Rule of Three
I've logged tonight much the same story as the one I started a few nights ago. Identical, with changes: the dead man's one theme. A life in the laboratory made Dr. Ressler see everything that happened on earth — everything that ever can happen — all speciation as a set of variations whose differences declare their variegated similarity. Yet in the end, the work he left behind, the bit he added to the runaway fossil record, proves that the occasional, infinitesimal difference, astronomically rare, is the force that drives similarity into unexpected places. Tonight I put the scratched record on the machine again, playing it out loud when my memory becomes too spotty to call up the melody. The same tune this evening, same simple scale as the one that a few days ago prompted me to end my professional life. But not a note of Dr. Ressler's piece is in place.
Last week, the dance seemed a duet, subtle play between a right hand too close and courant to hear and a left I left so long ago I didn't at first recognize it. But tonight: I definitely hear trio. Love triangle. Dr. Ressler's story is nothing if not a threesome. He loved a woman; and he loved something else, inimical. Research didn't teach me this; firsthand contamination did. I've been to the place, picked up the spore.
Coy cat-and-mouse, familiar Q-and-A game around since the dawn of Chordata. The man I loved was of a low opinion of love's predictability. I can hear him — in the same voice that wandered up that stacked, homeless chord while he conducted himself— singing, "Birds do it, Bees do it; even shiftless ABDs do it…." I loved Franklin, and it all seemed a duet once. But every late-night visit I ever had from him, every visit I ever paid, took place in the shadow of an unnamed corespondent. A third party. Every couple an isosceles.
I am no calmer tonight. For all that I've already written, Dr. Ressler's death still comes on me at odd hours. Worse, more real. I hit a sentence requiring a fact I can't bring back intact: Ask Stuart; he'll remember. But his memory, the finest I've ever seen, is scattered, lost in small changes. What I have in mind is no clearer now than on the day I gave notice. Half my two weeks is over, and I've still not explained to incredulous coworkers what's going on. I promise to, the moment I figure it. Tomorrow, I start my last week of work, with no plan for after. Every book I touched this afternoon seemed strange. I must have been crazy to quit. Overreacted in a moment's grief. I've thrown away what little prospect I had of making it through these days intact. And yet: hurt demanded that I lose my job. For a week, I know I must square off against quiet, coming catastrophe alone.
Tonight, at the old sticking point, I hear another voice in the bass, below the love duet. However entwined the upper lines, another figure informs them, insists on singing along. All two-part voice separation harbors a secret trio in dense fretwork. Three in nature is always a crowd. A chord. A code. If science was that man's perpetual third party, the scientist himself was mine.
Today in History
Inappropriately exhilarating to be in the stacks today, now that I'm a short-term impostor. Still, work continues until the last check. This morning, as if nothing has happened to routine, I posted for the Event Calendar:
June 28
Half a year before the United States' entry into World War II, Roosevelt establishes the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Vannevar Bush, designer of one of the earliest computers, becomes director. The OSRD coordinates U.S. scientific work with military concerns. It presides over the development of radar and sonar, mass-produced sulfa drugs and penicillin, mechanical computing, and the atomic bomb. The contributions of science to the war effort are widely appreciated. But the effects war has had on subsequent scientific research are more difficult to state.
Posting, I'd already made my break with the branch. My thoughts were no longer on work, but on that other today, twenty-five years ago, when Stuart Ressler, newly minted Doctor of Biological Science, nine years old when the OSRD was born, arrived in the Midwest to commence adult life and make his crucial if subsequently forgotten contribution to progress. His bid for the Who's Who.
III
We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder
From the window of a wandering Greyhound, Stuart Ressler gets his first look at unmistakable I-state phenotype: unvarying horizon, Siberian grain-wastes, endless acres of bread in embryo. The most absent landscape imaginable, it calls to him like home. Schooled in the reductionist's golden rule, he sees in this Occam's razor-edge of emptiness a place at last vacant enough to provide the perfect control, a vast mat of maize and peas, Mendel's recovered Garden. Green at twenty-five, with new Ph.D., he leaves the lab to enter the literal field.
The tedious bus haul catches him up on the literature. The Journal of Molecular Biology takes him into Indiana, where he acquires a seatmate whose disease of choice, obesity, spills provinces over the armrest into Ressler's seat. Three articles into the National Academy Proceedings, Ressler must listen to the huge stranger's invective on the perils of reading. "My father could put away a Zane Grey in one afternoon, and it got him nowhere. Never touch the stuff. You'd be wise to go easy on it." Ressler nods and twists his lips. Not recognizing the dialect, his seatmate persists. "What do?"
Quick decoding eliminates Gesundbeit as appropriate. "I'm a geneticist."
"Oh, rich! You fix women trouble? What I wouldn't do to trade places with you. Oh brother. What I wouldn't do. Heaven on earth for you fellas, init?"
Ressler inspects his shoes. "Never touch the stuff." This too cracks up his fellow traveler. Fortune extracts the man at Indianapolis, and the plague of companionship passes over. Safely into Illinois, a half hour from his new life, organics lays a last ambush. A stream of tortoises possessed of mass migratory instinct crawl over the highway in the twilight. Bottlenecked cars take turns gunning, crunching over the shells. The tortoise-trickle does not even waver. Ressler stares out the rear window as long as he can stomach it. For a hundred yards, he can make out the horror. The insane persistence of the parade holds him in fascinated disgust.
Chelonia has nothing over primates re the processional urge. Ressler weighs the similar drive that brought him out here. Four years earlier, a fellow first-year grad stormed into his dorm room waving the legendary Watson-Crick article in Nature. A new threshold torn open for the leaping. The awesome, aperiodic double helix — with its seductive suggestion of encoded information assembling an entire organism — spread before him at twenty-one, wider than the American Wilderness. The next day, he dropped his four-year investment in physiology to rush the frontier.
To his astonished adviser, he pointed out how much solid prep he already had for the curriculum change, how much carried over into molecular. He'd concentrated on chemistry, so the scale change would be a snap. Besides: all significant breakthroughs were made by novices free from preconceptions or vested interests. In six months of ferocious precocity, he'd made believers of everyone. Research schools singled him out as a future player, recruiting him even as he put the last touches on his thesis. He accepted the post-doc at Urbana-Champaign, guided exclusively by heroic impatience. Illinois could get him started the fastest. From the stack of invitations he selected theirs, scribbled a ballpoint signature at the bottom, and dropped the reply in the nearest box. The game was afoot; a lab was a lab so long as it was antiseptic. Hunch, induction, and technique could put even an I-state on the map.