He lapses again into amazed gazes at various objects about the room until Ressler clears his throat. Tooney wraps his wife tighter and continues, "Realizing I was stuck awhile, I began to see the place differently. The stacks had always been a purely functional means to an end. But now, I lived there. A long night ahead, and the third-biggest collection in the country to pass it in. It occurred to me just what the place contained. Millions of volumes. The figure, which has always struck me as impressive, now became staggeringly real. At first, I got a chuckle going around looking up everything I've ever published. Then I began to track down every published reference about me.
"It slowly dawned on me that everything Ulrich, Botkin, or Woyty will leave behind is locked up in those shelves — their best insights, the record of how that trace spread or failed to catch hold. All the noise any of us has made in this world. I pulled our friend here's dissertation. I independently confirmed that he graduated summa cum laude." He gives Stuart a cuff. "After a while, the game of deciding which parts of each of us will live began to grow thin. It was after midnight, and I hadn't even gotten off that deck, let alone scratched a fraction of it. I had ten levels to play on, without the slightest plan of attack.
"You wouldn't believe the substance of that collection. A book-length study tracing a century and a half of disease among a single tribe on Mozambique. A thirteen-volume log of an 1848 botanical survey in the South Pacific. Photo cavalcades to performing hand surgery. An experimental account of chimps addicted to painting, whose work declined as soon as they began getting rewards for it. And I hadn't even gotten out of Biology yet.
"The words spread in all directions, an endless, continuous thread. I could jump in anywhere. Goethe. Glosses on the Koran. How-to dog sledding. Crackpot theories about ancient supercon-tinents. Accounts of Marian Anderson singing the national anthem at the Lincoln Memorial, because the DAR wouldn't let her sing it inside. Watercolors of Pemaquid Point by assorted artists. I lost twenty minutes to an article about whether or not Clara Bow had really slept with the entire UCLA offensive line."
Blake falls silent, preoccupied, sliding down the early slope of a syndrome that could drop off as suddenly as the continental shelf. Ressler tries for casual silliness. "We need to rush you to Info Detox, Tooney?"
Blake laughs, but nominally. "It's the world's damn DNA in there. Not to trivialize tornadoes, but suppose yesterday had been something more… extreme. How many died?"
"At last report, ten."
"Kick that figure up a few exponents. If worst-case scenario comes down to worst, there's enough information in the stacks right now to rebuild everything we have, within a narrow tolerance, from scratch."
"Provided the survivors would want to do something so ill-considered," Ressler counters.
"I'm serious," Blake insists.
"I am too."
Blake stands and begins to pace. Margaret waddles out of bed from the next room, welcomes her father back from missing per-sonhood with a nonchalant kiss, and curls up against her mom. Eva sits at attention, not quite knowing what's going on. Nor do any of them. "How much of that information do I — any of us— actually have a handle on?" Blake pauses, the question more than hypothetical.
To get the man to go on, Ressler answers, "Almost none."
"My God, we're reaching the point where we're stockpiling more information than we can manage."
"That's what indices are for," Ressler interrupts, this time to slow his friend down.
"But we're racing to the day when even indices won't help. We're outstripping even the Index of Indices. New discovery daily, and we can't even find the damn thing by this time next week. Go spend a night in the stacks. We're committed to nothing less than a point-for-point transcript of everything there is. Only one problem: the concordance is harder to use than the book. We'll live to see the day when retrieving from the catalog becomes more difficult than extracting it from the world that catalog condenses. Book and lab research will pass one another in the drifting continents of print."
"What are you suggesting?" Ressler asks. "It seems a bit late in the day to stop accumulating."
"No! We can't afford to stop. We've got to keep on top of the stockpile. Here we are, digging in the dirt, turning up shards, millions of shards, more than anyone expected to find. But nobody knows what the shattered vase they all came from looks like. Whether it's a single vase, or even a vase at all. What we need is not more shards. We need to accumulate something else altogether. Something much wider."
Ressler doesn't follow this last leap and says as much.
"Look," Blake challenges. "Take our own field. Blown wide open lately. Which do you think will be more complex: a complete, functional description of human physiology, or a complete, functional description of the hereditary blueprint?"
Ressler considers the number, weight, and function of the purposive proteins in a working body — the countless, discriminating, if-then, shape-manipulating, process-controlling, feedback-sensitive, integrated programs composing the complete organism. As in the old Von Neumann joke, he sees at long last that the answer is obvious. "Physiology is vastly more complex."
"But the more complex is contained in the less complex, right? We believe in the simplicity of generating principles."
Some equivocation, some sleight of hand here. Can genetics really be said to contain all physiology in embryo? Yet Ressler concedes Blake's central point, Poe's point, in that volume buried in the 8OOs. Poe's cryptanalyst needed three things to turn the hopeless gold-bug noise back into readable knowledge: context, intention, and appropriate reference. A night of information science has forced Tooney to confront the full width of that triplet. "Wife," Blake says, grabbing his matched half. "Oh, Eva! I'm sorry. Something's happened to me." This all ought to be occurring elsewhere — anywhere but Ressler's living room. Eva's features are smothered in wonder. She touches her husband's head, coaxing him into relaxing the cords in his neck. "It's crazy," he repeats.
"No it's not," she says, combing him.
"Friend." Blake smiles helplessly at his wife. "I didn't plan this." Eva smiles broadly: nothing you could possibly do will upend our life. "I may," Blake says, laughing at her unconditional trust, swinging his head sideways in disbelief, "I may have to resign from the faculty."
Evie coddles him. In a very bad John Wayne, she says, "A man's gotta do___"
Ressler refuses to believe the exchange. "Quit the team? To do what? Where would you go?"
"Back to school," Eva says, almost hissing. Protecting her husband from this outsider when he is down.
It's impossible. "You can't. What about your child?"
"Who's a child?" Margaret demands.
Blake mistakes him. "My child? She's in school already."
"How will you live?"
"There's always the Civil Service," Eva volunteers.
"Tooney," Ressler says, "you've had a strange night."
Blake just laughs. "No doubt about that."
Anger fills Ressler at his friend's uncharacteristic leave from realism. "What will you study?"
Blake shrugs: the discipline hasn't been invented yet. "Look, Stuart. How can I pretend to do science, take apart the mechanism, inventory all the particulars, when I haven't even a rough feel for the sum? I haven't even dusted the spines of a fraction of the stuff they have shelved in there."
"And you never will."
"True. But I wouldn't mind a rough take on the big picture. A life of educated guesses, and I haven't even a clue what we're guessing at."