"You've told him as much?"
"He won't listen. He has that fucking proof."
"He told you about that?"
"Stuart," she says, ready to debase herself. Her vowels caramelize. "I don't care what inheritance says. Inheritance is wrong." He glances down at the bright child, tilting her head in curiosity all around the enormous room. All right, then. He's ready to accept the astronomical odds. But his willingness is not at issue. Ivy babbles, grabs Stuart's cuff, shakes it, waiting impatiently for the next letter game. The baby, however precocious, doesn't know what's hit her. But she is a fast study. She'll learn in no time.
A week later, Ressler takes his first outdoor tomato juice in months. In vitro is still jammed, and he has nothing to fall back on but the torture of relaxation. Propped in the forgotten lawn chair, he realizes that he'll soon have been in the I-states a whole year. The landscape is unchanged, but his 1958 debut stretch on the lawn is incomplete. No Tooney and Evie Blake will materialize, step out from K-53-A, glasses in hand, having waited all winter for this first lawn party of the season. No one will set up a chair at Stuart's side and kick in a conversational bracer. No decimated Woyty, now, and Jesus: no Levering. And Koss's awful resolve to keep away, keep from seeing him, will be no weaker, no less erratic, than her original passion.
His eye scans K court, the tar-paper triplexes. He looks across the toy town street toward A through J. He imagines all the doors opening at once, pouring out their contents, Tornado Day. He animates the imagined occupants, marches them his way, stands them out on his front lawn tapping an imaginary but ample keg, trading the character flaws that are the generating spark of all beer bashes. A neighbor who studies wish fulfillment in corporate execs, a woman who conditions rabbits to do this trick with a rosary, a fellow with a theory about rag content in Spanish Renaissance manuscripts, another who claims he's in grad school but whose big trick is to sing the words to the Gunsmoke theme so fast you can't tell what language he's in: they are all there, behind closed doors, lined up in these row houses. Statistics and human variability guarantee it.
He has only to tap on any window and they will come out, eager to meet him. Ressler has yet to commit himself to whether dreams carry codified information or whether they're just electrical residue. As he nods deeper into this one, the difference becomes insignificant. He snaps his head up each time it droops onto his chest. Then, from nowhere, he sees himself staring at clarity, at the rarest, most paradisiacal species.
In that moment of visitation — arriving once in a life if lucky and requiring a further lifetime to recover — it comes to him. He is afraid to move; the least muscle tic will frighten the creature off. He sets his empty glass down on the grass, taking forever to reach ground. He lifts himself slowly from the chair, feeling his knees infinitesimally unbend. He stands, turns, looks: it is still there. Everything he is after, the last bit, the complete, documented map home, squarely in front of him. His.
He stays up all night hitting it, but it will not break. He tries to knock it out of commission by reviewing the literature, but it stands up to the articles. The means are so clean, so self-evident, that the suspicion that someone must already have it sits in the crook of Ressler's gut like a silver-dollar-sized, swallowed acid drop. He is waiting for Botkin outside her office when she shows up the next morning. She's surprised enough to know not to ask anything until she opens the door. Stuart makes a beeline for the couch, where he lies back and announces, "We are so bloody stupid."
"Instantiate that pronoun. You and me? The research group? The department? The human species?"
"Whichever is largest."
"This," she says, her pitch cupping upwards with each word, "is Biology?"
He grins in a way that confirms his sweeping generalization. "We've done the thing exactly ass-backwards. We've done step two, the hard part. And we've been stuck backing up to step one, the piece of cake. Like someone building an entire internal combustion engine and then serendipitously saying, 'Hey! Why don't we put gasoline in here?' Stupid. Dumb. Pea-brained."
"Dull. Dim-witted. Duncical," Botkin agrees. "So tell me." She laughs, infected with the visitation of science, which she has felt once before. Laughs for this young man, for the moment of insight that will not come in this way again.
"Unbelievable. I designed it toward this end. I'd already realized it would have to be something like this. That was the whole point of Gale and Folkes. I'd laid it out, everything but the method itself, months ago. But I must have___" Marveling: how could it be? "I must have forgotten."
"And now you've recovered?"
And more. Romped. Routed. "You see, it was the fault of pattern. All those months of numerology we put in. I've been as guilty as Gamow, Crick, Ulrich, any of them."
"Explain yourself. Two speeds slower, please."
"We all wanted to make the codon catalog conform to some kind of internal necessity. The problem is, math does provide a few surprising, elegant, yet irrelevant ways of producing the number twenty out of the numbers sixty-four, three, and four. But you see, Nature — well, it's not even perverse, because it's not even a noun. Nature had no idea what we had planned for it."
"You're suggesting that we forget your poet's advice about forcing Homer into English — allow the result to be less than rapid, plain, direct, noble?"
Ressler nods his head impatiently. "Because no experimental evidence for internal commas exists, we assumed a self-punctuating code, got hung up on catalogs where no two successive codons create valid overlaps. The notion of a self-punctuating, error-correcting code was never far from my mind. It happens that the largest possible error-detecting, self-framing catalog is exactly twenty codons. As a result of this coincidence, I was predisposed against even thinking of long monomer chains like CCCCCC. Monotonous strings like poly-C carry no internal information. Not worth toying with, I thought. Couldn't be more wrong." Ressler sits up, carried forward by excitement. "The trivial chains are our entree into this thing."
A slow, broad grin of understanding- breaks out over Botkin's face. She glimpses it. Her pleasure confirms Ressler. She could blurt it out, fill in the missing bit herself now. But she sits back happily, waiting for him.
"We have built ourselves a working in vitro interpreter, an Enigma Machine that converts any nucleotide chain we feed it into the protein polymer it stands for. Oh Toveh!" His voice is a husky, amazed low wavelength. "Child's play. Stupid, stupid, stupid. It really is. We've built the flower, then discovered sun." He's come too far not to spell out the obvious. "Grunberg-Manago and Ochoa had polyribonucleotide synthesis three years ago. Accidentally, but we'll take it." He nudges the smile in her direction, stands, spins Euclidians in the narrow office. "Khorana has nucleotide-building down to a science. We can say anything we want to our little transcriber. So we synthesize our own RNA message, only we make it the most simple-minded, open-throated, informationless whole-tone shout imaginable." In the beginning was the Word. "We make our own gene for reading, only we make it all of one base. We take this constructed, monotone string — poly-C, poly-anything— and submit it to the protein-synthesis process. I'll wager the remainder of my fellowship that the resulting protein will be a repeating polymer string of a single amino acid. We will have the first word of the code: the codon CCC codes for whatever poly-amino makes up the resulting string."
"All right," says Botkin. "We get UUU, AAA, GGG, and CCC. Four down leaves sixty to go." That takes care of transmuting lead into gold. What do you do for an encore?