They stand, all but there, confronting one last unskirtable hurdle. They can cause the code to be broken, eavesdrop on the process, but they can't get close enough to read the code book. For weeks, neither Koss, Botkin, nor Ressler has been able to supply any fresh suggestions. Ressler concludes that they are in need of new blood. He tries out the problem on his office mate. Since assaulting Ressler that day outside Ulrich's office, Lovering has been unreadably neutral. Enough time has passed to try reestablishing relations. This intellectual problem is Ressler's peace offering. Lovering declines the proffered branch, polite but indifferent, too busy to be bothered. To leave Lovering an honorable out, Ressler jokes, "Maybe your girlfriend would like to take a shot at the problem." When Lovering jerks his head up from his desk, eyes burning, Ressler regrets the miscalculation.
He takes a slow walk to the Woytowichs', a path he has lately reopened. They will never replace the Blakes, but they are nevertheless — what is the word? — contact. The prodigious Ivy has an undeniable fascination about her rapid development. This time Dan and Renée are between diaper changes. He and Dan trade project stumbling blocks. It gives Ressler no pleasure to hear that the ILLIAC project is just as seriously log-jammed.
"The kid's program is fine," Woyty admires. "It's terrific what he can make that machine do, after only a few months. But after every run that closes in on an occurrence of the pattern we're after, Joey changes his blessed instruction deck again. The program keeps expanding, like those radioactive tomatoes Botany is always growing. Exceptions to the latest exception-handling. The do-loops have grown do-loops on them several nests thick. Very Ptolemaic."
Ressler suggests that they might be engineering their desired result. Dan nods gravely at the possibility. Then, as if hitting on a remedy, he says, "Hey. Come take a look at this." Ressler follows Dan into the infant's bedroom. There, father arranges Ivy on the rug and sets in front of her four brightly colored blocks — rose, powder blue, eucalyptus, lemon — boldly imprinted with oversized letters. "Find the A, Ivy. Come on, little girl." Singsong, he coaches, "A is for ap-ple, aard-vark, an-gi-o-sperm."
Ivy is off and crawling. Stretching out a system of muscles she can still but pitifully coordinate, she falls on the correct block. Ressler remains guarded. "One in four." Can she repeat?
Woyty laughs confidently. He returns the child to the starting point, shuffles the blocks, and says, "Can you show me the C, Ivy? Sure you can. C is for cat and cactus___"
"Cuneiform," Ressler suggests. "Codon." The baby, unperturbed, heaves herself against the correct letter in question. Ressler's eyes light, fueled from a source far away. Still in the crib, Ivy knows her alphabet. Is it real learning or just conditioning? The question, at this level, is meaningless. The scientists sit on the nursery floor. Daniel exercises his daughter's arms, strokes the hamhock smoothness of her back, stimulating the nerve connections to solidify into a network. Ressler relates the in vitro successes and describes the block they now knock up against. They can produce plaintext proteins from ciphertext nucleic acid. But analysis cannot yet tell them within acceptable margin of error how the sequences correspond.
"So close you are almost past it," Woyty says.
"With long chains, we can label the bases in the sequence we feed the decoder. We can label the amino acids picked up in the synthesis. But it doesn't give us position. The best we can do is assign weight ratios — We're no closer to actual assignments."
"It's a pickle," Daniel concedes. A missed beat reveals that Woytowich is not really following him. He's playing with the baby. The gap between them wraps Ressler in loneliness more severe than that brought on by banging on the closed codon library door. Daniel says, "I wish I could help you, Stuart." Struck by a happy inspiration, he suggests, "Let's ask Ivy."
Weeks pass, the project advancing without real headway. One day, he cannot even name the month anymore, he comes home to the barracks to find Jeanette, in lovely familiarity, waiting for him as if they were silver anniversary candidates. Their time apart cannot even masquerade as moral restraint anymore. Simple cautious terror. But here she is again, in his front room, smiling richly, once more free from the delays and wastes of time that constitute their love. He returns her kiss, goes to the record player, puts the sound track on. She follows him eagerly with her eyes. Like me. Need me. "Hungry?" he asks. "I think I have something that might have been Major Grey Chutney once."
"No thanks. I never eat when I'm in love."
"You know this from experience?"
"Do now." Jeanette makes a little space for him to sit. No sooner does he than she changes her mind. "Stuart? I've a great idea. Let's go outside."
"Outside?"
"You remember." She crooks a finger toward the window. "Trees. Sky. Living things. Perfectly safe, in small doses."
"Well__" Suspicious. "It isn't the strontium 90 level I'm worried about, you understand."
"What, then?"
"It's just that, you are — how can I put this delicately?"
"Married?"
"Exactly. Walking in public, together__"
"Could be that Edward G. Robinson scenario all over again." Spring has made her reckless. "Come on," she laughs. "It's tougher to hit a moving target." She will go walking, and won't hear no. Nor, after another minute, does he want to refuse.
They roll onto the lawn, turn up the block, put Stadium Terrace behind them. He is struck by the department store of smells, after the stale monoscent of the barracks. "And," he adds, thinking out loud, "there are a lot more places to sit."
She stretches herself luxuriously. Relaxing, slack on the return stroke, she slips her arm into his. Here, in residential Champaign, in front of a gauntlet of plate glass — colleagues, friends, faint acquaintances — she makes an open, unambiguous declaration. He knows what it means. She is ready now, ready to leave her husband, that blameless man, to upend her life, to break it and build it again in this arbitrary spot, to recommence, uncertain, with him, only him. Here, now, in spring. Ressler's arms are paralyzed. He cannot move them a millimeter in any direction, either to encourage her or to withdraw and spoil the happy idiocy that has come across her face. He goes numb from neck down.
The abnormal warming trend has brought on, ahead of schedule, a rush of returning life up and down the ladder. She makes first mention of the event. Her voice is low, imparting, even-keyed: Here we are, outside, together, nothing hidden. "Flowers," she says. "How early! But it's been so long." He studies her skin. Just below the yellow, little-girl's surface, two blue-green blood tubes in her temples pulse as deep as a spanking new bruise, as the Aegean. She catches him looking, curls up shyly. "What are your favorites?"
"Favorite whats?"
She shoves him. "Haven't you been listening? Favorite flowers."
He is every bit as adrift as when he didn't know the antecedent.
"Hmm. Coleus, I suppose."
"Coleus? You suppose? Its flowers are this little."
"Sorry. I guess I meant crocus."
"Oh. Crocus is all right. First. Virginal. Paschal. Fresh schoolgirl." She pauses, putting things together. She grabs his arms, stopping him. "Wait a minute. You're an amateur, aren't you? And you call yourself a biologist!"
Ressler kicks a stone. "I've never called myself that."
Jeanette gapes, hurt by his willful ignorance toward blooms, but half excited at the thought that here, at last, is something she can be the first and only one to give him. "Wait. Look. See over there? Do you know what those are?"