With that, he excused himself; the machines were calling. He hoped I would drop by again. "He doesn't deserve it, but give this young man the benefit of the doubt." Ressler: if anything, more mysterious in person than in the elliptical accounts. The riddle the young scientist had once faced — how a four-letter chemical language could describe all life — was more opaque now than when it had sent him empty away. The only thing the visit told me was why Todd so urgently wanted to turn up this man.
By next morning I'd checked out Poe. I too wondered whether human ingenuity could construct an enigma that human ingenuity could not resolve. Yet the detective in me, a hardcover strain crossbred with hardy paperback perennial, was stumped by Ressler's ingenuity in displaying himself to us without revealing a thing. I rephrased Poe'S dictum: It may well be doubted if genetic ingenuity can construct an enigma that genetic ingenuity may not resolve. His genetic code, the gradual accretion of living molecular language, had created itself out of free association. Everything derived from it, all successive mutations, recombinations, crossings over— fish in the ocean, eels in the sea, a thousand Darwinian finches, every researcher, Todd and I, Ressler himself, all natural history were elaborate permutations on an original four-base message. The young scientist left in this gaunt body was himself a product of the code he'd been after, the code that couldn't keep itself hidden from itself.
I took his paradox apart from every direction. Against my policy of not repeating sources, I hit "The Gold Bug" twice over:
In the present case — indeed in all cases of secret writing — the first question regards the language of the cipher…. In general, there is no alternative but experiment (directed by probabilities) of every tongue known to him who attempts the solution, until the true one can be obtained.
There lay the rub; the language of Ressler's enigma was the genetic code, organic chemistry, well-understood forces. Ressler had known all that; the work of generations of whitecoats had identified the idiom the secret writing was written in. But there the man was, at the end of his working life, empty-handed, high and dry, alone at night in a dark room lit only by CRTs requiring as much attention as wetting infants.
The code he was after was not so much a message written in a language as all grammar itself. I felt that with my first good look at his wasted face, his intelligent eyes that resigned themselves to courteous elegance. The old vocabulary of research and exploration, the whole poetics of science still poured from the man's mouth in rolling, perfect paragraphs.
At work, the routine that had taken me into adulthood came up short. I did not want my life. I wanted another thing, an analogy. I wanted to read Poe, all Poe. I wanted to read science, the history of science. I wanted to be back with those two men, listening to the language of isolation they spoke to one another. Half a dozen sentences, and I was fixed. Was any grammar sufficiently strong to translate the inner grammar of another? Did anything in the cell, in the code itself, actually know the code? I needed to win this man's confidence, to ask him as much. To ask him how he had guessed I'd wanted, once, to be a dancer.
Todd had said to call him anytime. I did, in the middle of the afternoon a few days later. "Oh God, I forgot. I woke you."
"No, no," he lied groggily. "There's something I've been wanting to ask you forever."
"We answer anything."
"What is the origin of the phrase 'Make the catch'?" Half-conscious silliness: repeating the question, reproducing the round he pretended to ask about. Clear dalliance, an open invitation to come again, that evening if I wanted. I had passed the audition. I needed no further lure. I could sit in that soundproof control room behind the one-way glass, savoring the banter of people who understood the scary unlikelihood of speech. I laughed something back at Franklin; hard to say which of us led the flirtation walk. A step-ladder catch, second voice identical, only higher. He chases her until she catches him.
The Nightly News
Ressler accepts Botkin's standing invitation to eat with her. Food's gone by the boards too long. Over venison or Duck a l'Orange, they might even make headway on a coding angle. The elder woman's mind is first-rate; if her science isn't up to the minute, it's the fault of the discipline's runaway proliferation, not her ability to grasp essentials. He himself can't understand more than three of five articles, even in those journals devoted to his narrow specialty. He becomes a regular at her table, benefiting more than just nutritionally. Botkin too seems fond of the chance for conversation. Odd thing: talk's no good alone.
By day he frequents her office, the single place on campus providing that balance between attention and escape necessary to concentrate. Over decades, Botkin has perfected her digs. A heavy oak panel obscures the pea-green steam pipes, and lace curtains, white embroidery on white, meliorate the industrial frosted glass. University-issue khaki bookcases against one wall house journal indexes, meticulously aligned, going back into forties antiquity. Across from these shelves stands another case, a varnished turn-of-the-century hardwood masterpiece. It holds editions of Werfel, Mann, Musil, essays by Benjamin and Adorno, and other suspect tomes from the soft sciences. The spines alone qualify some as minor triumphs of decorative art. Ressler likes to heft these, examine the marbled paper. He is entranced, too, by other items on the shelf: molding Furtwängler platters older than he is, pressed, to his delight, on one side only. "So did this man collaborate?"
Botkin smiles sadly. "Half the NSF collaborated."
The lid of her centenarian rolltop desk, long stuck closed, renders the piece ornamental. Dr. Botkin now employs it only for stacking; piles of print, heaps of paper of all religious persuasions, welded into inseparable masses, ski down the desktop slope into further piles scattered about the floor. And yet, the room is meticulous, tidy. A Viennese overstuffed chair, faded but impeccable, flanges in ornate wings at the top; armrests flourish fruits and vines, and the stitchery on the back, though ghostly now, still shows the trace of a pastoral scene. The right armrest bears stains smelling of anisette, temporary storage spot for candy when the bone-handled phone demands answering. Botkin sits there for hours while Ressler lies flat out on a tooled Moroccan leather couch, as if for regression analysis. Botkin abstractly considers the skin on the back of her hand, which has gone slack and no longer snaps back when pinched. "And what is our lesson for today?"
Ressler, prostrate, grins at the ceiling. "The surface shape of the split helix. Its transcription to RNA. Energy considerations against assembling protein chains directly on the strand. The possibility of the peptide chain peeling from the RNA surface as it forms."
"If you insist," she sighs. But her imagination has come alive after a dormant winter. She once more reads voraciously, devising tests, learning, freeing herself from dead preconceptions, leaping for the first time since the war.
The room, curtained for minimum sunlight, smells of tea, rose water, hair oil, napthalene — nonspecific aromas of the past. Its scent encapsulates a forgotten ghetto — Danzig, perhaps, or Prague, though it would take a hopelessly sensitive nose to tell. Ressler can concentrate here. What's more, he can think out loud. Botkin has the intellectual chops to keep him honest. Something about the place makes it perfect for guided associating. Oriental richness, dark and full, despite a paucity of decorations. Only two ornaments grace the walls, two framed photographic prints, one of Mahler and one of the chemist Kekulé. The latter dreamt one night of a snake rolling its tail in its mouth, and woke with the structure of the benzene ring. The former composed, in already antiquated idiom, a staggeringly beautiful song cycle on the death of a child from scarlet fever, losing his own to the disease shortly thereafter. The two contemporaries hang side by side, a semblance of a shrine. Near them, mounted under glass, hangs a tiny, inexplicable object that could only be a gold filling.