Then another scent, as neutral as air. Thin aromatic hydrocarbon, one part per billion in the room, catalyzes him. The smell fits; he knows it. There, shining from a corner, standing out against the sepia clumps of conversation, a still spot in the sea of relayed distress, a face as familiar to him as speech. Clear as the cold, cloudless night, a lucid journey of features framed in a shell of hair, eyes that flash recognition, that have been marking him all along, a mouth smiling broadly at his rush of relief, a young head shaking at him in wonder, in pure pleasure from across the room, announcing one, unambiguous certainty: be of good cheer.
Jeanette. His Jeannie. He can no longer keep away. Nor can he remember, so strong is this welcome home, why he needed to. He forces his way through the celebrants, drawn to her north. She takes a few steps to him, verifying: inevitable. In the blaring secrecy of this public place, she places the flat of her palm across his ribs. "I love you," he tells her. He expects her to spring fawnlike at the snap of a tree branch, the flush of this snare. Instead, she melts against him, catches her breath.
"Don't say it," she answers. She looks up, all forgiveness. She moves her hand minutely against him. With that gesture, she assumes all blame, confesses to a symmetrical wedge. She lowers her eyes, awaiting further sentence. Every program in his body, every enzyme, every gemule collaborates on synthesizing a single biophor: take this woman and kiss her. He does, here in the middle of danger, hard, moist, lasting. Empty symbol, leading nowhere, appeasing only the immediate edge of hunger, explodes in his brain. A hand grasps his shoulder and he steels himself to receive the blow. But it is not the enemy, the legitimate complement to this jean-home. It is Joe Lovering, pulling Ressler out of the clinch.
"OK, Buddy. Move over." Ressler, reeling, looks up where Joe points: a dismal piece of plastic mistletoe. The crowd around them smiles indulgently. Jeanette straightens his tie. He backs off, dizzy. Lovering steps into his place, looking over his shoulder confidentially as he takes his turn at grabbing Jeanette. "Sandy doesn't need to hear anything about this," he winks to Stuart.
After preliminary recon, Lovering launches his frontal campaign.
To Ressler's horror, Jeanette kisses the cretin back, with a laugh of anonymous pleasure in the license. Of course: she has to. Protective coloration, or they are both exposed. But her easy subterfuge makes him crazy. Lovering at last breaks off, pronouncing, "Hmm. In Sandy's league. Could substitute in a pinch. But doesn't quite ring the bell one hundred percent."
"Thank you very much," Koss sniffs. Lovering goes on to regale them with his astonishment at actually being more fixated on the polymorphous Sandy than when she was still a veiled novelty, so many months ago. Koss and Ressler ignore him. Unflapped, Joe snags a cup of wassail. "What is this stuff?" Lovering swills a mouthful, cocks his head contemplatively, and declares, "1889 Jolly Roger Green. Cheeky bouquet. Sandy's a great wine connoisseur. Me, all I know is 'Beer then whiskey, pretty risky. Whiskey then beer, never fear.'"
Koss blinks, rests a sympathetic hand on Lovering's shoulder. "Joey, it might be furlough time." Lovering downs another glass and goes on to perform combinatorial studies on the gifts from "The Twelve Days of Christmas."
Ressler mingles, his gaze scrambling back to the buoy of Jeanette's. She catches his glance with one just as helpless: Where can we go? We need to talk. He checks his watch; how long can the bash last? He is cornered by Ulrich and Woytowich, the euphoric father-to-be. Anxious to follow up the coup of the first paper, they are debating the next step: might the table be based on a super-symmetry of purines and pyrimidines? Never angels and shepherds for very long.
His earthbound colleagues exasperate Ressler. "Why don't we go in and have a look? Study the effect of positional havoc." He tries to take the edge out of his voice. "Induce point mutations along the length of the message. Compare the synthesized proteins. The words will fall like dominoes___"
He doesn't labor the ramifications of Ike's metaphor. The seniors smile in the thing's glare. Ressler receives, for his pedagogical pains, a clinical gaze. Woyty strokes his chin, scanning the notion for flaws. "We'd have to work out a few bugs, of course." Vogue expression, derived from the moth that crashed a complex program on one of the first sequential logic machines. Sent the coded instructions out into the electronic ether.
Ressler nods. He feels the blast of the kiln: the method, a complete experimental attack, all but here. He dies a slow death for the chance to work it out with someone who'll grasp it, help him past the last hurdle. He bursts inside to diversify. Multiply, subdue with fruition. But he is alone — no ears to hear, no hands to understand. Except perhaps hers.
He slips out of the party, the mocked-up festive lab. He stands in the darkened hall, a hundred steps down, in a blind recess, waiting. Five minutes turns into an agonized ten. Surely she must have seen him leave. At last, she hurries out furtively, looking over her shoulder in fear, sheer erotic terror at being caught. He steps from his shadow. She stifles a shout and collapses into him, clinging.
"Listen," he orders. "Nature, 1955. Gale and Folkes. Test-tube protein synthesis. Incorporation. I told Tooney, before he left. He thinks it'll work. We place the sequence to study in glass. Out comes the offending enzyme."
"Shh," she says, convulsing rhythmically. "I love you." The sound of singing, candle scent from the far end of the hall. He holds her to him, all along his length. Her tangled hair, her face, her muscular shoulders, the small of her back, her upper legs. "Make up for lost time," she laughs, sniffling. She lets out a short, soft, pained cry midway between a howler monkey and a gothic angel's et exultavit. He signals her, unnecessarily in the dark: Don't even say it.
Deus ex Machina
Q: Who made me? Defensible evidence only please.
A molecule able to influence two others that would not react otherwise: can my miracle reside here? Does DNA, the map unfolding the whole organism, do no more than manufacture reagents, golem formulae, tinctures where soul emerges if the secret proportions are hit on? The code I am after must embody not just stuff but substance: process, decision, feedback. Not data alone; behavior at molecular level.
The lint-ball tangle of an enzyme — its charged terrain of twists and turns, vise-grips for welding chemical substrate — makes it a three-dimensional, supple machine. Here is the muse of fire I've been needing. Certain of these enzyme proteins become single-molecule transistors, devices that test and respond to feedback, creating a free repertoire from predictable physics. The assembled amino string of an allosteric enzyme can tangle into two different shapes. With unique twists in each shape, it thus possesses two separate sets of binding sites. The molecule may be enzymatically active in one shape and inert in the other, like a shoehorn that sometimes warps into worthlessness. A substance that binds to a site in either the active or inert shape will lock the enzyme into that configuration: