How indispensable models have been in the fray to date! Watson and Crick did the trick with tin shapes, interlocking jigsaw pieces that refused to combine in any configuration consistent with the data except the spiral staircase. The great Pauling's snips of accordion cardboard are an industry legend, an industry joke until laughter was hushed by the tool's repeated success. Pauling's children — molecular spheres and dowels — pop up in classrooms, raising a race of clear-eyed students whose innovative exhalations already warm Ressler's neck. All the models agree: life science, to advance at all, cannot start with big and hope to pull it apart into underpinning little. It must begin with the constituents and tease them into a structure consistent with observation. Cyfer needs a model as simple and labile as baby blocks, a breathtaking Tinkertoy indistinguishable from the thing it imitates.
Four years ago Ressler, along with every other hapless haplo-type, noticed that the double-spiral staircase embodies two identical informational queues. The ascending angel order complements and mirrors the descending stream. Wholly redundant. Each angel-file sequence can be entirely recreated from the other. Bright and dark men, dark and bright women: each pair-half uniquely mated, each edge of the staircase carrying the same message. All there in Crick and Watson's tantalizing summary: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." The angel-files in each half-stair must somehow be capable of latching on to their proper mates out of angelic bouillabaisse. Chemical lightning, sundering the staircase down its middle, unzipping it, creates two severed parades, each capable of recreating the entire original ladder. Ressler, in his bunk, has the wind knocked out of him by the ingenuity, the rightness of it: a long molecular chain, stupefyingly massive but simple, obeying nothing but chemical requirements, somehow lucks upon viability — the fundamental, self-replicating machine.
Stairway replication, an inanimate molecule's ability to double, is just the tip of proliferate miracle. Somehow, incomprehensibly tortuously simply, coded in permutations of brights, darks, males, and females — four bases alone — is all the sequence needed to conduct the full angel choir. On this dream of spiral ladders, he lulls himself into brief, shallow sleep. Rest does not last long, nor does he wake refreshed. He is back in the stacks at opening, armed with the tip-off Jeanette Koss has passed him. He came to Illinois to crack the nucleic code. To date the only triplets he's gone up against are Dewey Decimal. He looks up her clue in the card catalog: Poe's "The Gold Bug." Mystery, suspense: a story in a thousand anthologies. It's been years since he's read any fiction except the Oppenheimer charges. But the library jump-table leads him to 813 as easily as if he were a regular.
Squatting between two metal shelves, Ressler loses himself in the adventure. Discovery — a piece of heated parchment reveals secret writing. Pictograph of baby goat identifies author as Captain Kidd, language of cipher as English. Simple letter frequency and word-pattern trick leads scholar to pirate's treasure. But directions to treasure are themselves a coded algorithm for unburying. Two men and blackfella servant, applying human ingenuity, measured paces, and plumb line, crack third-level mystery and uncover wealth beyond wildest dreams. Only at story's end does he emerge, shake off the fictional spell. "Gold Bug" is the ticket all right; he's come to the right place.
If he understands Dr. Koss's warning correctly, Ulrich may be in danger of confusing the message of base-string sequences with their translation mechanism. Bulling through frequency counts and base-order mapping will never reveal a simple rule equating the impenetrable archive of nucleic rungs with hair color, hand length, texture of skin. The game is immensely bigger; much more than gene-reading is at stake. To search for sequence substitution, to pan for genetic gold bugs, would be tantamount to learning a foreign language armed with only a translating dictionary. They'd get no farther than a refinement of Morgan's endless generations of Drosophila: chromosome bump X produces white eyes. A swap of one name for the other, no more than a means of reading individual messages without ever getting fluent in the tongue they're written in.
The heart of the code must lie hidden in its grammar. The catch they are after is not what a particular string of DNA says, but how it says it. For the first time, it is possible to do more than wedge open the door. They must throw wide open the means of molecular articulation. They must learn, with the fluency of native speakers, a language sufficiently complex and flexible to speak into existence the inconceivable commodity of self-speaking. The treasure in Poe's tale is not the buried gold but the cryptographer's flicker of insight, the trick, the linguistic key to unlocking not just the map at hand but any secret writing. Ressler must bring the team to see that they are up against something considerably larger than the pleasures of the Sunday Cross-word, fitting a few letters into empty boxes. Not the limited game of translation but the game rules themselves. Sprawled between the girders of the 8OOs, in the summer of his twenty-fifth year, he gets his first hint of the word puzzle he is up against. He must latch onto a language that can articulate its own axioms, a technique that can generate — in the effortless idiom it models — endlessly extensible four-letter synonyms for Life.
Quote of the Day
When I left the library, I took my entire collection of index cards, the complete file of the three boards I'd established at the branch. The records would have disappeared long ago had I not squirreled them away in the first place. Still, the data theft will hurt more than a couple of old friends, who over the years have come to rely on my pocket score the way we all rely on Bowker or Wilson Line. Let them find their own materials. Yet by taking the card collection into custody, I've created my own problem. Squarely on my grandfather's desk, a private encyclopedia of three-by-fives cries out to be transcribed.
Any attempt to extract affidavit from these facts requires dirtying my hands. Franker, with his charming idiocy, liked to compare existence to a mound of potatoes: "You can't proverbially mash 'em till they been proverbially skinned." Information theory phrases the problem more elegantly but not as well. Yet the thought of putting my card hoard to account fatigues me beyond saying. A flood victim's, a chemotherapy patient's fatigue. July 15, 1985: I look over the options from the file, the day's previous incarnations. One stands out from the cycle, one that positions me on the timeline.
I was no longer fresh in the field when I posted it. Much of the novelty of the job had worn off. But I was working full time, for myself, for achieved adulthood, for the sheer pleasure of work.
The Event Calendar, my pride, had run smoothly for a couple of years. I posted everything from Savanarola to Synthetic Rubber, and people enjoyed the end results. In 1978, I took a small risk. I posted as canonical history an event only three years old. July 15, 1975: two spacecraft, each the peak technological achievement of two supernations, inimical enemies at ground level, take off from the earth. The enemy craft dock and join crews somewhere in the endless, frozen, neutral vacuum. The crews visit one another's quarters. The coupled craft float soundlessly in orbit. Back on earth, everything is, for a moment, wonder.