At twenty-five with no major contributions yet, he's under the gun. Miescher was twenty-five when he discovered DNA ninety years before. Watson was twenty-four. If the symptoms of breakthrough don't show by thirty, forget it: throw in the lab coat, get an industry job. Research — America in '57—is no country for old men. Sure, his dissertation was a minor tour de force, but just juggled ideas evident to anyone paying attention. Quickness and insight, both necessary, won't suffice to take him where he's headed. Now he must mint, in the crucible of his new lab, hard currency. He packs two changes of clothes and comes to this outpost Eden.
He acclimates instantly to the box houses, orthogonal blocks, and infinite corn in parallel plowcuts running clear to the horizon. Urbana, at twenty thousand, is just what he needs. Stagnant backwaters are the most fecund. He needs only a steady supply of pipettes and a place to spread his bed. Stepping off the bus into the greasy station, he parses the downtown, shoos off a soliciting cab, walks to campus. All significant discoveries are made on foot. The straightedge streets of his adopted town bear ingenious names: numbers, states, presidents, and the trees slaughtered to make way for them. They swell with whitewood houses, diners, five-and-dimes. A church pokes Pentecostal finger at the nimbus of clean linen laid over it, its promotional postboard announcing Sunday's sermon: "Can the Guests Morn When the Bridegroom Be with Them?" — the "u" deleted in point mutation. The rows lining each lane seem so many complementary, self-replicating pairs — the fifties' fastest-breaking metaphor. In minutes, Ressler forgets the seaboard, the flattened Eastern affect of his childhood. He settles into this emptiness, a symbiotic bacterium in the belly of his host.
On campus, he discovers there is no room at the inn. A superannuated department secretary, predating fruit flies, scrapes him up a place in the old army barracks reprieved from destruction until veterans stop pouring back to school on the G.I. Bill. Stuart, who missed the world crisis by enough years to think that G.I. bills come from internists for services rendered, also scabbed out of Korea on dissertation deferral. His thesis drafts him into another campaign, a magic bullet as explosive as any gunner's. Fitting then, military digs: vicarious enlistment. He takes possession of one end of a single-story tar-paper triplex in a shanty called Stadium Terrace. The row huts line the colonnaded shadow of Memorial Stadium, one of the country's largest collegiate football coliseums. He delights in discovering that his cell number, K-53-C, encodes his precise locus within the village.
Cursory inspection turns up ratty bunk, gas stove, half a black-and-white print of James Dean with head on steering wheel, several septic razor blades, and a box of cereal with both flakes and enclosed coupon devoured by red ants. He needs nothing more. He unpacks his worldly belongings — a tartan suitcase of second hand clothes and a tote bag crammed with journals. Social rounds, town exploration can wait. After a perfunctory trip to the convenience grocery, he holes up in the barracks. Days he toys with the coding problem and evenings he sits on a lawn chair staring at the pie-wedged fallout-shelter signs plastered over the stadium across the way. For dinner, tomato juice minus gin: alcohol is a trace mutagen and destroys brain cells. The department must wonder why he hasn't come by to introduce himself. That's all right; wonder is the trump of the twenty-three-pair chromosome set.
He remains horizontal for days, boning up, resisting the temptation to indulge in premature cracking. Feverish, unleashed vistas tempt him with fat feasibility. He must first consolidate, gather strength, quiet his mind, assemble the tools, await, without expecting, that rare, most skittish visit. Yet before insight can alight, the outside world flank-attacks him through the mail. A letter appears in his box, his first communique since hitting Illinois:
July 16, 1957 Dear Stu,
Heard you're in town and hope you're not waiting for official commencement of the fellowship to drop by the lab. We could use you in the Blue Sky sessions if nowhere else. No one's doing much biology at the moment, as you might imagine. Too much excitement in the air. Right now we're all thinking math and language. How are you at combinatorials? Oh for a spark of Aha! By the way, Charlene and I are having the team over for dinner and cards or something next Thursday. Do come. We'll even have the get-together in your honor, if that's what it takes.
Yours, Karl Ulrich
P.S. Review Adv Biol 4:23 if you haven't done so recently, and let me know Thursday if you think Gamow's right in discarding the diamond code. I never liked the layout: too pretty; too much the work of a physicist. But too convenient if the whole pattern just coiled up and blew away.
Ressler has met his new boss only through the professional journals. A prolific writer, the man is to trees what Bill Cody was to buffalo. Ulrich, at fifty-two (Ressler's age transposed), is Illinois's grand old molecular man, guiding spirit behind Cyfer, the team of microbiologists, chemists, and geneticists who induct Ressler as new recruit. Stuart ingests the assignment in place of lunch, tracking the article down to the university library. The stacks, third-läfgest in the country, are, like Memorial Stadium, decorated passim with orange-and-black Civil Defense pies. Ressler doubts the pragmatics of the motif. Four floors of masonry are not likely to survive an airburst. Brick and poured concrete do reduce rad passage, but story-height blown-out glass does not. And using the library as shelter until the renovated landscape returned to safe levels would require keeping survivors alive for weeks on cellulose alone.
Nevertheless, this homage to Dewey Decimal is the most impressive monument America's Breadbasket has yet shown him. Several million volumes colonize ten floors of catwalks and twisting alleys. Every deck contains, in its hectares, plumbing and facilities for long-term residents. If the stink of binding paste didn't offend, he'd go AWOL from the barracks and set up his two pieces of luggage here. A sadly vindicating tour reveals an 824 untouched since Henry James died. Humanities have clearly slid into the terminally curatorial, forsaking claim to knowledge. Ressler finds his niche-to-be, 575, by cytotropic sixth sense, tucked away in a grotto deep in the cavernous recesses, incandescence lending it appropriate spelunker's air. This rarefied branch of a specialized discipline, barely extant a decade back, now rates several shelves, swelling by the hour.
At any other time, he'd be hopelessly waylaid by 1930s unemployment lists, turn-of-the-century novels, hundred-season sets of symphony programs. A comprehensively dense map striving for perfect isomorphism with the outside world provokes his browser's awe. But commissioned, Stuart goes straight to the target periodical without cracking a spine. He's read Gamow's views on the code — one of the first formal attacks on how DNA might embed its protein-plans. But best review the physicist's retraction; its details are likely to be of more use at Dr. Ulrich's soiree than the latest Elvis or Fats Domino. Advanced Biology 4:23 comes off the shelf suspiciously easily, plops open to the piece in question, a penciled scrawl near the title:
JHB SZI HVA OLP GVX IKZ XHO DBN ZRU ALW WKH TVI HQQ BTI VSR EP
Disguised messages hook him by the brain stem. The cold lure of this adept's sport, text trapped in nonsense: a face-slap, tapping impulses fiercer than the urge to pile up cars or cure the forbidding loneliness of women. The sanctioned desires of twenty-five — Warm breasts and cold chrome — are mere substitutes, garbled misread-ings of the real pull. All longing converges on this mystery: revelation, unraveling secret spaces, the suggestion that the world's valence lies just behind a scrambled facade, where only the limits of ingenuity stand between him and sunken gardens. Cryptography alone slips beneath the cheat of surface. Yes, test adrenaline, the attempt to justify the teacher's faith, contributes to this nonsense string's siren song. But this puzzle — clearly planted for his benefit — this chase, this unscrambling, waiting, working, worrying the moment when simple, irrefutable plaintext explanation descends: this (the cadence of his thought straying dangerously close to Protestant hymnody) is the reason why awareness itself first evolved out of inert earth.