Of course they had; we hadn't left ourselves a margin to get back. We'd counted, covertly, on this emergency, and now we had it. We inspected the car, made token efforts at clearing the wheels. I got in and started the engine. Dr. Ressler wedged himself against the fender and tried to rock it down what was once the cabin path. But we were not so much stuck as buried. The back door of the cabin slammed and out ran Todd. "Brought you some traction!" Smirking like a schoolboy, he produced a salt shaker.
"Save it for the boids' tails," I shouted. Giddy, euphoric.
We rocked a while, stupidly, humanly, going a dozen feet.
"Shovel time," Todd suggested gaily.
"You're mad," Ressler said. "It's three hundred meters to the road."
"Note the metric precision," Todd told me.
"And the main road is itself under."
"Just as well. We don't have a shovel anyway."
"We'd best call Jimmy," Dr. Ressler suggested. "Not that he'll be able to do much to pick up the pieces."
"Oh God," Todd giggled, despite himself. "Jesus. East Coast Fiscal Collapse."
"Is there a problem?" Knowing what their typical evening consisted of, I couldn't conceive of their being anywhere near indispensable to anyone.
"We may not do anything. But those big metal boxes do. Quite a bit."
"Can't Jimmy run them?"
"Around the clock? Without cohabitors? Maybe for a day."
"At half speed," Ressler clarified.
"With the night operations procedures manual at his side."
"A book we haven't kept current for months."
"So who has a phone up here?" Todd yodeled, listening for the echo.
Ressler cocked his head in the direction of the path we'd taken Saturday night. His eyes flashed: it was not, perhaps, the shortest route, but was by far the more beautiful. This being North America, it had eventually to lead to a phone. We took off happily up the drifted hill. We made slow progress, propping up one another. At the spot where that pair of eyes had looked us over in the dark, we stopped and searched but found no tracks. The snow had long since rubbed out all trace. We crested and saw, a few hundred yards off, a house that looked lived in. We threaded our way down the valley, between the bare trees, hunters returning home. Making the most of the last few minutes before human contact, Todd asked, as if nothing had intervened between their conversation and now, "So is that why you quit?"
I was walking next to Ressler, and he took my arm. "Not in so many words." And because we weren't going anywhere that night, or the night after, he suddenly had all the time in the world to tell us what had happened. And he did. In so many words,
Storm Waltz II
sea_change(ressler,koss,X) if in_Jove(ressler,koss) and
not(knows(X)).
Briefly humanity recalls, in a dream of distant past, that use is no use. For a week, it's again clear that the question is not ends and applications, but shape, sound, angels arriving on the raw doorstep, an ache, an instant hint, singing the new year in, in a bleak midwinter. Then back to grim progress. In a dim hall just off the Christmas party, the folio-wing afternoon in a public lecture, passing in crowded corridors, seated pointedly apart in team brain-storming, a few excruciating minutes alone in the lab: they fall deeper, more carelessly into unwished desire. Her confession of love, at the close of the old year, sweeps away his last sense that this has all been self-torture. He pays for that relief by losing all say in the outcome. He has confessed to her, too.
He feels in Jeanette a perverse urge for danger. She is crazy reckless, slipping hand between his thighs at a faculty meeting. In their stolen clinches, she strains her head around with fear at the least rattle or click, only to relax her neck desperately again, hating herself, her nerves, loving the near-escape, moaning for more, moist fear. Startled, silky, mottled, new to the place, terrified, perpetually about to bolt.
Away from her, he vows to break off, a resolution already hobbled by attached fatalist clauses. Hopeless. She demands to be pressed, kneaded, her trembling animal lip down registering the. punishment of pleasure they cannot forego. Creature-reversion, triggered simply by touching certain spots on her — he can't stop re-experimenting with it. The image comes involuntarily just before he falls asleep, how she closes her rolling eyes, shudders, lets her focal "I" slip twenty centimeters down her spinal column. He can feel it in her muscles, in how she stands against him, indentured to the flood response of her body, teaching him how.
He too is addicted by the sense, new to him, of being victim to a thing he cannot help. Debauched, depraved; the words give him an erotic thrill proportionate to the pro forma resistance he still manages. He knows her public composure is the thinnest wallpaper patch above a seething hive in the board beneath. She wanders from the lab to the supply closet nearby, looking for something: tubing, glassware, him. He follows her into the distant room. She stands at the shelves, the picture of business. But turning, she grabs him like a vegetative trap, nudges closed the door, begins to mouth him as if the verb were truly transitive.
"If we get caught," he says, we'll be dead on many levels."
"I know." She kisses him, pushing away and pulling at the same time. "Leave me alone, why don't you?" She kisses again, more circumspectly. "I must want to get in trouble."
He hears her struggle to keep from cooing audibly. "This is as far as I go without a note from your parents." He nearly says husband.
"Me too," she replies dreamily, drugged, aroused. "As far as I go." They catch one another's eyes. The danger is real. They sober, swing back to adulthood, agreeing they must wean from this madness. "Little boy," she says, restoring her glasses, "in another life, I could take you around the block a few times."
The brave kindness, the funny, forlorn way Dr. Koss delivers it pulls him back regretfully to her face, where they lose another moment. In this bittersweet heuristic, he is not the experimenter. He is the subject of these trial runs. That car will go around the block itself if he doesn't brake.
They share lucid moments, but only under supervision. She visits him in his office, in Lovering's gaze. "I've just read Gale and Folkes," she says. Ressler looks across the office. He can't very well ask her if she'd like to talk outside, now that talk is really talk.
"And?" he asks weakly. "What did you think?"
"Incredible. 'Incorporation reactions for specific amino acids can be activated by specific recombinations of nucleotides.'"
"Spitting distance of an in vitro system that will crack the game wide open."
"You're right. You must be right." She smiles, her back to Lovering, a double entendre smile.
"Two Cambridge scientists…" he doubts out loud.
"… who've missed a follow-up. You've seen wrong turns before?"
He's more than just seen one. "A two-year-old article in one of the most prestigious journals going___"
"And no one's noticed it? No one picked up Mendel for thirty years."
"What's this over yonder?" Lovering banters. "I distinctly hear dreaming."
"Joey," Koss says, returning to the thuggish quip-trader Ressler first took her for, "call your wife, Sandy. I hear she's at home taking a delivery from the furniture man."
"She's not my wife. Sandy doesn't believe in the hypocrisy of the institution. We live in sin. And believe me, sin's gotten an undeserved bad name."
"Have you told Ulrich about this?" Koss readdresses Ressler.
"I tried to," he claims.
"How hard?" She grins.
"You know the man's bias. You told me yourself. Hung up on pushing the thing through statistically. The last time I spoke with him, he tried to interest me in doing some machine coding."