Assembling such a band of crossovers initially struck Ressler as half-baked. How dare they jump headlong into the hottest topic now going, a field already filled with skilled investigators? Yet the more he mulls it over, the shrewder Ulrich's move seems. Molecular genetics, precisely because it is rapidly converging on a cross-disciplinary synthesis, requires exactly this assorted band, technically adept but without the retarding lead.
The field is dense with DPs: Gamow, Avery, Franklin, Chargaff, Griffith, Hershey, Luria, Pauling. The purebred geneticist among them is the rarest of blood groups. The coding problem can be approached from any angle: math, physics, stereochemistry. The problem in this moment of synthesis is that the mathematicians, physicists, chemists, and biologists don't all speak the same language. It's all interlingual patois. Ulrich's assembling a few native speakers of the various dialects to meet weekly increasingly seems a master stroke. The group has built into it all the expertise it needs. Ressler himself is to play a lead role: state-of-the-art liaison. The only one of them young enough to have grown up speaking molecular. Hell of a burden to place on a kid just out of school.
So be it. However disarrayed the sessions, they give Ressler the unique opportunity to pick the brains of experts in fields he has only rudimentary exposure to. The first four weeks of group barn-burning remain theoretical. Experimental progress must wait for the recent flurry of development to clear. The same thing that makes the coding problem the most exciting project going also makes it the most opaque. Theory permits a bewildering array of possible codes, while DNA sequence data provide no hint of regularity of pattern. This proliferation of too many possibilities gives Ressler hope that Cyfer has as much chance as any to receive the capricious break that will catapult them to the fore. The twist, always unanticipated, like the arrival of a startling bird one morning at the feeder outside the breakfast window, may pay its fragile visit at any moment. Ressler posts, by his office window, Delbruck's words: "It seems to me that Genetics is definitely loosening up and maybe we will live to see the day when we know something about inheritance__"
On an obnoxiously hot August day that melts the streets of Stadium Terrace into La Brea tar, Ressler takes time out to do a rudimentary milk run. He hits the futuristic supermarket with no shopping list except necessity. Pushing a cart with one oscillating wheel, he genuflects in aisle four toward Battle Creek, Michigan, for making survival possible. The daily cereal, consumed each evening over journals, if failing to carry him inexorably toward athleticism, has at least kept him from scurvy. Likewise, frozen juice concentrate takes one fifth the space of a mixed pitcher and requires no maintenance aside from rinsing the spoon. He ignores the taste, even enjoys it. Processed foods write the species' insatiable advance in miniature: freed from the overhead of care to get on with the real matter.
He chooses a meal that promises "Ready in One Minute," figuring he can eat it in two. Thus recovering four hours a week for his own pursuit, he swings his cart leisurely around the corner smack into none other than Toveh Botkin. The elderly Western war prize, whose protein chemistry work Ressler has studied, keeps cool in the mangle of metal. "I understand that the auto accident is a national obsession with Americans, Dr. Ressler. But don't you think this a bit extreme?" He grins and waves the curlered housewife traffic around the wreck. The two empiricists step forward to inspect the damages. The fronts of both carts are mauled. "Are you insured?" she asks.
Together they restore a pyramid of soap boxes their wreck has upended. "How wonderful!" Botkin exclaims, holding one up for Ressler to see. A green explosion on the soap box advertises the obligatory miracle ingredient, Delta-X Sub-2, dirt-bursting enzyme. "Here our little group racks its brains to get enzymes out of nucleic acids, while the rest of the world is busy figuring out how to get them into laundry powder."
They dust themselves off, shift effortlessly into a notes session. They compare the relative merits of direct templating of protein chains on the surface of the split DNA string to some form of intermediating sequence reader. The conversation breaks off when Botkin catches sight of the contents of Ressler's cart. "My young friend. Convenience taken to its logical extreme is cowardice." She looks personally wounded. "If the universe were as convenience-minded as you, it would never have proposed so inefficient an aggregate as life."
Ressler loves this woman's speech. Worth the dressing-down to hear her perform. "Dr. Botkin," he counters. "It's impossible to cook for one."
"Nonsense. I've cooked for one for half a century, occasional dinner party aside. But if it is the motivation of pair bonding you need__" She hooks a passing young thing in white anklets and coos at her, "My dear. Would you love, honor, and obey this decent-looking young man so that he can get a reasonable meal in the evenings?"
The girl giggles. "I'm already married."
"Do you expect your husband to live very long?" At length, Ressler makes a few dietary concessions, the most important being his agreement to dine with her at least once a week. "I will introduce you to the clarity of thinking brought on by baked lamb, and you can bring me up to date on molecular mechanisms. I think I understand the part about the tall pea plants and the short, but beyond that…?" Botkin shrugs, reverence for the engine of skepticism. They arrive at the checkout behind a woman giving herself whiplash by watching the bagging and the register at the same time. What a very strange place he has been set down in, this world. He ought to get out more often.
Botkin, whatever her gifts as a conversationist, is almost as old as the rediscovery of Mendel. The other extreme in age, Joe Lovering, beat a time-honored path out of pure math into muddy population statistics. Ressler has seen the guy potting about in the lab, although exactly what the excitable kid does is anybody's guess. He looks decidedly gumfooted holding any equipment more corporeal than a chi-square. Stuart takes him to the Y for lunch, part of a court-your-resources campaign. He has the sub, Levering the congealed mac and cheese. Hardly are they seated when Joe whips out a napkin and begins sketching proofs. He argues that the genetic code, as an algorithmic formal system, is subject to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. "That would mean the symbolic language of the code can't be both consistent and complete. Wouldn't that be a kick in the head?"
Kid talk, competitive showing off, intellectual fantasy. But Ressler knows what Joe is driving at. He's toyed with similar ideas, cast in less abstruse terms. We are the by-product of the mechanism in there. So it must be more ingenious than us. Anything complex enough to create consciousness may be too complex for consciousness to understand. Yet the ultimate paradox is Lovering, crouched over his table napkin, using proofs to demonstrate proof's limits. Lovering laughs off recursion and takes up another tack: the key is to find some formal symmetry folded in this four-base chaos. Stuart distrusts this approach even more. He picks up the tab for their two untouched lunches, thanking Lovering politely for the insight.
In mid-month, a departmental review committee spot-checks the lab, sits through a free-association session where Lovering shows the group that the translation scheme under consideration can't map sequences of four linear bases into twenty amino acids and still indicate where a gene message starts and breaks off. Since the last few weeks have been devoted exclusively to this scheme, Cyfer disbands that afternoon knowing less than it did a month ago. The review panel is sympathetic to the need for experimental interludes. Fact-gathering without theoretic guidance is mere noise. But theory without fact, the review suggests, is not science. Incriminatingly large amounts of glassware in the lab carry that See-Yourself Shine. They urge Ulrich to produce some activity, reduce the Blue Skies, begin investigating something.