He dusts off, grinning at how good his clothes feel, how wonderful the wrinkles. He takes himself back inside. He tunes in an emergency report, running only minutes behind the event itself. The twisters leave ten dead across Illinois: a misleadingly small toll, not indicating the power of the thing, the lightest flick of Coriolis effect that chose, this once, to pass over. The tornado failed to take him by only the narrowest swirl of turbulence. When the information repeats, he shuts off the radio. He picks at random from his new reference set a disk to return to. Brahms's number comes up: the Second Piano Concerto. The sound so transfixes him that he rises to place the unprecedented phone calclass="underline" to Botkin, to verify her safety after the storm. The gesture moves her out of proportion to its facility. He hangs up, hands fused momentarily to the phone. No: he cannot call that other, whose safety means more than meaning.
He returns to a piercing, slow 'cello solo, music too beautiful even to listen to in this century with a clean conscience. But he listens. The homecoming of the piano, demure soloist, is punctuated by pounding on the door. Outside, it is pitch-black; near the solstice, that could mean any time after 4:00 p.m. Eva and Margaret Blake stand shivering together under a quilt feathertick in the dark. He quickly lets them in.
"Is Tooney here? Have you heard from him?" Evie asks, looking about, a timid meter reader looking for the main. "It's late," she adds, rebuking not her husband but puerile nightfall. "He never came home." Ressler settles her and gives Margaret a can of orange juice concentrate and a spoon, sufficient to delight her. He and Mrs. Blake begin the systematic round of phone calls, first to everyone on the team, all negative. Then they try the lab, every office at the Biology Building where someone might still be around to pick up phones. No one does. Only then do they resort to the finality of police, who reassure them that the twin cities have reported no fatalities. Last, the hospitals, who cannot match any injured to Tooney's description.
Eva has worked herself into a state. She's reluctant to return to K-53-A alone with the child. He insists that they stay with him. Over Eve's ennervated refusals, he makes up the bed for them, apologizing for the brutality of bachelorhood. Margaret is across the mattress and asleep before he can turn out the light. He returns to the front room and his journal pile, prepared to sit up all night, a trick that has become almost easy. He has just hit upon an article in a 1955 Nature—one that, for an instant, seems as catalytic as Watson and Crick's piece two years earlier — when Eva pads in, still wrapped in the quilt. "Can I sit out here with you? I'll be quiet."
"You don't have to be quiet."
"Good. Nature again, I see. You men are all alike." She takes the volume from him, thumbs through its thickness, and drops it back into Ressler's hands. "OK. Ask me anything."
Before he can smile, she coils up and follows the book into his lap. She collapses like a cut tree, lets out a bleat of anguish, and balls herself up against him. She is uncannily cold; he wraps her in his forearms to try to trap what little warmth is left in her. "He must be somewhere," he offers.
Evie stifles a vowel. "Keep talking." She digs into his leg, a breeding sea turtle scooping deeper into the beach.
Ressler pops the clutch for a moment before he can locate his deep sentence structures. He begins talking about Tooney and the tornadoes, the likely scenarios accounting for his absence. Paralleling in rough analogy the series turning electrical current into magnet pulse into paper motion into air wave into earbone disturbance into neural network into Brahms, his words of coded comfort drive Evie's muscles into slack acceptance. When he runs out of explication, he goes on filling up empty space. He talks about how essential Blake's sensibilities are to Cyfer, his lucid, first-rate spoiling of half-baked ideas. Tooney is the one person liked by everyone on the team. Eva acknowledges this praise with a muffled sigh. Ressler goes on, explaining how Cyfer has squared off against the coding problem, just what difficulties still lie between them and a map of the nucleotide grammar. As the details are lost on her and therefore safe, he lays out the theory of an in vitro solution just weeks away from gelling: submit the simplest imaginable message to the coding mechanism, and see what the enciphered text looks like. Crack the system by standing over the encoder's shoulder.
He stops, struck by the beauty of the thing he touches. His hands keep working, rubbing warmth into Eva in ways they would not dare with the other woman now. Eva has lost her agitation. He can stop the invented monologue. But for this perfect audience, asleep, unable to hear, he recites, "I'm in love with a colleague of your husband's. She's as married as you are. Nothing to do about it. No point." He checks each mark off, brutally succinct, but he stops short of the worst: She is a locking template I cannot shake.
He wakes up early to the sound of someone letting himself in. He watches fuzzily as Tooney Blake enters and sits opposite Ressler and still-sleeping Eva. "She was cold and just fell asleep here. Your daughter is in the next room." Tooney fakes a suspicious look, speaking volumes, knowing that Ressler is already hopelessly compromised. Blake does not wake his wife, but only sits, staring disconcertedly through things rather than at them. Stuart asks if everything is all right.
"Fine," Blake answers, distracted tone contradicting him. The monosyllable rouses his wife, who in sleepy euphoria attaches herself to her mate. She rises up radiant, blinking, without a hint of question to her. The night's anxiety needs no other payment: they've weathered the worst, already more than repaired. When the embrace settles, the space of reprieve gives place to the collective need for postmorteming. Something Blake needs to announce, a chance locution that threatens to change his life. He has this aura about him, difficult to miss. Blake grabs his wife by her shoulders, about to launch into There was a ship…. "Honey," he says, "something's happened."
At the moment that the Civil Defense horns began their Gabrieli, he was across town, in the stacks. "Somebody has the whole microbiology library out on loan," he growls at Ressler, casting accusing glances about the periodical-strewn floor. "When the alarm went off, I figured I was already in as good a place as any other; no point going from one designated shelter to another. So I went down to Deck One, instinctively sought out the subterranean. I'd just gotten into a cozy study carrel when the power went out. Pitch-black, surrounded by that maze of shelves. I couldn't move without banging up against the 120s. I kept thinking, 'If this is the end, at least I'm surrounded by books.'
"After a long time, with a lot to think about, I tried to work my way to a stairwell. I found one at last, and after some trouble adjusting to the steps, I hauled myself up to the deck at ground level. Light coming in from the street. Cars shuttling. Life as normal, except for a few vanished trees. I groped along the aisles, doing my Theseus bit, keeping my right hand on the wall. I found the entrance and yanked the door. It wouldn't budge. Locked in. I heard the all clear go off downtown. I waited patiently in the dark, convinced that if I sat still long enough, something would happen. Sure enough, forty minutes later, the lights flooded on. When my eyes adjusted, I went to the emergency phone on Deck Five. The thing was as dead as a mayfly on day two. The lines must have come down in the storm."
Eva giggles, the low, jittery laugh of relief. "Oh Toon-ey! Locked in the stacks overnight! You must be a wreck."
"Strangely enough, I've never felt better in my life. They'd have to install vending machines before I'd agree to move back in on a long-term lease. But I've never spent a more important night." A comical whimper from his wife forces him to append, "Honeymoon excepted, sweet."