Imperceptibly he thawed. He told terrific stories of scientists. An aged teacher who'd spent seventeen years in Morgan's fruit fly room. A colleague who left his research team to surface, years later, as codeveloper of the first artificially intelligent encyclopedia. The famous Swiss botanist Nägeli, whose habit of tasting bacterial cultures was a great source of information but shortened his life. So it would go until, at the end of an evening, I would realize that we hadn't had to draw the man out once.
astonished(todd) or scared(todd).
Frank was unable to believe the turnaround. As Ressler grew daily more voluminous, Franklin clammed up, afraid to say anything that might dispel the fragile moment. "Did you see the man?" he'd ask later in bed. "Searching through his pockets for clippings to give me? Like a third-base coach giving signs!" The clipping-gifts were superfluous; Todd's notebooks had closed. He no longer needed them. The companionship they'd substituted for had sprung to life.
Frank would play the fool out of sheer terror. While the mainframes processed end-of-day transactions, he'd bait his mentor with silly challenges. "How high can you count on your fingers?" He whispered in my ear the proud target thirty-five, one hand standing for digits and the other for groups of six. Ressler paused a few polite minutes before responding with 1,024—each digit a single place in binary notation. Todd sulked. "Yeah, well… anything higher?"
"Always," confided Ressler. And they took to the problem together, like competing cousins at a family reunion, chucking the softball, testing each other's arms.
"It says here," Franker announced one night, "that we have genetics to thank for the killer bees heading north o' the border from down Mexico way." He spoke the word from Ressler's past, sidling up surreptitiously to the conspicuously avoided issue.
Dr. Ressler nodded, not at all reluctant to take up the topic. "That's right. An attempt to tame an aggressive African strain with a docile South American one backfired. One of hundreds of plagues we've initiated by improving the ecosystem. Transplanted gypsy moths; imported rat-catching cats that destroy South Pacific islands; mongooses overrunning the West Indies: cures worse than the diseases. This one's especially damning. We haven't just replaced one pest with another. We've created a new one to call our own." He huddled us around the console, created a workspace, and whipped up a Mendelian genetics lab, a field where we could put our creations to the test. A simple simulation, but complex enough to prove his point. "There are a lot more ways to fall off the tightrope than to inch forward."
Ressler, the author of every declaration fed into the machine, was often surprised by the executing program's outcome. Todd and I, who had to have each line explained to us, were floored to see self-modifying behavior built from a few innocent assertions. I learned not only the danger of intervening in systems too complex to predict, but about declarative programming, the thin line between determined and emergent, the ability to surprise. Looking down at Dr. Ressler, newly bearded, Icelandic blue, typing keys, leading us with infinite patience through the nuances of his composition, I knew the world had lost in him not just a scientist of the first order, but something more important: a gifted teacher.
We ran the simulation many times, each time failing to steer the model toward anything but collapse. Todd threw up his hands. "The discerning intellect of Man bested by bees. I've a suggestion: we greet the little buggers at the border. Instantly upon their crossing the Rio Grande, we lavish them with Walkmen, warm-up suits, the whole nine yards. They'll shed their asocial ways in a flick of the Zippo — get ahead, secure the Mercedes, et cetera. Adieu national panic."
Still, the conclusion of the ecosimulation distressed Todd's Renaissance belief in the perfectability of the natural world. "You aren't suggesting we stop cross-breeding?"
"No," Ressler affirmed.
"Or that we quit with all this inheritance and population dynamics stuff?"
"No again."
"But we aren't yet ready to build a better mouse?"
"No."
This last answer was ambiguous: No, we're not ready? No, we never will be? No, that's not what I mean? But Franklin was afraid to pursue the point. I could hear him form and reject delicate questions in his head. At last he blurted out, "Bacteria engineered to protect potatoes from freezing?"
An art-history ABD specializing in obscure 450-year-old panelists, the spokesman for technological progress, versus a Ph.D. in molecular genetics, once the comer to keep one's eye on, cautioning that the possible and the desirable were not the same. Ressler fielded Todd's question without flinching. He ran his hand lightly over his head, smoothing his hair. He seemed not a minute over thirty. He was spoiling for something — not for a fight. For the mystery and heft and specificity of conversation. "If we're to do recombinant DNA, you'll need more background."
journey(north-woods) if
Todd jumped at the chance. He suggested we three drive up the following Saturday to a cabin in New Hampshire. "Belongs to a college friend who will gladly lend it for a weekend."
Inviting the professor for a camping weekend seemed just short of asking one's priest if he'd care for a round of racquetball. Had Todd run the idea by me first, I certainly would have squashed it. But Dr. Ressler broke into a boy's grin and said, "Do you know how long it's been since I've gotten out of this damn city?" Both men turned to me, and I nodded with enthusiasm.
"Should we ask anyone else?" I couldn't think, aside from our day-shift friends and the man at the sandwich shop, who Todd had in mind.
Ressler handled Todd's question with his usual grace. "Having put our hand to this three-personed plow, I suggest we stay with it. This is a congenial enough group as it stands."
That was all it took. I arranged my hours at the branch. Todd secured not only the cabin but a beaten-up Plymouth to ferry us there. I was in charge of food and Dr. Ressler of kerosene and campfire reading. They picked me up at three in the morning after their Friday stint. Todd met me at the door of the antique shop, shushing hysterically, as if this were a teen-aged prank. I guess it was.
The roads were clear, and after we jumped the city, the night was crisp and quick. We got free of the interstate, preferring seat-of-the-pants navigation up through empty New England towns. Todd drove, and we passengers were assigned the task of keeping him awake. For a stretch, Dr. Ressler had us all rolling with a dry commentary about how every road sign in existence—"Slow children," "Cross traffic does not stop" — contained unintentional slipped meaning. Todd ruddered via Boston, Saturday morning. We spent two hours in the Fine Arts, studying the conflagration he was after, and he bought a postcard of it. Then he hauled us across the Fens to the Gardner and that domestic chamber music in amber by Vermeer.
We arrived at the cabin late Saturday. I felt, by contrast, how my life in New York had become a spasm of hormone and acid jolting my system into continuous speculation on how I was going to get killed. My key to surviving, or not dying too quickly, had been to swim in stress without feeling it. Adaptation to environment. Suddenly this place: rag-quilted, smelling of sap and kindling, spices hanging from kitchen beams, squirrels marauding in the walls. A foot-pumped parish church organ stood against a wall with a Lutheran hymnal on the music rack. A five-thousand-piece picture puzzle that Franklin identified as an Aelbert Cuyp lay spread over the dining-room table. Salvation, in short. I hadn't known I needed it until I was there.