Yes, the message has changed before, momentously. The marshaling of the organelles, the development of the eukaryotic membrane, energy by ingestion, colonies, differentiation, the notochord, the brain, the first croak of distress, courtship, self-expression: the word has always been permanently restless, wanting only to repeat imperfectly, recast what it has been until then. Life can't be protected against a fate it's coveted from the beginning. But this break is something else again. Angelic, catastrophic, unprecedented except in the origin. Life is passing the second threshold, emending the contract. The next generation will wrap their opposable thumbs around processes he can't even begin to conceive. What can be filled in of the map will be filled in.
Worse: everything that can be done to the process will be done. The thing the adaptor molecule has for billions of years tried to articulate will, in the last click of the second hand, be channeled into massive habitat clearance, would-be property improvements, trillion-dollar toxicity, terminal annihilation. A million species lost irretrievably by the time he dies, an acceleration of slaughter that can only be ignored by an effort of will. One species a day, soon one an hour, one a minute. Not research's fault per se, but tied to the same destructive desire to grow, be more. And in return — he can't grasp the grotesque trade-off — a few new species that, for the first time in creation, can be signed by the artist.
The realized ability to masquerade as the creator — not achieved this week yet, but certainly next — this slim, second shot at the garden calls out for nothing less than a complete, instant maturation. Anything short of the creator's wisdom will chuck us into chaos. Ressler skims his eye across the open space of this campus: a quaint building for math, another brick Georgian for music, a curious, classical colonnade for English literature. Clearly, we lag behind ourselves, knowledge always hopelessly outstripped by available information.
At one end of the trimmed rectangle, in front of the auditorium, a boy and girl, both sweet-and-twenty, stand propping their bikes, one's thighs brushing the other's. Each pretends they are talking. Neither admits the real issue, both crazy with spring, aroused to inchoate blur by sap-distraction. These two children will be first-time lovers tonight, find a way to violate the segregated dorms. Neither realizes the historical moment they inhabit — the sad potential, the willful waste of it. They may never know the place the way he does in this minute, wider, stranger, more calamitous than he suspected, the place research from the first has been desperate to reach. They will feel rushing finality in everything they do without ever being able to name the utter change in life's program that researchers at their own school have set inexorably in motion.
He weighs the odds against the day being saved by the arrival, in the nick of time, of that judicious, adult nature that must accompany this discovery. No chance. They are on their own, lost, lost to this obscene place, a place larger than anyone can safely care for, the place his carefully isolated adaptor molecules locate and leave him to. Left to whistle in the dark the tune described in information-bearing strands that life itself will now be able to compose, perform with the chemical philharmonic he and his friends now conduct. Even now the piece must be further improvised, built up from the given ground, played on that piano roll he will pass through test-tube ribosomes. The cell-free spinet must take up the tune, singing as it goes, the way the record his love gave him sings under the reading needle.
But his experiment, a first solution to the coding problem, will put him no step closer to solving the code-breaking urge, a place unlocatable in either the lookup table or any aggregate survey of it. Investigation is an ache, a permanent displacement, an accidental by-product of necessity written into the program itself. He sees it briefly, the random outline thrown up for an instant in an electrical storm: he will spend what remains of his life guessing at a pattern that is itself nothing more than exactly similar. Those codons all in a row: just successive approximations about the possibilities of pattern in this world. The gene is an experiment in its own decoding. It too, like the commands it shapes, remains a beginner in its own life. An educated guess. A blundering amateur.
How can the one place where that fragile experiment thrives, how can it be protected, kept from being trampled? Investigation cannot and ought not be stopped. The command to decipher was present at the start, driving the first clunky, unshelled, self-duping, primitive amino-assembler. But if research, life, is to protect itself from itself here at the eleventh hour, the moment of its second revolution, curiosity must be amended, matured. He cannot bring that new thing to life by himself. But there is one he might ask about this idea forming in his mind, a friend who might already be halfway toward founding that new science required to save creation from the creative urge.
A nervous coed approaches him as he drifts by the library. Are you the one from the picture magazine? She thrusts out a scrap of cash-register receipt and asks him to sign his name. "Oh, no," Ressler objects. "Thank you, but this is premature. I haven't done anything yet. Ask me next year, perhaps." He grins to smooth her apology and backs away. He runs for the barracks. Sprinting, gulping air, he knows it is high time — yes, even this late in life — to tie himself forever to his companion. There is something they must find, develop together as helpmates. They will only be able to reach it in combination, each contributing a half-proposal to the corrective that pure research calls out for. It is not too late to fabricate, between them, an answer to the riot of silence awaiting life on the far side of the patent. They will put the finishing touches on the in vitro catalog. Then they will use the international reputation the work will lay at their doorstep to convince the world that it is not too late for the getting of wisdom.
This something else: he hasn't gotten it yet, he does not know its precise shape. But they can arrive at it together — the one descendant he and Jeanette can leave to this teetering place. Herbert can, of course, visit anytime he wants. Even live with them if he likes. That will not be the last concession to the law of human averages they will need to make in the decades in front of them.
They must perfect the only way home, the one trick of natural pattern forever unpatentable. They must learn quickly, this afternoon, to care for living existence with the tender survey of parental love. It's time for him to become a husband. A father.
He sprints the distance to Stadium Terrace, arriving on the stoop gasping for breath. He is about to stumble inside when something stops him. Through the thin wooden door, he hears a strain of music as familiar to him as breathing. She has anticipated him. She is inside, playing this disk hinting of the new science they must originate. He stands for a moment, simply listening, hearing a certain play of counterpoint for the first time. He pushes the door open, shouting her name on the air.
The record is indeed playing, Olga indeed centrifuging dutifully above it. But Jeanette is, like the decoding urge, nowhere. He thinks: The bedroom, enters shyly, wondering what tender, depraved rendezvous she has arranged for him. But the room is empty, the linen unmussed. He calls once, softly, pointlessly, to her attending ghost.
His answer waits in the front room, both sides of a full sheet in his laboratory notebook, left lying on top of the stack of delinquent periodicals that has become his de facto reference library. Every relationship he enters into on this earth comes down to a carefully printed message. Her hand, that spidery, runic script — as much as her voice, her scent, the curve of her forehead where his fits— begins carefully, perfectly across the horizontal.