He shakes his head: she, of all people, knows the nature of the work he must finish. "I don't think another laboratory would be appropriate just now." He listens to what he has just said, and adds, "Or needed, really."
"You would make an astonishing teacher, given time."
Teaching: yes, that might almost be close. But teaching is the most perilously slow way man has yet devised for conveying a message. "The student world won't miss me."
"But what about you?" Her eyes are a peculiar, fluid mixture of maternal distress and deep, secret satisfaction that this, her star pupil, has selected to set off into the dark. For abiding is nowhere. "You will be all right?"
"Without the prizes, you mean?"
"Yes. Without your Prize."
He wonders how it would feel to be able to sit back, late in the afternoon, and bask in genuine contribution. "I'll be fine." Even as he speaks this, a door opens in front of him and he gets his first foretaste of just how long, how uncertain an existence in pursuit of an unverifiable idea must be. That slow, tooling nucleotide freight, that packet boat threading itself through his ribosomes, when named out loud, carries nothing more than a letter to Jeanette, to the Blakes, to Botkin, to the rest of his colleagues living and dead. Nothing more than a letter to the world, all along. But he must post it alone.
She feels him waver, and not for the last time. But it is the last time she'll be around to be of any help. "Mönchlein, Mönchlein. Du gehst einen schweren Gang. Can I help you in any way? Can I do anything?" she asks, regressing to an accent so impenetrable he has to infer her words from her face.
"Yes," he says. "Yes you can." He slides over to the dark leather Viennese couch and lies down one last time. He slips his hands behind his head, crosses his legs at the ankles. Now. How does one get started in this enigmatic trade? "You can play me something."
The Lookup Table
I brought Dr. Ressler the names and addresses he asked me to find. He took them with a last, chivalrous compliment of my reference skills and entered them grimly into the hit routine that now hovered invisibly over the MOL data bases the way Bles's fire quietly waits to run loose through imaginary Flanders. "I've made you an accessory," he said, half to me, half to the console where he typed.
"No, I did." From the day I had signed on. I had also taken the initiative to retrieve a different set of addresses from the archives, and when Dr. Ressler reached a pause in his work, I produced my scrap of hurriedly copied chart:
The genetic code for mRNA as determined in vitro, considered universal across all living creation. "That's the ticket," he said, his eyes on the paper, studying it for some revealing nuance that he and everyone else had so far overlooked. Without meaning to, I'd reduced him to embarrassment. He continued at that vanishing decibel. "Doesn't look like much, does it?" I told him I'd spent half an hour in the library learning how to read the thing before figuring out that it was a simple substitution in three variables. Two years would pass before I had even a rough, reflected image of what the table described.
"No question. It's an interesting time to be alive," Ressler said, tapping the sheet of paper as his documentary proof. "We have attained ancient wishes, the plan to dig all the way down, to the bottom, like little children in the backyard shooting for China. In twenty years, we've put together a comprehensive, physical explanation of life. Only, at every way station on the way down, the destination slips one landing deeper. Heredity is not only chromosomes. Then, not only genes, not only nucleotides. My generation found it was not only chemistry, not only physics. Seems life might not be only anything." He traced three rays with his fingers, verifying that UCG coded for serine. "No question. An intellectual achievement: those of us understandably prejudiced toward seeing life from chicken level, realizing that chickens are just the egg's way of perpetuating the egg."
Todd joined us in the control room, dusting his hands in a parody of manual labor well done. He came from the computer room, where he had been erasing the packs containing the old versions of the programs and data files. We had crossed the backout point. The only existing copies of the disks containing the complete financial histories of tens of thousands of people now carried the changes that Dr. Ressler and Todd had engineered into them.
Todd and I had spoken little in the handful of days since my return. The catalyst that brought me back was too pressing, Jimmy's hospitalization too real for us to waste time on private reconciliation. He offered no apologies, tried out no resolutions. We were both there to assist Dr. Ressler in getting Jimmy back under coverage. There was nothing to explain, to remedy. One night, seeing Jimmy for the first time since the stroke, returning to the offices to try to lose himself in an intransigent bit of machine code, Todd had weakened. "Would it be impossible for me to come home with you? One Day Only?"
I felt myself waver at his exhausted attempt at humor. "I don't think that would be a good idea."
"You do know that the lovely Ms. Martens and I are—"
"It's no business of mine." I did not want any news on the matter. Were what? Married? Divorced? History? It no longer concerned me. Annie too had tried to mumble something about intentions and ignorances and getting past misunderstandings. After the second blanket forgiveness I gave her, she stopped trying to approach me about anything but technical matters. In fact, none of us had much occasion to talk about anything except the specifics of our data terrorism. For the first time since I started visiting, actions ran ahead of words.
But that evening, as Dr. Ressler inserted the executive address list into place and Todd joined us in the control room, dusting his hands after putting the original, unedited disk packs to sleep, we were at last forced to sit down with each other as we used to, thrown back on the old, limited compensation of talk. Todd took my scribbled sheet of hieroglyphs from Dr. Ressler. As he looked it over, trying to catch up with the conversation, the professor slipped in his last bit of pedagogy for his only graduating class. "The spookiest thing about the code is its contingency. Some order in it, the symmetries of significance. But matter very well might have missed hitting upon even this configuration, no matter how large the reservoir of time it had to move around in. It might never have arrived at even this bootstrap translation had initial conditions been even a hundredth of a percent different. Or even exactly the same," he said, with a wicked glance at me, setting in motion the chain of idea-links that would eventually make me lose a year to the study of variation.
"But we got the sucker now," Todd said, facetious emphasis on the plural pronoun; nothing could be further from his field of expertise than this cryptic chart.
"Yes, we have it now," Ressler said, interpreting the phrase a little differently. "Perhaps other codes arose at the same moment, but this is the one that won out. It will never happen again; too much inertia now. Places we can't get to from here. Unlike what they teach in schools, the master builder can only proceed by patching onto existing patches."
"Having recently authored some pretty ugly kludges myself, I am glad to hear that."
Ressler extended the idea. "Efficiency and accuracy are not the same thing. Like it or not, life can only revise itself like a library saving or pitching books strictly on the basis of how frequently they've been checked out." He spoke obliquely to me, tailoring his metaphors to an end I could not then see. "We like to think of nature as unerring. In reality, everything it does is an approximate mistake. Its every calculation is short-term, a quick fix. 'Kludge' is right, Franklin." Under the shadow of what we were about to launch, the rules of decorum were changing.