“What’s this over yonder?” Lovering banters. “I distinctly hear dreaming.”
“Joey,” Koss says, returning to the thuggish quip-trader Ressler first took her for, “call your wife, Sandy. I hear she’s at home taking a delivery from the furniture man.”
“She’s not my wife. Sandy doesn’t believe in the hypocrisy of the institution. We live in sin. And believe me, sin’s gotten an undeserved bad name.”
“Have you told Ulrich about this?” Koss readdresses Ressler.
“I tried to,” he claims.
“How hard?” She grins.
“You know the man’s bias. You told me yourself. Hung up on pushing the thing through statistically. The last time I spoke with him, he tried to interest me in doing some machine coding.”
“Sounds interesting,” Lovering throws out.
“Damn it, it’s not.” Ressler slams his hand on his desk, surprising even himself. “He thinks we can put together some kind of grind-out generator of all sequenced nucleotides, throw it up against some data structure showing every known protein, and let the thing iterate a couple hundred hours …”
“Couple hundred?” Jeanette almost falls in his lap. “On the ILLIAC?” CU’s trimmed-down, transistor-overhauled, performance-boosted, cutting-edge version of the power-hungry rooms full of hardware, brave new programmable switch boxes, descendants of those devices originally built in the forties to assist in cracking wartime codes.
“Sounds like it would work,” Lovering says.
“I’m not saying it wouldn’t.”
“What’s the problem, then?”
“It’s overlaborious, superfluous drudgery, that’s the problem.” Koss and Lovering both laugh at his adjective production line. “I can’t believe it. Not after the success of the first paper.” Ressler’s first work has already caused ripples. The English and French, as well as the Californians, have requested reprints. But the more notorious the work gets, the more cautiously Ulrich pursues it.
Lovering shows his allegiance. “Come on. How hard could the programming be?”
“Oh, the algorithm is trivial. Little more than a nested loop, with cases hooked on to it. It would take a few weeks to throw together, test it, get the bugs out. But it would be a time-eating monster.”
Koss blurts out, “Joey! Friend. How much programming have you done in your wee lifetime?”
“Zero. Null. Nil. Naught. Void.”
“Good. I’ll teach you everything I know.”
“Everything?”
“Everything that can be expressed politely in FORTRAN. And Joey.” She stares at him and whispers. “We’ll race you there.”
helps(heaven,X) if helps(X,X).
Koss and Ressler get clearance from a dubious Ulrich to try the incorporating techniques suggested by Gale and Folkes, under condition that they give Lovering a hand in formulating an algorithm for the matching program. They are to split their time between in vitro synthesis and computer tutorials. He gives them a two-month probation, not enough time for anything, yet more than Ressler expected. If they have something tangible to show by then, Ulrich will talk extension.
Ressler tries to cop assistance from Woyty, but the man is tied up reading Baby and Child Care. Renée, pregnancy safe from spontaneous abortion, is due in weeks. Stuart visits Toveh Botkin in her oriental-carpeted office. He surprises her, slumped back in chair, in a Ringstrasse Hapsburg reverie. “Where were you?” he asks softly.
“In the Café Centrale,” she smiles.
“Talking to Mahler?”
She scoffs. “To Trotsky. In French. He was trying to make me pick up his check.” She laughs at herself, a laugh that trails off into a tsk. “Friend, it may be time to retire.”
“I’ve something that will change your mind.” He shows her the article, which she devours in minutes. He tells her about the release time he and Koss have won from Ulrich.
“Let me wash beakers. Pull periodicals. Anything.” Her eyes plead for one more shot at the code before giving in to it.
“We can pull our own damn periodicals. From you, we need chemistry. And the appropriate inspirational music.”
“Be not afeard,” she says. “The isle is full of noises.”
What noises? Down the quad, over in the Music Building, Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson put the finishing touches on their composition, “ILLIAC Suite for String Quartet,” spawning a new genre. They use the computer as a giant random-number generator, an engine that produces, within restrictions set by the programmer-composers, sounds and suite airs for four-pair hands to unvary. The project reflects a dawning awareness that the life score itself is assembled from successive iterations of random mutation. It is left to the unprepared audience’s ears to unalgorithm as best they can, to reverse the random process, to hear in the blips and bleeps of this new, startling conch shell the steady surf of the first sea.
theme(goldberg,list[g,f#,e,d,b,c,d,g,g,f#,e,a,f#,g,a,d,d,b,c,b, g,a,b,e,c,b,a,d,g,c,d,g]).
variation(X,Y) if theme(Name,X) and equals(Y,mutation(X)). mutation(X) if
“ILLIAC Suite” shares processing time with Cyfer’s attempts to secure the definition of life. Compared to the tunes coming in over the transistors at that moment, it comes from a new planet. “Honeycomb” is the hit of the season. Even Ressler, after laborious attention now able to distinguish between Haydn’s London and Mozart’s Prague, dissects the disposable tune in two hearings. For the week in question, he is forced to listen to it twice an hour. The message is inescapable—the measure of the minute. It blasts from a thousand portable radios all across town. For the invention of the transistor, blame crosstown physics faculty member John Bardeen. The 1956 Nobel laureate, Bardeen has come to Urbana to continue the work that will make him the first repeat winner in the same field.
The transistor itself is a flexible current junction: small voltage differences at the base produce large differences between emitter and collector. With this simple lexicon, the transistor can serve as everything from current amplifier to logic gate. In the ten years since its evolution, the device has crept into circuits ranging from ILLIAC to the portable radios giving white kids of Anywhere, America, their first taste of black sonority, racy innuendoed danger. R and B currently mutates to R and R, a dialect banned in several communities as subversive, destructive, and unpatriotic. In years, changed beyond recognition yet virtually the same, the sound will go from threat to ubiquitous backdrop: decorative prop for everything from news broadcasts to barber shops.
William Shockley, Bardeen’s collaborator and corecipient of the ’56 Nobel, has gone from Bell Labs to California. There he begins thinking taboo thoughts about the inherited nature of intelligence. Might it be passed along as discretely as wrinkled pods? He becomes possessed by an idea in embryo—a sperm bank for geniuses. Keep the genetic pool from pollution. The racist tinge and resultant outcry are picked up, reported, and amplified in the general transistor noise.
As for the text of “Honeycomb,” it strikes Ressler as a straightforward variation on the time-honored metaphor of Love-as-Edible-Food. Nuzzle, nibble, chew, swallow your baby, your honey-pie, your sweet. Until now, he always considered the pap embarrassing, indulgent drooling. Now he no longer holds it in contempt. Soft, tuneful, pathetically appropriate. He’d like to nuzzle, suck, sing to her, even. Jeanette’s form sears him with the instantly consumed melancholic cheer of radio tunes. Heartbreaking, vulnerable, in black-pleated narrow waists, peach tapering bodices, she is the core of girlishness, a fleeting goodbye to summer, sailboats on the lake, the downy, borrowed body about to be eaten and spit out by the shape-hungry world. She hovers at her last moment, soon to be expelled from visitation. He must preserve, fix her at this unarrestable peak of loveliness. He doesn’t know how. All he can do is attach himself to her at the mouth.
They preserve enough presence of mind to work together on in vitro. With Botkin’s assistance, they advance on a clean technique. Lab work is exciting again, not solely on accoun
t of their proximity, hours spent within touching distance, more secret because more open. Back in the barracks, doing a dish, he is struck by how much repetitive maintenance it takes just to exist. Existence is the cycle extraordinaire; everything tangent, constantly spinning just to stay in place. But the missing piece of the coding problem offers entrée to another process—lines, deltas. They stand at the base of Jacob’s Ladder. Can they be on the threshold of completing what until then had been merely repetitive climb?
For weeks Ressler has bankrolled a private research venture, exploring to what extent a toothache is imaginary. When the tooth abscesses one morning, flash burning at the stake makes him recant, tear to the dentist. In the waiting room he blunts himself into oblivion over back issues of Life. He reads Dulles’s brinksmanship quote, which he missed the first time around. He scans the magazine’s breezy treatment turning high-ranking Nazi von Braun into the Rock Hudson of Rocketry. He has a premonition: the final solution to the modern crisis will be to turn the threat of news into light entertainment.
The world is at war, perpetual war, moving at all tangent angles. All over the world, a spreading collection of brushfires extends the head-on conflagration by other means. Wars come down to the control of information. They purport to be about the attainment of battlefields, defense of property, renovation of antiquated systems of ownership, liberation of oppressed peoples, geopolitical dominance. But these are just material proxies for pursuing conflict’s real end: the testing of new technologies, the stockpiling of data.
Information is ordered contrast; it can be won only by building a differential between sound and noise. The purpose of gathering information is to increase predictability. Information theory was born in the War, when Norbert Wiener was asked to build a gunsight that could tell where an enemy plane would be in the next few seconds. He’s read Wiener: wars are won by making your enemies more ignorant than they can make you. A state’s ability to wage war is measured only loosely in kilotonnage. A better indicator is a country’s ability to wage randomness, to impose a signal-to-noise problem on the enemy, render his informational stockpile incoherent.
Since Caesar, warring states have known that the best way to protect information from enemy corruption is to disguise it as noise. A coded message already appears random, protectively colored. But since the Gauls, warring states have studied how to break the noise barrier, reverse the garble. The history of warfare is the story of cryptology. In one of the paperback cipher books he pored over when the coding problem was forming, Ressler read that the British alone during the recent outbreak sported thirty thousand information troops. The number has risen steeply since. The Cold War marks that moment in organized violence when the number of people attached to various code books surpasses the number toting rifles.
No matter how well coded a message, how ingeniously the treasure is reduced to apparent gibberish, there is always a key that reveals the underground sense under the cloak of noise. This gives secret writing its otherworldly quality. The cryptanalyst’s arcane ritual of incantations— MAGIC, as the army/navy wartime decoding efforts were named— transmutes seeming meaninglessness into firm predictions. The one who renders the message readable possesses all the import of the original.
In Life’s breezy treatments of Dulles and von Braun—aided by the swatch his abscess cuts across his brain—Ressler sees that even the safe haven of academia, so far from the industrial trenches, will not prevent his being conscripted. The genetic code, however selflessly and reverently, will be co-opted in the broader code war. Life, use’s henchman, serves up as comestibles everyone from assassins to scientists (“modern mandarins, modern necromancers”). His act of pure research, done with religious indifference to consequences, delivers all organic creation, codebroken and codespoken, into warring hands.
Just as his tooth sends up another flaming wave, Ressler stumbles across a photo essay of the twenty-odd-year-old pianist, interpreter of the Goldberg recording that Koss gave him. Given the ends of photojournalism, Ressler is not surprised to catch the gist: the boy is young, single, romantically eccentric, a crank hypochondriac, never seen without his panoply of pills and jars of spring water. He possesses the Lovering allele of cold virus paranoia, wearing wool coats in the height of summer. He sings out loud while recording—ghostly, alternate vocalizings the technicians can’t muffle. He has a carefully worked-out, outlandish theory about recordings rendering the concert obsolete. Yet the nut is a genius. He has inherited a contrapuntal brain, and the Bach decoding algorithm is congenitally embedded into his ten-bit, digital circuitry.
Suddenly the notes are in Ressler’s ears, conspiring voices, sounding of lost days, lost names, affections, friends. Those variations, fragments, flint-splinters of the original: how long he has lived with them since his first, dull attempts at theory. His slow, purpose-free pursuit of the four-by-four-by-four aria, the Sixty-four Sarabande Dollar Question has become so instilled, so somatic, that he has forgotten the point of the experiment until this moment. Jeanette! Why infect a stranger in the first place? She hadn’t a clue to his nature, yet she came, brought this unprovoked birthday encyclopedia of crystallized sounds—iced trees clicking together after a storm; scrape of metal runners coasting down a hill near evening, sparking bare rock, reticent snow brushing the blades; shouts in the city; the clink of tipping scales; the slosh of ankle-dangling euphoria; summer insect swarms; plash of sun’s rays lengthening over the lawn; baroque silliness; French fluff; political fervor; the chill call of last illness; the swelling sound of always, of never. Did she know already where they would arrive, long before either dared to consider the first touch? He forgives himself this once the too-brief two-manual figure in the thick of his chest, deciding that the only measure that can crack these patterns is beauty.
Ressler reads the profile three times but finds no key to the Goldberg code. He is called into the operating theater. As the dentist administers the composite anesthetic, preparing to yank out the offensive handiwork of bacteria, Ressler calms himself, grips the arms of the chair, and relaxes, following the contour of the seductive melody he has never really put aside since that unbirthday party long ago. He recreates tracts of the piece in his head. Preexistent knowledge of the piece, recovered in a hundred hours of close listening, allows him perfect recall. But the music, the note-for-note isomorph in his interior concert hall, is not the piece she gave him. One cannot step into the same theme twice.
His dentist saws off the tooth’s crown, ferrets out the roots. His mouth is blown apart. At that moment, when pain ought to rack his body, the pain of violent mistake, murderous razor-pain, Ressler is cast adrift, at sea on sound. A Pentothal haze of realization: every sound wave ever uttered could be packed into a single generating pattern a few measures long, the world’s pocket score. He barely flinches as the chunks of infected, lodged bone are ripped from his head.
asks(ressler,koss,question(Today,X)).
question(2/1/58, “Why can’t I tell you what I hear?”).
equals(question(Day,X),question(Day + 1,X)).
At home, a bloody cotton wad in his mouth, still under the protective residue of anesthetic, he calls Koss. He gets the husband. Pleasant acquaintance from faculty parties, dignified man of standing, food technologist of the first order, impediment, innocent victim, human being who has never shown Ressler anything but trust. “Hello, Herbert. Ressler here. Wife home?” No mean feat with a mouth of pebbles and blades.
“I didn’t recognize your voice. Drinking?”
“Dentist.”
“Ha! Not the slurred speech of choice. The wife’s in the study, all bothered over this new experiment of yours. Hold on.”
After gruesome pleasantry, Ressler doesn’t mind being left dead on the line. He stares at where his hand has been tracing out automatic writing on the phone pad: phonenumber phonember phonembryo phenomeber.
A silence comes across the receiver, one whose breathprint he has come to hear most hours of waking and deep into
sleep. Her lungs, in and out, are a muffled Morse. Those soft pulses of silence are the one message they can transmit to one another uncoded. At last she says, “Stuart!” Cheerily, a little surprised for the benefit of her husband, listening in the distant room. Yet cloaked in a subtext intelligible only to him. Quite a trick, making the word serve double purpose for two parties. Her subsequent lines are the same—masterly ambiguous hermeneutic chestnuts. It scares him to hear that actress’s modulation, her flawless delivery. She lies beautifully, as confidently as Eva Blake doing crosswords in pen.
But fright is also deeply silken, burgundy, arousing. He hears her excitement across the line, cadenced so that her husband cannot. He relishes the awful irony: she lets the man think we’re discussing biochemistry. And we are. “Jeannie,” he grits out through numbed mouth. “Jeannie, I’m sorry.”
“No need for that. Hold on a moment. Let me get a pad. OK. Now: were you speaking in the short or long term?”
“I’m sorry for calling. I’m sorry for falling in love with you. I’ve had a hundred opportunities to stop. I wanted to. I’m sorry for ruining yoür life.”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s nothing we can’t salvage. What’s the damage, in your estimate?”
“Jeanette,” he says “Darling. Friend. We have to quit.”
“We can’t.” Perfectly modulated. “Not while we’re ahead.”
“Jeanette. You’re killing me. Every minute is a terror that something’s happened to you.” Without thinking, he blurts, “You have to leave your husband.”
At the other end, excruciating, ambiguous silence.
“We have to have each other.”
“Well?” she giggles, eighteen, baiting, ignoring the chaperon. April invitation. “What’s keeping you?”
Where is Herbert? Has he stepped out? Does she no longer care? Her invitation burns like a fist of opium, warm, loose, nothing to be done. He will go over this minute, taste her, feed her, make her call out to her husband in the next room that no, she wasn’t shouting. Nothing wrong. Ressler looks down at his growing list: genenumber genome genehome. “I’ll die, otherwise.”
The Gold Bug Variations Page 51