As I learned his story, I continued to steal his quotes for my own use. Even as we set in motion our own small act of code-breaking, I posted extracts from that Poe story, the one that marked for him the bewildering human propensity for metaphor. "Circumstances and a certain bias of mind," says the cryptographer of "The Gold Bug," a coded persona of his inventor, "have led me to take interest in such riddles, and it may well be doubted whether human ingenuity can construct an enigma of the kind that human ingenuity may not, by proper application, resolve." I posted this on August 21, the day after meeting Dr. Ressler for real. Although we had exchanged only a few paragraphs, my head still spun on his long, periodic sentences, the sense underneath.
I told Tuckwell I was going out that evening with a couple of friends who were in town. The old rot about half-truth being better than whole lies. Keith was so relieved at not having to throw our apartment open to a night of reminiscence that he didn't even ask who the friends were. He gave me a blank check for the evening. I had the warehouse address and a standing invitation. I needed only walk a few streets from the branch and satisfy my curiosity, answer my questions for once. The nondescript reddish-brown building was flanked by two sooty, brick, cliff walls, gullies where sunlight would not shine again until all buildings fell. It was fronted on the alley side by loading docks. On the street, story-length stone-trimmed windows filled with uncooperative darkness. From the outside, it was one of those mildewed, permanently For Let places, countless late-nineteenth-century brick rectangles that I no longer noticed after my second day in the city. I thought: They've lost the deed to this place. No one owns it. A forgotten tract squeezed between forgotten tracts, stuffed floor to ceiling with wooden files from a hundred years ago, papers slowly ammoniat-ing. Nothing could have been further from the truth. In bland buildings with concrete cornices, everything is decided.
I peeked inside the first-floor turret. I could see nothing through the smoky quartz and iron bars. In front of the main door, I scoured the buttons until I found the suitably corporate monogram MOL— Manhattan On-Line. "You can remember the name," Todd had told me over the phone, "because we're not in Manhattan and we're not on-line." I debated a last time and pressed the bell. After a second, a tinny transcription of Todd's voice came over the intercom. "Friend or foe?"
"Do I have a choice?" I heard either static or his laugh, followed by the magic buzz. I grabbed the door at the tone's order, and climbed the stairs in the half-dark. At the top of the first flight, following the quaintest layout imaginable, the stairs petered out and presented an accordion-grated service-elevator shaft, the only way higher. It violated all zoning ordinances. I pressed what passed for a summons button. Cables tensed like a surprised nest of bush-masters and a counterweight sluggishly unwound. Several seconds later, the elevator — little more than an open cage with forty-watt bulb strung through the ceiling — sallied down into sight.
The antiquated grate made a noise like an enraged myna. I took my life in my hands and entered. On the way up, I had to yank a cast-iron dial crank back and forth in its semicircle to keep the lurching car in ascent. Just as I was sure a cable was about to snap, a man's voice echoed down the shaft telling me to stop at the next landing. I eased the throttle and cruised to a halt. I'd entered the car from the north. The box's exit, however, lay to the east. To leave the deathtrap, I had to open a perpendicular grate, revealing a period-piece, dented, lead-alloy door with frosted chicken-wire glass — the non-windows once ubiquitous in office buildings. Todd's silhouette on the other side called out, "Ya gotta kick it." I did. The door swung open on a turn-of-the-century anthology of alcoves, now a functionless reception area, Manhattan On-Line being one of those businesses that never received. The dozen subdivided walls were of assorted glass, multicolored brick, and an afterthought of stucco.
"Ms. O'Deigh," Todd greeted me with a formality that might have been mock. He shook my hand as if we were execs meeting over power brunch. Every time out with this fellow was starting from scratch. "Terrific you've come. I've got so much to show you." Absolutely unreadable. He led us down the hall to a restraining door. He punched a code into the electronic lock, and we entered a blazing fluorescence reminiscent of fifties science fiction. Behind massive plate safety glass, several thousand square feet of room stood in the pallid postindustrial shimmer of night shift. The space, once tall, was now wedged between false floor and drop ceiling. The room shone as bright as daylight but with minute, maddening, near-imperceptible flickers.
Machines took hold in every niche of the place, devices in no way mechanical-looking. Beautiful expanses of metal and plastic, each enclosed in seductively homogeneous chitin of earth tones and ochers, formed a ring around the room as secret and monolithic as Stonehenge. Todd conducted a Grand Tour, mapping the layout. The world outside this nineteenth-century masonry held no sway here, so self-defining was this fluorescent, windowless aura. Todd took me to a console, where he issued a command to a keyboard, the rites of an inner circle closed to the uninitiated.
"Don't be taken in by the bells and whistles. We're engaged here in one of the most tediously repetitive routines known to man. The assembly line of the digital info set." He punched a few more acronyms into his CRT and hit ENTER. Behind us, discharging pneumatic libido, a punched-card reader came to life. Todd removed a rubber band from a card deck and dropped the packet in the hopper. "Antique input method," he apologized. The device sucked up the instructions, spat them out, and fell into cogitative silence.
I tried to study his face without staring. He was different on his own turf, but I couldn't say how. His melodic voice showed no surprise at my being here. "I get in early every evening. Kick these beasts around until two, three a.m. An hour for lunch." He smiled faintly. "Procedure for keeping the wheels grinding is absolutely axiomatic. Let me show you." He tapped a pen-and-ink flowchart taped to the side of a nearby cabinet. "We go in this funnel here. We follow these arrows. Human intervention at the diamonds. We get pissed out here at the bottom. Then it's time to go home." He meditated on the flow of control. He pointed at a spot on the chart and said, "You are Here."
He showed me the storage devices — waist-high spindles with removable packs resembling layer cakes under cover. "These boys will take an entire thirty-volume encyclopedia each. I hate to use the word 'gigabyte' in mixed company, but there seems no way around it." He showed me the industrial printer, screaming under its sound hood. He opened the card cage of the CPU. "When this little electroluminescent display flashes 'Help me, I'm melting,' you're in for a long night." He introduced me to a dozen other devices whose functions I instantly lost. Decollators; sequencers. Like one of those five-language bus travelogues through Rome— never quite sure where the guide's English leaves off and his German begins.
When Todd at last fell quiet I noticed the hum of the metal, hard at work on calculations that never ruffled the silky surface. Constant, low-level drone permeated the room. Noticing, he dropped to his knees and spread supplicant-style across the floor. He put his ear to the acoustical tile and tugged on my pant leg for me to do the same. Amazed at myself, I crawled down with him and did the Native American trick of listening to the ground. Sound rushed into my ear, a rumbling chorus somewhere between Hoist's Planets and Aristophanes' Frogs. He gestured me to lift my head. "Know what they're humming? 'Wake up, wake up, wake up you— Get up, get up, get up, get out of….' Synthetically, of course."