“A girl,” said Molly.

Klimus moved closer to see for himself. “Good head of hair,” he said, touching a gnarled hand to his own billiard-ball pate, but making no other comment about the child’s paternity. “How much does she weigh?”

“Seven pounds, twelve ounces,” said Molly.

“And her length?”

“Seventeen inches.”

He nodded. “Very good.”

Molly discreetly moved Amanda to her breast, mostly hidden by her hospital robe. Then she looked up. “I want to thank you, Burian. We both do. For everything you’ve done for us. We can’t begin to say how grateful we are.”

“Oui,”said Pierre, all his fears having dissipated. His daughter was an angel; how could she possibly have a devil’s genes? “Millefois merci.”

The old man nodded and looked away. “It was nothing.”

Je ne suis pas fou, thought Pierre, a month later. I’m not crazy. And yet the frameshift was gone. He’d wanted to do more studies of the DNA sequence that produced the strange neurotransmitter associated with Molly’s telepathy. He’d used a restriction enzyme to snip out the bit of chromosome thirteen that coded for its synthesis. So far, so good. Then, to provide himself with an unlimited supply of the genetic material, he set up PCR amplification of it — the polymerase chain reaction, which would keep duplicating that segment of DNA over and over again. Needing nothing more than a test tube containing the specimen, a thermocycler, and a few reagents, PCR could produce a hundred billion copies of a DNA molecule over the course of an afternoon.

And now he had billions of copies — except that, although the copies were all identical to each other, they weren’t the same as the original. The thymine base that had wormed its way into Molly’s genetic code, causing the frameshift, hadn’t been incorporated into the copies. At the key point, the snips of DNA produced through PCR all read CAT CAG GGT GTC

CAT. Just like Pierre’s own did; just like everybody’s did.

Could he have screwed up? Could he have misread the sequence of nucleotides in that original sample of Molly’s DNA he’d extracted from her blood all those months ago? He rummaged in his file drawer until he found his original autorad. No mistake: the thymine intruder was there.

He went through the long process of making another autorad from another piece of Molly’s actual original DNA. Yup, the thymine showed up there, too — the frameshift was present, shifting the normal CAT CAG GGT

GTC CAT into TCA TCA GGG TGT CCA.

PCR was a simple chemical procedure. It shouldn’t care if the thymine really belonged there or not. It should have just faithfully duplicated the string.

But it had not. It — or something in the DNA reproduction process — had corrected the string, putting it back the way it was supposed to be.

Pierre shook his head in wonder.

“Good morning, Dr. Klimus,” said Pierre coming into the HGC office to pick up his mail.

“Tardivel,” said Klimus. “How is the baby?”

“She’s fine, sir. Just fine.”

“Still have all that hair?”

“Oh, yes.” Pierre smiled. “In fact, she’s even got a hairy back — even I don’t have a hairy back. But the pediatrician says that’s not unusual, and it should disappear as her hormones become better balanced.”

“Is she a bright girl?”

“She seems to be.”

“Well-adjusted?”

“Actually, for someone just a month old she’s rather quiet, which is nice, in a way. At least we’re managing to get some sleep.”

“I’d like to come by the house this weekend. See the girl.”

It was a presumptuous request, thought Pierre. But then — dammit, he was the child’s biological father. Pierre felt his stomach knotting. He cursed himself for thinking anything this complex would end up not being a source of problems. Still, the man was Pierre’s boss, and Pierre’s fellowship was coming up for renewal.

“Um, sure,” said Pierre. He hoped Klimus would detect the lack of enthusiasm and decide not to pursue the matter. He took his mail from its cubbyhole.

“In fact,” said the old man, “perhaps I’ll come over for dinner Sunday night. At six? Make an evening of it.”

Pierre’s heart sank. He thought of something Einstein had once said:

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing. “Sure,”

Pierre said again, resigning himself to it. “Sure thing.”

The old man nodded curtly, then went back to sorting through his mail.

Pierre stood still for a few moments, then, realizing he had been dismissed, took his own mail and headed on down the corridor to his lab.

Burian Klimus sat in Molly and Pierre’s living room. Amanda didn’t seem to take to him at all, but, then again, he didn’t make any effort to hold her or baby-talk to her. That bothered Pierre. The old man had wanted to see the girl, after all. But instead of playing with her, he just kept asking questions about her nursing and sleeping habits, all the while — to Pierre’s astonishment — scrawling notes in Cyrillic in a pocket-size spiral-bound notebook.

Finally, it was time for dinner. Pierre and Molly had both agreed that although tonight was Pierre’s turn to cook, the evening would probably go better with something more elaborate than hot dogs or Kraft dinner.

Molly prepared chicken Kiev (Klimus was Ukrainian, after all), potatoes au gratin, and Brussels sprouts. Pierre opened a bottle of liebfraumilch to go with it, and the three adults made their way to the table, leaving Amanda — whom Molly had breast-fed earlier — contentedly napping in her bassinet.

Pierre tried all sorts of polite topics for conversation, but Klimus rose to none of them, so he finally decided to ask the old man what he was working on.

“Well,” said Klimus, after taking another sip of wine, “you know I’m spending a lot of time at the Institute of Human Origins.” The IHO was also in Berkeley; its director was Donald Johanson, discoverer of the famous Australopithecus afarensis known as Lucy. “I’m hoping to make progress with Hapless Hannah’s DNA in resolving the out-of-Africa debate.”

“Great film,” said Molly lightly, really not wishing to see the conversation devolve into shoptalk. “Meryl Streep was excellent.”

Klimus raised an eyebrow. “I know Pierre knows about Hannah, Molly, but do you?”

She shook her head. He told her about his breakthrough with extracting intact DNA from the Israeli Neanderthal bones, then paused to fortify himself with another sip of wine. Pierre got up to open a second bottle.

“Well,” said Klimus, “there are two competing models for the origin of modern humans. One is called the out-of-Africa hypothesis; the other is the multiregional hypothesis. They both agree that Homo erectus started spreading out from Africa into Eurasia as much as one-point-eight million years ago — Java man, Peking man, Heidelberg man, those are all specimens of erectus.

“But the out-of-Africa hypothesis says that modern man, Homo sapiens — which may or may not include Neanderthals as a subgroup — evolved in east Africa, but didn’t expand out of there until a second migration from Africa just one or two hundred thousand years ago. The out-of-Africa proponents say that when this second wave caught up with various erectus groups in Asia and Europe, they defeated them, leaving Homo sapiens as the only extant species of humanity.”

He paused long enough to let Pierre pour him another glass of wine.

“The multiregional hypothesis is quite different. It says all those erectus populations went on evolving, and they each gave rise independently to modern man. That would explain why Homo sapiens seems to appear in the fossil record pretty much simultaneously across all of Eurasia.”