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was troubled by Ester’s reminder.
    Next Tuesday was his night, and after such a Saturday night he would have to cancel unless he started his homework early. Ruefully he went into his study and returned to bed with a folio of paintings, drowsily leafing through the lithographs.
    Suddenly his attention was drawn to a familiar nude by Rubens, “Venus Reclining.” Cupid flitted above the sleeping female with his bow drawn, and the artist had captured a tension in the bowstring Ward had never noticed before. It was the direction of the arrow, really, which created the drama in the string. On the couch, Venus was only feigning sleep; he could tell from the expectant half-smile on her lips. She knew where Cupid was aiming his arrow, and the target was ready.
    “By golly,” Ward breathed, now fully awake, “Peter Paul Rubens was a pornographic painter.”
    Church bells awakened him in the morning. He rushed through breakfast to get to the lab quickly, then had to call a taxi because his car wouldn’t start.
    Ward chose laboratory over church on Sunday because he felt that working with protein molecules brought him closer to God than singing hymns off key. This Sunday’s work, to explain God’s ways to the Nobel Awards Committee, would be particularly sacred.
    Outside, a Sabbath quietness lay over the campus, the air was balmy, and a jacaranda tree bloomed beside his door. He felt communion with his microscope as he slid a slide of fragmented DNA under the focusing lens and gazed on the mulligan stew of life. He stroked the positive switch, watching the fragments come together, stop, come together, stop, like shy and inexperienced lovers.
    Remembering with pleasure Ruth’s idiosyncrasy of last night, he tapped out “La Cucaracha” on the key, making the elements dance toward a union. In rhythm, they circled to find each other, sugar to phosphate, cytosine to guanine, thymine to adenine. When the parts of the helix were almost in place, Ward held the third beat conventional for the rhumba.
    But the elements of the assembling molecule did not stop with the current.
    “Tarara BOOM de ray!”
    Guided only by inertia of rhythm, with the current on “off,” the elements leaped toward one another in a spontaneous, self-willed creation of DNA ladders.
    Ward was stunned. He shattered the nucleic molecules with a negative flow and re-ran the experiment. He had seen aright the first time. When the sides of the ladders were in close proximity, moving to a set rhythm, they leaped to interlock.
    Suddenly Ward knew what had happened on the slide, knew why, and knew there was no language by which his knowledge could be verified.
    The key was environment, and the rules were universal. Thymine and adenine loved each other with the passion of valence, and they coupled in a two-hydrogen bond of marriage to form the DNA, family for the cell, nation, which formed the body, civilization. All this was tender and true, but how did one convert sex appeal into a number and solve for sentiment in an equation? What was the prime factor, the ultimate unity, and what math could explain organic affinity?
    First, one created a symbolism combining the abstractions of mathematics with the metaphors of literature…
    Ward’s phone rang. Ruth had decoded the DNA, read “hamster,” and was ready to give him hell. He decided to head her off at the pass as he picked up the phone.
    “God speaking, Creator of Life.”
    “My God!” It was Ester and angry. “You parked your clunk in the drive and I couldn’t get my car into the garage until I called the service man for a new battery.”
    “I’m sorry, dear. It was stupid of me.”
    “Your stupidity is no excuse. You’re going to be punished. I’m modeling my new mini-nightgown before you tonight, and locking you out Tuesday.”
    She always berated him when she came in from a tryst as if she were projecting her guilt feelings onto him, so he had to plead a bit to placate her. Ten minutes after he