A TALE OF TWO BROTHERS

By Richard Lacayo

Despite the seven-year difference in their ages, Theodore and David Kaczynski are brothers with a lot in common. Everyone who knows them offers the same descriptions: smart, introspective, quiet. They went to Ivy League schools but didn't use their prestigious degrees to chase the almighty dollar. They both sought solitude in remote parts of the country, where they tried to shed whatever stood between them and the natural world. Both of them appear to have compelling notions about justice. Ted's may have led him to murder. David's led him to turn his brother over to the FBI.

Now that he is the man who the FBI believes may be the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, 53, has begun to emerge from the obscurity and isolation he cultivated for most of his life. And as he comes to the surface, so does David, 46, his brother and his keeper. No one quite expected the saga of the Unabomber to encompass such poignance--and such eternal parables. The prodigal and the faithful son, the favorite and the outcast, the firstborn and the younger are characters as old as the Bible that resound in every family today. And here, with surprising pangs of recognition, are variations on themes that began with Cain and Abel.

Anyone with an imagination is using it these days to imagine themselves in David's shoes, facing the questions he has faced. When should the bonds of family give way to the obligations to society? And how, in the intricate and ambiguous dealings between brothers, can anyone be sure that an apparent act of principle isn't also, ever so slightly, a subtle act of retaliation? "David is a straight arrow, sensitive and moral. He didn't want to hurt his brother," notes Father Melvin La Follette, an Episcopal priest and a friend. "But at the same time, he was scrupulous. He wanted to do the right thing." David once trekked 40 miles to return an Indian flint knife to the place he found it after he learned it was wrong to move it.

David and Theodore Kaczynski have both put some distance between themselves and civilization. Unlike other baby boomers whose back-to-the-land impulses could be satisfied with a Neil Young album, they know what it's like to live without electricity or running water. On the 1.4 acres of Montana woodland that he bought with David in 1971, Ted spent whole winters living on dried root vegetables, some rice and flour and the snowshoe hares he tracked down with his .22-cal. rifle. In the early 1980s, David headed for the desolate Christmas Mountains of West Texas. The cabin he has used for part of each year stands 20 miles from the nearest paved road. Before it was finished, he hunkered down for a while in just a hole dug in the ground. To keep out what little rain fell, he pulled a tarpaulin across the opening.

But unlike Ted, who was once described by the chairman of the mathematics department at the University of California, Berkeley, as "almost pathologically shy," David was more personable, even talkative when he got going. And unlike Ted, he eventually reached an accommodation with the larger world. In 1990, just before their father committed suicide while suffering from terminal cancer, David came north, cut his hair and soon thereafter married his high school girlfriend, Linda Patrik. She teaches philosophy at Union College in Schenectady, New York, near where they live. For the past three years he has been a counselor for troubled teens at a youth center in Albany.

For Ted, 1990 also appears to have been a turning point, but in the opposite direction. He didn't attend his father's funeral. For some time he had been cutting back his already grudging contact with family members, complaining he had developed a heart arrhythmia made worse by dealing with them. To identify any "urgent and important" letters they might send, he asked them to draw a red line under the postage stamp. When they used it to mark the letter in which they broke the news of his father's suicide, Ted wrote back complaining that the message didn't merit a red line. From that point he retreated even more firmly into the Montana woods, his books and himself.

Was Ted different almost from the start? Investigators say that at the age of six months he was hospitalized for several weeks after suffering an allergic reaction to a drug. During that time, his parents were not allowed to hold or hug him. When he came home, they found him listless and withdrawn. In light of that early denial of human contact, investigators are intrigued by the fact that one of the Unabomber's early targets was James McConnell, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan who eventually became well known for researching the benefits of sensory deprivation for autistic children.

Investigators were told that in childhood Ted seemed to avoid human contact. As their firstborn sulked through grade school, his parents suspected that he might be unhappy because he was so much brighter than his peers. In those years "he was a discipline problem," admits Robert Rippey, a retired math teacher at Evergreen Park High School who remembers Ted fondly as one of his brightest students. "He drove his teachers up the wall. So in high school we had to figure something out." What his parents and school officials arrived at was the accelerated curriculum that allowed him to skip his junior year of high school and shot him to Harvard at age 16. But while his brother David also skipped junior year, Ted may have been more deeply affected by a fast track that landed him among older kids.

However maladroit he could be in conversation, or maybe because of that, Ted liked to put his thoughts and feelings down on paper. In the early 1970s, after abruptly leaving his teaching post at Berkeley, he wrote a long essay that opposed funding for scientific research, particularly in the field of genetics. (The same points appear in the Unabomber manifesto.) In the hope of getting his essay published, or at least publicized, he sent it to columnists around the country.

David, who graduated from Columbia University in 1970 with a degree in English, is a writer too, but of a different temper. In recent years he has produced stories and poems. Stuffed somewhere in a drawer, say friends, is an unpublished novel about baseball. "He's a man of few words," says Mary Ann Welch, a friend in Schenectady. "So it all comes out in his writing, very detailed and descriptive."

Starting in 1974, David taught high school English for two years in Lisbon, Iowa, a town where his parents had lived for a while when he and Ted were at college. Co-workers describe a popular teacher who cared greatly for his students and nothing for material things. If he ever had a proper winter coat, no one seems to have seen it. When guests came to his apartment, he served them soft drinks in jelly jars. But unlike Ted, David demonstrated a gift for human contact. Though not much of an athlete, he joined the other high school faculty for Thursday-night basketball games. "You could talk to Dave about anything," says Jim West, a junior high math teacher. "We used to kid him about being so smart, and he'd say his brother was so much smarter that he had a hard time talking to him. That was hard to imagine."

After Iowa, David passed through a number of jobs. One was as a supervisor at the Addison, Illinois, factory of Foam Cutting Engineers, a company that also employed his father. For a while in 1978 one of his subordinates was Ted, who had left Montana briefly in the hope of earning some money. According to investigators, at the factory Ted began dating a female supervisor. (A fellow employee told TIME it was a single date.) After their relationship went nowhere, he responded by composing crude limericks about her and posting them around the plant. When David ordered him to stop, Ted stuck one onto the very machine his brother was operating. David instantly fired him. Ted had been on the job just four months. Soon after, he wrote the woman a letter in which he said he had considered doing harm to her. She was lucky, he told her, that he had decided not to. How serious was the threat? The first Unabomb explosion had gone off three months before his firing.

In the early 1980s, David made his own move into the wild. For a pittance he bought a 30-acre spread at Terlingua Ranch, a grandly named stretch of bare-bones, no-nonsense privacy among the mesquite and greasewood of the Chihuahuan desert, where lizards and diamondback rattlers are the nearest neighbors. To a few friends, he was even known jokingly as "Henry David"--as in Henry David Thoreau, the literary patron saint of nature lovers and solitary souls. He took a passionate stand against paving the two-lane road into Terlingua Ranch. "We both worried about the destruction of mankind from too much emphasis on technology," says Joe La Follette, an English teacher and friend who joined David on long desert hikes. "But he didn't have a solution."

Did Ted? David revered his brother's commitment to a full-time wilderness existence. Because his cabin has no running water, David sometimes showered at a bunkhouse maintained by Terlingua Ranch. It was there that in 1983 he met Juan Sanchez, a Mexican farmhand who sometimes did maintenance work at the estates. David helped him secure a green card and urged him to write to his brother in Montana, who he suggested might be able to offer him advice on his immigration problems. That led to a seven-year correspondence. From November 1988 to November 1995, Ted wrote to Sanchez as often as eight times a year in neatly penned, grammatical Spanish. Ted wrote mostly of his poverty and isolation. With a mathematician's precision he described his finances down to the penny. "As to my poverty, I have $53.01 exactly, barely enough to stave off hunger this winter without eating rabbits." At Christmastime 1994, Ted sent Sanchez an intricately carved wooden tube marked with a Latin motto, Montana Semper Liberi (Mountain Men Are Always Free).

By then, David and his wife Linda had been married four years. Their backyard wedding had been a mixture of Buddhist and Christian ceremony. After the bride and groom, sitting before a large painting of a Bodhisattva, clanged finger cymbals and chanted, a Christian minister offered a blessing. It was in late 1994 that Ted wrote asking for money. David sent $1,000 in October. Two months later, Thomas Mosser, a New Jersey advertising executive, was killed by a device the Unabomber had mailed from San Francisco. In February 1995, David sent Ted $2,000 more. Two months after that, Gilbert Murray, a timber-industry lobbyist, was killed by a mail bomb at his office in Sacramento, California. Ted never paid back the loans.

David began to suspect something in the summer of 1995, when news accounts about the Unabomber reported he was thought to have grown up in Chicago and to have lived in or around Berkeley and Salt Lake City, Utah, all places where Ted had spent time. When the manifesto was published a few months later, David thought he could hear his brother in its philosophy and language. It wasn't just the rote denunciations of technology, a sentiment familiar to anyone who ever cursed a computer. Ted and the Unabomber shared certain turns of phrase. For example, "Eat your cake and have it too." Most people say it the other way around.

Last October David brought his suspicions to Susan Swanson, a childhood friend of his wife's who works for the Investigative Group Inc., a prominent detective firm. She in turn contacted Clinton Van Zandt, a behavioral-science specialist, formerly the FBI's chief hostage negotiator, who runs a security consulting firm. Without saying who had written them, Swanson turned over typed copies of two of Ted's handwritten letters. She asked Van Zandt to compare them with the manifesto. After studying them with a psychiatrist and a linguist, he found a 60% probability the same man had written both. Van Zandt also passed the material on to two specialists in communication. They put the likelihood at 80% to 90%. The first week of January Swanson brought in Anthony Bisceglie, a Washington attorney, who contacted the FBI. In February, he persuaded David to talk to the agents directly. For the family, Bisceglie said, "there was a tremendous amount of anguish."

And nothing perhaps compared with what lies ahead. All around Ted's cabin, FBI agents continue to dig for clues to connect him to the Unabomber. Late last week David and his mother Wanda visited the offices of the federal public defender in Washington. Is David now hoping to shield Ted from the law he gave him over to? A brother's obligations can be a complicated thing.

--Reported by Wendy Cole/Chicago, James L. Graff/Lisbon, Laura Lopez/Chihuahua, Elaine Shannon/Washington and Richard Woodbury/Terlingua

With reporting by WENDY COLE/CHICAGO, JAMES L. GRAFF/LISBON, LAURA LOPEZ/CHIHUAHUA, ELAINE SHANNON/WASHINGTON AND RICHARD WOODBURY/TERLINGUA