Experiment per se has never carried any special appeal; rare steak aside, Ressler has never enjoyed cutting into any genus higher than Anura. But the driving design___He forgets the article and sets to work on the pencil smudges. "EP," the closing, sole couplet: the initials of his antagonist, KU? He tries a few relations before hitting on a simple one. P to U is a jump of five letters; E to K, a jump of six. An incremental substitution cipher — a good, reversible garbling scheme. Seven to the final "R" yields "Y." Eight to the "S," going around the horn, arrives at "A." The last triplet comes out "day: " paydirt. The rest of the reconstruction is brute counting. Soon shell cracks and sense seeps through:
IFY OUC ANR EAD THI STH ENT HEP ART YIS REA LLY WED NES DAY
Back to native tongue. Grouping by threes is Ulrich's hat tip to the prevailing idea that the unit in the genetic code is a triplet of bases. Regrouping reveals all.
He passes the rite of hidden passages, wins his first glimpse of the new boss. The path from discovery to tinkering to inspiration to solution takes place outside time. Returning to deck entrance, he discovers that he has narrowly missed being locked in the stacks overnight. Only when he is safely back at the barracks, flat out on the bunk in K-53-C, sipping tomatoes and savoring his victory, does he realize that he's forgotten even to glance at the article Dr. Ulrich asked him to review.
Stuart arrives at the Ulrich doorstoop on the revealed Wednesday, groomed for the occasion. The chief ushers him into the party with only a "Good job." Ressler, the last guest to arrive, uncomfortable in newly purchased suit, presents host and hostess with a box of after-dinner chocolates filled with greenish fungi. Suit and gift are both wild miscalculations; soon he'll be unable to go out in public at all, so completely has he botched the social code in his haste to crack the genetic. He makes the rounds, meets his future labmates. Tooney Blake, dark, mid-height, a youthful forty, is at the piano doing a terrifyingly down-tempo version of "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off." Only he's missed the point of the song: "Potato, potato, tomato, tomato," all pronounced exactly the same. A gracious woman with an uncanny Eleanor Roosevelt impersonation, Dr. Toveh Botkin, stands by in great pain, waiting for the promised formal feeling to come. Her accent reveals her as one of those brilliant Central European scientists lured away from the Russians in '45 by democracy and cash. Musically illiterate, Ressler can nevertheless tell by Dr. Botkin's bearing that the soiree is soul-toughening purgatory for her. She says as much in her first sentence to him, declaring with convoluted tact that the machine responsible for the apotheosis of Beethoven's Diabelli, not to mention the transcendent Opus 109 set, had been a sacred instrument to her until a few moments before. He nods, without a clue to what she's talking about.
Joseph Lovering, five years Ressler's senior, sits on a sofa noisily denying that he is now or ever has been a member of this or any party. He and Jeanette Koss, also near thirty, heatedly discuss some political bomb that Ressler lost track of while in grad school. These two, the only folks close to Stuart in age, more or less ignore him after the obligatory hand-grab. Daniel Woytowich, the other senior Cyfer member after Ulrich and Botkin, is at work in the corner, head wrapped in Pyrex eyeglasses, watching the Ulrichs' rabbit-eared black-and-white set broadcast Garry Moore's I've Got a Secret. The show is interrupted by a flash announcement: scientists have succeeded in creating today's modern aspirin, the Ferrari of the gastrointestinal Le Mans. Faster, Stronger, and now Improved. "Last year's aspirin only killed the headache…" When Ressler introduces himself, Woytowich tells him the panelist's secret: by marrying the mother of his father's second wife, he's become his own grandpa.
The night's entertainment alarms and depresses him: how can so human a collection hope to penetrate its own blueprint? The code must certainly be more ingenious than this crew it created.
Ressler knows Cyfer's considerable collective intelligence from their published track record. He needs them; they represent specific expertise in cytology, biochemistry, ontogeny, fields wild to him. Yet they sing, watch prime time, talk politics. Incredible comedown, awful circularity: no one to reveal us to ourselves but us.
The welcome-aboard party — easily his most nightmarish evening out since prom — leaves Ressler in serious need of a purgative. He pays his first visit downtown since the bus pulled in. There he indulges uncharacteristically in buying something. Spending money is not a problem; he's never been one to form emotional bonds to crinkled bits of safety paper. The wrench for him is acquiring more stuff. Since late teens, he's never owned anything more than he could carry out of the country on short notice. Now, in less than a month, he's already saddled himself with dishes, a table, even a heap of chicken-wire sculpture that charitably passes for a chair.
He buys a record player that folds up into a box with handle, a pink that has been coaxed out of the spectrum by suspect means. He is sold by a matching pink polyethylene ballerina that snaps on the spindle and pirouettes slavishly at 78, 45, 33⅓, and— whatever happened to 16?—16. Never musical, he inherited what is physiologically referred to as a tin ear. His father carried the tone-deaf gene, forever going about the house delivering a spectral version of "Get Out and Get Under." Discomfort with harmony leaves Ressler not only ignorant of music but deeply distrustful. Pitch-writing obeys amorphous, ambiguous linguistics — a dialect just beyond paraphrase. Fast and loud is more exciting than slow and quiet. The rest is silence.
He needs, without knowing, those old, Renaissance formulas equating C-sharp minor with longing, sudden modulation to E major with a glimpse of heaven. How dare an obnoxious greaser four years younger than he turn the Civil War tune "Aura Lee" into the Hit Parade standard "Love Me Tender," without a wiggle of concern for the underpinning chordal message? Either this language has no content, or tonal tastes have festered, fixed for 100 years and more. Both options terrify him.
He has trouble selecting tunes to keep the ballerina dancing, and Olga herself remains noncommittal. At length, he settles on an anthology called Summer Slumber Party, the bobby-soxer, center cover behind the pillow, reminding him of a woman he dated in college. Straight brown hair and artesian eyes, she dumped him for never getting off his Bunsen. With the assistance of a sales clerk, he secures two other primers: Britten's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra and Leitmotifs from Wagner's "Ring." The latter, still politically suspect, appeals to him from the liner description: a story told in a book-code of memorable riffs. One of these disks might contain his tonal Rosetta. To round out his disk library, in the spirit of Separate Can Never Be Equal, and knowing the tunes from his father, he buys an album of spirituals by Paul Robeson.
A summer night, the last before his marriage to experiment, and Ressler spends the few, dark, warm hours soaking in the deep evangelical minister's voice seeping in spirituals from K-53-C onto Stadium Terrace's lawn. Robeson sings, "Sometimes it causes me to wonder. Ah, sometimes." The sound ambushes Ressler, slack in his lawn chair. He watches the waves continue east at 1,134 feet per second, where they will arrive in D.C. later that evening. He hears the phrase knock at John Foster Dulles's window as the secretary of state prepares for bed. Dulles curses, shouts for this blackfella to leave him be. He's promised to return Ol' Man River's passport as soon as Robeson returns the '52 International Stalin Peace Prize. Last year Dulles told a Life reporter that a man scared to go all the way to the brink is lost. "Brinksmanship" is now the going word. Dulles, hands full with the Suez and Syria, his troops in Lebanon within a year, shaken by the runaway slave's son singing "Jordan river chilly and cold," shouts out the window of the State Department at Ressler to turn the volume down and have a little respect, forgetting, under stress of the brink, that democracy is the privilege of not being able to escape the next man's freedom of speakers.