The fearful symmetry of this structure gave a first glimpse of living logic. Ressler described to us the days on the threshold, poised on the brink of cracking the supreme philosophical crime novel. His voice rarely straying over the surrounding machine hum, he imparted his urgency for resolution. He compared his anxiety then to that anecdote about Bach entering a party where the harpsichordist broke off in terror at his arrival. The composer had to rush past his host to resolve the suspension with appropriate cadence before making his formal greeting.
“There had to be a surprising aha, a way we could get the cell to crack the code for us. That was my bias. It’s pure torment to know that revolutionary, self-evident connections might be anywhere but here. We had no idea if a reliable method for determining codon assignments even existed. Some of us tried to tackle the problem theoretically, in ignorance of the data. On the other side of the tracks, retort heaters went about gathering data without grasping the formal problem. Like Brussels Balzano: traffic signs so bilingually cluttered that neither camp could read them. My only advantage was that, fresh from school, I spoke just enough of both to put together something dangerous.” He smiled weakly, at all that fluency hadn’t prepared him for.
He told the story of a friend’s short-lived glory. “Tooney Blake had been killing fifteen minutes before teaching his seminar. Doodling, he stumbled onto a stunning twist. How many one-base triplets were there? Four: AAA, CCC, GGG, and TTT. How many had only two identical bases? Four doubles times three in the last slot makes twelve. Triplets of three different bases produced four more combinations, ignoring order. He did the sum a dozen times: four plus twelve plus four, refusing to believe it added up to the magic number.
“Our chief immediately put him up for promotion. Others told him to save his scrap of work paper. Even interest in his piano playing revived. We were all so intoxicated by the dead-on simple fit that we overlooked, for weeks, the fact that Tooney’s model treated the codons AGG, GAG, and GGA identically. At last one of us came to his senses and pointed out that such codons could not possibly be read the same. Tooney took the setback in stride, but others wanted to pursue the prettiness, even in the face of evidence.”
Parsing was all-important. If the codons in the string
ACGGATCTAGACCT …
did not overlap, then the triplets separated:
ACG GAT CTA GAC …
But if every codon shared two bases with each neighbor, the same string would group into entirely different words:
ACG CGG GGA GAT ATC TCT CTA TAG …
This full overlap packed more information into each DNA half-strand but attached restrictions on the ordering of code words. The beauty of Gamow’s diamond code lent early favor to overlap models. When his scheme failed to comply with experiment, Gamow withdrew it but suggested another full overlap in its place. But by 1957, such schemes had been all but discarded. In full overlap, every individual base appears in two adjacent codons:
CGAT → CGA GAT → x-y
A mutation altering the single base G would change both codon words, and thus both amino acids x and y in the synthesized enzyme. Even single mutations would then produce at least two amino acid divergences. Yet Ingram’s famous sickle-cell hemoglobin structure differed from normal hemoglobin by only one amino. This argument damning full overlap contained the germ of an elegant and overlooked idea. A mutation, traced from nucleic acid to that text’s observable protein translation, might be the leverage needed to manufacture a rosetta. The code could be cracked by tracing how it read its message’s errors. One of the most powerful ideas in the infant science: the power of the traceable, testable blit. If the string itself was too complex to read, a small mistake in it might nevertheless show up as a discernible, translated difference.
Error lay at the source of all change, all species experiment. It was the author of all the still emerging, undesignable variations on life. Ressler’s gift lay in understanding that he stood on the threshold not just of uniting chemistry with inheritance, but of joining these both to the grandiose Darwinian mutation. Tiny, cumulated, field-tested errors were all that accounted for the change from one species to another—a half-dozen chromosomal inversions between us and the nearest ape. Advance by analogy: induce a small alteration, note what value the process assigns that one ripple. The most baldly obvious idea imaginable. Yet as that most quotable biologist J.B.S. Haldane, instrumental in linking population genetics to evolution, who attributed all sonnet-writing to the microscopic speck of sex chromosome, once said: “It is, in my opinion, worth while devoting some energy to proving the obvious.”
TODAY IN HISTORY
Although I still lived in the height of summer, the days had already gone into gradual decline, at first unfelt, then undeniable, shuttling back to their opposite number. The longest day of the year is also the day diminishing sets in. In 1983, I lagged behind the official sunset posted in the almanac. As late as September, I felt the expectation brought on by sky remaining light late into evening.
Like the student who in the course of a perfunctory thesis finds a remarkable, forgotten book, I took possession of my discovery. Dr. Ressler worked his way into my daily conversation. In a slow period at the Reference Desk, I asked my colleague Mr. Scott what he knew about mutation dating. He had a master’s in anthro, which suddenly seemed to me a half brother to genetics by incest. He put his fatherly arm around me and said, “Dear, I’m afraid M.S. in my case stands for Mostly Sketchy.” He proposed that general imbecility might be reduced if people had to renew their diplomas the way they had to renew driver’s licenses. “It wouldn’t make anybody smarter. But it might slow the nonsense glut.”
Not even Mr. Scott’s cynicism checked my new rhythm. For events, I turned with increasing frequency to breakthroughs in science. The Question Board tracked an influx of interest in patented life. An anonymous submission of a simple penny-flipping brain teaser launched me into an aside on evolutionary statistics. A question about regional dialect differences between sodas, tonics, floats, milk shakes, frappes, jimmies, and sprinkles led me into linguistic drift and a sketch of the Sapir/ Whorf hypothesis that regional word-tools predispose ways of thought.
I’d caught a salubrious dose of curiosity about the live-in puzzle from nothing more than meeting a man who had retreated from it. I must have been waiting for the slightest push, for when it came, I jumped. A dozen visits to the night hermitage and the human program took on conspiratorial beauty. The science of inherited characteristics was only my jumping-off metaphor, an entrée into what until then had been neutral material. I felt the air of a new planet, the hint of unexpected links leading somewhere, things about to be revealed. I shed the curatorial, began to sense the impenetrable mechanism of mystery. Plainly put, when I woke up each morning, I knew where I wanted to be.
I had no idea whether my enthusiasm for their company was returned any way but politely. I only knew that when I visited MOL, in the presence of those two, I discovered my own powers of talk, undetected all these years. Real work was still in front of me. I had been only been resting, gathering strength for an act of connection about to become clear.
The rush of anticipation of those days lent even the most prosaic routine an edge I had forgotten. My exhilaration began to overstep propriety, at least by librarian’s standards. In answering a three-by-five barely able to mask its terror about whether “secular humanism” wasn’t a textbook-poisoning of the six-day wonder, I summarized the Supreme Court majority opinion, followed with Religio Medici, the Doctor’s religion, and wound up with Haldane: asked what his work in life science had taught him about God, he’d replied that the Creator showed an inordinate fondness for beetles.
I received a formal reprimand. Unable to take the matter seriously, I replied that my answer contained no intended cheek. I was notified by committee that nihilism was out of line. I couldn’t believe my ears. Haldane’s beetle sass, so far from the opposite of nihilism, reveled in the force and grandeur of accidental creat
ion, a creation following rules more remarkable than we ever assigned any Maker. The incident blew over, leaving invisible scar tissue; the hurt of misconstrual left me a little more eager for that somewhere else that MOL began to open up for me.
Within a few weeks I became a fixture in the deserted office suite. In the first throes of addiction, I saw that converted warehouse as the last endangered habitat left in my part of the world. Magic visits left me impatient when I wasn’t there. And when I was, the lost digital domain filled me with anticipation. Something was at last about to happen. Something not in the least expected. Inexplicable: how a room of indifferently calculating machines and two men on the beau geste shift keeping watch over nocturnal computations could stir in me anticipation profound enough to derail a life that had worked comfortably for years. I didn’t know what reservoir they tapped in me, what primitive string vibrated in sympathetic resonance. And I didn’t care to know.
There was the obvious explanation, of course. But an objective female jury would waffle between Todd and Tuckwell for raw desirability. Todd had the undeniable advantage of being new: his hair fell an unusual way across his temples, and I could watch for hours while his eyes modulated. Even level-headed women are programmed to spread themselves through every available backwater of the gene pool. At thirty, though, lust is no longer the giddy-maker it once was. Hormones will have the upper hand over me until their manufacture stops. But Todd’s appeal—the reason I began to watch the library clock—was something else as well. From the moment I arrived at the MOL intercom to be buzzed in, he would pay steady flirtation. “What did we answer today? Wait, let me guess: the name for the plastic end-seals on shoe laces. No, no: how many wheelbarrows of Weimar marks it took to buy a loaf of bread.” Tuckwell’s manic humor made me laugh out loud. Todd’s jokes, always sotto voce, made me ache with wanting.
He ran a continuous interrogation; I stood between him and the world. Frank’s questions had nothing to do with empirical fact. His were amorphous, soft around the edges. We would sit in the corporate cafeteria while he, with a favorite skillet ported from his apartment, grilled an omelette with mace and cardamom for 9:00 p.m. early brunch. Out of the blue, he would ask, “Did you get along well with your parents?”
I’d do my best to look abashed, but he refused to let me off. Whether I answered in earnest or replied, “What’s it to ya, Bud?” he would smile, ply me with requests for intimate details, and then reveal the hidden association. “These eggs, this aroma: my father’s Saturday-morning ritual. Complex man, my father. Invested thirty-two hundred dollars—half his life’s savings—when I was born, so there’d be something to send me to college on. When I came of age, through amazing business acumen, he had nursed the investment to a grand total of twenty-nine hundred dollars. Every Saturday of conscious existence, he woke us up with the aroma of omelette. All we need is a little Coleman Hawkins. Loved music, my father. Brought me up to play the accordion. ‘You can always make a living with one of these.’” Then, quick key change: “Could you fall for a man who played the accordion in his youth?”
The hopeless second question was indistinguishable from the misplaced, expansive first. He did not ask whether I could fall for him. He asked me to savor a sad hypothetical, a current of circumstantial strangeness. He carried on like this—questions, stories, self-absorbed silences—nothing to lose and everything to gain; pushing past the normal politeness of terms. His constant word-wayfaring was all the more romantic because it never struck him as anything but ordinary. He read wildly, at random. Dostoyevsky one weekend and Little Women the next. “Have you read this? God, it’s beautiful! Let me read you one passage.” And one passage would inevitably grow into a chapter and more, Todd reading on expressively, obliviously, for forty minutes, stopping only to feed a punched-card deck into the hopper. I didn’t mind; I could spend all evening watching the further hope and hurt that all manner of words registered in his reading face. I had forgotten how one could live on just words.
Manhattan On-Line was my enclave, safe haven in the middle of nowhere. I could walk into the warehouse, summon the rickety, trapezoidal elevator, ride to an upper room where all the windows were silvered over, showing nothing of the outside but a crystal diffraction pattern of night lights—the sparkle of Whistler’s nocturne. To drop out of the inescapable city from a trapdoor in its middle was like discovering a geothermal jungle at the pole that had somehow evaded all the search algorithms of man, even the ridiculously detailed eye-in-the-sky satellite maps.
MOL took me temporarily through the forgotten gate to a platform outside, a fulcrum. Todd became an oasis of companionship, refuting and strange. His thought was profoundly different, but not so foreign that I required an interpreter. He was capable of endless inventive talk about any subject. “You know what Nietzsche says? He says, ‘Oy, this headache!’ No, really. He says: if two people are going to get married, they ought above all to be able to talk well to one another. Because everything else disappears.”
But Tuckwell and I could talk too, before I killed our conversation. Keith was very bright, peripherally alert. If he had lost the ability to surprise me, he could still keep me honest. But his job, his view of people, his life in the city had cut a rift between us, a gulf of getting and spending. Tuckwell was an adman, I a librarian. Should never have happened in the first place. However implausibly long our contract had lasted, all I had left to give Tuckwell was my departure. But on ambivalent days, when I remembered the woo we two too had started with, even that idea seemed rationalization.
The man I lived with, well-adjusted ambassador of urban neuroticism, used sardonic salesmanship to rouge the bruise of living here. Todd, Keith’s maladjusted obverse, was sick at heart from believing that men could live in this grisly grid system as they once lived in Bruges. And yet that sad, protective urge—his coming to me to save a man already beyond repair— drew me out. I thought—incredible vanity!—I might keep him company.
“So what do all these boxes do?” I asked one night after we had solved the crossword together. We had been sitting for some time in the hum that passed for silence when I realized I still didn’t know what all the equipment was.
Todd looked affectionately around the room. “My babies? Bookkeeping, mainly. Hey. Might that be the only word in English with three consecutive double letters?”
“How should I know? Stick to the point.” But he was already on the phone to Dr. Ressler in the control room. Todd waved to his superior, although we could not see through the one-way glass whether the other waved back.
“The professor’ll write a search routine for other triple doubles and run it on the dictionary file. Where were we?”
“Your babies.”
“I call them that? Perverse. In any case, we, if I can use first person plural for a group I’ve only seen assembled once in my life, are what are obnoxiously called Information Brokers. A fuzzy concept. Close as I can tell, it means we provide data and services to other folks—some permanent clients, some steady customers, and a few one-shot users. I’m forbidden by Scout’s honor to tell you their names, but I could spell out initials. Alternately, you could infer them through Twenty Questions.”
“That’s OK. I get the idea. What data do you sell?”
“Who wants to know?” He looked around furtively. “Well, we have two general categories up for auction. First, the standard numbers racket. Big-time data processing. Receivables, Payables, Ledgers, and Payrolls for a dozen credit unions, even a state office.” I gathered this was the daily, repetitive processing that made up the bulk of his evening. “Second, the piece sales. Our list-crunching spins off information that either these clients, or others by the same name, are willing to spend major world currencies for. Anything from mailing lists to …”. He shrugged, suggesting that no enumeration could catch all the categories, cross-references, or calculations someone somewhere might find useful.
“The truth is, I’m not supposed to know myself who we render what service
s to. This whole outfit is run on distributed ignorance. A little like civics. Day and night shifts work in separate memory partitions. Analysts aren’t allowed in programmers’ area. Programmers are locked out of Operations. The hardware guys are not permitted in the listings library. The software guys can’t touch the machines. As an Operator, I’m not even supposed to know how to program. Barefoot, preggers, and harmless. But the professor has taught me a little.” His face reflected that truism about the danger of a little knowledge. “COBOL’s a piece of cake. No conjugations, no cases, no inflections. Fortunately for me, I didn’t mention language skills on my application.”
“Officially, then, what do you do?”
“As little as possible, as you must have noticed.” He took me on a second tour, one that made more sense to me now that I had visited the place a few times. “Think of us as pure functionaries. Wednesday’s core routine never changes from week to week. We check the chart, any special jobs left by the day shift, drop the right card deck in the hopper, answer the questions on the screen …”. He smiled empathetically. “At certain places during the run, we have to change the printer to multipart or forms. You know all those financial statements you get every day instead of letters from friends? Well, now you can think of them as personal communiqués.” I wanted all of a sudden to wrap him in my arms, but because we had not yet jumped that threshold, I contented myself with pinching his shoulder.
The Gold Bug Variations Page 17
