The lab is well equipped. The experimental world divides into steriles and breeders. Stuart did his graduate work under a breeder, a brilliant teacher whose workplace's itinerant confusion — proliferating notebooks, apparatus, scopes, and racks of flasks whose labels had soaked into illegibility — was acute torture. Ulrich, happily enough, is a sterile. Never have supply cabinets so closely mimicked the pictures in warehouse catalogs, and the entire team, from post-doc Koss through veteran Botkin, keep their rubber-glove boxes prominently displayed.
The steriler the riper for Ressler. The only antidote to what ubiquitous radio announcers call the aches and pains of today's modern living is hair of the dog: research alone will cure a world sick on the aftereffects of discovery. Empiricism is the only way from ovum to novum. The panacea he has in mind requires only a lens with focal length long enough and a sterile place to stand.
Ulrich's note was accurate; the lab is between measurements at the moment. The day Ressler arrives the group is on extended leave from titrations, stains, and partition chromatography. They are after a transcription axiom, linguistic. For the rule linking nucleotide sequences to protein synthesis to be determined experimentally, Cyfer must first play with its shape, its inner symmetries. They are up against not so much the chemistry of biology as the math. Molecular genetics, stringing the fine line between experimental and theoretic, has a first shot at bridging the gap, grounding organic complexity in fundamental arithmetic. Ulrich has called a moratorium to consolidate the lightning results of recent months and formalize Cyfer's understanding of the symbolic logic that genetics has stumbled on. First vocabulary; then the generative grammar. Time for pure speculation. No more cigar butts, fingerprints: just, as the Belgian says, the little gray cells. Ressler's first day at school is a day to indulge in that old sworn enemy of experiment: reason.
The team was originally called the Ulrich Group, but that was impossible to say without coming to a full stop between words, which no one since Chargaff has had time for. The year before Ressler arrived, the team was rechristened the Enzyme Synthesis Identification Group. But that broke the unwritten rule of acronyms. At last Tooney Blake hit upon Cyfer, a compression of Cytology Ferment. While they weren't strictly in the wine business, the name was the catchiest in the hard sciences since Bill Haley and the Comets. The sobriquet even gives them an edge with grants.
A strange brew of personalities the name stands for. Toveh Botkin bicycles up on a machine that might have taken her on annual prewar pilgrimages to Bayreuth. Tooney Blake enters, abstractedly patting every empty pocket on his person. Karl Ulrich pulls into the Biology Building parking lot in a VW bearing the plate E COLI. Ressler has nothing against this bundle of bacterial joy so long as it stays in the intestines. But why dirty one's hands in the buggers when the problem of pure coding is at stake? All present and accounted for, Ressler joins his maiden Blue Sky session. The informal brainstorming gets underway, everyone tossing out abstracts of articles and volunteering to review others for the following week. Soon talk wanders onto topics that leave them sounding more like a clutch of cabalists or college of cardinals.
From their predecessors — pylons in the vast, incomplete suspension bridge between the inanimate atom and the world ecoweb — Cyfer inherits a list of numbers it must arrange into a magic square. They work with an alphabet of four nucleotide letters. These, if grouped as commonly believed into trinities of nucleotides, produce a vocabulary of sixty-four different words. These three-letter words translate into immense miracle-sentences in a language of twenty amino acid actants. Cyfer brainstorms, trying to weld together these incunabula into a grand, new gnosticism.
In this free association, they run the gamut of human failing. Joe Lovering races in minutes from embracing the newest fad on punctuation to discarding it wholesale in favor of a newer, improved flier. Dan Woytowich remains, incredibly, the last of the old guard to refuse to embrace the Watson-Crick model. His every static-sparking comment rejects the helical staircase. He declares, in a folksy singsong tailored to get on everyone's nerves, "Too simple to be all there is." Whenever anyone says anything remotely lucid or steers the group toward something they might at last get started on, Woyty shakes his head sadly and says, "We're overlooking something here. We're talking the big L, after all."
Ulrich is a bright spot in the painful group grope toward mi-crounderstanding. Cyfer's leader runs the session as a benevolent dictator, neither encouraging nor condescending to his charges. He follows the time-tested policy: let intellect propose and measurement dispose. He fills the chalkboard with A's, T's, G's, C's, unzipping helices, decoding boxes, templates, diamonds, triangles, every model short of hex signs. He mutters out loud from time to time, as do the rest of the team. But Ulrich's mutterings hold the floor. The part of Ulrich's presentation that most captivates Ressler is not molecular, but rhetorical. To one beautiful scheme that reveals a flaw, rolls belly-up against experimental evidence, the chief pronounces stoically, "So goes poetry. Shipwrecked on shoals of fact."
Ulrich possesses that critical leadership skill in the age of Big Science: the ability to inspire others to work with devotion. Members compete to win the next stroke of praise. Ulrich makes them each sense that all of their names will appear on the resulting paper. Still, Ressler declines to put forth his private bias on how to begin cracking the coding problem. Reticence is not an issue, nor fear of bruised ego. In his freshman session at the public trading post, the small crystal of clarity he now possesses might get lost in the hypothesizing pandemonium. In a few weeks, after he learns the ropes, he'll lay out his vein, the method so new that he himself can't formulate it yet.
As Ulrich smoothly wraps up the Blue Sky session before it turns to Gray and Partly Cloudy, someone slips Ressler a note. More spectral theory, a spidery nineteenth-century hand:
Dr. Ressler—
Dismissals of verse notwithstanding, Fearless Leader harbors a closet predisposition to literature. Ulrich has contracted Poe's Gold Bug.
Communicable, I gather.
J.K.
The syntax seems a sequel to this session in cryptography. But the note, on second reading, begins to make marginal sense as plaintext. There already is a "J.K." in the room; no need for letter substitution. Yet the note resists ultimate understanding. It doesn't occur to him, as the brainstorm session breaks up, to ask the woman herself what she means. He watches her leave the room and looks again at the note, the first he's received in twenty years of school. He follows Dr. Koss with his eyes across the lab and out the door. Monk Mendel's chief lesson returns from first-year genetics: the rift between inner genotype and outer phenotype. Surfaces lie.
Back in his bachelor and still unfurnished flat, Ressler lies in his bunk at night, wrapped in the barrack walls, the cradling vacancy of his adopted town. The day's stimulation prevents sleep. He runs through the proposed structure currently entrancing all biology except Woytowich and a few lone holdouts. The spiral molecular staircase — two paired railings sinuously twisting around one another, eternally unmeeting snakes caught in a caduceus — becomes in his fueled brain the stairs of Robeson's spirituaclass="underline" Jacob's Ladder, the two-lane highway to higher kingdoms. Angels are caught descending and ascending in two solemn, frozen, opposing columns. In his soporific reverie, four kinds of angels twist along the golden stairs. Bright angels and dark, of both sexes. Four angel varieties freeze in two adjacent queues up and down the case, each stuck on a step that it shares with its exact counterpart. Every bright man opposite a dark woman. Every bright woman, a dark man. Fitful in his bunk, in the blackness, the unappeasable modelmaking urge. Four angel varieties to signify DNA's four bases: thymine, cytosine, adenine, and guanine. Jacob's helical staircase ladder conjured out of a single strand of nucleic acid.