Ressler leaves, rebuked but pleased. Ulrich's tacit advice to play things close to the chest unwittingly exonerates Stuart for not yet announcing his even more sweeping line of thought. In the premature evening of his office he follows a bibliographical trail, searching down another experiment from a pair of years ago. He dimly recalls a paper with similar elliptical conclusion that could vaporize the intractable barrier between him and the last lab step. His concentration for work is shaken by the hierarchy of ethics. Ulrich's edit can in no stretch of the term be called fraud, or even suppression. Yet aggregate reticence shades imperceptibly into misrepresentation.
He has not, under grant or tenure pressure, recreated results without resubmitting them to the experimental apparatus. No; his data are beyond reproach. He's not even on the hazier ground of corner-cutting in the name of efficiency. In school, he worked for a big-name researcher who occasionally whipped up extra runs, substantiating more careful trails but skimping on controls. The accusation's been made against Mendel himself: the smooth-versus-wrinkled ratio is too perfect. But that was something else altogether — the unconscious influence of conviction. Another, more troubling imputation against the monk asks why he studied only traits that all reside on independent chromosomes. Did he examine and fail to report inheritance patterns complicated by inexplicable linkage that would have thrown the infant theory in doubt?
Simplification, paring back the variables, far from invalidating results, is indeed required by the foundations of empirical design. The success of reductionism depends on measuring and reporting only that bit of the cloth that can be understood and tested piecemeal. Ulrich's advice partakes of the same reductionist pragmatism: let's establish the part beyond the slightest doubt, before we speculate on the whole's make and model.
Ressler releases this work — insignificant compared to the catch he now angles for — from safekeeping. But the question nags at him. The question of just what he is or isn't obliged to telegraph to the competing scientific community masks a deeper ethical issue, his secret competitive motive. Easier to tell all, free himself from the advantage of insight. He hoards the self-sabotage urge the way his fellow children of the Depression hoard tinfoil.
He lets Ulrich strike the summary and does not press his own extrapolation. Demurring is worlds away from the most defensible fraud. It doesn't begin to flirt with falsification. Even in the continuum between subjectivity and chicanery, no one would call it doctoring. But simple selective silence, cautious calculation itself, carries along, like an unsuspecting trouser cuff bearing the free-loading burr of a seedpod, some particle of self-servance. The nauseating calculus of survival flashes on him. Self-furthering stratagems color even that perfect, informational openness, the unedited wonder of the most ideal human pursuit: good science.
Cyfer has a greater threat to its survival than entrepreneurism. Circumstance strips the team of its clearest-headed member. The train is set in motion on December 19, when the world weather engine is traditionally in almanac respite. The day is too warm for near-winter. The unusual front that releases the balmy air in the same breath releases a burst of tornadoes across the belt of Missouri, Arkansas, and Illinois. They catch the states off-guard, well past the usual time of year.
Ressler has just returned from the retail strip, where he has bought himself an early Christmas present. He has taken his last two untouched checks and a list prepared by Toveh Botkin and made a run on the record store. He returns to barracks with two LPs for every periodical still strewn about his front room. He assembles a respectable, compact music library, from Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli to Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima.
He listens, relaxed, alert, despite just coming off of a triple shift of journal scouring, article amending, and experimental speculation. Finding the music precise, the notes excruciatingly discrete, he decides that the need for sleep is vastly overrated. The intensity of music keeps him from hearing that the long, sonorous, extended pedal point arising from the continuo of a bit of until-then-banal Venetian Opera is, in fact, the Civil Defense horns crying disaster. Discovering that the piercing tone is not shook out of his phonograph's paper speakers, he wonders if he's skipped ahead to Tuesday, 10:00 a.m., the weekly CD drill. But days can't have passed: he's still in the seventeenth century.
At the air raid's insistence, he steps outside his shack to scope out the situation. Unforgettable: the sky has gone a sickening, Matthew Passion, faulty-Zenith green, right out of the Crayola box. Otherworldly: everyone in Stadium Terrace, from infant to eternal student, streams in column to the stadium, toting suitcases, pulling Rapid Flyers full of belongings. No simulation would bother to be this elaborate.
Tuning in the radio strikes him as superfluous. He stares at the sky creeping toward yellow, making a break for infrared. The long-expected airburst, most likely Chicago or old Midwestern rival, St. Louis. At 150–200 miles, a midsized device, as the papers like to call them, would kick up enough dust to discolor the atmosphere, give it this early, dramatic sunset. He goes heavy at the waist; his knees fold involuntarily. He crumbles onto his stoop, watching the refugee crowd fanning toward Memorial Stadium for an unscheduled game. Some amazing instinct has gotten it into these heads to try to save their possessions: scrapbooks, chairs, an antique doll, blendors, anything arms can drag or shove. He considers calling out to the lady hauling the home tanning lamp not to bother; she's getting a healthy dose of rays already.
For thirty seconds it hails, but cuts off abruptly. The violence of the wind, the backlash of pressure electrifies his skin, returns him to a child's awe at one-time forces. He watches the sky slip to a silver gray and calculates the airspeed by timing a scrap of paper tearing across the lawn. A ten-year-old boy breaks from beside his hysterical mother in the file and waves his arms like a crane, shouting: "Run from the funnel!" His clutching mother snatches him back, yelling at Ressler as if he were an abductor. So the cause is natural, not induced. It makes no difference: correction will eventually have its out. But spreading his fingers across the violet grass, he does feel something, the bulb of skin flaring after a failed immunity test: gratitude that he may have a chance to see Jeannie again.
The stream of evacuees drains to a trickle. The wind whips to such craziness that he cannot keep from laughing. In the cusp moment, he sees the vertical cloud on the horizon feeling its way, prehensile, across the harvested fields. He calculates the number of steps to the relative safety of the stadium. Even if he'd dedicated his youth to distance sprinting, the protection of colonnades wouldn't warrant that open-field gallop. It's all over except the virtuosity. He spreads himself on the ground, facedown, head to the side so he can view this performance from the edge of the pit. He sees the outlines of groundbound things tossed about where they oughtn't be going. On all sides of the cross hairs where he lies, physical law defers to easy chaos.
When it's safe to sit up, he does, slowly. Stadium Terrace is overhauled with scrub, branches, trash, furniture, pieces of wall— no longer the center of the biggest plain in the world, but a tidal zone of flotsam. Astonishingly, his tarshack and most of K block have escaped. He succumbs to childish disappointment, the one he felt years ago on seeing the picture of that domed structure that obstinately survived Ground Zero. Can't even violence accomplish something unmitigated?