Jimmy caught me in possession of the door password again, but this time resigned himself to my coming and going. I had free rein to let myself into the computer room as if I were on salary. A few nights after my confession to Todd, I arrived to find the entire population missing. Someone, in theory, was supposed to be laundering the day's data at all times. I sat and waited, thinking that the shift must have stepped out to an all-night sandwich dive. A minute later, all digital hell broke loose. Sys B began making the distress ah-oo-gahs of a wounded submarine. The spindles on Sys A powered up and the console spit cathode fireworks. Helpless, I ran to the screen, thinking I might at least jot down error codes. The screen erupted in animated celebration:
Our Dearest O'Deigh. Welcome to the median. The U.S. Bureau of On-Line Statistics assures us that 30 splits the country in half. As usual, you're right on the fence. Get out of that frilly blur of an apartment and acquire a mortgage. Accumulate some debt. Numbers compel you to do something middling___
The display was amazing: letters grew, skidded across the screen, recombined into new words, surged in normal distribution curves, twisted into visual syntax, "fence" forming one for "you" to sit on, "frilly blur" dissolving into one, "debt" coming out gothic, "middling" in Times Roman. The letters exploded into life, accompanied by bells and whistles on the terminal speaker:
Happy B-day. We hope that 30 is your most profound variation yet. Never forget that you are living at life's critical instant. Your fellows in aging, SRESSLER & FTODD
Then the screen went blank, came back with its inscrutable system prompt politely inquiring "Command?" I looked up from the console and clenched a fist at the initiators, doubtless observing behind the two-way mirror. Todd came out, followed by a sheepish Ressler. I cold-shouldered Todd, addressed the professor. "How did you do that?" He shrugged: all Boolean. A matter of access.
I wheeled on Todd. "How did you know it was my birthday?"
"You told me."
"I only said it was coming. How did you get the date?"
He grinned, thick with significance. "We looked it up."
Operation Santa Claus
Blake's departure hits Cyfer hard. The lab is poorer without the force of his arbitrating humor, his even keel. The defection makes the remaining members suspect they've been kidding themselves; chemical inheritance will evade them. To restore morale, Ulrich turns the last Blue Sky session of 1957 into a Christmas party. He invites other department members, staff, favored graduate students: anyone who might keep the remaining team from staring at one another in stunned silence.
Christmas is an odd holiday to be observing, intent as they are on substituting a molecular model for the miraculous winter birth.
Nevertheless, they go through the motions, set out a wassail bowl, paper cups depicting Santa Claus in various postures of levity, a herd of wax reindeer, and a university record player on which Toveh Botkin, music committee, keeps up a stream of modal progressions insisting glad tidings of great joy.
Ressler wants to know how it has come to pass, despite his friend's exit, the flicker of the tired capacitance lights, Sputnik standing in as Nativity Star, the daily radioed word of low-level violence decimating the unwatched flocks by night, that Christmas still lodges itself so deeply under his skin. It can't be the fugitive baby on the run from the authorities, a story he saw through when not much older than the infant in question. Still, he finds himself steeped in the crusty old four-parters Botkin churns out on the turntable. Their modulations draw him toward the pitiful speakers, exhalation of synchronized air through the trachea suggesting chords that might lift the edge of the translation table for a quick look. These medieval intervals, a fossil record of his dazed arrival here in this room of reagents and gauges, this change of venue, with no quantitative test for discerning the way back. A camaraderie he wishes he could admit: he too, smothered in the stink of gingerbread and pine needles, lapsing into Lydian under forever unangeled skies, might be culpable, guilty of trying to reach beyond his grasp, of attempting to comprehend something he can't hope to name, something that might better be left to metaphor, myth, popular fiction, the beautiful counterfeit.
At the record player, he asks Botkin with his eyes for an explanation. His old friend raises her finger. At the end of the current tune, she slaps on another sprightly chorale. "Samuel Scheldt," she identifies. "From the Köln Gesangbuch, early seventeenth century." Ressler cocks an eyebrow at her, uncomprehending. The piece has some slight charm, aura of otherworldliness. But as full of leftover Renaissance censer scent as this tune is, it cannot minister. It has no healing power, no explanation.
Botkin notes his confusion. "Wait. Wait." She musses about in the cardboard sleeves and pulls out another disk. "O Jesulein Suss." She drops the needle down on exactly the same tune. Only everything different. The thing now arches and breathes, soars through agonizing suspensions, pours across a new, unexpected support in the bass, moves its four lines independently yet in a coordinated harmonic terrace of beauty. "Bach," she says, shrugging, the attribution self-evident.
The two works differ as a salt crystal and a spider's web. Scheldt, competent craftsman, labors on a carved doll that, however lifelike, remains wooden, while the other joiner need only apply the lightest imaginable touch to transform the clunky melody, lift the crippled thing to life. "A cradle song," Botkin glosses. "Composers cut their eyeteeth on chorales. No musical form is less sophisticated. A year of theory and you could churn them out blindfold. Bach manufactured them by the hundreds. And yet___" She points to the turntable, as if the secret behind the miraculous transformation searing Ressler lies there. On the vinyl. In the vibrating diamond.
Just as she is about to make the critical point, to identify what turns beats into beating, Toveh is interrupted by Dan Woytowich. He grabs them both in a friendly embrace, happier than Ressler has ever seen him, happy enough to be another person. The only happy soul in the room. Team setback can't touch him. Wife Renée, after losing two first-trimester fetuses, has finally passed the danger point and is on her way to making the couple a family. Woyty has chosen the party to announce, sure that this time the news will not turn out premature.
"Christmas music: is that the topic here? You two hear about the phantom of Urbana? Yesterday's paper. Two undergrads walking on the quad at night in the snow hear this harpsichord tinkling. Nowhere in the world it could come from. But they both hear it, and track it down, with difficulty, to one of those cast-iron grates in the sidewalk. Turns out a fellow's been living down in the steam tunnels for months. Persian rugs, stuffed chair, harpsichord, candelabra, bookshelves full of classics pinched from the library."
Ressler listens to the transformed Woyty. After a bit more banter, he excuses himself. The snippet of excruciating chorale, Toveh's interrupted explication, confirms it: some part of him has hem-orrhaged. Companionship, connection to another is now as locked off as that beautiful halo of notes hanging above the winter cradle. He turns from the music, from his friend Botkin, from grinning Woytowich, turns into the decorated lab. Clots of partygoers, the forced gaiety of holiday streamers close the matter. He wanders the lab, a priori lost; it's not miraculous birth all these desperate preparations are for, not birth at all. Each face swinging to greet him is etched with the same scrimshaw hysteria. The thought of doing his bit for this outfit repulses him. Behind the sickening melange of aromas — the light Euglena petri mildew, the smoky paraffin and dye of burning reindeer, the sweet-greasy thermoplastic mistletoe, the unguent perfumes, hair oil, deodorant, skin lotion, the beakers of astringent and rinsing acids, furtive fart vapor trails — is a smell so stand-out that not even this richness can smother it: the mammal-gland emission, out-and-out animal bafflement at being left here, spoorless, to toast in another New Year.