He flips through the book. It opens, at random, or perhaps to where she has creased the spine, to a picture of a flower — delicate, blue-purple petals piled up along a thinning stalk. He remembers having seen it before, in another, hypothetical life. The only clue to her whereabouts, her one return address. The caption gives both scientific and popular names. "Polemonium vanbruntiae. Jacob's Ladder."
XXVIII
The Placebo Effect
Everything she writes is borne out. Ulrich circulates a note the next day, announcing Dr. Koss's departure just before term's end. With admirable dexterity, the head of the all but annulled Cyfer manages to praise the woman's contribution to the team without once giving the reason for her leaving or mentioning her destination. For once, Ressler is left with more knowledge than information. The chief gives the note a day or two to sink in, then calls an emergency meeting. Ressler is the last to arrive. The other three are waiting for him.
"Right to it, then," Ulrich begins with more force than conviction. "Is there any point in holding this thing together?"
Ressler looks at his boss, understands. The practice of science is less about sudden shifts of insight or repetitive hours of irreproachable lab practice than it is about funding. Always a subtle parasitism on patronage. Each year's grants deadline hastens the day when the question of whether a piece of work gets done will rest exclusively with the impartial peer review.
Ulrich's poll is clear: have we still a chance to go up against the massive labs, Big Biology? Or is this curse of defection fatal? Woytowich keeps his counsel; he's ready to return to teaching, rating TV — the life of the embittered divorcer. The continuance of the project is to him a matter of immense indifference. Ressler is also tacit, ready to be dismissed. It takes Botkin's eloquent intercession on his part to recall Stuart to unfinished business. She gives the group a rundown on the state of the cell-free system, including an abstract of the conceptual breakthrough she and Ressler hashed out just days before, at the precise instant when Jeanette sat in the barracks writing her Abschied.
She does a better job presenting than Ressler could have. At last, when it is too late, Ulrich's eyes widen. He has been sitting on a resource beyond anything in the equipment catalogs. This generating idea, the means into the composition, puts them as close to the heart of the problem as anyone. "We have three vacant salary lines, and we can get more. I can book over eighty percent of the remaining supplies budget. We can get you both full release time, as far as the department is concerned. Just tell me what you need."
Ressler says: "I need a week to think."
He goes home and sits for days, projecting himself into the ideal scenario: he and Botkin set to work on the synthetic mapping, in charge of a small army of eager assistants. They scoop the world. They lay out the first, rudimentary lexicon of life's language. They complete the table. They lay the capstone of the first material model of inheritance. Then he imagines himself the recipient, six months from now, through the mail, in an envelope with smudged return address, of one of those black-and-white hospital shots. A small, hairless, closed-eye cross between a planarian and Khrushchev, ID tag illegible. Like the words of organic nature hidden in the lookup table, this infant's features grow more inscrutable upon closer identification. It has no one's features, neither father nor mother. Like that complete, mechanical explanation, this complete, clean account of Jeanette's departure explains nothing.
His thoughts during this brief sabbatical return to one image: that man, ready to disappear without issue, whether or not his choice of companion in this life chooses to accompany him in exile. Is even Herbert's gesture part of the "pollen-trick"?
Then, into his third week of passive disengagement, Ressler wakes to a morning blazing in beautiful light. He showers, puts on clothes stiff with laundry soap, discovers: I am ravenous. He walks a brisk six blocks to the pancake house, ordering the full rancher's, trucker's, bricklayer's, red-blood, high-starch, artery-clogging special, and adores every mouthful. The waitress flirts shyly with him over the check. He tells her she is lovely, then backs away, smiling affectionately, helpless in human contact.
He walks to the Biology Building, taking the longest detour that still leaves him inside the twin cities' jurisdiction. He hears, for the first time since the days of the Home Nature Museum, how different the repeated calls of a single bird are. Are these tiny perturbations in the melody random, or do they mean something? He will make a study of this. The sound of automobile tires slopping the pavement suggests a review of physics, the equations for friction. He is struck by the shape of three identical poplars: might some mathematical expression guide the branching of trees?
By the time he gets to campus, it's clear, as clear as anything will ever be in the rough translation allotted him. The self-serving, pointless duplication of giant molecules created him in its own image, set him down here with only one order: Do science. Postulate. Put together a working model. Yet the hunt for the single, substantiating thread running through all creation is just a start. It's time for science to acknowledge the heft, bruise, and hopeless muddle of the world's irreducible particulars. This field, this face, this day are not just the result of tweaking the variables, twisting the standard categories. Every alternative on the standing pattern is distinct, anomalous, a new thing requiring a separate take on what is and might yet be. And for that, theories must diverge and propagate as fast as the wonder of their subject matter.
He reaches Botkin's office, enters without knocking. He surprises her in scowling over a popular magazine with a weekly circulation greater than the population of Austria in the year of her birth. Her grin of expectation at seeing him collapses into a demure, understanding "Oh." He walks to her desk where she writes, removes the magazine. He takes her hand in his, stroking and examining it at the same time. Why should skin lose its elasticity with age? If he were to pinch hers, it would stay bunched like stiffest muslin. He holds her hand between his for a moment, and says, "I wish I'd taken more meals with you when I had the chance."
She laughs sharply. "I wish I'd gotten more into you per meal." He leans over her desk and kisses her still forehead. He glances over her desk, her dark, filled bookshelves: this room, the place of so many discoveries, bathed in the light of midday, affords him the closest thing to religious reconciliation that empiric sensibility allows.
Age does not deprive her of the responsibility of having to play the group's advocate. "But what of your work?" she says. "It can't be left undone."
"Give it a year or two," he answers, calling her bluff. The process of directed chance is inexorable. "Half a dozen people will hit on it all at once."
"It's always the numbers game with your generation. Have you ever considered taking up gambling?"
Ressler laughs; it was her generation that saddled them all with perpetual probability. "I wouldn't know a blackjack if one hit me over the head."
"Boychick. You can take this project anywhere, you know. Dr. Ulrich, myself: we can get you taken on anyplace you like. Cambridge. Cold Spring Harbor. The Institute. A real lab. Wherever is best equipped. Finish what you've started. Say the word. I will write letters, call in favors. You can name terms."