Grisha spent three hours with Vitya, telling him about his work. Vitya listened rather listlessly at first, but when he heard the words “universal language,” he sat up and took notice.
“What do you mean by that?” Vitya said. Grisha gave him an answer that amounted to a whole lecture on the subject: from Darwin to Mendel to Pasteur to Mechnikov to Koltsov, Timofeyev-Resovsky, and Morgan. He finished with Watson and Crick. “The double helix of the DNA is the alphabet on which the entire history of the world is written. And it’s not only a collection of genes, but a program for molecular computers of the living cell.”
“Fascinating,” Vitya said, nodding. “I’ve never thought about that. You’re saying that this chemical molecule, as you call it, can be a program?”
Grisha opened the battered briefcase of his late grandfather, a famous doctor, with a silver clasp that read “Für liebe Isaak Lieber,” and, with a mysterious expression, took a book out of it. Vitya looked at the book attentively. Grisha’s expression was the same one he had worn fifteen years ago when he gave Vitya Hausdorff’s Set Theory, which changed the course of his life. The book he was holding now was dog-eared, rather small, and was called What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell. The author’s name on the cover he didn’t read until the next morning, after he had read the whole book from start to finish: Schrödinger.
The simple, mundane law of duplexity, by which similar events occur twice in succession—first roughly, approximately, and next, definitively—familiar to all observant people, especially women, was unknown to Vitya. For the second time in his life, Grisha was the bearer of news of such magnitude it could alter Vitya’s fate. This little book, though unprepossessing in appearance, gripped Vitya and held him fast. That night, his usual insomnia was transformed from tormenting bondage into complete bliss. His clear head delighted in its activity. It was as though a veil had fallen from his vision, and the world was transfigured, illuminated by a thought that was absolutely novel to him: mathematics, the highest stage of human reason, did not exist separately from the rest of the world, but was itself an auxiliary science, a part of a whole, a part of a more general and higher stage. A part of what, though? The word “Creation,” which slipped off Grisha’s tongue so easily, was not a notion that Vitya was conversant with, and Vitya felt a combination of envy, desire, and haste. He wanted to enter this world which only the day before he had had no inkling of, and no interest in discovering. The vestiges of his depression lifted, as though it had never been.
The next morning, Vitya set out for the Lenin Library and started reviewing all the material about those things of which he had no inkling. Quantum mechanics and calculus posed no problem; their language of description was self-evident. With chemistry and biology he was on shaky ground—he had to begin with the high-school textbooks. Three days later he was delving into the college-level textbooks. This was far more interesting stuff. Like most mathematicians, he took a rather dim view of physics. Biology he didn’t consider to be a science at all; rather, he saw it as a refuse heap of facts. It was all like unplowed land, experiments performed higgledy-piggledy, uncoordinated data that demonstrated the researchers’ inability to manage and process the results it yielded. On top of all this, there was the complete absence of a mathematical foundation. Chemistry, about which he had the vaguest notions of all, seemed to him a somewhat more rigorous science than biology.
Schrödinger looked at this plethora of disparate facts and decided that Darwin’s theory of evolution was the only structure capable of maintaining and organizing this avalanche of information. Most important, he noted that the phenomena connected to space and time, which physicists observe, also apply to living organisms. Thanks to Schrödinger’s book, Vitya discovered that mathematics is not the highest achievement of human reason, but only an instrument for grasping the workings of the world, a world that is far greater than mathematics. This was a revelation to him.
From that point on, Vitya started to revive. Within the space of three months, he lost ten kilograms. He spent every day in the library, from the time the doors opened to when they closed again, in a state of eager impatience. At a certain moment, he realized that his English, adequate for reading articles on mathematics, was completely insufficient for reading articles on biology. He called Nora to ask her whether she could help him study English, as she used to help him in Russian. Nora refused, but recommended a good teacher she knew, whose rates were reasonable. Vitya had no money at all at this time; but he didn’t really need it, either. Meals were always on the table, ready for him. The library was ten minutes away by foot, and the one ruble he needed for a lunch snack with tea at the library he took from his mother’s wallet, with no feeling of compunction whatsoever. It was only through conversations with Nora that he came to understand that money might come in handy. It remained unclear, however, how he would get it. Certainly not by teaching mathematics: his inability to communicate with other human beings rendered that impossible. He asked Nora, “How does one earn money?” She just laughed and said she’d like to know the answer to that question, too. Their relations had solidified with time. Vitya even graced her with his presence for an overnight stay a few times; they remained an unconventional family.
To give this out-of-the-ordinary family its due, the idea of alimony never entered the minds of either one partner or the other. Vitya had to scrap the English lessons because of financial insolvency, but he began to study independently, with the help of an old English textbook that had been languishing on Nora’s bookshelf since the time when Genrikh had still lived with his first family. This was a slim volume published before the war for rapid acquisition of “basic” English—Step by Step, by Ivy Litvinov.
Three months after Grisha’s visit, Vitya called him. They met. Vitya returned to him Schrödinger, about which he had a number of questions. Grisha answered them to the best of his ability. But—and it was essential to keep this in mind, he told Vitya—the book was published in 1943, the year they were born. Science had advanced so much since then that Schrödinger himself was no longer as relevant as he had once been.
Grisha told him fascinating things about the cell membranes he had been studying for several years. He shared with Vitya his brilliant (in his own estimation) idea that the future generation of computers would be quantum computers—maybe not tomorrow, but in fifty years—and that this was the main current in scientific development. Vitya understood everything almost intuitively, and began asking such sophisticated questions that Grisha felt a bit flustered: Vitya was able to grasp the essence of matters that it had taken Grisha five years to get to the bottom of. But Grisha was a creature of preternatural nobility, and, shrugging off the petty jealousy that stirred in the depths of his soul, he invited Vitya to have a conversation with the head of the laboratory a week later. The conversation lasted for four hours, and at the end of it, Vitya had been offered a staff position. True, it was the lowliest position in the laboratory—senior lab assistant—but it came with special privileges for him. He wasn’t required to come in to work, and he would have a weekly meeting with the head of the lab to discuss concrete problems assigned to him. He was now occupied with building a model of a living cell as a computer. It was connected to what he knew best of all—computer programming.
Vitya’s trained mind worked in overdrive, and the pleasure his work gave him spurred him on still more. He was completely consumed by his task, and had no interest in any events or processes that didn’t feed the fires of his devotion. He simply didn’t notice them. He attentively followed the computer revolution that was advancing day by day before his eyes, and understood the degree to which the creation of a computer model of the living cell depended on the development of the general idea of the computer and on new technologies, and that the idea of a cell computer was a function of technological progress.