The quiz-show scandal breaks. Jack Benny admits to being forty. A leading manufacturer brings out a nontoxic floor wax, to save infants that lick their way across the kitchen. According to Time, eleven thousand new “citizen-consumers” are born every day in the U.S., adding a city the size of Norfolk, Virginia, every thirty days. “A new wave of opportunity coming.”
Science too can’t help but join the footrace. The accidental clarity that Ressler and his love stumbled upon over the phone remains solid, even in the unforgiving light of following days. Botkin declares the proposed angle as right as an inevitable passacaglia. They sit in her office listening to Fauré, Franck, drawing up the apparatus needed to confirm his serendipitous insight.
In barely controlled excitement, Ressler does the week’s summary for Cyfer. He begins all the way back in the uncontestable: the double helix. Not even Woytowich holds out against the model any longer. He has just become a father—an architectural marvel named Ivy. The impossible reprieve leaves him open to even the most outlandish proposals about life’s generating plan. Taylor’s radiographs, too, transcend disagreement, proving that DNA replicates by that classic postwar cure-all, political partition. One message splits into two; two halves each restore the one message. The simplest form of molecular baby-making: divide and regenerate.
Adding a demonstration of Mendelian inheritance for mutations, Ressler presses up against the last unequivocal certainty. This double-twined ribbon pastes up, from its internal library, the army of proteins that pump, breathe, inflame, hoist the whole organism. The rest is tentative, beyond the limits of current, territorial waters.
“Our own work,” Ressler casts a cold eye at Ulrich, “elaborates the decoding parameters: triplet, colinear nonoverlapping, unpunctuated bases. We know that DNA never leaves the nucleus. I submit that it sends out a courier, a single-strand RNA molecule templated on its surface, a plaster-cast of the recipe. This messenger strand carries its transcription of a base sequence—call it a gene, for old times’ sake—to the ribosomes, where protein synthesis takes place.” He draws a freehand philosopher’s stone on the blackboard:
In Nucleus In Ribosome
DNA—(transcription)→ RNA—(translation) Protein→
“OK,” says Ulrich. “Two separate processes. One directly templated, one read and assembled. Ribosomal RNA promoted to translator, not message. Valuable,” the chief concedes. “But does it get us any closer to reading the bugger?”
Introducing a new, ephemeral, RNA messenger—itself a singleribboned series of four bases, with uracil substituting for the thymine in DNA—doesn’t change the informational nature of the problem. From a cryptographic vantage, it makes no difference whether the code word is the RNA simulation or its DNA original. They still track the old, elusive pattern. So despite the opportunity staring him in the face, Ulrich insists that codon assignment is more a symbolic problem than a chemical one. He fails to see that Ressler’s clarification gives them an experimental wedge, a way of simulating nature’s own mechanism, letting the cell solve the problem for them. Instead, Ulrich is preoccupied with his own pronouncement: the discovery of a way of juggling the letters to produce a pattern so satisfying that it must be correct.
Ulrich announces, in competition with Stuart’s unsubstantiated diagram, that he, Lovering, and new conscript Woytowich may be in a position to land the Big One. “The closer we get, the better it looks. DNA splits loose along the inside seam to present the base sequence. Either edge might code for the protein, so any codon and its complement on the anti-gene would stand for the same amino. The triplet AGU thus codes for the same thing as its Chargaff anticodon UCA on the other strand. Two chains, two directions, so to the synonyms AGU and UCA, we can add UGA and ACU. Four words under the same thesaurus heading.”
“Treatment by retrograde and inversion,” Toveh Botkin mumbles, troubled. “Bach was fond of putting fugue subjects through both.” So was this fellow Schoenberg, thinks Ressler, who’s done his homework on the matter. But that proves nothing. He’s nonplussed and can do nothing but keep still and follow the working-out.
Ulrich lists the sixty-four-codon catalog according to groups of shared degeneracy, the plan growing increasingly obvious:
Codon Inversion Retrograde Retrograde inversion
ACG UGC GCA CGU
AGC UCG CGA GCU
ACC UGG CCA GGU
AGG UCC GGA CCU
AUG UAC GUA CAU
AUC UAG CUA GAU
AUU UAA UUA AAU
ACU UGA UCA AGU
AAG UUC GAA CUU
AAC UUG CAA GUU
GAC CUG CAG GUC
GGC CCG CGG GCC
AAA UUU — —
GGG CCC — —
AUA UAU — —
ACA UGU — —
AGA UCU — —
GAG CUC — —
CAC GUG — —
CGC GCG — —
“All sixty-four permutations. The set contains twelve fourfold synonyms and eight twofold synonyms.” With a touch of show-man’s pause, Ulrich says, “Twelve plus eight equals our magic number.” The pattern is stunning in its own, horrific way. The rationale for construction seems at least reasonable, and the numerology is perfect. That Ulrich has leapfrogged empirical constraints to get there seems temporarily defensible.
“But it’s all wrong,” Ressler whispers, glancing at Botkin for support. He’s afraid to appeal to Koss, afraid to look at her in public for fear that her ephemeral face might make the day’s pragmatics too much to bear. But it’s Koss who comes to his aid. She objects, grounded in the best literature, to the idea that the complementary strands are being read equivalently. For all her substantiated accuracy, the facts wash up impotently against perfect pattern.
That Ulrich’s subdivision of sixty-four triplets uncannily produces a hidden number equal to that of the essential amino acids carries the surprise significance of arithmetic. He is under the spell of physics, where the pursuit of fundamentals pares back a mass of data to simple, elegant expressions. It seems safe to assume that cellular mechanisms, carded back to their core, are also driven by symmetry. But it’s not safe; safety and life science are incommensurate. That one can derive twenty from sixty-four with pretty, reciprocal twists may be nature’s sheer perversity.
Botkin lowers herself into the line of fire. “Grammars are not usually so clean.” Her cheeks contract bittersweetly: don’t we always mean more than we say? Why not the we within us?
But the objection of one senior member is offset by another. Woytowich, revived by infant Ivy, wanting to be worthy of her when she is old enough to evaluate fathers, throws his hopes in with Ulrich’s dash for the cymbal crash. “It’s not evidence, of course; but the fit’s attractive enough to do some stat analysis on those groups we think might be equivalents.”
Lovering’s vote is a foregone conclusion. There’s only one way Ulrich can run that sort of analysis: through ILLIAC. And Lovering has proved so skilled at programming that he has replaced Stuart as Cyfer’s fair-haired boy. All Ulrich’s hopes are now pinned to numeric confirmation of his simple table. Ressler tries again to interest them in in vitro, but these three refuse to concede that the codon catalog is arbitrary, devoid of internal order. The debate comes down to temperament, individual hobby horses. What each feels ought to be true. The team splits down the middle—gnostics versus nominalists, formalists against functionalists. They forget the first article of scientific skepticism: meaning always reveals pattern, but pattern does not necessarily imply meaning.
Ressler cannot fault Ulrich for leaping to the beautiful conclusion. Would Stuart have begun in science if he wasn’t predisposed to believing that what lay behind common sense was more beautiful because more objectively indifferent, dense, feverishly specific? Ulrich sends them off with his blessing: “Both parties’ results to be continuously exchanged, of course.” Yet Ressler knows he will be out a fellowship come spring. He is resigned, for his own sake, to losing everything, every profes
sional advantage, for a glimpse of the demonstrable. Only now, he has dragged Botkin and Koss into the breach with him. Against their careers, he has only a vague plan: learn the trick of the cell-free system.
They now know the tube must include synthesis-active RNA messenger chains as well as ribosomes. They’ll also need an energy source, ATP, and the raw amino building blocks. Their technique is still crude: throw them together; see what you get. On evidence, he is no less culpable than Ulrich, perhaps even more stained by faith, hope, and love—the old triumverate keeping life perpetually on the trail of its own suspected order.
But he is not ready to tell Botkin or Koss the wildest of his suspicions: the double helix somehow codes not only for its own messenger, but also for the elusive adaptor, the ribosome assembly line, and all the enzymes needed to recognize the adaptor, affix the amino acids, promote the growing chain, and trim the finished proteins. Enzyme-trimming enzymes. Ribosome-building ribosomes. Synthesis must itself be synthesized. The machine is as self-bootstrapping, as self-selfing as consciousness itself. Why not? Consciousness, the thirst for exchange and research, is just the self-selfing chain writ large, considering, synthesizing itself.
Why so complex a path? Why so many intermediaries? And how can everything come from four simple bases? Ressler, even now, closing in on tendering a first, tentative model of the arrangement, is blocked by his own unspeakable desire to ambush the experiment, wreak the control by introducing the irreducible variable of personality. He hears it in the deep cell’s core, lapping at the heart of comprehension. Despite the danger, he cannot help it. He must make a little room in himself for himself, for the same mistaken guide that now leads half of Cyfer astray, for that terrible Pauline triplet. And of those three, most of all love.
SELF HELP
Each passing day has payoffs. Ressler, Koss, and Botkin daily refine the bottled-synthesis technique. He sees one perhaps uncrossable barrier in front of them. On that day when they can finally drop a stretch of active RNA into the chemical mix and have it produce its isomorphic protein, the resulting sequence will still be beyond direct chemical correlation with its source; they might still require Ulrich’s ILLIAC bulldozing for any hope at analysis.
Fat chance that Lovering will be forthcoming with his do-loops for the competition’s sake. Ressler learned programming as a tyro undergrad— how to octal-toggle machine code directly into Core an instruction at a time. Worse than annihilating on the nerves; not surprising that the average software cowboy ran into a break-point at thirty-two, sent home with smoke steaming from the circuitry. Even punching cumbersome codes into Hollerith columns seemed small improvement. While it did save wear on the neural nodes, coding remained hell and debugging impossible.
It was with the zeal of a convert that he welcomed the work of Von Neumann and others, who lumped common machine instructions together and made them available as macro commands. Assemblers—programs that take macros and generate machine-executable code—still strike him as miraculous kludges, like the first wind-catching membrane stealing upon those lizards that had been hopping about in trees. Released, the analogy spread like disease. Full-fledged compilers were upon him before he finished graduate school. Compilers, of course, are themselves written in assembly language, giving the whole tower of Boolean babel more than a facade’s resemblance to the House That Jack Built. Code-writing code. Program-designing programs. Uncomfortably like the thing they built this tool to help examine. Why stop there? Why not assembler-assemblers? Application-generating applications? Jacob’s Ladders off and runging, climbing themselves; tools that turn the trick of replication. Among the projects that the Lovering-Ulrich-Woytowich pattern-matching program time-shares ILLIAC with is one to write a high-level ALGOL language compiler. In ALGOL.
Without further refinement of their cell-free system, Ressler, Koss, and Botkin will have to stay on good terms with Joe, something that grows increasingly difficult with the man’s expanding personal triumphs. Lovering, finding his vocation in programming, is on the ascendant. His well-being is consolidated by the devotion of the much-touted Sandy. Ressler has still not met the woman, but to hear Joe speak of her, she is all sweet surprise and variety personified.
The accounts Lovering sprinkles liberally over his office mate are ludicrously effusive. The woman lisps in numbers. She’s built like a shit brickhouse, although Joe produces no photos to substantiate. She plays Mozart with the proper smidgen of rubato. And she understands Lovering’s own abstruse work, without his yet conceding to bring her around the lab. “I explained the gist of the coding problem to her the other night. Granted, she didn’t take in all its particulars. Who can? But in her own words—without any formal training—she came up with this beautifully intuitive formulation of framing.”
“How does she feel about code degeneracy?” Ressler asks. The man’s adoration of the woman grates on him. He wants to shake him violently until the blathering stops. But for reasons Ressler’s reason more than comprehends, the most he can level against the self-deceiving fellow is gentle kidding.
“Go on, laugh. She anticipated the proof against overlap.”
“Jesus, Joe. You’d better go nuptial. When’s the date?”
“Just after yours, Dr. Ressler.” Miffed, Lovering addresses his card-punch forms.
“Seriously. With a woman like this falling into your hands, you ought to cleave, be fruitful, and multiply. If they let Dr. and Mrs. Woytowich do it, surely …”
“Who says we ain’t cleaving?” Lovering looks up slyly. “I told you, Sandy doesn’t believe in licensing love. We’ve talked it over, and neither of us sees why we have to pander to the boojwah by going through with dress-ups. That’s a socializing trick, all that paper signing. The only party to profit from marriage as it is currently defined in middle-class America is the State. We’ve drawn up our own contract.”
“Joey, I can’t help thinking that you’ve chosen the wrong moment in history to make an experiment in alternative mores. Just yesterday I read about this minister who was defrocked for using the word ‘sex’ when preaching the seventh commandment.”
“How can they hurt us? We’ve just put a payment down on a house. We move this weekend. It has a room for her piano, and a garden plot, and …”
Botkin knocks softly and enters. Hearing the conversation she unwittingly walks into, she sits by Ressler’s desk like a frightened undergraduate. Ressler says, “A house. That’s nice, Joe. But how are you going to go about making babies?”
“Stuart! And you claim to be a biologist. Historically speaking, there have been some very impressive genomes born out of wedlock.”
“Who you calling a bastard?” Woyty calls from the doorway. He enters, evening the gnostics and nominalists in the room. He has come hunting down Lovering with more sequences to key in. But he capitalizes on the opportunity to sentence the party to baby pictures. Seven-pound Ivy Woytowich looks to Ressler exactly the way every newborn looks: a hive of tube worms attacking a soft-boiled beet.
“Sandy’s already made it plain that I’m free to sample other women, so long as all my offspring are with her.”
“‘A miss for pleasure and a wife for breed,’” Botkin supplies. “As far as I have ever heard, we are the only species who seek out nonprocreative liaisons. Who get distressed when the surrogates accidentally do the job they substitute for. Do you suppose we succeed in tricking our genes into irrelevant pleasure? Or do they still get the surreptitious last laugh?”
“What is this woman talking about?” Lovering asks the other men. Ressler knows. Botkin looks so sadly at him that she must certainly have guessed everything there is to guess about who is fooling whom.
In the following days, the shame of that look drives Ressler to force the equilibrium of aroused danger he lives in. He will push at the precarious spot, get to know his enemy, the rightful husband. The man she sleeps with every night in abject intimacy. He cannot invite himself to their home, sit on their settee, run a semantic different
ial on Herbert Koss as she looks on. His trial must be isolate, valid. Life, as always, supplies its own contrivance: the Local Industries Trade Show at the Champaign Holiday Inn. This year’s theme is “1983: How We Will Live a Quarter Century On.” Every east-central Illinois entrepreneur in the book has banded together to reassure the consuming public that the future will continue to present no end of new things to buy. The roster of participants lists Herbert Koss as a principal. Booth 112: “Better Food in a Fuller Tomorrow.” Ressler locates him on the newsprint map amidst a forest of voice-activated appliances, vibrating soap, self-regulating lawn grass, and power-driven exercise cycles.
Ressler catches the food technologist manning the booth alone. Herbert and his outfit have taken a conservative stance compared to the antigravity, space-station approach of other vendors. His predictions are modest. Hexagonal steaks for efficient storage. Vegetable appliqué that cooks on the stove top. Plastic wrap at once spoil-retardant, clingy, and edible. Herbert’s brave new delivery systems attract a continuous lull. Ressler wonders if he need introduce himself; he has met the man only casually, half a minute at a time. But Herbert greets him at once, friendlily, his color deepening to rose under the convention-hall neon.
“Dr. Ressler,” he blusters. “Ha! You would have to catch me in my finest hour.” They shake quickly. “My wife said you were likable, but coming to say hello to a neglected huckster is beyond the call of duty.” He spreads his hands over his display, deeply embarrassed. “I assume you have no genuine interest in how the future bodes for edible goods.”
The man’s no fool. Just an engineer making a living. His self-deprecation fills Ressler with shame for the daily transgressions of thought, word, and everything up to and all but including deed against this man, whose carriage and speech embody a quality promoting him beyond contempt: good-natured humility. Ressler has for weeks enjoyed the self-congratulatory belief that disinterested tinkering with nature was somehow more virtuous than retail. Now he stands in front of the man, quietly accepting indictment in the lines of this fortyish, kind face. His failure to pick up the conversational gambit only makes Mr. Koss more graciously awkward.
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