery, no one would call it doctoring. But simple selective silence, cautious calculation itself, carries along, like an unsuspecting trouser cuff bearing the free-loading burr of a seedpod, some particle of self-servance. The nauseating calculus of survival flashes on him. Self-furthering stratagems color even that perfect, informational openness, the unedited wonder of the most ideal human pursuit: good science.

Cyfer has a greater threat to its survival than entrepreneurism. Circumstance strips the team of its clearest-headed member. The train is set in motion on December 19, when the world weather engine is traditionally in almanac respite. The day is too warm for near-winter. The unusual front that releases the balmy air in the same breath releases a burst of tornadoes across the belt of Missouri, Arkansas, and Illinois. They catch the states off-guard, well past the usual time of year.

Ressler has just returned from the retail strip, where he has bought himself an early Christmas present. He has taken his last two untouched checks and a list prepared by Toveh Botkin and made a run on the record store. He returns to barracks with two LPs for every periodical still strewn about his front room. He assembles a respectable, compact music library, from Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli to Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima.

He listens, relaxed, alert, despite just coming off of a triple shift of journal scouring, article amending, and experimental speculation. Finding the music precise, the notes excruciatingly discrete, he decides that the need for sleep is vastly overrated. The intensity of music keeps him from hearing that the long, sonorous, extended pedal point arising from the continuo of a bit of until-then-banal Venetian Opera is, in fact, the Civil Defense horns crying disaster. Discovering that the piercing tone is not shook out of his phonograph's paper speakers, he wonders if he's skipped ahead to Tuesday, 10:00 a.m., the weekly CD drill. But days can't have passed: he's still in the seventeenth century.

At the air raid's insistence, he steps outside his shack to scope out the situation. Unforgettable: the sky has gone a sickening, Matthew Passion, faulty-Zenith green, right out of the Crayola box. Otherworldly: everyone in Stadium Terrace, from infant to eternal student, streams in column to the stadium, toting suitcases, pulling Rapid Flyers full of belongings. No simulation would bother to be this elaborate.