Franklin and I exchanged astonishments. Todd dismissed him bitterly. "I mean something more than keeping up with the journals."
"So do I." The professor returned a self-conscious grin. "Look. Analysis depends on breaking down complex hierarchies into understandable parts. That's indispensable to good science, and I did it for years. Even got a paper out of it, as you junior sleuths insist on reminding me. But analysis is just part of the method. When you catch a glimpse of your smallest, discrete components, and even these don't explain the pattern you are after, sometimes the situation calls out for another motion, a synthetic cycle.
"Remember John Von Neumann?" he asked. " 'Yes, it is obvious'? The sharpest systematic intellect of the century. Games theory, contributions to quantum mechanics, father of digital computer software." He gestured through the two-way mirror into the computer room, suggesting that something of those old language generations still floated around in the newest machines. "Codeveloper of the hydrogen bomb and advocate of the preemptive strike. Once told Life, 'If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at five o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?' Claimed to have invented a whole mathematical discipline while riding in a taxi cab. Wrote a pivotal book, published posthumously by my old I-state research university, called Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, in which he proves that machines can be made complex enough to copy themselves.
"Von Neumann, the cleverest product evolution has yet offered, thought that the language of the functioning brain was not the language of logic and mathematics. The only way we would ever be able to see the way the switches all assembled the messages they sent among themselves would be to create an analog to the language of the central nervous system." He fell silent, perhaps wondering whether sheer cleverness is ever enough. "The firmware language of the brain. That's what I have spent the last twenty-five years pursuing."
The revelation stunned us. Todd rubbed his temples. "I don't get it. No institution? No grant? No laboratory? What are you doing here?"
Ressler laughed. "It's not a particularly popular or accredited line of research these days." He held up a finger, holding the floor. He went to his attache case, brought it back to the table, and unzipped it. It poured forth, like a flushed warren, long, stiff, manila-colored, heavily penciled-over scores. Musical scores. "This one is a woodwind octet," he announced self-consciously. "Look here. I stole this bit from Berg. But he stole a similar bit from Bach, so I'm safe from lawsuit."
Todd flipped through the penciled staves, looking for some explanatory key. I collected myself first. "You're a composer," I said, a thrill coursing at the forbidden word.
"Yes, I guess I am." He sounded as startled by the revelation as we were. "I even went back to school awhile, although the pieces have remained hopelessly amateur."
"And?" I asked. I could not help myself, took his hand between mine. Nothing he could say or do would ever surprise me again. "Research results? Anything to write the journals about?" Could there really be another language, cleaner than math, closer to our insides than words?
He answered me figure for figure. "Precious few conclusions, so far. Soft, slow passages more effective when contrasted with loud, fast ones. Nothing much more definitive. But bear in mind, the field is still in its infancy."
Todd, recovering his wits at last, plied him with enthusiastic questions. What had he written, and how much? Lieder, chamber works, symphonic? Problems of instrumentation and registration, color, timbre. The trade-off of genre. Tonal? Serial? Aleatoric? I tried to follow this tech shoptalk but found myself hearing something else, absolutely silent: a monk, late twentieth century, working in total isolation, locked in a cell for longer than I could imagine, a lifetime, just composing, trying to emulate, recreate, variegate, state, consecrate the sound he had once heard while standing on his front porch on a spring morning, about to enter, thinking his love waited for him inside. I thought of all the experimental, heuristic, and botched compositions that kept him company over long years, and how, whatever the orchestration, form, choice of language, all pieces amounted to love songs, not just to a lost woman, but to a world whose pattern he could not help wanting to save.
What he had done, how he had chosen to spend his energies, really was science. A way of looking, reverencing. And the purpose of all science, like living, which amounts to the same thing, was not the accumulation of gnostic power, fixing of formulas for the names of God, stockpiling brutal efficiency, accomplishing the sadistic myth of progress. The purpose of science was to revive and cultivate a perpetual state of wonder. For nothing deserved wonder so much as our capacity to feel it.
I did not know the letter names yet, but I gathered that this biologist had discovered that A, T, G, and C spelled out endless variations on the old Socratic imperative in the cells. To say that the variants came from the same command was not to say they came to the same thing. Each still had to be identified in its particular texture. For that, one could only remain alert, stay flexible, keep deep down, work. All human effort now hung on the verge of revealing something unexpected, from the simplest of beginnings. The system ran undeniably toward randomness, but along the way, a steady stream of new nuances accumulated, each complete in its complexity, each incorporating the issuing theme. Dear Goldberg, play me one of my variations.
And at that moment, losing the thread of the conversation, I blurted out that colossal contemporary irrelevance: "Have you had any pieces performed?"
Dr. Ressler looked as nervously delighted as a little boy about to do his talent show number. "Opus One debuts tomorrow," he declared. "The sole work by which I hope to be remembered."
He punched up the system time on the screen, and we were struck by the work still left to do before the arrival of the day shift. "Oh Jesus," Todd let out.
The geneticist-turned-musical-recombiner threw his portfolio back together. "Sorry. My fault. That's what happens when you begin to solve the globe's problems. Before you know it, it's a quarter to six in the morning."
We fell to the cleanup tasks. I shredded the printouts of our last-minute test runs. Todd dummied up a console log, leaving no clues about the nature of the program that would soon be executing. And Dr. Ressler performed his coup de grace. He selected, at random, a string of zeroes and ones deep in the system firmware. Using it as a cryptographic key, he ran the sequence against the program code of the impostor routines, storing down the scrambled product. Then he manually single-stepped into the loading procedure a pointer back to that random sequence, so that the scrambled programs would be deciphered into intelligible code when and only when they fed into the machine at run-time. When the corporate programmers went into the packs the next day to list the files and see where the unexpected behavior came from, they would find only gibberish. The trick was not uncrackable, but would slow the reversing process down.
The self-enciphering spread across acres of digital storage. "All right," he said, when the task came up complete. He took a deep breath and lifted a significant eyebrow. "Time to collect the songbooks." Our bit of genetic engineering was done. For better or worse, Franklin brought down the last remnant of old firmware. We held our breaths like rocket scientists as he attempted to boot the complete, new system. The status indications flashed one by one across the console without producing any unexpected warnings. Up came what seemed to be the old, original cold-start screen.
Ressler, ensuring that his name would be the only one traceable to this new boot, used two fingers to type it in. The screen prompted "password: " and echoed its demure x's as he entered his. It waited an ungodly whole minute, long enough for us to realize that a crash now would leave us with Jimmy on the street, his mother without a mortgage, and the three of us plus Annie in prison. Then, having put the fear of God in us, the system at last decided to flash: