Blacklisted Heroes -- Asimov's Ranger; Del Rey's Badge; Watson's Helix

I think everybody is pretty familiar with the part in cop movies where the police chief tells the investigators, "You're off the case!"

James D. Watson has a similar kind of story in his book The Double Helix, the account of Watson's work with his colleague, Francis Crick, to discern the structure of deoxyribose nucleic acid, or DNA.

Nowadays DNA is just as familiar to everybody as cop movies are. DNA, like the Theory of Relativity, has become one of those ubiquitous scientific ideas. Everybody knows the double helix. Everybody knows that our genes make up who we are -- to some degree, at least. And everybody knows that our genes are made up of DNA.

But when Watson and Crick were working to discern what the structure of DNA was, many, if not most, scientists didn't even think DNA was very fundamental at all. Instead, scientists were trying to work out some kind of theory of protein as a basic molecule, in and of itself, instead of as something which DNA creates.

James Watson was a rather level-headed guy. But, according to Watson, Crick was a bit over the top on occasion. He had a wild, loud laugh, and his voice could be heard all over the Cavendish Laboratory of King's College, Cambridge, where he and Watson worked. The head of the Cavendish Laboratory, Sir Lawrence Bragg, himself noted for work in the revolutionary field of x-ray crystallography, often dreaded the appearance of Francis Crick, as it generally meant an environment so packed with speech that nobody else could hear themselves think.

Watson and Crick, about halfway along the path of their researches into the structure of DNA, went a bit over the top, trying to convince a couple scientists, whom I'll talk about in just a moment, that Watson and Crick finally had the right idea regarding the structure of DNA. They were proven embarrassingly wrong.

Bragg cut both Watson and Crick out of DNA research. The two scientists already had research projects they were supposed to be working on, anyway. The DNA research had simply snowballed into something much larger. And Bragg figured it was time to melt that snowball. But Watson continued to work, a bit covertly, on the structure of DNA.

Watson's book The Double Helix was a best seller. I feel like it was a best seller simply because of the subject. DNA is one of the hottest topics in science. But Watson also wrote the book with a lot of feeling and style. The way he describes the interactions he has with scientists, artists, and aristocrats in Europe and America is really filled with conflict, intense personalities, and lively situations.

But at the bottom of the story is, really, the mystery of DNA. This mystery could, I feel, be presented as a detective story. I'm sure others have said that before about this book. But I found the story interesting because it actually related to two other mystery stories I've read over the past few months.

One of those stories is Badge of Infamy, by Lester Del Rey. I read this story in September. I don't remember all the details of the story. And I'll talk about it in a moment. But the story of The Double Helix, written in 1968, though it was about the events of 1951 to 1953, has a lot in common with Lester Del Rey's novel, which was written in 1957 -- and is about events taking place 200 or so years in the future.

But the other story The Double Helix seems to relate pretty darn well to, and which I read only a few days ago, is David Starr, Space Ranger, by Isaac Asimov. Again, this story was written in the year 1952 -- so, right about at the midway point of Watson and Crick's efforts.

David Starr, Space Ranger purports to be a mystery. There is some kind of mystery, even though I don't think it's very well executed. For Asimov, this is kind of a surprise, considering that he writes mystery stories quite well. But I don't think this is one of his more popular books. In fact, he wrote it under the name Paul French. Anyhow, the fact that the mystery doesn't work very well doesn't really wreck the parts of the story that are good.

However, there is another strange element to this story. I noticed this before I'd read The Double Helix, actually. It was like Asimov, in David Starr, wasn't just trying to write a mystery story. It was like he was trying to write a hard-boiled pulp novel. As I read the beginning of the story, I had a strange feeling that I was reading something that was actually trying to sound like Lester Del Rey. Though -- I've only read Badge of Infamy. So I really can't make a solid judgment on what Del Rey's style really is.

Asimov's story doesn't stick to the pulp element, though. It wavers in and out. There are other themes which I don't think I'm very accustomed to seeing in Asimov. At one point, David Starr receives the name "Space Ranger" from a group of aliens. The scene is so comic-booky that one can almost imagine everything happening in frames, with dialogue bubbles. And later on, there are scenes where David Starr place a phantom-like alien character with a spookiness one might expect from Tales from the Crypt.

All these elements together make for a kind of uneven narrative, in my opinion. But taken as separate elements, they are enjoyable.

David Starr, Space Ranger is the story of a young investigator for the Council of Science, a kind of agency that supervises the affairs of the entire universe. David Starr is the son of Lawrence Starr, a scientists who was killed by space pirates while David was only a little boy.

Starr has just graduated from the Academy of the Council of Science. He is going to celebrate at a new restaurant in International City with one of his mentors, Dr. Augustus Henree. But while Starr is waiting for Dr. Henree, he sees one of the other patrons of the restaurant up and die from poisoned food.

Eventually Dr. Henree arrives and helps Starr see to the dead man. Starr and Henree go back to the Council of Science headquarters and talk about matters. Earth can no longer grow enough food to support the five billion (!) people who now live on the planet. So Mars is the main source for Earth's food.

But somebody on Mars is tampering with the food supply going to Earth. Nobody can figure out who's doing it, or why. The poisonings are all small and they all appear to be random.

Starr goes to Mars to do some undercover investigation. He goes to the Farm Employment office to get a job as a farmhand. While he's there he meets a guy named Bigman. Bigman is a human who's lived all his life on Mars. He used to work on a farm for a guy named Makian, one of the biggest farm owners, and hence one of the richest men, on Mars.

But Bigman caught Makian and his stooges sneaking out to do some shady business one night. He didn't keep his mouth shut about what he saw. So he was kicked off the farm. He was also blacklisted from working at any farm on Mars.

Starr's chances don't look much better for getting a job. Earth men don't have an easy time finding approval in any aspect of Mars life. And as Starr is preparing to leave the employment office, Makian and his goons head into the office. They see Bigman and try to start up some trouble with him. But Starr gets in the way.

Starr has, it seems, a kind of super-human strength and reflex power. It doesn't seem to be well-explained in the book. But it does seem to be part of some overall mystery regarding Starr's childhood. It seems like, in the pirate invasion that killed Starr's father, Starr himself may have been exposed to some kind of radiation that made him super-strong.

This is yet another comic book or super-hero motif in the book that I don't think I've found in anything else Asimov has done.

Starr, knocking down a guy named Griswold, one of Makian's best men, gets accepted to work on Makian's farm. He says he'll go if he can bring Bigman along. So they all head out to Makian's car -- where Starr and Bigman are promptly clubbed on the heads.

Starr wakes up a while later in a room that serves as a prison on Makian's farm. Starr makes up some story about wanting to work on a farm because he wants to investigate the poisoning of the food from Mars. He says that he had a sister who was killed by poisoned food. Makian and his henchmen seem to be okay with this explanation. So they let him work with Bigman -- in the kitchen, serving the "real" farmers their meals every day.

In the meantime, Starr makes friends with an agronomist on the farm. The agronomist, or farming scientist, is named Benson. Benson is pretty powerful on the farm, since food has to be well cared for to grow at all on Mars. Benson even confides in Starr that he believes there are actual aliens, non-human Martians, living underground. He says that perhaps the underground Martians are poisoning the food as it grows.

One day, Starr is serving Makian and his henchmen their dinner. Griswold tries again to start up a fight. Starr handily beats Griswold. Makian and his second in command, Hennes, seem to approve of Starr's ability to handle himself in dangerous situations. They recommend that Starr go out with some of the farmers the next day for a "checkup" run The "checkup" runs are trips out to the farms of Mars.

The humans on Mars all live inside of gigantic bubbles. But -- I think -- the actual farms are outside, in the fields of Mars. The farms are all encased in small, glass boxes. But Mars is so constantly subject to windstorms that the glass boxes constantly stand a chance of breaking or cracking. So the farmers often have to go out and check on these boxes and fix them.

Starr agrees to go out on a "checkup" run. Bigman finds a way to sneak onto Starr's crew. Griswold is still playing tricks on Starr. He gives Starr a car without any extra ballast. This is the other thing about Mars. Inside the bubbles, the gravity is made to match the gravity of earth. But outside the bubbles, the gravity is Mars gravity. So things are much lighter. And since Starr's vehicle doesn't have any ballast, it is extra light, and it reacts violently to any bumps or swerves in the road.

Starr almost dies. When Starr manages to get his car stopped, Griswold blames Starr for bad driving. But Bigman sees what Griswold has done. He calls Griswold on it. Griswold says that if Starr has a problem with it, he can fight. But everybody, in the atmosphere of Mars, is wearing oxygen masks. So Griswold and Starr take off their oxygen masks and have a breathless fight.

Starr and Griswold are fighting near a gigantic gorge. Griswold tries to maneuver Starr near the gorge, so he can throw Starr down to his death. But instead, disoriented by his own lack of oxygen, he falls off into the gorge himself.

The farmers all approve of Starr now. But now Benson asks Starr to work for him. Starr starts doing chemical analysis of vegetation to see if he can find any poison. The work is getting nowhere. He never finds anything.

Bigman has finally gotten his working papers back. He is no longer blacklisted, and he has no desire to work for Makian's farm any more. So he's leaving. He comes to tell Starr goodbye. But while he's there he finds out that Starr is working undercover for the Council of Science. Bigman is pretty impressed. Starr gives Bigman a task -- to retrieve some documents for Starr, some maps of Mars, from the Library of the Council of Science in a nearby Martian town.

Bigman does this. Starr and Bigman meet later on, outside the dome. Starr reveals that he's going down the gorge. Starr tells Bigman about Benson's statement that there could be non-human Martians living underground. Starr's going to check it out. To repel down the gorge, he uses a repelling cable that hooks into rock walls using an invisible force-field kind of grappling hook.

Bigman leaves. Starr heads down into the gorge. But he only gets a certain way down into the gorge before the top closes over him. Not only does the top close over him, but some invisible force presses down on his body, kind of crumpling Starr up into a fetal position. In this position, Starr passes out.

When Starr wakes up, he finds himself in a small room. There are two aliens in the room with him. But he can't see them. They speak with him telepathically and tell him that they are non-material. They are thought-forms. They have no desire to interfere with humanity. But, when they saw Starr coming down into the gorge, they thought it might be interesting to run a few tests on him.

The aliens see that Starr has journeyed a bit through space, and that he works as some kind of law enforcement official. So they, not really understanding proper names very well, call him "Space Ranger." Starr likes the name. He thinks he'll keep it.

The aliens believe that Starr's race can develop itself into highly evolved thought-beings eventually. And so they will let the humans alone to develop in peace.

However, the thought-form aliens also have the ability to transmute matter into anything, at will. The thought-form aliens give Starr a gift, a strip of gauze which can be worn over the eyes, but then spreads a kind of cloaking device all over the body. The cloaking device scrambles some kind of electromagnetic waves around the person. This not only creates a minor kind of force field shield around the person, but also conceals the person's identity in a kind of jumbly haze.

Starr is floated back up to ground level and allowed to go back to the dome. But as he's headed back to the dome, he's caught in one of Mars' sinister, murderous sandstorms. Starr almost dies in the storm before he recalls the gauze shield the thought-form aliens have given him. Starr puts the gauze shield over his eyes. Soon the force field is protecting his whole body.

Starr arrives back at the dome, a bit worse for the wear, and finds out he's been gone for two whole days. Makian and Hennes suspect that Starr's been plotting something against them. So they imprison Starr in his room. Starr, in bad shape from the storm, needs a bit of medical help. So he's given that, as well as a bath.

Later on, Benson comes in and shows Starr a gun he's been using, ostensibly to collect samples from shipments of Mars food. Benson seems terribly worried, and he tips Starr off that there's probably going to be a much bigger attack on earth's food supply within thirty-six hours.

Starr is again attacked by one of Makian's henchmen. This time, however, Makian gets a number of men on Starr, and Starr is subdued -- in fact, he's almost strangled to death! But now another member of the Council of Science arrives on the scene, led to Starr's prison by Bigman. This member of the Council grants Starr his freedom.

The member of the Council is something like a judge. He is going to preside over something like a meeting with Makian to figure out how to stop all this poisoning. Nobody yet knows what's causing it.

But Starr is now pretty assured that Makian's second-in-command, Hennes, is involved somehow with the poisonings. I think Hennes motivation, described earlier in the book, is that, as the poisonings, which were never very large scale, get more and more notoriety in the press, Martian farms get sold off by people who don't think they'll be able to make money off them anymore.

In this way, I think, Hennes reasons, Makian will get all these lands at a very cheap price. Then he can stop the poisonings. Martian food can resume being sold. And Makian -- and Hennes with him -- can become richer than ever.

So Starr appears before Hennes under the guise the aliens have given him: "Space Ranger." He plays some kind of haunted house ghost kind of game against Hennes. Hennes really does end up being kind of freaked out. Starr manages to get a set of keys to the safe from Hennes' room. Starr then goes to the safe, which is -- I don't know -- somewhere else. He finds -- don't ask me why or how -- Benson's sample-gun inside.

The next day there's a big trial, at which Starr doesn't show up, but which the "Space Ranger" attends. Starr has already figured out that Benson, at Hennes' request, has been spreading the poison into selected batches of food by the use of the sampling gun. He gives all the details of how this was done. Hennes eventually confesses to the whole thing.

Later on Bigman, who was also at the trial, says that he knew the whole time that Starr was the "Space Ranger." It had to do with Starr's space boots. On Mars, space boots are very individual things. Most people choose bright colors and odd patterns. But Starrs have always just been white and black. And so were the "Space Ranger's" boots, even thought Bigman could barely see them behind the cloud.

Starr says he is getting ready to head out on more adventures. Bigman would like to go with him. So Starr and Bigman decide to head out on more adventures together. And the book ends with a silly kind of "Three Musketeers" catch-line.

Now, I can't remember the names or plots from Del Rey's novel Badge of Infamy, but I just wanted to get some of the details down here, so it could be compared with Asimov's book.

In Badge of Infamy, the main character is a doctor who's been blacklisted. This is the future, about 200 years from now. Labor unions basically control the world. If you belong to a labor union, you cannot practice the labor if you are not in a union-sanctioned area for practice. And if you do practice, you are blacklisted from your profession for the rest of your life. I think you may even be subject to corporal punishment.

So the story begins with a doctor who's been blacklisted for saving somebody's life by performing on the spot surgery outside of a union-sanctioned hospital. The doctor not only can't get a job as a doctor: he can't get a job at all. When you're blacklisted, your eventual fate is to starve to death.

But the doctor is "lucky" enough to have one of the people in the flophouse he's in die in the bed next to his. The doctor has tried to help him medically in small ways, I think. So the man gives the doctor his ticket to Mars. The man was thinking he'd be able to work on the farms of Mars. He'd come from there before, and he was just getting ready to go back. But he'd suddenly been stricken with the illness that then killed him.

So the doctor goes to Mars. But he goes on a flight on which is also his ex-wife or ex-fiancee. The ex-wife now hates the doctor. She looks at him as a traitor, since he practiced medicine to save a man's life in a non-sanctioned area.

On Mars, someone lets some thugs know who the doctor really is. They all beat him up. He passes out, but is picked up by a farmer who takes the doctor out to his farming village. The farmer says that he hates the blacklisting rules of earth's union-driven society. He does whatever he can to help people who have fallen victim to it.

But the farmer has another motive for helping the doctor. The people of the farmer's community all seem to be dying of the same disease. It's a virus or a bacteria or something. But people can't figure out what's causing it or how to stop it. The farmer is hoping that the doctor, who was, before he'd been blacklisted, one of the greatest doctors on Earth, can stop the community from dying out. The farmer also suspects the illness is a Mars-wide epidemic. So if the doctor can help, he'll probably be helping everybody on Mars.

There are a number of dangerous scenes that follow. The doctor gets caught, kind of reconciles with the ex-wife, goes up into space for punishment, and is helped, by his ex-wife, to escape the punishment and return secretly to Mars.

The doctor and the ex-wife now both start working on a solution to the problem of the Mars virus. They don't know exactly what will stop it. The doctor and ex-wife are somewhat reconciled. But they still aren't on very good terms with each other. Eventually they seem to figure out the solution to the problem. But while they are figuring out a solution to the problem, a big revolution is starting on Mars, which is revolting against being ruled by Earth.

The big Martian revolt is stopped, and the cure for the virus is presented to people. The cure for the virus is a Martian-native weed called Bracky-weed. You have to smoke it. So anybody who has this virus just has to smoke Bracky-weed for the rest of their lives, and they'll be fine.

Regardless of the fact that the ending to this story seems to be prescient of the uses of medicinal marijuana, it also has some linguistic commonality with James D. Watson's story of The Double Helix. In Watson's story, Watson was, as I said above, told that he could no longer work on discerning the structure of DNA with Francis Crick. Watson and Crick were "off the case," as a police chief might say. And they had to go back to more normal researches.

But Watson's more normal research was studying RNA patterns in Tobacco Mosaic Virus (TMV). And, it appears to me, if Watson hadn't been made to step away from being so focused on DNA -- if he hadn't had to look at TMV, he wouldn't have been able to look at the DNA problem from a distance, with the perspective he needed actually to be able to solve the problem.

The basic story of The Double Helix involves five people: James D. Watson, Francis Crick, Linus Pauling, Maurice Wilkins, and Rosalind Franklin. Watson and Crick did their research at King's College, Cambridge. Wilkins and Franklin did theirs at King's College, London. And Pauling did his at Cal Tech, in the United States.

Pauling was already famous for his theories. He was about fifty years old, and he had even worked, I believe, on the Los Alamos project for constructing the atomic bomb. As the book opens, Pauling announces his discovery, which he came upon by the use of atomic models he'd built, of the a-helix of DNA. This was a pretty big discovery.

Watson himself hadn't been too interested in DNA to begin with. He was a biologist from Chicago, and he even classifies himself as a "birdwatcher." He then went to Copenhagen to study the process of multiplication in bacterial viruses. The professor under whom he studied was Herman Kalckar.

Watson needed more training in chemistry to really understand the proceses. And, as part of his training, he was sent by Kalckar's friend Luria to a conference in Naples. At this conference, Watson heard a lecture by Maurice Wilkins on x-ray crystallography. X-ray crystallography, practiced on crystallized portions of DNA, were helping to indicate the shape of DNA.

Pauling had determined the shaped of DNA by working with physical models. But Wilkins could do it with precise machinery. This seemed to be quite exciting to Watson. Watson tried to talk with Wilkins about it. But Wilkins didn't seem to interested.

Watson, at the time, had his sister, Elizabeth, with him. Wilkins seemed to be attracted to Elizabeth. Watson thought he could use Elizabeth to get Wilkins more interested in DNA. But Wilkins was still rather glum and ineffectual.

It turns out that Wilkins was glum and ineffectual because of the person he was working with at King's College, London: Rosalind Franklin. Franklin was most likely the best x-ray crystallographer in the world. And she was only getting better. She had the best techniques for taking x-ray diffraction photographs.

But Franklin seemed to be a bitterly misguided feminist, in Watson's opinion. She was so determined to have an equal place with the men around her, that she fought violently against everything the men said to her.

It was really hard for Wilkins to get any work done with Franklin. Franklin was almost abusive toward Wilkins, who was a rather meek man. But Wilkins also couldn't fire Franklin. She was the best x-ray diffraction photographer in the world. So he was terribly glum, not really motivated to do any work at all.

Watson gave up on Wilkins. But he wondered if he could go somewhere else to work on figuring out the structure of DNA by using x-ray diffraction photography. He found another laboratory, the Cavendish Laboratory, in King's College, Cambridge.

But Watson was still doing research up in Copenhagen. He couldn't just up and leave from there. But suddenly Watson's professor, Kalckar, ended up plunging into a marriage situation that was likely to end up in a divorce. Kalckar basically told Watson there wouldn't be much research over the next year. Watson was free to do what he wanted.

So Watson wrote to Sir Lawrence Bragg, who ran the Cavendish Laboratory, as well as Max Perutz and John Kendrew, who were working more closely with the x-ray photography machine. The men welcomed Watson down to Cambridge. And Watson left. Watson had a hard time finding a place. But he ended up being invited to live in an apartment in the basement of John and Elizabeth Kendrew's residence. Watson stayed there for a year.

At King's College, Watson met Francis Crick. Crick was by this time known as a kind of genius who could help everybody else see their own ideas through, and could always produce brilliant help, even solutions, for other people's problems, but had yet to make a brilliant breakthrough of his own.

Crick was thirty-five. He'd served as a scientist in London during the war. But after the war, he was kind of left out in the cold. He'd tried in a few different places to get his bearings, so that he could finally make a career for himself out of science. But he was never able to do it.

Finally, thanks to the goodness of his friends, Crick ended up at King's College, studying the effects of salt-water solutions on the compression of hemoglobin proteins. This, at the time, was an extremely important question in pre-DNA biology.

Crick was hardened by his life. But he didn't let it show, in general. He had a loud, boisterous laugh, and he could talk a mile a minute, for miles and miles and minutes and minutes. He also loved girls. Girls, in these days, in Cambridge, were called "popsies." And Crick's wife Odile would (surpisingly) find Crick's discussion of the beauties of these "popsies" quite amusing.

So would Watson. In fact, Watson really loved Crick's personality. And he'd have dinner with Crick and Odile at their house, known as the "Green Door" (from a Strindberg play, I guess), all the time. Watson said that he wouldn't ever want to leave Cambridge, simply based on the entertainment provided there by Crick's personality.

But a lot of other people, including the administrator of the laboratory, Sir Lawrence Bragg, had a really hard time dealing with Crick's personality, especially his loudness and boisterousness.

Crick and Watson shared an interest in DNA. They began discussing the difficulties of the problem, and the promises of its solution. They both felt that simplicity was key. Scientists knew at this point in time that DNA was composed of a sugar, a phosphate, and a base. The base was either purine (adenine or guanine) or pyrimidine (cytosine or thymine) -- the A, G, C, and T now familiar to us all.

It also seemed pretty likely that the sugar and phosphate together formed a kind of backbone for the DNA. This backbone probably had a regular pattern.

Linus Pauling, as I said above, had recently made another great contribution to science by modeling the a-helix of DNA. This showed that DNA coiled about. It didn't solve all the difficulties of the structure of DNA. There had to be more to DNA than just the first coil -- I think because the problem of replication wasn't solved with just one coil. But I'm probably wrong about that.

Anyhow, Crick and Watson knew that the really important discovery would be the one that could take Pauling's a-helix discovery and add the missing pieces -- whether they be additional helices or something else.

Crick and Watson felt like the best way to do this would be a double-attack. First, Crick and Watson would try to beat Pauling at his own game: they'd build three-dimensional models, like Pauling had. Second, they'd use x-ray diffraction photography, which Pauling didn't use.

But it turned out, after all, that nobody would really work on x-ray photography for Crick and Watson at Cavendish. So Crick and Watson went back to Maurice Wilkins, who was already, through Rosy Franklin, working on x-ray diffraction photography of DNA. Crick already had the advantage of having worked with Wilkins in the past.

But when Crick and Watson got to Wilkins, he was in a bad mental state. Franklin was trying to convince Wilkins not to do any more DNA photography. Franklin had her own researches, now, and she wasn't even talking to Wilkins about them. Franklin was completely impossible to work with, it seemed. And Wilkins was just trying to find some way to get rid of her. In the meantime, Wilkins wasn't getting anything done at all, and he didn't seem interested in getting anything done.

To make matters worse, Crick suddenly became distracted by a terrible argument, which almost became a scandal, between himself and Sir Lawrence Bragg. Crick accused Bragg of stealing an idea that Crick had recently been talking about. Bragg insisted that he would never have done such a thing. And he would not have done such a thing. The senior scientists helped patch up matters for Crick. But Crick was definitely seeming to wear out his welcome with Bragg.

A while later, Watson went to a lecture by Franklin. Franklin's lecture, though cautious and tentative -- while also intending to take the significance out of the recent discoveries of men like Pauling -- did give Watson a bit more insight into the chemical context (if I can use such a term) of DNA. However, Watson still hadn't done much work to improve his knowledge of micro-biological chemistry, so that even the stuff he did understood kind of drifted away from him before he could completely grasp it.

Watson tried to speak with Franklin after the lecture, but she was completely unapproachable.

Watson went back to Crick with the information he'd gotten from Franklin's lecture. The only problem was, Watson, in his usual easy-going style, didn't take any manual notes on the lecture. He just listened and soaked in what he could. As a result of this, he got the water component of the DNA's environment (context, atmosphere, whatever) wrong by a factor of ten.

With this really skewed water component as a part of their calculations, and with only a basic knowledge of the chemistry they were working with, Crick and Watson excitedly began building their models for DNA.

Crick and Watson were now convinced that DNA was a double-helix. They figured that the sugar-phosphate "backbones" of these helices actually stood at the center of the DNA, so that the bases kind of spiked outwards. The sugar-phosphate backbones were linked together with some kind of ion, either a Magnesium cation (Mg++), or a sodium ion (Na+).

Everything seemed to fit together so well that Crick and Watson brought in Wilkins and Franklin to look at the results. Wilkins, though he seemed to be under the cloud of Franklin's abuse (in Watson's opinion), so that he was completely irresolute about everything else, was still passionate enough about DNA research to feel like it was his baby. He was protective enough about it to be pretty angry if someone acted confident about solving its problems, but was really just blundering and bumbling around with it.

And that's just what Crick and Watson appeared to be doing. Wilkins didn't point this out. Franklin pointed this out. Franklin was actually angry enough at Crick and Watson's antics to become quite aggressive toward them. She pointed out that Crick and Watson were working under a majorly incorrect assumption, and that, because of this assumption, nothing else they said could be listened to.

The assumption? They had the water content in the DNA environment incorrect by a factor of ten. Compared to the amount of water Watson and Crick's DNA had, the real DNA was basically swimming in water. Watson and Crick's DNA model couldn't possibly work. Wilkins and Franklin left as soon as they could.

And this was the point at which Sir Lawrence Bragg, chief of police (in a melodramatic sense) for the Cavendish Laboratory, told Watson and Crick, "you're off the case!" Crick was sent back to researching the compression of hemoglobin proteins in saltwater solutions. And Watson chose the topic of x-ray diffraction photography on the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV).

I believe Watson's main goal was to understand the characteristics of RNA in TMV. This would separate Watson's work from Wilkins' work enough so that Wilkins, feeling bruised by the perceived insult of Crick and Watson's perceived DNA tomfoolery, wouldn't fear he was about to be assaulted by Crick and Watson's hijinks all over again.

In the meantime, Crick found a new source of influence in the scientists Erwin Chargaff and John Griffith. Griffith began discussing the ideal of a "perfect biological principle" with Crick. As Crick became more and more excited about the potential DNA had for fulfilling his friend Griffith's idea of a "perfect biological principle," Watson was already starting to show Crick the x-ray photos of the TMV RNA, which was also giving a decidedly helical pattern.

Crick was suddenly excited. He figured the best way to make a new start on the DNA research was by discussing it with these two great scientists, Chargaff and Griffith. Now, Chargaff knew a lot about DNA as it presently stood. And he'd be hard-pressed to believe anything new that someone tried to tell him about it. Chargaff himself had actually discovered the equivalence between adenine and thymine and between guanine and cytosine.

But Crick, in the state Crick and Watson were commonly guilty of -- i.e. vague knowledge of important chemical principles -- had dinner with Chargaff to propose his ideas. He was arguing decently. But he suddenly got to the main point in his argument, when he'd forgotten formulas he didn't know very well to begin with. The problem was -- these were formulas that Chargaff himself had invented. Crick had to sit there, asking Chargaff about his own formulas.

I'm not sure how long it took, after that night, for Chargaff not to think Crick was a clown.

So Crick and Watson were on their own again. In the meantime Wilkins and Franklin didn't seem to be making any progress. Franklin, who was finally planning on leaving Wilkins' lab, anyway, was even asserting that DNA wasn't helical at all! Nevertheless, her x-ray diffraction photographs were more and more virtuosic. She was the best photographer in the world, and her tremendous photographs always seemed to indicate to Watson the double-helix formation of DNA!

Watson, in the meantime, seemed to be separated, in the normal course of his life, from DNA. He'd been dropped from the Copenhagen project, when it became evident he now had no plans of returning there. And he'd been picked up at King's College, working full-time on the TMV RNA project. He'd moved out of John and Elizabeth Kendrew's house and into some residences at Clare College.

Watson was very close with his sister, Elizabeth. Elizabeth even lived at Cambridge while Watson lived there. But Watson was very protective of his sister. So during this time, he talks about protecting his sister from men he doesn't think are good enough for her. Eventually Elizabeth has a bit of a flirting relationship with a high-class Frenchman who's come to Cambridge to "perfect his English." Watson remarks about "au pair" nannies from France who do the same thing.

Finally Linus Pauling came out with a paper where he claimed to have determined the double-helix structure of DNA. The only problem was that his solution implied a type of hydrogen bond that was completely inadmissible, even according to the very basic ideas of chemistry. But Watson and Crick were inspired by Pauling's attempts to continue along their own lines.

But before Watson and Crick went full-steam ahead on their ideas, they had to get Wilkins and Franklin's approval. Watson went to London to talk to the two. Wilkins was busy. So Watson spoke with Franklin first. Franklin was tremendously aggressive toward Watson. By the end of their conversation, Franklin even seemed on the verge of attacking Watson physically!

This is a picture I kind of love. If you see any pictures of Watson at this age -- he was twenty-four years old at the time -- he's skinny, with a fog of shaggy, disordered hair drifting over his head. To see skinny, brainy guy being threatened with attack from this strong woman is kind of a wild scene!

Watson was about to beat a hasty retreat, but he bumped up against Wilkins in the doorway. Watson told Wilkins that Franklin almost beat him up. Then he ran down the hallway. Franklin slammed the door in Wilkins' face. Wilkins then later told Watson he'd had a very similar experience with Franklin. He really though Franklin was going to beat him up.

Suddenly, through this shared experience of Franklin's violence toward them, Watson and Wilkins found themselves on some kind of same level. There'd always been a feeling of superiority in Wilkins, even if it was just something Watson had imagined. But now Watson and Wilkins were like equals -- all because Rosy Franklin had almost beat the both of them up.

Wilkins again showed Watson how Franklin's photographs just kept getting better and better, and more indicative of a double helix, but how Franklin just kept insisting that DNA wasn't a helix at all. This all provided plenty of encouragement for Watson, who figured he and Crick were going to use models, not x-ray photographs, so that they didn't have to worry about Franklin.

The only criticism Wilkins gave Watson was that there was no way at all, given the data from Franklin's photographs, that the sugar-phosphate backbone was in the center of the DNA. It had to be on the outside. This meant that DNA did not look like two poles twisting around each other with spikes coming off of them. Instead it looked like the twisty ladder that we're all familiar with.

So Watson went back home to Crick. The two of them had the metal-shop at King's College construct pieces for the models they intended to make. The sugar-phosphate pieces came first. So Watson had plenty of practice building backbones that would go along the outside of the DNA, rather than up the center. The A, G, C, and T pieces, as well as the hydrogen bonds, and so forth, all seemed to be taking a long time to have ready.

So Watson spent some time theorizing about the bonds. For some reason I don't understand (Crick seemed familiar enough with Chargaff's Laws of A to T and G to C -- I don't know why Watson didn't), Watson decided that he had to pair all A's to each other, all T's to each other, etc. He did this based on some set of hydrogen bonding theories he'd found in a textbook. But an American chemist friend of his, who was also doing research at Cavendish, told him that those theories were all, if not outmoded, then at least known, by people who know, to be fibs or fudges.

Watson went back to the drawing board. At the same time, he finally received the models of A, G, C, and T, and all the hydrogen bonds and the other pieces that could be fit into the backbones. He tried working with them along his previous line of thought, A to A, T to T, etc. But his American friend walked in the door. So Watson spontaneously decided to match some A's to T's and G's to C's, based on what his American friend had said. It worked!

This -- basically -- this point right here, was the end of the discovery of the structure of DNA. All that remained was for Watson and Crick to put together their puzzle and write up a report on it. They did this.

But as they were putting this information together and -- at the insistence of Sir Lawrence Bragg, who was tired of being embarrassed by Watson's and Crick's hasty mistakes -- having the chemistry of their ideas checked and double-checked by people at Cavendish who really knew their chemistry backwards and forwards, Watson and Crick were also slowly letting their colleagues know that the DNA structure had finally been determined.

Linus Pauling, who had generally been friendly personally toward Watson and Crick, but kind of removed from them when it came to discussing anything regarding DNA, was actually thrilled that the discovery had been made.

Wilkins and Franklin were also thrilled. Something in Franklin's personality changed altogether. She became an incredibly nice person. It was decided that Wilkins and Franklin would write a paper on the x-ray diffraction photography aspect of the discovery, since basically all the photography that had influenced Watson's and Cricks thoughts had been the result of Franklin's virtuosity.

Watson's sister Elizabeth actually typed up the report, after Watson and Crick were finished making their manuscript. Not long after this, Elizabeth went back to America, where she married a man of whom, I'm guessing, Watson approved.

Franklin, though she didn't seem to keep much in contact with Watson, actually became good friends with Crick. She sought Crick's advice on things, and Crick often looked to Franklin for insight as well. However, Franklin ended up dying from a terminal disease at the age of thirty-seven. Nevertheless, she was brave in the face of her own mortality, and worked up until the final few weeks of her life.

Now -- ugh! I've done it again! I've written these long, long summaries of works. And I only meant to make short summaries. I have to get better at this. Well, I think the patterns of the Asimov story are easily compared to the patterns of the Del Rey story. And the patterns of the Del Rey story are easily compared to the patterns of the Watson and Crick story.

Hopefully my skill will be good enough in the future that I can actually summarize the stories succinctly and comment on them as well.

Beastly Manners -- The Hound of the Baskervilles

I'm going to begin this post with a mild spoiler. But I'm sure this whole post will be just full of spoilers.

I personally was annoyed, when I read Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and found out the identity of the two ladies' murderers. The murderer was a beast. At the same time, there was something very comic-booky about it that I liked a lot.

Like in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's book Hound of the Baskervilles depends on a beast to commit the murder which serves as the starting-point for the book. But whereas the man who "owns" the beast in Poe's story is not in control of the beast -- in fact, he's just as afraid of the beast as the women being murdered -- there is a bit more of an element of control in Doyle's story.

Poe's story, in my opinion, is also not much of a story, whereas Doyle's story is more of a story. By that I mean what I suppose most people as shallow as I mean -- there's not a lot of real action. In fact, Poe's Auguste Dupin stories, which are said to be the beginning of the detective novel genre, don't seem to be much like stories at all. Rather, a murder occurs, the details are all laid out, and there either is or -- in "The Case of Marie Roget" -- isn't a resolution.

But in Doyle's Hound of the Baskervilles, there is a story, a dramatic through-line, I guess I mean: plenty to hold a person's interest. And there's plenty of action.

But what also interests me about Poe's stories and Doyle's Hound of the Baskervilles is that they begin in somewhat the same style: the detective has to kind of show off his skills by using his assistant as something of a foil. This shows the audience that the detective is really a smart guy, I guess. But it also, I think, must put the audience in the mood for thinking a little bit outside of day-to-day life and logic in order to participate in solving the mystery.

In Poe's story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," the story is told from the viewpoint of the assistant-character, who is more of a benefactor to Poe's detective, Auguste Dupin, than an assistant. But I can't remember the name of this assistant character off-hand. The story actually begins, I think, with the man discussing how he met Dupin. But it then moves into Dupin doing a little detective work at the assistant-character's expense.

The detective Dupin has watched the assistant-character's reactions to some bit of jostling on the street, followed by the man's eye movements to the ground and up to the sky. As Dupin watches the man react to various pieces of scenery, and possibly make some kind of body gestures as well, Dupin deduces that the man is thinking about a play the two men had seen the previous night, and of the physical deficiencies of one of the main characters.

This bit of deduction by Dupin, based on nothing more than the glances of the assistant-character and his body gestures, amazes the man almost as much as if Dupin had actually read his mind. And, I suppose, the audience is also supposed to be amazed to the same degree. But to me it seems to require a whole lot of leaps of faith -- and not for much purpose. I don't find Dupin's deduction very interesting, anyway.

This piece of showmanship is often used at the beginning of the Sherlock Holmes stories, often at the expense of Holmes' assistant, Dr. Watson. Like in the Auguste Dupin stories, the Holmes stories are told from the point of view of Dr. Watson. So we, as the audience, can experience Dr. Watson's amazement with Holmes' deductions along with Watson.

The difference is that in the Sherlock Holmes stories, even if the deductions are "elementary" as opposed to being huge stretches, they're often practical and fun.

The showmanship at the beginning of Hound of the Baskervilles is also very interesting because Dr. Watson is first charged with making the deduction. A person has visited the house on Baker Street, where Watson and Holmes live. He's left after not receiving an answer from Holmes or Watson. But he's left his walking-stick at the Baker Street house.

Watson is asked by Holmes to deduce who the owner of the walking-stick could be, given certain characteristics of the thing. After Watson has made a full round of observations, Holmes appears to be very pleased with Watson. But, it turns out -- Watson has basically made all the wrong deductions!

As Holmes puts everything right regarding the deductions that should properly be made based on the characteristics of the cane, the owner of the cane shows up, confirming everything Holmes has said.

The owner of the cane is a Dr. Mortimer, who once practiced medicine at Charing Cross Hospital, but, having gotten married, has moved to the country to practice. Dr. Mortimer has moved up into the north of England, to an area called Dartmoor. He lives out on the moors -- an area partly desolate with craggy, grey rocks, and partly imposing with sinking, muddy mire.

The neighborhood of Dartmoor is really small. There are only a few households of any consequence, and only a couple of intellectually interesting people. There are Mr. Stapleton, the naturalist, Mr. Falkland, an eccentric lawyer, Mr. Baskerville, a wealthy landowner, and Dr. Mortimer himself.

Only -- Baskerville has died. Dr. Mortimer explains the details by showing Holmes and Watson a couple of documents. One is an old paper discussing the curse of the Baskervilles. There was one extremely vicious Baskerville, generations ago, who had brought down on himself and all his descendants, apparently, the curse of a hell-hound. This Baskerville had actually been killed by something like a hell-hound.

Now, only recently, as Dr. Mortimer illustrates to Holmes and Watson by another document, the most recent Baskerville has been killed, also, according to Dr. Mortimer, by something very much like a hell-hound. Dr. Mortimer doesn't want to believe that the murder was actually committed by some supernatural being such as a hell-hound.

But Dr. Mortimer really doesn't know how the murder could have been committed. What's more, the new tenant of the Baskerville residence, a young man named Henry, who's been living in America, is arriving in London today to be taken to Dartmoor by Dr. Mortimer. Dr. Mortimer wants to know what's going on so he can protect the Sir Henry Baskerville. So Mortimer enlists the help of England's greatest practical mind, Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes needs time to think over the case. So he asks Mortimer to come back the next day, along with Henry. Mortimer agrees. The next day Henry and Mortimer arrive. Holmes, at Mortimer's request, doesn't discuss the curse of the hell-hound.

But Henry already has a foreboding of evil. He's received an anonymous letter, made by pasting words from a newspaper to a blank piece of paper. The letter tells Henry not to come up to Baskerville Hall because his life is in danger. In addition, Henry, after spending one night at his hotel, has found himself missing one boot of a brand new pair he'd bought!

After this discussion, Henry and Mortimer leave Baker Street (I can't remember why -- they may have to make some kind of arrangements for something). Holmes and Watson follow Henry and Mortimer back into the heart of London. But Holmes and Watson, keeping their distance, notice that Henry and Mortimer are being followed by a man in a horse-drawn carriage!

Holmes dashes for the horse-drawn carriage. But it speeds up and escapes before Holmes can practically get into a carriage of his own. The only thing Holmes could make out about the man in the carriage was that he had a long beard with a square cut. Holmes assumes that the beard was fake.

After some investigation and some diversion (I think going to a picture gallery), Holmes and Watson -- I think -- go back home. They investigate the man who had been driving the horse-drawn carriage that had been following Henry and Mortimer. But they don't get much information out of him.

The next morning, Holmes and Watson meet Henry and Mortimer at their hotel. Henry's brand new boot is still missing. But Henry is also missing one of his old boots as well, now! Henry seems to be really upset. But then he finds his new boot in a place where he was sure he'd looked for it a few times.

Holmes is interested in Henry's case. But he says he can't investigate it -- he's dealing with a very important case in London. So he has to stay here. Instead -- Holmes sends Watson up to Baskerville Hall, Dartmoor, with Mortimer and Henry. The next day Watson, Henry, and Mortimer all head up to the north of England, to the desolate moors of Dartmoor.

Watson is charged with sticking close to Henry whenever Henry leaves Baskerville Hall. But he also has to do investigations of the people in Dartmoor, and send his accounts of his investigations to Holmes in letters.

Watson generally conducts these investigations by himself, while Henry is busy taking care of the accounts left to him by the previous Baskerville. Baskerville Hall is something of a center of funds for Dartmoor. Dartmoor has become dependent on the wealth of Baskerville Hall for its subsistence.

So Watson heads out to the neigborhood of the moor to meet the various people here. Everybody lives pretty separated from everybody else. Dr. Mortimer seems to live quite a distance away.

A Mr. Falkland, an eccentric lawyer who is always sueing everybody at Dartmoor for some infringement or another, also lives at a small distance. He would have plenty of money. But he wastes money on his legal cases, and so has found himself in tight conditions. To make money, he sits on his roof and uses a telescope to do some kind of work for some government agency -- but I can't remember what.

Another resident of the hall is a young naturalist named Stapleton. Watson crosses paths with Stapleton as Stapleton is running through the moors, trying to catch a rare and elusive butterfly in his net.

This would be, for most people, a dangerous occupation, as the moors -- even though in many places they look like regular meadows of grass -- are filled with muddy areas that are just as entrapping as quicksand. These areas could lead to a man's death. They often lead to the death of wayward horses or cattle. But Stapleton brags that he knows these areas better than anyone else, and that he can navigate the most dangerous portions of them.

Stapleton is thin, suave, charismatic (it's all telegraphed right there, in my opinion, and anybody interested only in the whodunity could probably just stop reading the book at that point). He invites Watson to his house, just a ways down the road. As Watson and Stapleton are talking, a terrible howling sound fills the air. Watson wonders what it is. Stapleton says that he doesn't know, but that all the villagers (of whom you don't actually see too many in the story) say it's the hell-hound that has killed the previous tenant of Baskerville Hall.

Watson goes to Stapleton's house and meets Miss Stapleton, who is introduced as Stapleton's sister. Stapleton, it is told, used to be run a boarding-school on the west, I believe, of England. But, Stapleton says, some kind of epidemic really affected the school, and so the school had to be shut down. Stapleton and his sister decided to move out to Dartmoor because of its quietness and remoteness, which Stapleton thought would help him study his science better.

Watson leaves Stapleton's house and walks down the road. Apparently, Stapleton's sister is just as much a master of navigating the dangerous mires of the moors, as well: for she has cut across one of the meadows to meet Watson further on down the path. Miss Stapleton warns Watson against the curse of the Baskervilles. Watson tells Miss Stapleton that if she likes, she can come meet Henry Baskerville himself at Baskerville Hall.

So Stapleton and Miss Stapleton go to Baskerville Hall for dinner one night. Henry falls in love with Miss Stapleton. But Miss Stapleton seems only concerned with getting Henry out of Dartmoor and back to safety. Nevertheless -- and much against Watson's better wishes -- Henry and Miss Stapleton start taking opportunities to go out walking by themselves.

Watson manages to spy on Henry and Miss Stapleton on one of these occasions. On this occasion, which Watson watches from a nearby promontory, Henry finally makes romantic advances toward Miss Stapleton. But Stapleton intervenes. He pulls Miss Stapleton away violently. He seems tremendously angry at both Henry and Miss Stapleton.

Later on Stapleton justifies his anger by saying he's always been extremely attached to his sister. However, he will approve of Henry's love for Miss Stapleton as long as Henry can keep from mentioning or acting on his love for Miss Stapleton for the next three months, to help Stapleton get accommodated to the fact of Henry's love for the woman. Henry agrees to this proposition.

In the meantime, the two servants at Baskerville Hall, a Mr. and Mrs. Barrymore, are posing a mystery of their own. Watson has seen Mr. Barrymore approach a window late at night. He waves a lantern in front of the window and then lets out a kind of haunted moan.

Watson doesn't know what this is all about. But it turns out that Henry has also heard the strange noises made by the servant in the hallway late at night. So Watson and Henry decide to find out what Barrymore is doing at the window.

It turns out that, just before Henry arrived at Baskerville Hall -- but after the previous tenant had been murdered -- a murderous convict had escaped from a nearby prison. This convict, it turns out, is Mrs. Barrymore's little brother.

The convict is hiding in the craggy hills of Dartmoor, evading the police, for a couple of weeks. He plans to take a steamship to South America when it leaves. But he has to wait to leave Dartmoor until right before the ship is ready to leave.

In the meantime, Barrymore, at Mrs. Barrymore's request, has been bringing out food for the convict at night. The light before the window is a signal to the convict regarding where to go for his food. Barrymore's groan, obviously, is his detestation for having to be a part of the whole scenario at all.

Watson and Henry decide to see how much of Barrymore's story is true. So they decide on this night to take the food out to the convict. But the convict gets startled by the two men and makes a mad dash away from them. Watson and Henry can't keep up.

But when Watson and Henry are walking out of the craggy hills and back to Baskerville Hall, they see a completely different figure standing up in the full circle of the moon atop one of the hills. Who this man is is a complete mystery to them.

Barrymore and Henry have an argument the next day. Henry wants to talk to the police about the convict. But Barrymore and Mrs. Barrymore win Henry over to their side. In exchange for having hurt Barrymore's feelings, Henry is convinced by Barrymore -- I think -- to give Barrymore some of his old wardrobe, as Henry has just bought a new wardrobe.

Not long after this -- I can't remember how it happened, now -- but either Henry or Watson retrieved a half-burnt piece of paper from a chimney in the study at Baskerville Hall. The paper had been intended for complete destruction. It appeared to be addressed to the murdered Baskerville. It had been, apparently, from a lady. And it directed the Baskerville to meet the lady at an appointed time and place -- very nearly the time and place where the man had been murdered!

The initials of the lady who had written the letter were L.L. The only L.L. known in the area was a Laura Lyons, in a neighboring town. So Watson goes to the neighboring town and interviews Laura Lyons.

Mrs. Lyons is actually the estranged daughter of the eccentric lawyer Mr. Falkland. A while back, an impulsive poet came up to the north of England. Laura Lyons caught the poet's eye. The poet married Laura but then up and left her. Mrs. Lyons had been trying for some time to get a divorce from the poet, Mr. Lyons. Laura's father wouldn't help her.

Eventually, Mrs. Lyons says, Mr. Stapleton suggested that the previous Baskerville be enlisted to help Laura get her divorce. After all, Baskerville Hall was a source of funds and, often, counsel for Dartmoor's residents. So Mrs. Lyons went along with Mr. Stapleton's suggestion. Stapleton said he'd help.

Stapleton finally came to Mrs. Lyons one night and urged her to have the previous Baskerville meet her on the very night on which he'd ended up being murdered. But Mrs. Lyons insisted she didn't know anything else about the whole situation.

Watson asks Mrs. Lyons if she'd talk about this with anybody. But she won't. She finds the whole matter shameful. And, besides, she won't talk about it at all if it would do anything to compromise Stapleton's standing. And it would. Already she looks suspect -- she'd written a note to Baskerville to get him to come out. But if anybody knew it was at Stapleton's bidding, Stapleton would look suspect as well.

Watson can't understand Mrs. Lyons' allegiance to Stapleton. But Watson, to see what else he could come to understand about the character of Mrs. Lyons, goes to visit Mrs. Lyons' estranged father, Mr. Falkland.

Mr. Falkland, upon meeting Watson, is worked up about some case he's involved with. Somehow the police were against him -- I can't remember how. But Mr. Falkland brags that if the police won't help him, he won't help the police. He confides in Watson that he knows where the convict is.

Watson is terribly frightened at this prospect. He assumes it could get Henry and even himself in trouble. They've just decided not to say anything to the police. That's basically the same thing as aiding a crime. And if the convict gets caught, would he give everything away?

But Watson keeps his cool and lets Mr. Falkland tell his story. As Falkland tells his story, he actually, looking out the window, sees a figure dotting the hills. Excited to show Watson the convict, Falkland pulls out his telescope and lets Watson use it. What Watson sees is actually a young boy carrying a knapsack of goods up to a stone hut on one of the hills.

Watson assumes this child isn't carrying the food to the convict -- the Barrymores do that. He assumes the food is being carried to the mysterious figure he and Henry had seen on the night they'd chased the convict.

So Watson makes some excuse and leaves Falkland to go back to working on his law cases. He rushes out to the hills, to where he'd seen the child. He works his way through the hills, to the stone hut to which he'd assumed the child had delivered the food. He actually finds the foods, still wrapped up in the knapsack. Along with the food in the knapsack is a message: "Watson has gone to visit L.L."

Watson realizes that this mysterious figure has been following him! He suddenly hears the steps of the mysterious person returning to the hut. Watson has a gun with him. He draws his gun and prepares to meet --

None other than Sherlock Holmes!

Holmes explains that he'd been conducting his own investigations in parallel with Watson, though in secret. He used the other investigation as a front, so nobody would suspect that he was here. He had received all of Watson's reports, which he'd found useful as a supplement to his own investigations.

Holmes is now certain that the person guilty of the murder of the previous tenant of Baskerville Hall was -- Stapleton. But he doesn't have enough evidence to go to trial yet. However, Holmes has a secret. Miss Stapleton isn't Stapleton's sister. She's Stapleton's wife. Holmes also guesses that Stapleton has fooled Mrs. Lyons into falling in love with him, making the need for getting the divorce even more urgent.

Holmes believes that if he can prove to Mrs. Lyons that Stapleton is actually married to Miss Stapleton, Mrs. Lyons, feeling betrayed, will willingly provide her witness against Stapleton. This -- and a trap Holmes hopes to lay for Stapleton -- should be enough evidence for a trial.

The sun is setting, and Holmes tells Watson to go back home and make sure Henry is doing alright. But just at that moment, the horrendous howl splits the air again -- the howl Stapleton had pointed out as belonging -- according to the villagers -- to the Hound of the Baskervilles, the murderous hell-hound. But Holmes and Watson also hear a man's scream!

Holmes and Watson run in the direction of the man's scream. They find, at the bottom of a cliff, a man in Henry Baskerville's clothes, dead from a jump from the top of the cliff. Watson and Holmes are sorely ashamed. They both figure they'd been in charge of protecting Henry. But the Hound of the Baskervilles had reached him, while they were both busy talking about the case. Now he's dead.

But as Holmes and Watson prepare to carry the body back to Baskerville Hall, they realize it isn't Henry at all. It's the convict! The convict had been given Henry's old clothes, which Henry had given Barrymore. The hell-hound -- whatever it was -- had been set on the convict because it had been mistaken for Henry.

Of no surprise to Watson and Holmes, Stapleton soon approaches the murder scene. Stapleton is surprised to see Holmes, who he'd though was in London, investigating a different mystery. But he's even more surprised to see a man who isn't Henry lying dead on the ground. Stapleton leaves the scene.

Holmes and Watson go back to Baskerville Hall to explain everything to Henry. Holmes expects that Henry will likely get an invitation to dinner from Stapleton. In fact, Henry says, he has just received one. Holmes tells Henry to go to the dinner. It's for the very next evening. In the meantime, Holmes and Watson pretend as if they are going back to London the next day.

The next day, Holmes and Watson both go investigating in secret. They go back to Mrs. Lyons' house and give her the proof, which Holmes had dug up by going through the records of old boarding-schools -- Stapleton said he'd run a boarding-school in the west of England. Mrs. Lyons, feeling betrayed, says that she certainly will testify, regardless of what it would do to Stapleton.

In the evening, Holmes and Watson, along with a police officer -- along to witness the scene of Stapleton's new crime in progress -- hide in the shadows outside while Henry is having dinners with the Stapletons.

I'll save the final details of the story for anybody who's interested. Needless to say, there is a chase, it does involve a hell-hound. And the hell-hound is quite scary.

There are some fun similarities between this detective novel and another detective novel I've recently read: The Robots of Dawn, by Isaac Asimov. The Robots of Dawn moves from the planet Earth to the planet Aurora. Earth is a land of underground caves and cities crammed full of people. Aurora, by contrast, is populated and designed such that the world, in general, looks almost empty -- but far too manicured to look uninhabited.

In The Robots of Dawn, the detective Lije Baley has to go from residence to residence, or from office building to office building, to interview one person at a time. As Baley interviews each person, he gets a whole new picture of the world he's visiting.

I think this technique is a kind of mainstay of science fiction. It's a part of all fiction, though. Fiction gives you something new. It -- doesn't necessarily have to teach you. But it's nice if it makes you feel like it takes you away to some new place. You learn something new because you've gone somewhere new. I think of this aspect of fiction as being like a "travelogue."

I don't think it's any surprise to people that science fiction, to some degree, sprung out of allegory, and especially out of utopian visions. One of the first science fiction works, William Morris' News from Nowhere, is a combination of science fiction and Utopia.

But The Robots of Dawn is part science fiction and part detective novel. And -- I think -- while science fiction explores new worlds, detective novels explore manners. Dashiell Hammett's book The Thin Man is a pretty good example of this. You get to know the manners of an upper class family through the investigation of a murder. Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye is even better as an exploration of the manners of a certain group of people.

Actually, I think Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe mystery The High Window is an even better example -- not because it's better written, but because the joint-work is all more obvious -- of how detective novels work to explore manners as well as mysteries.

A lot of times -- as in the case of The Hound of the Baskervilles -- it's pretty well telegraphed who the murderer is. What's more interesting is the drama surrounding the murder. What are the conditions that led to the murder? What are everybody's connections to each other? These kinds of things are often revealed to the detective at first through his interviews.

These interviews are almost painfully obvious in The Robots of Dawn -- where all Lije Baley can do is drive from place to place, like a travelling salesman, and learn new things about the situation from the people he talks to. They're almost as obvious in The High Window, where Marlowe has tons of lengthy conversations with the various family members of the father who'd fallen to his death from -- a high window.

What's nice about The Long Goodbye, though, is all the action that Marlowe goes through as he's doing his detective work. And there is a similar pattern of action in The Hound of the Baskervilles.

The beginning of the story is a kind of moving away from Edgar Allan Poe's style of detective story, with the showmanship and the logical discussion of things. And as it goes farther on, the story becomes more of an exploration of manners in situ, according to the more modern tradition of detective stories, founded on, I guess, the allegory, utopia, and science fiction story.

But Doyle punctuates these interviews with action, drama, romance. Holmes chases the horse-drawn carriage through the London Street. Watson watches as Henry's advances toward Miss Stapleton are rebuffed violently by Stapleton. Watson and Henry take food out to the convict and are almost attacked -- only to find another mysterious figure peering down on them. Watson draws his gun on Sherlock Holmes unintentionally, then Holmes and Watson find a murdered man. Not to mention the great climactic scenes!

The story of The Hound of the Baskervilles isn't just the main mystery. If it were the main mystery, it could possibly make a pretty good short story, but not a novella. The real draw that keeps people reading is all the other stuff going on: the love story, the story of the convict, the quirky characters. And, of course, Watson is such a charming character, and so earnest about doing a good job on his own, that you root for him.

I think that Agatha Christie's book The Mirror Crack'd is a lovely outgrowth on this kind of story, in terms of the overall atmosphere and drama being what really draws people in. In that book, however, the drama is much more powerful, much more sinister, too, even though it's not about something as monstrous as a hell-hound.

Christie's book is about a quiet suburban town being developed in the 1960s. Instead of moving from a hustling, bustling London scene and into a quiet scene, like The Robots of Dawn and The Hound of the Baskervilles do, The Mirror Crack'd watches a new society being implanted on the older society -- watches as the quiet society is supplanted by a developing, hustling, bustling society.

Christie's detective, Jane Marple, also gleans her information about the society coming into her world through fashion and gossip magazines -- even though Marple eventually says that she mainly learns from those magazines that the lives of stars are very similar to the lives of average people.

This could, of course, also be said about Dartmoor. Dartmoor life isn't too far off from London life. And the different households in Dartmoor are representative of different households in London. The thing is, that they're all put into isolation -- isolation from each other, and isolation with each other. So one may really see how these various aspects of society interact with each other.

But, even though I am rather dull, I don't want to make it sound like I'm so dull that I think the portrait of manners is just a subject for detective novels. However -- if you look, for instance, through Dickens' book Bleak House, there's a kind of portrait of manners that is very similar to and yet different from the portrait of manners in a detective novel.

In my opinion, the characters of Dickens, though they are often in rather dire straits, are often also in situations where they have a lot of leisure time. This is very pronounced, in my opinion, in Bleak House. And I feel like a lot of novels, while they have that "travelogue" feel to them, base that "travelogue" feel on a sense of free time or vactation time or leisure time.

Detective novels make leisure time into a profession. So Watson isn't out in the country on a holiday. He's out in the country on an assignment. He's taking care of a job. All detectives may look like they have nothing but leisure time. But they're all out working.

And so I think the detective novel is a kind of singular way of exploring the manners of society while also not implying that free time is needed in order to do this. It's a kind of way of integrating the increasingly profession-driven element of society into literature.

There's an interesting section of The Hound of the Baskervilles, where Henry is told by Sherlock Holmes that he must trust Holmes, do whatever Holmes says, and not second-guess anything Holmes says he himself is going to do. Henry agrees to this. Holmes later tells Henry that he is going to leave Dartmoor and go back to London with Watson. Henry is immediately going to give up his trust in Holmes. Thankfully he doesn't, and the story is allowed to work its way to the climax.

This air of secrecy, of one character not knowing what the other character is doing or thinking, becomes more and more a part of the professional environment, especially in competitively capitalistic societies. The less people know about a project. Projects become compartmentalized, too -- and people don't "need" to know the other secret parts of the overall secret project.

Watson himself doesn't know what Holmes is doing. He doesn't know that Holmes is actually in Dartmoor. And, at first, when Holmes tells Henry he and Watson are going back to London, Watson genuinely believes Holmes. Holmes doesn't tell Watson otherwise, in fact, until the train leaves for London without Holmes and Watson on it.

There's a hierarchy of knowledge. Everybody in the situation is exploring the manners of their society in their own way. But only certain people know certain things. It's the part of the detective to know all the main secrets and to disclose only those necessary to disclose, and to work at discovering the secrets other people aren't willing to disclose.

This may just sound like a regular part of society in general, and may not have anything to do with being a phenomenon of an increasingly competitive, professional, and compartmentalized world-view. But I think if you look at this phenomenon in its full development, you'll see how it relates to professionalism very plainly.

The full development, in my opinion, would be the TV show Star Trek. In many of the episodes of Star Trek, Spock or Kirk will surprise the rest of the crew (and hopefully the TV-viewing audience) by making some decision that seems to assist evil. Or sometimes -- god, Spock seems to do it all the time -- Spock or Kirk will accept death penalty as a punishment for something instead of giving away all the information regarding something.

If you look at the hierarchy of Star Trek, it's basically an office in space. And I know that partly there's supposed to be a feeling of the ship being like a peaceful version of a military unit. But I think what mainly shows itself is that quality of the ship being like a big office in space.

And so, there are times when Kirk, as the boss, or Spock, as the second in command, has to carry out these secret projects. They can't tell anybody what's really going on. Sometimes Spock can't even tell Kirk, and sometimes Kirk can't even tell Spock. The holder of the most information has to carry out the project in complete secrecy. Once the project is completed, most of the information will be plain. And it can all be discussed.

So this is a really developed level the professional outlook. But it's also, apparently, exploring manners of society in some kind of allegorical form, like mystery on one level, might be supposed to do as well. After all, Star Trek is about a crew on a five-year mission to explore new worlds and so forth.

I guess the courtroom drama would be even more developed, and it would be a return to the detective novel style. But Star Trek obviously developed as a phenomoenon after the soap opera dramas that were, in a sense, the beginnings of courtroom dramas. So my ideas may not be fully clarified on that point -- or any point -- yet.

What Happened to Her Husband? -- Pylon and The Robots of Dawn

(Note: there are some minor spoilers for these two books in this post.)

William Faulkner has only two degrees of separation from Star Wars. Faulkner worked on the screenplay for The Big Sleep, which was also worked on by Leigh Brackett. And Leigh Brackett wrote the first version of the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back. So -- if you think of Star Wars as the whole series of movies, Faulkner is only two degrees of separation away from Star Wars.

Depending on who you talk to, this is either a compliment or an insult to either Faulkner or Star Wars.

So maybe it's not such a leap to include my reactions to a novel by Faulkner, who is known largely for his stream-of-consciousness style and sweeping Southern historical dramas, with my reactions to a novel by science fiction legend Isaac Asimov.

But Faulkner's book is only a half step away from science fiction, anyway. Faulkner's book Pylon must -- I really can't say for sure -- be among the first novels by a "serious literary" author to deal with flying airplanes -- let alone racing them!

In fact, I was about to call this blog post "High-Speed Wrath," because Faulkner's novel Pylon reminds me of The Grapes of Wrath, except that unlike the Joads, the main characters of this book are a traveling group of people who perform at airshows. But the time period is similar: the Depression era. And the theme of travelling workers is very much the same.

But Pylon was written in 1935, four years before The Grapes of Wrath. And Faulkner has an incredibly unique vision of a specific type of itinerant worker. Faulkner's world carries with it something of the cosmopolitan. Even these traveling aviators, living from hand to mouth -- if they even get that much to live by! --, sleeping outdoors, or under the wings of their plane, if the weather's really bad, have an element of the cosmopolitan to them.

There are five characters in the group of traveling aviators. Roger Shumann, who races the "family's" airplane; Jack, who performs parachute jumps at airshows; Jiggs, the airplane mechanic; "the woman," who seems to go nameless; and "the boy," whose name is eventually revealed to be Jack Shumann.

Why does the boy have the first name of the parachute jumper and the last name of the aviator? Easy -- because nobody knows which of the two is actually the boy's father! Both Shumann and Jack sleep with the woman. She got pregnant but didn't know who made her pregnant. So Shumann and Jack flipped a coin. Shumann won the coin toss. So he got to marry the woman. But both men still sleep with the woman.

The "family" also includes the mechanic, Jiggs, who doesn't seem to have much to do with the sexual relations of the group. Jiggs is, apparently, an alcoholic. But he's doing his best to quit with the booze.

The "family" has all come to Faulkner's fictional New Orleans, a town called New Valois. A new airport has been opened up in New Valois. The airport's ceremonies include a big airshow. So the "family" has come to perform in the airshow. The ceremonies are concurrent with Mardi Gras, which New Valois, like New Orleans, celebrates with days-long festivities.

The story begins with Jiggs at a shoemaker's shop in New Valois. He's trying to drive a bargain for a new pair of boots. His boots are totally wrecked. The boots will end up costing him $22.50. He doesn't have the money now, but he promises to come back for the boots in the afternoon, when he has the money. The shoemaker holds the boots for him.

So Jiggs takes the bus up to the airport, which is on the outskirts of New Valois. At the airport, Jiggs meets up with the rest of the family. But a newspaper reporter, who also goes nameless, has seemed to latch onto the family. He takes the job of taking care of the little boy while the rest of the family is running around, doing things like taking care of the plane, racing the plane, or jumping out of a different plane.

Shumann is flying an old model airplane. Three years previous, this was one of the newest models. But airplane models are constantly changing. And now Shumann's model is basically obsolete.

Nevertheless, Shumann, who hadn't expected even to place in the race he was competing in, actually gets second place! This raises hopes for the family. They now get prize money, which they expect will pay for a hotel and food for a little while. So now they won't have to sleep outside.

But it turns out that they don't get to receive their prize money for the flight until the next day. So they're depending on the money Jack is going to make by parachute-jumping. He gets $25 for doing a jump.

However, Jiggs has set things up so he can take Jack's payment for the parachute jump. Jack doesn't know it, but Jiggs takes Jack's money and goes down into town with it to buy the boots he had put on hold at the shoemaker's shop earlier in the morning. So now Jiggs has a pair of boots -- but the family doesn't have anywhere to sleep for the night. And they won't get their money for Shumann's racing performance until the next day!

As the reporter follows the little boy, and sometimes some of the other family members, he begins to get involved with their strange story. The reporter seems to be a real literary type in his own mind, even though it appears that most people see him as being something of a mix between a Frankenstein and a tapeworm. He's very tall, very thin, pale, and sunken-eyed. He seems to react extremely slowly to everything. And once he's attached to something he's stuck to it -- like a parasite.

In fact, he would have lost his job a long time ago, except that he also had the ability to cling to his reporting job like a parasite. He has an extremely mother, too, and that helps. She followed him to his job, without him knowing, at first, and bullied his boss into basically never letting him go from the job.

It's not really clear why the mother doesn't do more to actually make the reporter do more with his own life. But she doesn't. She only makes sure that the reporter's boss, a man named Hagood, always keeps her son working at the paper. So Hagood gets frightened into becoming something of a father-substitute for the reporter.

But the reporter, as literary as he may be, is not really a good reporter. He can't seem to find or write news. He can only go into spilling rants on the emotional state of either himself or the people in the situations that he has gone out to cover as newsworthy.

To make matters worse, the reporter always seems to be in the right place at the right time. He's always around when news is made, and he's always around the most newsworthy people. He even seems to contribute in some way or another -- all the time! -- to the events that actually become news. But he can never actually write about the news that he's standing right in front of, or even making happen!

To top all this off, the reporter is always borrowing money from Hagood, even though the reporter apparently makes a decent, or at least liveable, salary. But Hagood's afraid not to lend money to the reporter, just like he's afraid to fire the reporter: he doesn't want the reporter's extremely wealthy mother to come after him.

But the reporter also has no focus. And when he comes into the city room of the newspaper office to tell Hagood his news, all he tells Hagood is the whole emotional story of the family he'd hung out with all day long. Hagood gets angry at the reporter's inability to come up with a real story, so he tells the reporter he's going to fire him if he doesn't come up with a real story tomorrow. Hagood tells the reporter to go home and get some sleep, and to be back at the airshow first thing in the morning.

But the reporter doesn't go to sleep. Instead, he goes out partying with the rest of the Mardi Gras crowd. While he's stumbling through the crowd, he runs into Jiggs, who is wearing his new pair of boots. Jiggs takes the reporter to the hotel where the family thought they were staying. They thought this until just recently, when Jiggs finally let them know he had spent their hotel money on his new boots.

The family has been nursing drinks at the hotel, where a lot of people are partying at the bar. But they really want to get some sleep. Somehow, they get the idea to go to some run-down hotel that's kind of half-brothel, where they figure they can get some sort of deal on a room, or at least find a place for the little boy to sleep. But they run into some troubles there that I can't really remember very well. And they have to go somewhere else.

During all this, the reporter has called up Hagood again and let him know that he had run into the aviator family again. He gives some long, rambling speech to Hagood. But Hagood doesn't want to hear it. He flat-out tells the reporter he's fired. The reporter, who has been "fired" by Hagood before, nevertheless manages to take this seriously.

The reporter decided to let the aviator family stay at his house while they're waiting to receive their prize money. It eventually becomes obvious that he's doing this because he's in love with the woman. He keeps on fantasizing that somehow he'll be able to sleep with the woman, just like Jack and Shumann do. But it never happens.

On the way to the reporter's house, the reporter picks up a humongous jug of absinthe, which apparently has a laudanum kicker in it! The reporter takes the aviator family home and treats them all to a party. Shumann and the woman go to bed with the little boy in the reporter's room. Jiggs and Jack stay up and party with the reporter.

At one point Hagood -- again afraid of the extremely wealthy mother -- visit's the reporter's house and tells Jiggs to tell the reporter (who is now too drunk to face Hagood) that he better show up at the airport at 10 AM the next day to cover the rest of the airshow.

Jiggs and Jack kind of bully the newspaper reporter around a little. Then they fall asleep. The reporter, who has no focus, really, and can't ever really seem to get to sleep unless he passes out altogether, gets up and goes out to a diner. He's blind drunk, and he has some kind of queasy period of philosophical introspection as the sun rises.

The next morning, Jiggs, who is a recovering alcoholic, is already back to being hooked on booze because of the absinthe he'd drank all night long. And as soon as he wakes up he starts drinking again. Shumann's kind of upset about this because he knows that his plane needs to get a major tune-up before it goes out on another race. And he's starting to suspect that Jiggs, the mechanic, will be too drunk to fix the plane.

Nobody knows where the reporter is, and they all decide to leave without him. But as they are leaving, he is coming back. But right as he comes back to his house, he passes out, completely drunk, completely smashed, and, finally, too exhausted to stay up any longer.

The family all rolls the unconscious reporter for the money he has in his pockets. But they then feel bad. So they give the passed-out reporter back all of his money except enough money to buy all of them some breakfast. The family then leaves the reporter passed out outside his door and goes up to the airport. The reporter's maid comes by later, takes a few more bucks off of the reporter, then wakes the reporter up, gets him cleaned up, and helps see him off to the airport.

Up at the airport, the aviator family works on fixing up the plane for the day's race. But Shumann and Jack both have to go to some aviator's union meeting. They think they're going to have to strike -- as if the union wants the aviators at the airshow to get paid more prize money.

It actually turns out that because, on the previous day, one of the major aviators died in an air crash. His name has to be taken off all the airshow programs. So the airshow programs all have to be reprinted. And this will have to be done with the money in the prize pool. All the prizes will be reduced by two and a half percent. Even though some aviators grumble about this, it's generally thought not to be a very big deal at all.

Shumann and Jack head back to the plane -- only to find that Jiggs has abandoned his job of fixing the plane. He's off the plane, and off the wagon: he's gone off to the airport bar to get even drunker! Now Shumann and Jack have to do a really quick job of fixing the plane before Jack does his jump and Shumann does his race!

The reporter, finally arriving at the airshow, in his perpetual state of non-focus, somehow manages to run right into the now drunken Jiggs. Jiggs is beligerent and almost gets into a fight with a few people. He almost gets both himself and the reporter arrested, by a policeman who doesn't really like the reporter to begin with.

In the meantime, Jack has done his jump and has injured himself in the process. But he's stil angry enough with Jiggs to sock him hard enough in the face to knock him out. He also manages to sock the reporter in the face.

Somehow -- I can't quite remember how -- things get minorly patched up. The reporter finds the woman and tells her that the aviator family can have his place. He's going on some out of town assignment, so he can get away from the family. He's really latched onto the family -- mostly because he's extremely sexually attracted to the woman. But he also wants to do a good deed for them. So he's going to let them stay at his place while he goes out of town.

But -- I think -- while he's trying to explain all this to the woman, Shumann's plane crashes and catches on fire. Shumann ends up being okay. But the plane is completely destroyed.

It seems like Shumann is out of the airshow altogether, and that the family is out of its most important means of subsistence: the plane. But the reporter knows someone in town, a man named Ord, who was himself a great aviator, and who now owns an airplane shop. The reporter knows that Ord has a plane that the reporter might be able to get for cheap for the family.

So Shumann and the reporter go alone together to meet Ord. Ord doesn't want to sell the plane to Shumann. There's something wrong with the plane, and he doesn't feel like it's safe to fly at all. That's why it's been sitting in his hangar all this time, instead of getting sold, while he's been perfectly fine with selling other planes.

But the reporter and, to a lesser degreee, Shumann figure they won't take no for an answer. The reporter sends Shumann back home. The reporter then hatches up a scheme for basically stealing Ord's plane.

In the meantime, Shumann takes Jiggs out and tries to get him sobered up. After Shumann and Jiggs go out to try to get some food into Jiggs, so he'll be a little more sober (it doesn't really work), they go back home.

In bed, Shumann discusses his plans with the woman. Shumann has a feeling he's going to get Ord's plane and fly in one of the races tomorrow. One is a low-risk race where Shumann's almost positive he can place and get a little bit of prize money. And one is a high-risk race, where he'll be flying against Ord himself. If the plane is really as faulty as Ord says it is, Shumann believes he shouldn't fly in the high-risk race. But the high-risk race offers more money. So Shumann figures he probably will do the high-risk race after all.

At the newspaper office, which is where the reporter basically spends the whole night, possibly -- I think -- passing out for a couple hours over his typewriter, the reporter comes up with a plan for getting the plane. He types up a fake check for the plane. He then signs his name to it. He figures he'll get Shumann to sign his name, as well as his father's name, to it.

Shumann's father is -- I think -- a farmer and a country doctor, who already mortgaged away a farm he once owned in order to help Shumann get another plane. But Shumann doesn't keep in really good contact with his family, especially since he married the woman, who Shumann's family doesn't think is a good person at all.

So the next morning, Shumann and the reporter meet and go back to Ord's farm. They watch as Ord flies his own racing plane out to the airport. They then run up to the hangar and trick Ord's assistant, by using the fake check the reporter made, into believing that Shumann and the reporter have bought the faulty plane from Ord.

Shumann and the reporter take the faulty plane on a test flight. They believe they've found the problem, which is something like a center-of-gravity problem, which they think they can solve by using sandbags and a pulley system.

So Shumann and the reporter fly the faulty plane over to the airport. Ord conducts a huge meeting with the event organizers to get Shumann barred from flying the faulty plane in the race. But the event organizers want Shumann in the race. The more planes, the merrier. Plus, Shumann will be flying one of Ord's planes. Ord is a flying legend. It was good enough that he'd be flying in the race. But now he'd be flying against one of his own planes! What could be a better crowd-pleaser than that?

Well, the race happens, and, as you'd expect, the faulty plane breaks. It doesn't just have a center-of-gravity problem. The thing basically splits right in half -- and the back half basically disintegrates!

Shumann can't land the plane safely at all. So, in the last moments of his life, he directs the plane as completely out the crowd's way as he can. He crashes the plane into a nearby lake. He can't escape the plane, and he dies in the lake.

The woman blames the reporter for Shumann's death, and she refuses to talk to him anymore. There's a huge effort to recover Shumann's body from the lake. It lasts all day, into the night, and then into the next morning.

The reporter stays near the lake -- not really because he wants to be around when Shumann's body is finally pulled out of the lake, but because he keeps on thinking he'll be able to see the woman again. But the woman does her absolute best to keep the hell away from the reporter. She really feels like if the family hadn't had anything to do with the reporter from the beginning, Shumann would still be alive.

Eventually, toward the middle of the next morning, it becomes clear that it's going to take a long time for the machines first to locate the plane, and then to actually get Shumann's body out of the plane. The lake is a completely junked mess -- people have been dumping old cars and all kinds of other junk down there for years. Now if something gets stuck there, it's seriously stuck. Shumann and his plane are no exception. It may even be impossible to get Shumann's body out.

So Jack comes along and tells the reporter, who is still doggedly hovering around the lake, in hopes of seeing the woman again, that he, the woman, and the boy are all leaving town. Jack requests that once Shumann's body is pulled from the lake, the reporter send Shumann's body to an address in Ohio, which -- I think -- is the address of Shumann's parents. Jack gives the reporter the prize money from Shumann's first flight so that the reporter can buy a coffin and pay transportation charges on getting Shumann's body to Ohio.

The reporter, now defeated, goes home. It's not quite mid-day yet. The reporter manages, yet again, to run into Jiggs. The reporter takes Jiggs home. Jiggs and the reporter get a little bit drunk, as usual.

Jiggs tries to fix his boots. They're already a bit worn out. But he figures he's going to try and sell them back to the shoemaker so he can give the money to Jack and the woman before they leave town. Jiggs himself is also getting ready to leave town, in some other outfit, of course. Jack and the woman are through with Jiggs.

But Jiggs' methods of fixing his boots are all pretty terrible. Nevertheless, Jiggs takes his boots back to the shoemaker and gets -- five dollars! This was probably a bargain, because, as far as I can tell, all the weird-ass things he did to try to get his boots back to a normal condition probably wrecked them altogether.


So Jiggs ends up getting a bunch of candies and gifts for Jack and the woman. He's planning on dropping all this stuff in a package with the rest of Jack and the woman's luggage before they get onto their ride out of town. I think it's assumed that he is no longer on speaking terms with Jack and the woman.

While preparing, with Jiggs, to drop off the packages of candies and gifts, the reporter finds out that the authorities are going to give up on pulling Shumann's body out of the lake. So now the reporter can give the money back to Jack and the woman. One little kind of surprising incident happens here, which has a bit more of a surprising repercussion toward the end of the book. So I won't mention it.

Jiggs and the reporter part ways. The reporter goes up to the airport again. He gets drunk with a bunch of reporters who are waiting for the morning to come, so they can report on something about the lake. They're all playing a poker game. Something happens -- I really can't remember what -- to make the reporter go back into town.

The reporter meets one last time with Jiggs. I really can't remember what happens at that last meeting between Jiggs and the reporter. But after that, the reporter goes off by himself again and gets blasted drunk. After he gets drunk he heads back into the newspaper office and types up an article about Shumann dying.

In the meantime, Jack and the woman have travelled a certain distance. And now it's time for the two of them to part ways. Jack gets the woman and the little boy into a cab. The cab takes the woman and the little boy to the house of Shumann's parents. The woman leaves the litte boy with the parents. A couple of tiny surprises happen here.

The book then ends with a young worker at the newspaper office picking up the typed copy of the reporter's article. The reporter has left to go get drunk again. He's left the typed copy on his desk. The young worker thinks this article is like the beginning of some literary masterpiece. At the end of the article the reporter has scrawled out a nasty article to his boss Hagood, ending even that with a request to borrow a little bit of money.

*****

Pylon -- which I'm pretty sure is one of the more undeservedly neglected of Faulkner's books -- spans a few different genres. It is a literary book. There are passages in the book which are purely poetic, incredibly well-written. But the book is also a pulp-novel, a sensational story of love and death. And -- at the same time -- the world it describes, while being easy enough to imagine as a horse-racing story or a boys' adventure story, is also "high-tech" enough for its time that it could possibly be considered to border on science fiction.

Isaac Asimov's novel The Robots of Dawn is a science fiction novel. But it's also a mystery novel -- and very much in a tradition like that of Raymond Chandler. In fact, as I was reading through this novel, I felt a lot of similarities between The Robots of Dawn and Chandler's novel The High Window.

So this genre-straddling, which Asimov is a master of anyway, is one thing in common with Pylon and The Robots of Dawn. But the other thing in common is: a dead husband.

Just again -- I realize that right here I've given away a spoiler. I'm probably going to feel worse about giving away things with this novel than I was about giving things away for Pylon. This is probably because it's pretty hard to read Pylon. So if people have help, even at the cost of spoilers, they'll probably feel grateful, not angry. But The Robots of Dawn is a mystery, and a pretty easy read.

Anyway, The Robots of Dawn is the final book in Isaac Asmiov's Lije Baley Robots Trilogy. The first two books in this trilogy are The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun. This trilogy takes place in the distant future. Human beings on Earth have come to live underground, in gigantic, cave-like cities. But other planets have also been colonized by earthlings.

The people who have colonized these other planets are called Spacers. There are fifty Spacer worlds. Each of them are different. But, apparently, the two most elite of the Spacer worlds are Aurora and Solaria.

Life on Aurora and Solaria has become, in some aspects, so developed and advanced that the citizens of those planets live for three or four hundred years. They have basically freed the planet of infectious microbes, as well as the directly-shown violence that often leads to war.

But Aurora and Solaria are two vastly different planets. On Solaria there are only a very few human beings. Each human adult bascially lives in complete isolation, on huge estates just for them. They are generally served by whole companies of robots. But the robots also generally don't make their presence felt. Solarians are afraid of contact, even with each other.

There are fewer people on Aurora than on Earth. But there are still more people on Aurora than there are on Solaria. But, like on Solaria, the robot population largely outnumbers the human population. But on Aurora, human contact is accepted -- or, rather, contact between Aurorans. Aurorans have multiple sexual partners.

Sex isn't really much more than a sport to the Aurorans. Even marriage, which still exists, is only around to make childbirth official. And most couples don't even raise their children. What's more, Aurorans, who appear to be the most technologically advanced of all the Spacer worlds, which are generally all more advanced than Earth, tends to look down on all the other worlds, including Earth.

But somehow, the Earthman, Lije Baley, is called up to the planet Aurora to solve a case of "roboticide." As Lije Baley comes to see things, this is eventually the same thing as murder, in a sense. Earthmen are generally seen by the Spacer worlds as little more than barbarians. All the inhabitants of the Spacer worlds came from Earth. But the Spacers would rather forget that fact.

Nevertheless, this is the third time Plainclothesman Baley has been called in to investigate a mystery having to do with the Spacer worlds. Each time Baley's been called to solve these mysteries, it's been a mystery to him that he, an Earthman, has been called on by people who think of themselves as so superior to him.

The first mystery regarded the murder of a diplomat. It was thought that a robot had committed the murder. The second mystery regarded the murder of a man on Solaria. Again that mystery was thought to be the fault of a robot. In both these mysteries it seemed -- and ended up being -- impossible for a robot to have killed a human being.

This is because of the three laws of robotics, which Isaac Asimov came up with, I think, for his book I, Robot. The three laws are the most important laws for a robot to obey. They inform all the decisions a robot makes in the performance of its tasks. They are (paraphrased) 1. A robot cannot harm a human being; 2. A robot must obey all human orders, unless they break rule number one; 3. A robot must never harm itself, unless obeying the rule would break rule number one or two.

The first murder mystery Baley solved led Baley to consider the possibility of Earthmen going out in the universe and colonizing planets of their own. This was off limits, according to Spacer rules. But Baley began to get the idea, and spread it to other people.

The second mystery, of the murder on Solaria, strengthened Baley's interest in helping Earthmen colonize worlds. But the mystery also led Baley to meet a Solarian woman named Gladia Delmarre. Gladia's husband was the man murdered on Solaria. Gladia's relationship with her husband was terribly cold and frustratingly distant -- as were all relationships on Solaria.

Gladia simply couldn't function on Solaria. The life of complete individuality and isolation, where even husband and wife lived on separate estates, miles away from each other, was too much for Gladia too handle. She needed to live in an environment with more people. So Baley, who'd ended up befriending Gladia, managed to help Gladia move to Aurora.

Back on Earth, Baley had finally been developing real plans, with communities of people, to re-acclimate Earthmen to above-earth living, or, as Earthmen call it, being on the Outside. He was getting ready to find some way to propose to the Spacer worlds that Earthment should be allowed to colonize other planets.

But, unbeknownst to Baley, these plans were already being formulated by somebody on Aurora: Dr. Han Fastolfe, the greatest known roboticist. Aurorans were themselves drawing up plans for the colonization of other worlds. But the Aurorans thought their world-system was the best. And they didn't want any colonists, even Auroran colonists, deviating from the basic plan of creating worlds exactly like the Auroran worlds.

So one major Auroran proposal was that only Aurorans would be able to colonize additional worlds. And that the actual building out of the world would be in the charge, not of humans, but of robots. Robots would be sent out to new worlds and build out these worlds so they were exactly like Aurora. Then Aurorans could go to these new worlds and live there.

However, the building-out process would take a long time. And it was thought that the best way for all this to be taken care of would be if the robots were as much like humans as possible. Robots had developed a lot over the years. But most robots were not "humaniform." A humaniform robot is a robot that, in its form, most of its actions, and almost all of its mental processes, is indistinguishable from human beings.

But, as far as robot technology had gotten, there were only two humaniform robots in existence. One, Daneel Olivaw, had served as Lije Baley's partner in his previous two murder mysteries. The second, Jander Paneel, was the robot who'd been put out of commission -- somehow -- on Aurora. Both of these robots, normally, lived on Aurora. And both of them had been created by Dr. Han Fastolfe.

Dr. Han Fastolfe had created the only two humaniform robots in existence. And he'd determined that he wouldn't give up his secrets for creating humaniform robots. On top of this, he didn't want humaniform robots to be used in the colonization of other planets. Even worse, he advocated colonization by Earthmen, who, most Spacers thought, were simply barbarians. Dr. Han Fastolfe, a member of the Auroran legislature, had many people who would like to see him out of power, so he could not make it so that Earthmen could colonize other planets.

And then, suddenly, Jander Paneel was found, put out of commission. Murdered, as Baley would eventually come to see it. And Fastolfe's enemies began to see their chance. If they could prove that Fastolfe had put his own robot out of commission, for one reason or another, this kind of violent act would prove him not fit to sit in the legislature. He'd lose his political power. And his ability to advance colonization by Earthmen would vanish.

So, now, Fastolfe is in a tough spot. But, through Gladia's urging, he decides to call Baley to the planet to investigate. Baley comes to Aurora to investigate. Baley is attended by Daneel Olivaw, the robot who had served as his partner in the previous two investigations, and by Giskard, a non-humaniform robot.

Baley's first meeting is with Fastolfe himself, who gives him all the details. Fastolfe makes a few things clear. First of all, he's the only one who can create humaniform robots. Second, he's the only one who can create humaniform robot-brains. Third, he's the only one who understand the functioning of humaniform robot-brains well enough to have disabled Jander Paneel's brain.

Fastolfe knows he didn't kill the robot, though. He assumes that what really happened to the robot was a random disturbance in the magnetic field of the robot's brain. But random chance doesn't save Fastolfe. All Fastolfe's enemies would only argue that Fastolfe was using random chance as an excuse, to mask his real guilt. And Fastolfe would be thrown out of the legislature anyway. And then Earth would not be allowed to colonize other planets. Only Aurora would.

The case sounds hopeless. Fastolfe actually continually insists that it's hopeless. Baley wonders why on earth he'd been asked by Fastolfe to come here, if he thought the case was so hopeless. But then Baley goes to meet with Gladia. And Gladia reveals the fact that she wanted Baley to come and investigate. She urged Fastolfe to have Baley come from earth to investigate.

Gladia discusses emotions she'd felt for Baley, and why she'd wished for Baley to come back to the Spacer worlds. She'd come to understand what love was, just by a fleeting touch she'd given to Baley's cheek during their previous meeting. Life on Solaria was so isolated and loveless that even touching the cheek of someone caring like Baley almost made Gladia have an orgasm. And it would have been her first orgasm ever!

Gladia then discusses her experiences with Auroran men. For almost all of the inhabitants of Aurora, sex is more like a sport. People offer themselves for sex and are most often not denied. There's not much love in it, even though there's a lot more enjoyment of it than there was on Solaria. But what Gladia had been looking for was love -- what she'd started to experience when she'd simply touched Baley's cheek during their last meeting.

Gladia then opens up about her relationship with the murdered robot Jander Paneel. She'd come to discover that he was... completely humaniform. He turned her on. She came to love him. And he became a husband to her. She hid this fact from everybody as well as she could. She was probably right to do so. Nobody would really care, on sex-replete Aurora, whether Gladia was having sex with a robot. But thinking of a robot as a spouse would be beyond absurd. It would be almost offensive.

Gladia mentions that there is one Auroran man who hasn't stopped pursuing her. Despite the fact that, at the beginning of her stay on Aurora, she participated quite a bit in the sex play, to the point where a lot of Aurorans began to think of her as a bit too desperate for sex, this one man who kept pursuing Gladia was the man she continued to deny. His name is Gremionis.

Baley proposes that perhaps Gremionis had killed Jander. If Gremionis was so interested in Gladia, and if he'd managed to find out about Jander being Gladia's lover, not to mention being her husband, Gremionis might be jealous of Jander. Gremionis might have killed Jander out of jealousy. Although the idea seems to affect Gladia, Gladia dismisses the thought. Gremionis is an artist, not a roboticist, and Jander's death could only have been caused by an incredibly skilled roboticist.

Gladia also discusses Fastolfe a bit more. Gladia had become friends with Fastolfe. Fastolfe had a daughter named Vasilia. Vasilia had herself become a great roboticist. But now she hates her father.

Vasilia's relationship with her father was unconventional, by Auroran standards. Usually, children are sent away from the parents after birth, to be raised in a nursery. Children may or may not ever learn who their parents are. They generally don't know or care.

But Vasilia was raised by Fastolfe. This was, again, beyond unconventional. It was almost a breach of laws, and Fastolfe had to do a lot to make it work. But Fastolfe has always seen himself as in-tune with some of the older ways of living, including raising his own children.

Fastolfe came to love his daughter as a father would. But Vasilia came to love her father as a husband. Vasilia wanted her father to make love to her. There was no law against this on Aurora, as long as Fastolfe and Vasilia didn't have any children. But Fastolfe was revolted by the idea. Vasilia continued to pursue her father for sex. But when she finally understood her father would never have sex with her, she left him and became his enemy.

But now Fastolfe has become friends with Gladia, because Gladia reminds Fastolfe of his daughter Vasilia. Fastolfe feels that if he can make Gladia's life pleasant on Aurora, he will somehow have made up for the relationship he's apparently lost with Vasilia.

But these stories seem to get Baley no closer to the truth. Baley goes back to Fastolfe's house and to sleep for the night. The next morning he works, rather hard, in a lot of really fun and surprising ways, to get an actual interview with Vasilia.

The world of Aurora almost appears to be an empty world. The residences and workplaces are all so widely-spaced and hidden from view, or underground in many cases, that the planet almost seems to be uninhabited.

On top of that, Baley himself feels a great deal isolated. As an Earthman, he lives on a planet that hasn't destroyed all infectious microbes. Many people believe his simple presence around them might be able to kill them. So they avoid him. So Baley's investigation on Aurora largely feels like a series of interviews in offices and houses out in the desert.

Baley manages to back Vasilia into a corner, however, so that she'll meet with him in person. Baley, Giskard, and Daneel all go to Vasilia's office. (It's hardly uncalled for for Baley to have brought two robots with him. Everybody has robot attendants, almost all the time. In fact, Fastolfe and Gladia, who are basically neighbors, share a network of seventy-seven robots.)

Vasilia works for the Robotics Institute. This Institute is set up for the cooperation of all Auroran roboticists to work together to advance the development of robots as much as possible. Fastolfe, fearing the creation of humaniform robots for the colonization of other planets, simply for the use of Aurorans, has not become a member of the Institute. And so he's considered an enemy of the Institute. This is all the more reason for Vasilia to be a member of the Institute.

Baley learns that Gremionis, the man who'd been pursuing Gladia, had also been pursuing Vasilia for a little while. But Vasilia would never give in to Gremionis. But Vasilia managed to set Gremionis on to pursuing Gladia. Baley has his own suspicions as to why Vasilia would do this -- mainly so that Vasilia could get someone close enough to have put Jander out of commission. However Vasilia makes a pretty good argument that Gremionis would never have been able to do such a thing.

Leaving Vasilia's office, Baley stops at a public restroom along the road. Gremionis approaches Baley in the bathroom. Gremionis had been contacted by Gladia, who'd told him Baley's theory. Apparently Gladia believed Baley's story more than she'd let on. So now Gremionis was here to prove his innocence.

Baley is hungry. So Gremionis takes him to his house to eat. Gremionis tells the story of why he loved Vasilia, and why he now loves Gladia. His love for both women has to do with a fantasy Gremionis has, very unlike most Auroran's sexual desires, to be in a monogamous relationship with a woman. To have only one sexual partner, his whole life long. Vasilia and Gladia, for different reasons, seem like perfect candidates for fulfilling his fantasy.

Gremionis almost never met Jander, it turns out. And he had no idea that Jander was in a sexual relationship with Gladia. It wouldn't have bothered him, apparently. But being called jealous bothers Jander a whole lot. In fact, calling someone jealous is, on Aurora, a major crime of slander.

Gremionis vows that he, even though he's an artist and not some powerful politician, will get Baley kicked off Aurora as soon as possible. Most Aurorans already don't like the fact that Baley, as an infectious Earthman, is here. A little more bad sentiment about Baley would be sure to get him kciked off the planet.

But Gremionis, after speaking a little more with Baley, seems to forgive him. Baley calls Gladia and lets her know that he doesn't have the opinion any longer that Gremionis was jealous. Baley then calls the director of the Robotics Institute, a man named Amadiro. Again, using his wits to back Amadiro into a corner, Baley gets a personal interview with the man.

A storm has been brewing all day long. Baley, who has very seldom been outside the cave-cities of the Earth, and who has only been in one rainstorm, which was a terrifying experience to him, is not looking forward to the storm. But it seems as if he won't be able to avoid it.

The meeting with Amadiro begins rather cordially -- quite confusing to Baley. But Amadiro eventually begins to show his bitterness toward Fastolfe and his desire to get his hands on the secrets of the humaniform robots. Amadiro seems reluctant to let Baley go. Baley is annoyed with this. He wants to continue his investigations. But Amadiro seems to be stalling him.

But, as the thunderstorm begins, Baley insists on getting back to the car. Amadiro finally relents. Daneel and Giskard, still attending on Baley, have a really difficult time actually getting Baley out to the car. The thunderstorm and the driving rain are really a horrifying experience to Baley. He actually loses his presence and almost passes out altogether.

As it turns out, while Baley, Daneel, and Giskard were in Amadiro's office, Amadiro had some people messing around with their vehicle. The vehicle breaks down on the way back to Fastolfe's house. Giskard mentions that another couple of cars have been following them ever since they left Amadiro's office. (They were, I think, quite a long distance down the road. Giskard's increased sense of vision gave him the ability to tell that they were following from a very far distance.)

Baley realizes that Amadiro had sent robots after them. He wanted to capture Daneel. Daneel was, after all, the last humaniform robot. And Amadiro plainly expressed his desire to get his hands on the secrets of the humaniform robots. So, before the other cars could catch up with this now broken-down car, Baley has Daneel and Giskard leave him, so that Daneel can take refuge somewhere.

Baley is now by himself in one of the most terrifying experiences he, as a cave-city-dweller, can imagine: a thunderstorm. He stays in the car at first, because he thinks it's the only safe place.

The pursuing robots reach the car. But, as Baley assumed, they are only interested in the robots. Baley gives the robots fake directions as to where they went. The robots take those directions. But Baley now realizes that he can't be here once the robots realize that he'd given them the wrong directions.

So Baley leaves the car and runs away through the frightening thunderstorm. Baley has no idea where he's going, and he eventually passes out from shock and cold at the base of a tree.

A few hours later, Baley wakes up in Gladia's house. Giskard, having brought Daneel here for safety, then went out with Gladia, in Gladia's car, to find Baley. The car had broken down not far from Gladia's house, and Gladia and Giskard found Baley quite easily.

Baley is safe and warm. But his mental faculties are still kind of weak from the extreme terror and shock he'd experienced from the thunderstorm. This is my favorite part of the story. At this point, Baley seems to luxuriate in his weakness. Over and over again he fantasizes that he's a little baby -- an infant -- being taken care of by Gladia as if she were a parent.

Baley gets some chicken soup and ends up feeling a lot better, a lot more in control of his mental faculties. He even has enough energy to comfort Gladia a bit more. She's still very upset that she lost her "husband," so to speak. But Baley gets tired and weak again and decides to go to bed. Here he again pretends that he's a little baby -- an infant, as he says.

Apparently Gladia has been aroused by Baley's vulnerable, infantile state. And the love she felt for Baley before has now intensified. She can no longer resist. She comes to Baley's room and makes love to him. I love this idea. A man fantasizes himself to be a little baby, being taken care of by a woman, who then gets turned on by his infantile state and decides to make love with him. Add diapers, and that kind of fantasy would be right up my alley.

The next day Baley and Gladia have a terrific breakfast scene together. And then there is a final showdown scene, which is, I suppose, the closest thing an Earthman would get to a courtroom scene on the planet of Aurora. This is kind of the climax to the book. During and after the climax a few surprising things happened.

I'm kind of disappointed in this post, I have to admit. I've spent all my time summarizing these two novels. I'll get better at condensing the summaries and adding commentary. I have a lot more commentary about The Robots of Dawn than I do about Pylon, I would say.

Actually -- Pylon is such an under-read book that I wanted to give its plot as fully as I could, just so people could see what an interesting book it is. It's hard to get through sometimes, just because of the stream-of-consciousness, poetic passages. But the overall plot is really wild.

And the dialogue of the book -- well -- it's what made me think of Faulkner the script-writer. When you just look at the stream-of-consciousness passages, you wonder how in the hell Faulkner could have been a screenwriter. But when you read the dialogue, and you think of the action -- then you know why people wanted Faulkner as a screenwriter.

So I wanted to accentuate the plot for Pylon, just so maybe if people saw that alone, they might want to give the book a chance. I think, unfortunately, that carried over into my reactions to The Robots of Dawn. I read the two books almost in parallel over the past four days. And I'd read them both because, after going through Book of the Damned and Johnson's Lives so slowly, I just wanted to move through some stuff quickly.

I wanted to pick apart The Robots of Dawn on a number of levels, though. But I messed up by writing a huge summary instead. So, all I can say is, read it. I'm a tremendous fan of Asimov. And this book -- did have some weaknesses, in my opinion -- but, overall, it was a whole lot of fun, like just about everything Asimov wrote.