So in midsummer, a dozen weeks into his tenure, Ressler volunteers to help set up a showpiece, tracing the incorporation of traits through daughter cells. He'll use the elegant Hershey-Chase trick of radioactively labeling microorganisms to study how certain tagged strings are passed to the next generation. His first chance to do hard science since hitting the I-states.
Ressler devises a variant on the now notorious Waring Blendor technique to test the supposition that DNA information is transcribed and read like a linear tape. But the day he goes in to set up the growth cultures for his first run is a bad one for experiment. He smells aggression in the lab air, walks into the middle of a fight. He looks around but sees nothing departing from the status quo. Ulrich and Lovering are by the basins, the only two people in the room. Their conversation is subdued, their postures unthreatening. Ressler heads to his work area, lights a burner, and begins rudimentary sterilization.
Soon, however, Ulrich's and Lovering's raised voices filter into the public domain. Their words are lost in the flare of his gas jet. He assumes that the two are hashing out a labor dispute, currently in vogue. The McClellan committee investigates Beck, Brewster, and Hoffa, and suddenly everyone puts away his Monopoly set and joins the Mine Workers. It's demeaning for a scientist to argue over cash; Ressler has always solved budget problems by spending Saturday nights in the lab instead of at Murphy's — exactly the sort of chump that management loves to have in the rank and file.
A few escaping words and Ressler hears that matters are actually reversed. Joe is being called on the carpet, or the linoleum in this case. "You are forcing me to practice black magic, Dr. Ulrich. Pure popular hysteria plain and simple."
"Black magic? That's what you call a century of cumulative research, Dr. Lovering? Maybe you'd better give us your definition of science."
"What in the hell does Salk have to do with science?" Ressler shuts off the Bunsen. This one's a to-the-canvas brawl.
"Salk is the most systematic mind in today's laboratories. If we had half his thoroughness, we'd have the code out by now."
"Salk's a technician. An administrator. 'Thoroughness' is a euphemism."
Ressler strains to see without attracting notice. But he can't catch either man's face from where he stands, and he can't move without getting drawn into the fray.
"You're suggesting that science is only science provided it never turns up anything practical? That's not especially rational, is it, Dr. Lovering?"
Ulrich infuses "rational" with so much hiss that Ressler slips and contaminates a petri. He looks around the lab to see who else is in calling distance. Botkin's in her office down the hall, but an old woman wouldn't be much help in pulling bucks off each other. Lovering looks about to bolt from his corner and tackle his adversary. "This is a witch hunt. You've singled me out because of my politics."
"I'm doing no such thing. You've singled yourself out, by refusing to take a proven vaccine."
"Proven my ass. Read the field trials. Where are the controls? Polio reduction in heavily dosed areas; so what? The disease moves in epidemics. It's erratic by definition."
Ulrich becomes cool, compensatory to his junior's frenzy. "Joe, you're the only one in this lab who refused the vaccine."
"You want me to take the doses and cross myself like everybody else? What's the paranoia? You've had your three slugs; I can't hurt you."
"You can hurt me plenty. If word got out that a scientist refused readily available precautions this late, when we're finally moving towards eradication…."
"Oh! So funding is the issue. That's not especially rational, is it, Dr. Ulrich?"
Ressler can't believe this: the kid spits out words that could cost him everything. And the old man lets him. Ulrich grows gentler than Ressler has ever seen him. "Joseph," he says, almost singing. "Just tell me why you refuse it."
A look comes over Lovering's face: able to rationalize forever, when asked outright, he will not misrepresent. "Because my mother's a Christian Scientist. That's why." Lovering dashes from the lab, leaving Ulrich to nurse his victory. Ressler returns to experimental prep, but his heart is no longer in it. He lays out the first trial and organizes the notebook. Then he knocks off for the day. The lab is suddenly infected with labeled belief. The charm has temporarily fled the whole inheritance question.
Back at the barracks, with nothing to protect him from night's humidity except his lawn chair and tomato juice, Ressler involuntarily recalls a painful joke he himself helped propagate in grad school days: A Jew, a Catholic, and a Christian Scientist sit in the anteroom to Hell. The Catholic turns to the Jew and asks, "Why are you here?" The Jew replies, "Well, God help me, but I couldn't keep from nibbling ham now and then. Why are you here?" The Catholic answers, "I had a little trouble touching myself where I go to the bathroom." The two of them turn to the Christian Scientist. "And you? Why are you here?" The Christian Scientist replies firmly, "I'm not."
The joke incriminates him. Hypocrite: how did he fail to see in himself the same persuasion, the old blessed are those who have not seen?
VI
Cook's Tour
On August 20 I committed myself to leaving, putting together a portfolio of the day's restlessness. I began my travelogue in 1597: Dutch East India Company ships return to Europe with word of a remarkable voyage. Germ cell of the modern world, its commerce craze, engine of expansion. I added Bering's arrival in Alaska in 1741, precisely the moment — bizarre anachronism — when Bach unravels his Goldbergs. Another 173 years later, the Panama Canal's first week of business opens a short cut between worlds. The day of exploration seemed a cornucopia expressly for my use.
In fact, the date was nothing special. On any calendar page, exploration rolls out anniversaries on demand: take every location on the globe that produced a recorded first encounter and divide by 365. Each day approximates what it means to need to be forever someplace other than here. Faces pressed to the glass of cabs, a summer freight's lapsed, transfigured blast, autumn attic-rattling, the furious slam of screens in back-door disappearance. Departure was easy, commonplace, everyday.
I'd signed on for the full ride. August 20, after my shift was done and the foreign legion was just punching in, I showed up on the doorstep of the converted warehouse and buzzed to be let in. I'd discovered no more about Dr. Ressler in the interim. Harder to prove a thing's absence than its existence. But in the run of time, the evidence adds up. His work had clearly come to nothing. He had produced nothing of consequence that had entered the permanent record, at least the record I wasted weeks sifting.
His non-work began to infect mine. Life science made raids on events of the day, colored my choice of quotes. He and self-appointed sidekick Todd used my Question Board to settle running disputes — everything from that calculation about the degree of our isolation in deep space to "How far did Goebbels get with Katherine Anne Porter when they dated in the thirties?" They used the forum to communicate with each other, with me, and with a public that never wrote them, put it to work for everything from Todd's private joke about making the catch to Ressler's request for the name, lost to one of the rare failings of his memory, of the tendency of languages to become simpler — to drop inflectional cases and consolidate. I proudly produced, without revealing my footwork: A: Syncretism. The board became their private tin-can telephone, although I never saw Ressler inside the branch. He must have been by regularly, but either he calculated his visits to avoid my shift or he perfected invisibility in public.