Sputnik and the space race make less of an impression on Ressler than they might. He stands on the threshold of news that could rival the Russians’. After a bout of intensive lab work, sleeping little and eating less, he concludes the radioactive trials Ulrich assigned him as busywork. His results fail to support the phenomenon they were looking for. Yet—basic paradox—the unmitigated negative result reveals more than any qualified positive could. The nonresults tell Ressler something serendipitous, critical.
He can’t quantify it yet, but certain phages remain partly functional even after mutation should have wiped out enzyme activity. This degree of mutation survival may confirm that the gene is read like a linear tape, that the gene has error tolerance built in, that the message is more flexible than anyone suspects. Suppose a codon in the base sequence mutates from GCT to GGT. If the enzyme synthesized by the new codon is still functional, then perhaps GGT and GCT code for the same amino. Those extra forty-four codons that have been troubling everyone could reduce the chance of error. Redundancy may itself be useful.
He deduces this much from his data on enzymatic persistence. But another unexpected result suggests more. As widely grasped, individual mutations—insertions, deletions, or substitutions of base pairs—garble the stretch of affected message by rearranging its letters. But as little as a single deletion near one end of the asymmetric gene can totally destroy the enzymatic function the gene codes for. Conversely, a deletion near the other end leaves the gene function largely intact. An enzyme produced by a gene with a single dropped letter at the tail end remains chemically similar to the one produced by the original gene.
Ressler infers something Cyfer until then only supposes: the code is read from head to tail. An error at the beginning of the tape throws off the remaining reading. But an error at the end is translated only after most of the enzyme has been built. The metaphor fits, substantiates the model that Ressler has been working on in mental privacy. More important, in the course of the experiment, he’s come up with a technique that may help him assemble his Rosetta. He has learned to use acridine compounds in a way that lets him control more precisely just where he places the garble and what shape it takes. One of the first impediments into the codon substitution table vanishes overnight.
Three quarters of the methodology he needs must be out there in print somewhere, public knowledge. All he needs to do now is collect the leads from divergent disciplines and work them into a coherent whole. Nobody has yet assembled the pieces, although he feels the entire field teeter on the edge of the simplicity just beyond their mass conceptual block. His head spins with the immediacy of it: a simple, experimental means of inducing controlled mutations, the tool that will permit them to determine the codon/amino assignments. Selective garbling can tell them everything. Inducing mutations, introducing bits of nonsense into the gene’s message, can force the code to reveal itself in entirety.
He sits on a code mine. His mind races to the choices available should the method lead into the vein. He can keep the method in-house a little longer, surrender it to Ulrich, announce the results to the team. But as much as he’d like to, he can’t keep mum for long. He must publish the results from this experiment, hastening the pace of the accelerating field. He can’t refuse to testify, however much time it might buy. He feels a strange euphoria, an overwhelming sense of inevitability. The thing about to make its grand entrance surprises him by its uncanny familiarity.
Leaving the lab in late evening, he fails to recognize the outside, so deep are autumn’s inroads. He heads to Stadium Terrace, extended concentration catching up with him in mild hallucinations. Passing the sewage facility, he transposes two letters in its sign: “Flirtation Plant.” He hears his name in a distant car horn. The columns flanking Memorial Stadium, in inflamed peripheral vision, become a chorus line of Nike-Ajaxs in launch position. He knows what causes the phantoms; he even understands a little of the physiology involved. That doesn’t make the tracers any less real.
He recalls his meeting weeks before, his fumbling attempts to convey the idea to Ulrich, who instantly intuited how little Ressler actually knew of his target. Weeks have slipped by, weeks of self-exile. He longs reluctantly for friendship with team members, conversation, any conversation, even shared silence. What is it that makes it so urgent to sacrifice the pleasures of inconsequential contact, to get to the insight, to be the first to announce a rearrangement of thought? He is more driven now than ever. The means are nearer than he imagined. He needs only another few months. Time to verify, hunt down obvious oversight. Flush out the variables. Add the imminent last links. But can he take that time in good faith, or is he merely drawing out, delaying?
At home, in the dark, he feels why he needs to race this thing, prove his own intellect, assign a portion of the unmapped world a fixed, unambiguous valence. He knows the cause, but he will not say it. At night, in the dark, he lies in his bunk and listens to a brilliant keyboard strain that will never again sound as it did. The piece flies along under his fingers, in his substrate. Even repeated exposure leaves him with no resistance to her code bug. He imagines the woman’s face an inch from his. He reaches out, takes her head in his fingers, runs them over her meridian lines and ridges, around her ears, down to the slight flip at the base of her skull, back up to her crown. His innermost cells want to force up against hers, fuse, intermarry. He wants to fight for her, beat experience, propose himself as the best of all fits, the surviving solution. Yet part of him—the most recent addition to that composite surviving act—knows that knowledge this critical must do more than survive.
He is virtually there, on the threshold of a barrier-breaking as great as earth’s first artificial moon. For the first time in the procession of biosphere, some part, some chance permutation threatens the technique, arrives at the place where it might reach down, feel its own material base, place its hands on its own mechanism, its own inheritance, grasp it as deeply as it can be grasped. His own contained code can synthesize the last span. But how can he begin to press his hands through if he cannot extract even the information in this breathtaking tune?
NIGHT MUSIC
A neat trick fires my imagination all afternoon. One lovely demonstration proves that the genetic tape is indeed written in triplet codons. I seem able to catch these things only in rough analogies. I imagine the string of letters:
YOU CAN RUN FAR BUT CAN YOU FIX OUR BAD EAR OLD MAN
In that form, the string conveys little. But if I know the cipher’s word length is three, sense springs from the foliage:
YOU CAN RUN FAR BUT CAN YOU FIX OUR BAD EAR OLD MAN
The sense is still a bit cryptic, but I’ve shed enough noise for the emergence of message. Suppose something damaged this string as it was delivered. Parsing the letters into groups, I accidentally drop the first C:
YOU ANR UNF ARB UTC ANY OUF IXO URB …
Except for stray coincidence, the line now yields only nonsense. More gibberish results if I drop two letters near the beginning. But deleting three letters near the front produces:
YOC ANU NAR BUT CAN YOU FIX OUR BAD EAR OLD MAN
The message momentarily crumbles, only to rise again into sense. A single deletion near the beginning of a gene destroys the functionality of the synthesized protein. The same holds true for two deletions. But surprising modulation: three successive clipped bases partly restore the nature of the original protein, experimentally supporting a reading frame of three. This result, when combined with the sequential tape metaphor, provides a clue for solving the framing problem. If, in the catalog of sixty-four possible codons, one triplet stands for the start of the gene’s message, such a marker would not only separate genes but would also establish the gene’s word-frame.
My hunger for proofs grows as I consume them. I feel an unearned pleasure in tracing them, as if I were the first to haul them to the surface. As I catch the formal bug I begin to follow, in analogy, the cold joy, the distinction that had made Dr. Ressler seem so alien. The sim
plest, most childlike passion: he believed in readability—patterns connecting patterns—long after the age when the rest of us resign ourselves to adult confusion.
That triplet trick returns me to an evening Todd and I spent listening to the great tenth variation with him. Franklin should have been finishing his end-of-day processing. I should have been home, picking up the pieces of my domestic wreck. But neither of us could budge from the room, the formal spell Dr. Ressler had thrown over us. We’d been having an armchair discussion of current events accompanied by the standard background music for those parts. When the fughetta began its four bars of foreshadowing, Dr. Ressler broke off in midsentence. He announced, “Bass entry,” and pointed to one corner of the room, as if the piano producing the line hid there. Thus instructed, I heard in the phrase an ornamented descendant of the first four notes of the sarabande. Not as they occurred in the original, but as sent out into the world, harmonically:
A second voice entered. “Tenor,” Ressler commanded, pointing his other hand into the opposite corner. I heard the new voice chime in, duplicating the first, a fifth higher. Two more lines entered, question and answer, tonic and dominant, building up a complex clarity of texture. Ressler announced both in turn with near-shouts, “Soprano” and “Alto,” cueing each voice, pointing a finger into the room’s remaining corners.
At the edge of overflowing, the piece’s motor rhythm stopped. The break lasted less than a breath. Immediately, a new harmonic variant on the four-bar subject made its way through the four-voice rotation again, this time rearranged, accompanied by a counterfigure. “Soprano,” Dr. Ressler called out from the top, flipping toward the corner where he had first consigned that voice. “Alto,” answered right hand with left. “Bass,” he cued. I caught his eyes as he called out, “Tenor!” They were full, liquid with a throat-stopping delight.
When the fantastic construction dropped off into random silence, I looked over at Todd. He too, under the persuasion of Ressler’s four spatially separate pianos, had heard something. He looked at Ressler imploringly, the way a child looks to a parent to explain the latest infecting crisis. But Ressler was off elsewhere, remembering, after three decades, his search for the underwriting metaphor. “Four-measure bass, four-base measure,” he said, to no one in particular, as variation eleven already took the matter further. “Extraordinarily clever fellow, Bach. Ahead of his time.”
Only tonight, my head full of mutation tricks, do I begin to name just what I heard, what connection Dr. Ressler mumbled about. Four voices, at four measures for each subject entry, the whole turn-taking undertaken twice, yielded thirty-two measures, a map of the thirty-two-note parent. Not a breath wasted. Nor did the three of us waste ours for catching it. With Dr. Ressler pointing them out, I heard the successive reentrant voices, layering one on top of another, musical analogs of those plastic anatomical overlays in biology books. Each transparent sheet contains its own, separate hierarchies—circulatory, skeletal, nervous. But each overlay, flipped on the stack, adds its system, compacts its parts into a surprising, indivisible composite.
Hearing that much, however modest, was a small triumph. I knew that fugues—while most not as compact as this one—did not necessarily require enormous musical gift to create or hear. Marvelous in my ear, and yet, every note just as it should be. But that much was just the surface of the form, one that went all the way down, as far as I chose to follow. Listening to the cyclical subject-passing entrances, I all at once heard something else. Something going on in the lines after they’d made their grand, identical entrances. In between the formal constraints of fugal entry, percolating up through the piling voices, was the outline of a musical idea I’d heard somewhere before.
My ear flipped back and forth between figure and ground, focus and periphery. What was the bass doing in the second four measures, when the tenor has the subject? Or the bass and tenor, in exultant dialogue, four measures along, while soprano took up the fugue? I heard it in a single stroke, endowed with new ears: the growing braid of free voices sang out nothing short of a mutation on the Base, the original, template theme.
The music ran beyond cleverness, outside admiration. According to my scholarly reference, it follows that fugues, because the same subject enters slavishly in each voice, however brilliantly carried forward, are more or less determined by the thrust of the subject itself, in this case, the fughetta’s first four bars. But holding both vertical and horizontal at the same time, I heard that theoretical limit being shed, left behind like a spent chrysalis. Packed in the thirty-two measures of information was a harmonic structure informed by but also perpetually advancing the original aria from which it was merely descended.
The compositional triumph of the piece, both for Bach in the eighteenth century and the three of us lost in the twentieth, came eight bars from the end. The bass, taking its turn with the second fugue subject, extended the harmonic progression and completed the constraints of variation in the same four bars. Breath of air, genuine surprise although absolutely predictable. Rigidly perfect, but moldable to all the nuanced sworls of living ears.
The whole piece, as well as my brief understanding of it, lasted forty seconds. How Bach could meet both horizontal and vertical constraints with such efficiency of material, how he could add insight to inquiry without showing either seam or sweat left me in awe, even after my ability to hear it died away. During those forty seconds, I first felt the resonant, connecting joints holding together this experiment in reversing the randomness of inert matter. I heard the sound that caused Dr. Ressler’s eyes to water, the sound that had once vibrated in the tones of scientific reductionism. Pure analogy. No, I need a better name for being unable to tell where I left off and the piece began. I heard, for a moment, the explosion of shape, the diversity of living awareness, dovetail into one simple, accidental, but necessary and breathtaking generating form. For forty seconds, I understood that all evolution was accomplished by juggling only four voices. In the fughetta: SATB. In us listeners, in the fughettawriter himself: GATC.
The three of us stopped conversing long enough to follow the shadow of technical virtuosity at patient work, to listen to the fughetta map its own grateful ability to map at all. We eavesdropped, undetected for an instant, on a discussion supremely urgent and articulate but entirely without content. That sound took us, for forty seconds, beyond the point where experience commonly defers: beyond cleverness to joy, outside admiration into understanding, rubbing shoulders against wonder. I heard, in a word, my first few measures of music.
THE ENIGMA MACHINE
A line runs down the office he shares with Lovering, straight as a surveyor’s cut, an osmotic membrane separating the organization of Ressler’s area from the entropic mayhem of his office mate. On Lovering’s side, arboreal colonies of books, lush, vegetative pools of mimeograph, and ruminant herds of manila-enveloped crap creep up to the divide and abruptly drop off. On Ressler’s side: the formal gardens of Versailles. He’d feel better if the barrier were physical—firebreaks, barbed wire—instead of nothing more explicit than mutual goodwill.
His office mate’s filing system for the proliferating piles is astounding. Asked to retrieve any paper that has ever come into his possession, Lovering can pull it from the papyrus morass. Nevertheless, the watering hole gives Ressler the heebie-jeebies. He finds it hard to think, seated at his desk; he can feel tinea corporis in the damp air, jungle rot crawling behind him, tendrils sucking him into Lovering’s data sprawl.
This afternoon, he can avoid the place no longer. Ulrich distributes progress-review forms to be completed by semester end. He must describe all lab activity in the last four months. His one experiment—with its blaring negative results—must be reported with great care. He heads to his office, breathes deeply, and enters. Lovering sits at the desk opposite, red-lining, dispersing professional confetti. “Stuart Ressler! You still on the payroll? Thought you’d skipped town.”
“Afternoon, Dr. Lovering,” Ressler replies, affabl
e emphasis on the title. “I’ve been around. Lab work.” He keeps his eyes diverted, lest they register the excitement of what he’s stumbled upon. Head down, he cuts a path to open spaces.
“Work? You know what the good Dr. Freud says about work?”
“N-no.” Ressler sits gingerly on the edge of his chair and eyes the border for any recent incursions. He spreads the form in front of him. “I can’t honestly say I do.”
“But you do know what Saint Paul says about marriage?” This delivered with sly, shit-eating grin.
Quietly, placidly, Ressler resigns himself to the reproaches of conversation. “What’s that supposed to mean, Joe?”
“You know damn well!” Lovering rocks dangerously back in his chair, arms all over the place. Suit jacket and tie are suddenly belied by hayseed, goofy, boys’-locker-room intonation.
“What do I know damn well, Joe?”
“Poontang, my friend.” Lovering shakes his head, laughs. “You dog! You animal!”
Ressler does some rapid cryptography. “Oh, no. No, Joe. Really. Believe me. It’s nothing like that.”
“It’s something, then!” Lovering proclaims, as if verifying another organism’s distress were cause for publication. “Now we’re making headway. Come on, man. What else could it be? You found a little something? No, you haven’t. That’s the problem. No poontang!”
“Uh, Joe. Would you mind keeping it down? This is a university.”
“I knew it! How could you hope to keep anything like that from your close office mate?”
How indeed. “No, Joe. Really. It’s not … loneliness. I’ve just been winding up …”.
“We’re not talking about loneliness, Stu. We’re talking about the hot-to-trots. The savage scrotum. Your balls’re backed up. Nothing to get embarrassed about. Wouldn’t be surprised if the compulsion were programmed into the old transistors at a fairly deep level.” Lovering, smirking, tapping a retort rapidly against an ashtray, enjoys himself immensely. Ressler wonders how a nervous distraction he has just identified himself can already be public knowledge. For a professional decipherer, he’s shy on a few key secret-communication commodities. “Fortunately, there’s a fairly specific treatment,” Joe insists. “You just need to find a chick who’ll sully herself with you. Barring that,” Joe holds up his hand and wriggles his fingers, “there’s always the lab assistant’s assistant. Blood pressure is entirely incapable of telling the difference.”
The Gold Bug Variations Page 25