The Gold Bug Variations

by Richard Powers

  How can he remain impassive, give this woman no clue that she throws out his method, corrupts his buffer rates, soaks his equilibrium with a wash of chemical maydays? He has spent weeks ignoring her, but extended indifference only obsesses him further, ensilkens her smooth fur, enriches her odor. He probes, fascinated, cannot help but palpate the pain, the ulcered place. Oh, the blot is there, and not at all deep: the animal inkstain.

  She gives no sign that she has guessed. But how could she not? The bend of her limbs, her least motion, her mere presence is paralyzing. All he can do as she enters the room is look away, keep busy, breathe quietly. Press his informant hands against the Formica. He examines her secretly, minutely along her entire length, to see if he might not have made some mistake, some enhancement of memory belied by empirical fact. But searching for repulsive detail and finding none fixates him further. He watches her gingerly pour the chloroform, pick up the stainless recurve blade as if puzzled by how knowledge always requires this preliminary killing.

  Jeanette, all in white lab coat, a cat burglar working the day shift, is utterly altered from that irreverent sass he met at Ulrich’s soiree. Could she always have walked like this? Is that her same sweep of cheeks, nape, thigh? He cannot imagine when the new signal has taken her over. With a subtle muscular refraction, an imperceptible lip-twinge not directed at him but still returning his, she gives him the slightest, recursive suggestion of mutual cueing, letting him know she knows. There; it is out. She concedes. For an instant, she looks back. His silhouette is under examination. There, clear: she examines him for trace imperfections that will save them.

  Or did he project that glance, erased in an instant? He can no longer distinguish prey, no longer say precisely who titillates whom. In the tag, the tangled affinities, her every labcoat adjustment, her avoiding friendly greeting is tacit admission of complicity. Their each move changes the other’s. He studies her technique, indifferent to how the lines between them separate, oblivious to which of them is tagger, which taggee.

  Dr. Koss puts the injected, virally mauled animal out of its misery according to procedures. With smooth filleting swatch, she removes the skin and bares the soft tissue. She locates the organ she is after, removes it, makes a light mash, centrifuges, titrates it with reagent from a burette. At stopwatch intervals, she prepares a time series and labels each slide. What is she up to with this experimental detour into higher animals? Does work in autosomal inheritance truly necessitate such efficient rodent murder? Her method springs from facility.

  When she turns to leave the lab, he can’t help himself, doesn’t even want to. He’s compelled to turn his head a fraction, glimpse her lovely leave-taking. Dr. Koss chooses precisely that instant to pause, turn her own wide eyes in time to catch him in the act of looking. She turns at the lab door—unforgettable!—inquiring, challenging, yet timid. They turn simultaneously to inspect each other. Undeniable public confession: he heats and distresses her as much as she does him. There, the guilty exchange, admitted in her eyes: he opens analogous gateways in her senses, awakes her longing to travel beyond the courtyard, to recite the words that will throw off this walking trance, the sleeping-spell of mind.

  Then she is gone, leaving him alone in the lab with the apparatus he has been bludgeoning incoherently for the last hour. His viscera hold the impression—her turning pertly on that strategic threshold to announce that, yes, they are together in a hopeless impasse. He circles the recalcitrant fact. The woman is married; she made her selection long before he arrived on the scene, chose the display plumage of the man who finally got breakfast cereal to talk when you pour on milk. Herbert Koss: dependable, well-off, patient, kind—all those desirable qualities of mate-and fatherhood Ressler himself lacks. He can beat the man nowhere; he has no caught creature to lay at her den door as dowry. None except—it gives him a guilty rush—a crack at the secret of life.

  He slows, tries once more to back down into the reasonable. He is happy with lab bachelorhood. She has every reason for sticking to her field-tested bond. There is no forgivable reason to tamper with what isn’t broken, no possible attraction to exercise over one another. And yet, there is. Is one. It alleviates nothing to call it enzymes. Obscene cat-and-mouse, one that, if they can just this once transcend the way of the race, ought to remain cat-and-mouse forever, never developing into the thing it is surrogate for. Hot, gratifying confirmation fills him to recollect her hurried, questioning eyes. It maddens him, the extent of pleasure in this prolonged fiction, swarmed with all the alarm of the event it must never indulge in.

  She leaves him alone in the lab, abandons him to the old detective story, the sober mystification of the bug. Yet Jeanette—fawn legs, downscaped neck—has clearly announced a catalog more inscrutable than the sixty-four codons. Nature’s ciphers are at least objective, potentially solvable. But Koss is a thing apart. What the two of them do to one another may be no more than a complex-carbohydrate tease, cybernetic systems feeding back into each other, an infinite Do-loop, a sentence grammatical but out of syntactical control, whom looping around to subject subject who. The moment arrests him all afternoon: Jeanette, arched, aroused, frozen at the door in fight-or-flight, scared nocturnal mammal caught in the light. What frightened her? It could only have been him, his own cross-hands panic, his broadcast desire.

  The marathon sessions with the rate trials are over; he has verified them with all possible precision. He must now present his findings— the survival-value enzymes—at the next Blue Sky. Cyfer will appreciate the implications: a colinear, unidirectional, non-overlapping, redundant triplet code. They’ve suspected, but he has demonstrated it, assembling the facts in a configuration not entirely anticipated by anyone. He has checked and rechecked for coherence, consistency with the literature. The model is airtight, obvious in retrospect. His bit of crucial synthesis will in a few days become public currency.

  He has delayed, savored the edge his extra lucid pieces give him. By month’s end, the world will have everything he has, all the cards down. He must lay out his technique for controlled point mutations, selective garbling. But is he ethically compelled to point out that this technique, even more than the nonresults, holds the possibility of wrapping up the rest of the puzzle? Is he honor-bound to harp on a hunch, tip them off to his own intuitive certainty?

  He looks up to see Dan Woytowich lugging unusual equipment into the lab. “You know, they bill this as a portable, but the damn thing’s twice as bulky as a sewing machine.” He sets up the TV in a lab corner, where it blends into the background instruments. The tube is the size of the Svedberg centrifuge and chromatography equipment combined.

  “Dr. Double-U. What’s new? How’s the wife?”

  “Renée’s fine. Almost done with the dissertation. She’s blotted more than nine hundred lines of Shakespeare to date.”

  “Great. Just a hundred to go. Has she tried Titus Andronicus?” Woyty adjusts the dials, fiddles with the rabbit ears, and in a flurry of static (residual background radiation from the Big Bang), Ed Murrow springs On the Air. The invasion of outside news seems a violation of laboratory controls. The two of them sit entranced, Seeing It Now, Person to Person. Ressler must at least ask. “Not your ordinary piece of test apparatus, Dan. Are you working on something arcane?”

  Woyty doesn’t hear. He is submerged, watching Dulles announce that he won’t give Eleanor Roosevelt a visa to visit China because China doesn’t exist. He surfaces long enough to unload out of left field. “I think we ought to quit calling what we’re doing here ‘decoding.’ Technically, ‘decoding’ is restoring a coded message to plaintext by someone who already has the key. What we’re doing is ‘cryptanalysis,’ since the genetic code is probably not a code at all, but a cipher. Distort the description, and you distort the thing you try to describe.”

  Ressler listens to this impassioned plea for linguistic purity. He may be witnessing the first stages of total organic dissolution here. Woyty doesn’t blink; he gestures at the set, where the Y
ou Bet Your Life birdie descends on its wire like a dove ciborium, bearing a piece of paper around its neck reading “Grace.” “You know, I dreamt I was a contestant on What’s My Line? From the studio wings, I could see the panelists put their blindfolds on. I went up to the chalkboard to sign in, but instead of writing ‘Research Biologist,’ I wrote, ‘Crypt Analyst.’ Then the panelists grilled me about my profession. Get this: their questions were in code.”

  The news comes on, and Woytowich sits pasted to the tube. The top embalmer in the state could not have waxed the man better. His full-blown mania for current events must be linked to this other defect, free association. Ressler, his own work impaired by the electronic anesthesia, makes one last try. “Why have you brought a television into the lab?”

  Woytowich mumbles, “I’ve some trials that need attending.”

  “So do I, sir.” After an afternoon’s glance at eyes hazel and moist enough to explain why he has been taken out and dropped in this forsaken place, the last thing Ressler needs now is Beirut. Berlin. Woyty sighs and shoots Ressler a strained smile suggesting that the youth is not seeing him at his best. Dan, Ressler knows, is a brilliant technician with every right to be alienated. The sober, classical generational studies he’s produced for decades are enough to bore anyone to tears. A now ancient paper, written when Woyty was a baby post-grad, cried in the wilderness against the protein-as-gene climate. Vindication did little to rehabilitate him with the old guard he’d untimely challenged. In the early fifties, Woytowich, churning out disease patterns in fish family trees, experienced a short-lived rebirth. He reportedly combed the building for days, telling anyone who’d listen about a strange “jumping inheritance” which he could not duplicate or explain. Three years later, someone else published the complete mechanism. By then, Woyty had become an antinomian pariah, producing the barest minimum research to survive. Yet he never once violated the Lafayette Escadrille code of honor by claiming he’d almost been there.

  “Were you by any chance watching last year,” Woytowich wanders off irrelevantly again, bringing a blush of shame to Ressler’s cheeks, “when Ed Sullivan went on his Really Big Shoe and asked his audience whether they should allow Ingrid Bergman to appear on the program?”

  Ressler shakes his head quickly. “No set.”

  “No? Of course not. Well, it was the low point of modern opinion polling. Granted the woman is controversial, leaving her husband to take up with an Italian and all. Seven years of political exile, denouncement on the Senate floor, all for falling in love with someone other than her husband.” A pause sends shimmies up Ressler’s spine. “I never thought of our witch hunts as anything other than pubescent acne, aberrations caused by moving too quickly into the Data Age. Now I’m not that far out of the main-stream, and I’ve never given the green light to extremists, and as far as I’m concerned, we ought to send nuts like Lovering into Minnesota exile.” He snorts a laugh when Ressler doesn’t. “But imagine: ‘If you want to see this adulteress on the show, write and tell me.’ Not exactly a controlled survey.”

  Woytowich comes over to where Ressler finishes the beaker-washing he’d get a post-doc to do if he weren’t the post-doc. The way Woyty picks up the electrophoresis strips and raises his eyebrows suggests that the difference between cueing an audience and confirming an experimental hunch is a question of nomenclature. “I guess I don’t see how Miss Bergman’s problems lead to TVs in the lab.”

  Woytowich turns away. “It is just for tonight.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean … I’m just curious.”

  Like one of his dazed fish doing slow loop-the-loops in the tank, Woyty circles Ressler’s table. “I’d like to tell you something I’m not allowed to tell anyone. That I’ve kept to myself until now.” Ressler waits until he realizes the request wasn’t rhetorical; Woytowich really wants permission to tell. Stuart nods. “Renée and I … are a Stainer family.” Ressler laughs out loud to put it together. The Stainer ratings. Stainer, the national pollster, with his legendary secret sample group perfectly representing America in miniature. Woyty a Stainer voter? Ressler has never met anyone like Woytowich in his life. And yet: someone has to stand, in those endless polls of taste that run America, for every mephisto variation in existence. “I know it’s ludicrous. I was selected in my late twenties, shortly after my appointment as assistant prof at Illinois. Renée became royalty by virtue of marriage.”

  “Couldn’t you decline the nomination?”

  “Can lab rats turn down their boss’s NSF grant? A median citizen does not turn down nomination to median citizenship.”

  “It doesn’t pay, does it?”

  “Actually, being a responsible sample group member has cost me considerably over the years. No prestige, obviously, as we’re sworn to solemn secrecy. Knowledge of Stainer names would be golden.” Woyty gives a hapless look laced with irony: I’ve perjured myself to tell you this.

  “I don’t understand. Why put up with it, if it’s a burden?”

  “Think about it. There are only fifteen thousand Stainer members nationwide. Only one per ten thousand. We’re in the unique position of rating every televised message to enter the American home. If a show passes our chi-square, it becomes the law of the land. National sacrament. In its own peculiar way, undeniable power.”

  So it’s more than lack of collegial support that has kept this man from realizing his potential. Woytowich’s social obligations have for some time been tinged with the moral fervor of a Mormon setting out on his two-year missionary stint in the Third World. Woyty’s ethical compulsion to influence the sample mean mimics the first principle: go ye therefore and replicate thyself, and may the most persuasive opinions live. His peculiar polling position has made him purposive, a thing no scientist can afford to be.

  Woyty breathes deeply. “The way I see it, in an industrial democracy the size of Americorp, the vote is pretty much ceremonial privilege. Your state representative? Tribal holdover. More an after-the-fact efficiency check on mass manipulation. A ballot in the Stainer ratings, on the other hand, gives me a chance to manipulate the manipulators. When I rate, the boys on both seaboards snap to attention.”

  “But wait …”

  Woytowich aggressively cuts him off. “I know what you’re going to say. The small denominator fallacy. Well, you’re right. My proxy vote for ten thousand people has no more significance in the sample of fifteen thousand than the votes of the ten thousand Daniel W models from whom I am indistinguishable in taste in the hundred and fifty million nation at large. And yet,” Woyty smiles sadly, imparting the latest unsupported dead-on prediction of his scientific career, “the world is not a linear equation. Big changes come from small initial differences. You are a good enough scientist,” he accuses, “to know that all polls are, to a certain degree, self-fulfilling. Methods of inquiry create possible outcomes. The great difference between the Stainer ratings and Citizen Rule lies in the results each is after. Ike, Stassen, Truman, Stevenson? Jesus, who are these guys? Epiphenomena, emblems of the homogenation of taste, the by-products of mechanization, not the actors upon it. But ask a fellow—OK, fifteen thousand fellows—to judge Gunsmoke, and you start to zero in on the real substrata of civilization.”

  So this is who Dan really is. For the past several years, he has gone about in secrecy, unknown even to his team members, doing his bit for the elevation of the species. He has had to be perfectly informed, both about world events and the hydra of churned consumer culture. Somewhere last month, last year, he passed the point, without knowing it, where he no longer simply sought the up-to-the-minute. He needed it. Like enzyme-deprived mutations, Woytowich’s system can no longer function without a steady source—a glut—of broadcast.

  Woyty returns to the set, adjusts the aerial. “The problem with swaying the median is that I must move selectively, a blow here and there where it counts. Stay within the standard deviation. Guerrilla war. Dienbienphu of shrewdery against prevailing tastes. To use one’s Stainer vote to subve
rt popular culture for the better, one cannot saturation-bomb. Three votes in a row for the high-foreheads—be they ever so humble—and Stainer would dump me as an aberrant ringer.”

  “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 émigré, testifier 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.