The Gold Bug Variations

by Richard Powers

  It isn’t her attractiveness that puts him off. Jeanette’s features are not the sort that have ever threatened him. Her curves tend toward a topographical fullness he associates with varsity cheerleaders and nursing mothers. Those women who came closest to causing his own college coursework to suffer typically ran toward the homeless waif: You Can Save This Girl or You Can Turn the Page. The taste may be consanguine, but was certainly in place before his mother was reduced to terminal spindliness by her 6.6.

  To date, he has chosen to turn the page rather than save, although nights in the bunk in Stadium Terrace, in half-sleep, he regrets not having run the proffered experiment with a meager waif or two. These private nostalgias of desire reassure him that the clumsy cadences he suffers in random lab encounters with Dr. Koss are neither ugly nor unnecessarily indicting. He can’t be hot for her. Not in so many words.

  Yet it burns him to know nothing, to be in the dark about her except for the public-domain data that she is married and a few years his senior. He spends the first weekend in September raking up something substantive on her. Pickings are slim. He begs the superannuated department secretary on invented pretext to let him browse the staff files, but she will release no information without triplicate request from God.

  He runs into Dr. Koss in the staff lunchroom. She smiles awkwardly at him over her coffee cup. “Keeping the head dry?” To collect himself, he smiles back, pretends to be looking for someone, and leaves. Shortly after, at a colloquium where she delivers a lucid contribution on punctuation theory, he thinks to address her in the hall, ask for clarification. But he falls back instead on skepticism: she could reveal nothing that experiment wouldn’t expose more fully. He collars Blake, the closest thing he has to a confidant in the Midwest. “Dr. Toon. What do you make of the Koss commafree code?”

  “First-rate,” Blake answers, grinning quizzically. “You?”

  Too obvious an audit trail. Ressler swears off direct questioning and takes to the stacks. By summer’s end, he has gotten adept at caterwauling down the catwalks, and the stink of binding paste no longer distracts him. He digs up her dissertation: “Simple Nonpathogenic Autosomal Mutations.” He settles in for an evening with her apprentice piece. The woman describes some interesting mutagen manipulation. But the paper, while professional, contains little further interest beyond her education (Wesleyan and Cornell) and date of birth, February 14, 1929—St. Valentine’s Day massacre.

  A thorough search of the journals turns up references to her as coauthor on those Illinois publications Ressler already read before hitting campus. He falls back on the biographical compilations in the Reference Room, but turns up only her sterile university profile. By chance, he finds a mention of her husband in the Local Interest area: a praise-laden entry on Koss, Herbert, in a chapbook, Who’s Who Around and About C-U.

  The fellow is a chemical engineer, a leader in local food technology. His chief contribution to the spiral of ingestibility: a superior method of getting the barbecue powder to stick to potato chips. The chapbook reports his guarded optimism on work toward a chip that will always come out of the bag intact. Their typical dinner conversation is too bizarre to consider. Battle Creek, the spoonful of frozen OJ, will never be the same.

  Printed matter alone will not solve his Koss-word puzzle. As a result of killing a day and a half reading her thesis, he is unprepared to report on the article he’s been assigned for the next Blue Sky. Ulrich calls on him to deliver. Ressler sputters; for the first time ever—as far back as first grade, when his teacher let him take over her abortive lesson on the language of bee dancing—he has come to class unprepared. He can admit to not having read the article, blowing his short-term credibility and profiting the team nothing. Or, knowing what he does about the authors’ previously published research, the state of the art, and the article abstract, he can extrapolate a reasonable opinion. Not intellectual fraud, just the increasingly necessary short cut up the print mountain.

  In the critical minute under the arc lights, Ressler decides that, Schrödinger notwithstanding, not talking about what he can’t know doesn’t in this instance preclude his talking about what he doesn’t. He’ll take a closer look at the article later that afternoon; if it should turn out that he’s off base, he can give out his reconsidered opinion at the next session. Science is about reconsidering, revising one’s position in the light of more light. He takes a breath. The description comes out easier than he thought. “I would say, tentatively, that we don’t have to concern ourselves too much here with the Litner group’s angle. It’s ingenious in making the magic numbers fit; they get twenty out of four all right, but … Well, I think they may be overlooking a few stereochemical constraints.”

  “For instance?” Ulrich looks up from scribbling, suddenly interested, choosing the worst possible moment to sit up and take notice. That’s why Ulrich’s in charge. Not because of the importance of his early work, but because of his intellectual aggression. Attentive, noisy, blunt: all dominant genes. The team leader hasn’t shown half so much interest in Ressler’s rate experiment as he shows in this almost irrelevant paper.

  Ressler goes into a controlled stall. “I’d like another look at the piece before I commit, but …”. The whole team’s attention is now alerted by that most expressive musical device, the rest. “Well, for instance … the article seems to me to be sidetracked on a code that isn’t even colinear.”

  “Really?” An unexpected vocal timbre chimes in. “That’s not how I read the principal thrust at all.” A voice as mellifluous as a mortician’s. He turns from his lame chalkboard illustration to see who could be so intent on sautéing him in public. The ID is more confirmation than discovery.

  “Of course, if Dr. Koss can translate Litner’s prose back into English, she’s a better man than I.”

  The room, at a cusp of embarrassment, finds outlet in that remnant of violence, laughter. Lovering, nervous as the day Ulrich threw Salk in his stigmata, leads the way, letting loose a full-blooded cackle. Toveh Botkin, on the other hand, purses the notch above her lip crease, grim but forgiving the entire catalog of human failings. The deep-set, brown amusement of Dr. Koss’s eyes flashes explicit warning: forced the issue? Gotten what you want?

  Despite narrow escape, the incident humiliates him. In a few sentences, he has fallen monumentally in his own sight, if not in peer estimation. He wants only to quit this place, escape everyone, go punish himself. Succumbed to ridiculous, avoidable boy’s self-deception. It disgusts him to replay the incident. Shame is not acid enough to eradicate it. Work is ruined for the remainder of the day. He smells his own unmistakable animal odor. Yes, those most capable of making some noise in the world are precisely those with the greatest capacity for shrugging off sin, for distributing their felonies sympathetically across the whole hinged circumstance of shameful existence. But in the face of his own weakness, he cannot see how to do it. The shame of false witness mars his perfect record, debases his currency. Misrepresentation of the facts: no more forgivable for being mundane. An indelible blot on the transcript: a Fail, invalidating all good faith.

  Even by evening, he cannot shake the afternoon libel. He probes the ugly truth compulsively, unable to keep from picking at the wound. Far from salved by knowing how little consequence his minor lie carries, he is doubly appalled by how little it took to make him lose his head. How little it would have taken to come clean, to ask for an absolution it would now shame him worse to go after.

  Forgiveness requires not that he forget the crime but that he remember every other shame from his swelling past: the shop-lifted library book, the violated confidence of a friend, the broken crockery deceptively reassembled and left to break again at the next, innocent touch. Seamy little mazes of shame, not even respectably bourgeois, more disgusting for their avoidable pettiness. He nurses the catalog, above all, this afternoon’s grubby appendix. Contemptible desire to represent himself well. How much easier it would be to preempt the lie, come clean. And yet—the heart
of the shame—he still could not, even now, if the whole scenario were his to correct, bring himself to reveal the real reason for his lack of preparation: I was digging up the goods on Mrs. Koss. Not even a matter of momentarily fouling the facts. He can’t even bring himself to look at his motive in mucking about, much less confess it to others in good faith. He has shit on the truth.

  An even more indicting memory reveals his betrayal. He recalls, with sick precision, that day almost twenty years ago: first landmark of childhood, his seventh birthday. He awoke that morning with excitement that doubled when his father explained that his present would arrive by parcel express. His parents’ anxiety outstripped his own. Then, producing emotion difficult for a seven-year-old to grasp—awe, disappointment, alarm, thrill, and, even then, shame—the ruinously expensive set of encyclopedias arrived.

  Stuart, with child’s intuition, knew at once his parents’ sacrifice in securing this gift. He understood the enormity the minute the delivery man arrived at the flat with four unliftable cases. He wanted to plead with them, “Oh, no, no thank you. You mustn’t.” Thirty inexhaustible volumes, a yearbook, and an index. His father calls to him in a voice that never rid itself of the scratch of factories, “Look here, the Ivory Coast. Isaac Newton. Phloem and Xylem. Everything worth knowing, in these pages. Alphabetical, too.” Mother, father, and he sit together on the floor and unpack the treasure cases, poring over exotic entries the rest of the afternoon, the rest of remembered childhood.

  An earlier edition had been heavily discounted, but Stuart’s father had resolved on the most recent human understanding or none at all. His father never used the incurred debt, the years of resulting belt-tightening, against the boy. Stuart never gave him cause. The spines on every volume were broken within two years. The atlas of creases that formed along the binding—proof that the boy’s precocity exceeded even his parents’ guess—became his father’s favorite feature of the set. He would run his fingers down the prematurely worn bindings on domestic evenings, saying, “It’s all in there. Everything we’ve put together. Only a matter of learning how to get to it.”

  This is the ingenuous faith in accountability that Ressler has betrayed. For what? To keep himself from looking foolish in front of a woman for whom he cannot even plead the aberration of desire. Spirit-numbing memories follow one on another until he resurrects the summit agony. He was then twelve; the folks, years after purchase, still paying off the last encyclopedia installment. They had moved to Pittsburgh, “relocated,” Dad explained, “for the War Effort.” They were vacationing, camping in Maine, driving up the coast, when his father, at the wheel, in the middle of “Does Your Mother Know You’re Out, Cecilia”, slumped over in his seat. Stuart thought it a joke, laughed at the old man’s slapstick.

  But his father had suffered a massive myocardial infarction. Stuart’s mother went instantly to pieces, as she could be counted on to do in the pinch of horror, the descent of real event. His father superhumanly managed to guide the car to the roadside. Stuart’s mother could not have driven then even if she’d had a license. They were stranded in a remote stretch; hours might pass before they could flag a passerby. It fell to the twelve-year-old to drive them to hospital, while his mother flailed at her man’s chest in a pointless effort to revive him.

  From long afternoons browsing the encyclopedia paragraphs and plates, Stuart knew that the clutch was on the left and the accelerator on the right. Miraculously, from recall, he taught himself how to drive, covering the fifty miles to the hospital in two hours. Next to him on the front seat his mother huddled over the body, a perfect parody of the Michelangelo Pietà illustrating the article on Classical Sculpture. All the while, his father stupidly tried to get out last advice for the boy. Stuart repeatedly shouted at him to shut up, to save his strength.

  He knows now what the man killed himself trying unsuccessfully to get out: How wonderful, to have had a child who might add to the endeavor. What a piece of work it all was. No sacrifice at all! Thirty volumes, a supplement, and an index. And all alphabetical.

  This is what he’s perjured. The world has grown another summer evening, one that seems the end of all summer evenings. He puts the Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra on the grinder. But neither the musical primer nor Olga’s spinning convey anything to his leaden ear. Music fails him at the moment when he needs its compassion most. Autumn is here, an autumn that will spell the end of his front-lawn vigils. In town over two months; the pieces that hung so tantalizingly close to falling in place are farther now from linking than the day he arrived.

  Already smelling the mixture of cold air and burning leaves that will mark the change of seasons, Ressler assigns himself penance, the only possible contrition. If one, clean, unimpeachable nugget lies anywhere within his ability to explicate, he will surrender it to Cyfer. First, the busywork rate experiment Ulrich has assigned him. Then, if chance favors, the simple laboratory technique for determining codon assignments, the leverage so agonizingly close that he can close his eyes and see it in the phosphene tracers on his lids. And not one discovery will be his.

  However close he feels, he may never be any closer to the method than he is now, no closer than the baying kitchen mutt to the invading moon. His only means, not of adding his name to the volumes but of partially recovering perjured good faith, lies in returning to the puzzle, redoubling his efforts with focus so intense as to shame all effort he has yet made. He must place himself inside the isolated problem, feel its full, unrelenting force, cut himself off from rest, attach himself to the chance of not coming out, of never emerging from the search.

  Another summer evening’s knock at the door and Ressler assumes it is Tooney and Eva, through empathy of unpremeditated friendship, knowing to come and sit with him in his moment. The knock is them; humans are the only species that condition after one event. He stands, ready for companionship. He opens the door, jokingly asking Eva, “So what’s the code for sickle-cell anemia?”

  But it is not Blake or his remarkable Civil Service wife. In the doorframe stands the woman who set off this string of self-contempt. Out where the welcome mat should be, incomprehensible, stands short-sleeved, full-bodiced Dr. Koss.

  FACTS ON FILE

  I believe it because it’s absurd: the entire Britannica—not to mention the stacks of my old branch as well as the entire Library of Congress—can in theory be encoded by a single notch on a rod. The whole human reservoir can be condensed to a single information-bearing groove with no loss of meaning. A trillion pages, the complete journey from Aardvark to Zygote and back, enpacked, retrievable, in a flick of a nick on a stick.

  No high tech, no microengraving or fantastic manipulation of silicon. Just a twig, a pocket knife, and a grade-school ability with numbers. Any text, however long and complex, is a linear stream of characters. Letters, punctuation marks, typographic symbols: fewer than a hundred types. Each of these hundred can be replaced by a unique three-digit number. Simple substitution cipher, the sort even small children use for urgent communications. Montaigne’s brutal truth “If we saw as much of the world as we do not see …” becomes 131 006 222 023 005 222 019 001 023 222 001 019 222 …

  So far, even the mathless boy I loved with all my plaintext heart could take this message and, in minutes, reverse-engineer the meaning from the emotionless series. Digitization is now a commonplace, long since the stuff of grocery-line conversation. As goes Montaigne, so goes the whole Britannica: the entire set now represented by a huge stream of codon digits, a giant, linear, macromolecular, information-rich number.

  Now the remarkable twist. If I run the triplets together and put a decimal point in front of the number, the result is a rational fraction running to millions of decimal places. But a fraction represents, and is represented by, a portion of any distance, say from one end of a stick to the other. My Montaigne number, 1310062220230052220190010232 22001019222 … along with my complete card box of quotes of the day for every day of the year attached to its tail, can now be
committed to infinitesimally compact storage. I can incorporate my box of sayings in a discrete point a little farther than 13/100 of the way from tip to base. I might look at the mark from time to time, delighting in knowing that it encased the cycle of every famous saying ever to flesh out my calendar.

  Alien, unnatural, counterintuitive. But analogous simplicity encodes a far more complex catalog. The map key, the compression that put life’s Britannica, information intact, squarely in the palm of Ressler’s hand, sweetly resembles that long, linear decimal.

  Ressler himself worked out the math back in 1954, when the cell’s translation game was fast becoming obvious. The math itself was easy: anyone with a little algebra could do it. DNA—a long, irregular decimal with A, T, G, and C as digits—consisted of innumerable bases lying in line on the inside twist of the helix. He had first to determine the width of the coding unit—how many digits of A, T, G, and C stood for one amino acid. This codon obviously had to be wider than one base. Codons one base wide could stand for only four different amino acids, and proteins required twenty. Two-base width allowed sixteen different codons:

  AA AT AG AC TA TT TG TC GA GT GG GC CA CT CG CC

  A vocabulary of sixteen was still four words shorter than required. Three successive rungs of the DNA ladder—sixty-four different combinations— at last produced enough codons to name all twenty aminos, with enough left over for start and stop codes or any other special symbols that protein-building might require. The triplet codon suffered an embarrassment of riches: forty-four more codons than amino acids. What to do with the extras became the sixty-four-codon-dollar question. More than one codon might stand for the same amino acid. Such code degeneracy might even carry potential survival value, as Ressler intuited early on.

  In 1957, researchers learned how much easier it was to encode the Britannica than to experimentally extract from a given notched stick the particular Britannica it encoded. The giant informational molecule was the protein-constructing blueprint. The DNA base-pair sequences mapped out enzyme polypeptide chains. Ressler needed only intercept the map key. The unit word was a clump of at least three bases running along the half-DNA helix. No evidence strictly ruled out a larger codon, but most researchers applied the rule of parsimony. The next step was to determine exactly which triplet codon linked which amino acid to the enzyme under construction. Pure pattern-breaking attracted the lion’s share of fascination: secret-message reading, ingenuity impeded by no encumbrance greater than paper and pencil.