Gradually Ressler ventures farther afield. Dan Woytowich has him over for a nervous evening. The group's classical geneticist, Woytowich has spent his professional life raising fish and plotting their susceptibility to disease against their number of stripes. Full of promise once, by all accounts. No one knows exactly what happened. Recently, alarmed by the advanced hour and suddenly aware that his generational studies have been all talk and no action, Woyty has married a grad student in English literature half his age, a woman both stripeless and disease-free. Despite the late discovery that he would even now like to father a real family, Woyty's only child to date is wife Renée's emerging dissertation.
Renée describes her project in detail, after the get-acquainted conversation falls into autism: "You know Ben Jonson? O Rare Ben Jonson?" Ressler nods before she starts singing "Drink to Me Only." "Someone once told Jonson that Shakespeare never blotted a line. Jonson replied, 'Would that he had blotted a thousand.'" Renée explains; Ressler drifts, loses the thread. Something to do with her determining exactly which thousand lines Jonson wanted Shakespeare to blot.
Woytowich is reluctant to talk shop. Stuart could learn endless classical genetics from the man; he slighted macroheredity in school, in the heat of molecular excitement. But Woyty just sits taciturn throughout the evening. When Ressler catches Dan looking at his watch, he apologizes for overstaying and gets up to go. "Oh, no," Woyty laughs anxiously. " Tain't that. Only… would you mind very much if we…?" He gestures embarrassedly at the color set, one of the first quarter million to grace an American home. "It's news time."
Ressler defers with pleasure. He watches attentively, not the new technology or today's current events, but the behavior of his colleague, a genuine habitue of headlines. Woyty sighs. "I'm absolutely dependent. Jesus; even quiz shows bind me for hours. But the news; God. I'm terrified of missing something. Ever since Khrushchev did his CBS interview___Christ Almighty. The news is the most gratifying thing life has to offer. Think of it; we can know within hours, things all over the globe actually happening now."
They watch in silence, the first comfortable moment all evening. The danger of the nightly You Are There. Partly developmental, like the soaps: today's police action is tomorrow's outbreak, so stay tuned. Only the stories change faster and more wildly than soaps. "Catch the broadcast about the Saigon stabbing of the Canadian armistice supervisor?" Woytowich asks during the commercial. "A real whodunit. But what happens next? Always the question. Catch Diem's visit, the great scenes of Dwight personally meeting the man at D.C. airport? Bloody hell, you know? Gets to be a problem. I mean, I could sit until the world ends before they give the wrap-up."
At the next break, fearing for the man's well-being, Ressler tries to change the topic. He describes his last twenty-four-hour shift manning the rate experiment, the isotope readings on his cultures. But the elder partner is unseducible. "Ain't that the kicker? They fail to tell you in Bio 110 just how much science amounts to jacking a knob every hour for three years and jotting it down in a journal. You ought to look into one of those portables. Pick one up on payments. Put it in your office. Go anywhere with one. Never have to miss an update."
"There's always the next day's newspapers, Dan."
"Not the same, reading about Yemen after the fact. Like listening to a tape of a ballgame. What difference does it make if Mays gets a clutch hit when the affair's a done deed? Give me live broadcast, the announcer muffing his words, the station disclaiming the views of third parties. Give me simultaneous report." That's it, the reason Woytowich has sunk into information dependence: if he hears an event while it's still going on, he has an infinitesimal chance to alter the outcome. Not to watch tonight's segment, even to entertain a junior researcher, is to commit a sin of omission. He's Horace Wells all over again, the man who, altruistically pursuing proper anesthetic dosages, discovered, instead, addiction and squalor.
Summer's almost gone, winter's coming on when K-53-C gets its first knock on the door. Given his utter anonymity, Ressler assumes some terrible mistake. It's the NSA, confusing him with some other Stuart Ressler of the same name, or Veep Dick Nixon on search-and-destroy committee work. What's he done recently to run afoul of the authorities? Growing radioactive microorganisms without a permit.
The visitor is Tooney Blake. Although they've worked in proximity all summer, the two men are still strangers. Blake is a solid biochemist who has taken up partition chromatography, a six-year-old technique that, given patience and precision, reveals the amino acid sequence in a protein. He has never voiced anything but irrefutable clarities at the Blue Sky sessions. Neither brilliant nor erratic, Blake is the sort of steady lexicographer Ressler will need to pull off any coup de grâce. Here Tooney stands, inexplicably in the doorway on the last Friday evening ever in August '57. He has his arm around an attractive woman in her mid-thirties. Ressler can only greet the couple warmly, as if they've been expected.
"You know my lovely wife Eva." Ressler wobbles his neck. "You've met," Blake insists. "Ulrich's. Stuart, you'll never believe this. We just discovered it ourselves, in fact. We live under the same damn roof."
Ressler is lost in the vistas of figurative speech. Eva explains, "You know, K-53-A? The other end of the triplex?"
Blake takes up the slack. "Luck of the draw, huh? So Evie and I found this here bottle___" He holds it up, as if the label might persuade the fellow to let them in.
Stuart pulls himself together. "I'm afraid I haven't bought a welcome mat yet, so you'll have to take my word for it." This the Blakes do, with easy style.
Within minutes, Tooney has the Summer Slumber Party on the player, watching in fascination as Eva does a wonderful one-step imitation of Olga, the plastic spindle ballerina. In no time, the two of them have done Stuart's week of dirty dishes, singing descant to those teenage death songs the whole while, even getting the boy to kick in on the choruses. They graduate to the Wagner excerpts. "Ah, the hero's motif," Tooney says. "Just the tune to welcome young geniuses to town." Ressler reads the text on his tennis shoes. Inspired by the musical Siegfried line, the Blakes crack open the Riesling. Tooney proposes a toast: "May your stay here be filled with significant insights."
Noticing the empty space in the living room where a sofa should be, Eva protests. "You poor boy. Have you been sitting on the floor all this time? We've an extra one, don't we, Toon?" Shamefaced at being caught with more sofas than her share. "Don't say anything! It's yours on permanent loan."
Pointless for him to protest. Something in Eva's extreme generosity toward a total stranger — pointless, pathetically trusting— moves him to accept. Before he knows what's happening, the three of them dash down the barrack row and begin moving furniture in the Blakes' parlor. "Shhh," they giggle. "Don't wake the kid." They spring the spare sofa, trundle it across the lawns of K-53 in the middle of the night, laughing hilariously and daring all Stadium Terrace to mistake them for sofa burglars.
As they lever the beast through his door, Ressler realizes he will be twenty-six in a few days, too old for discoveries of consequence. He has done nothing to advance the project, to locate the approach that will systematically decipher nucleic acid. The three of them, gasping for breath, position the sofa to fill up as much empty space as possible and then plunk themselves down on it, exhausted. A failure, he is forced back on the compromise of companionship.