“But surely,” said Molly, intrigued despite herself, “if you have isolated populations, you’d end up with different species evolving in each area — like on the Galapagos Islands.” She rose to start clearing the dishes.

Klimus handed her his dinner plate. “The multiregionalists contend that there was a lot of inbreeding among the various populations, allowing them to evolve in tandem.”

“Inbreeding from France all the way to Indonesia?” said Molly, disappearing into the kitchen for a moment. “And I thought my sister got around.”

Pierre laughed, but when Molly returned she was shaking her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “This multiregional stuff seems more like an exercise in political correctness than good science — an attempt to avoid Felix Sousa’s which-race-came-first question and say, ‘Hey, we all evolved together at once.’ ”

Klimus nodded. “Ordinarily, I should agree with you, but there are excellent sequences of skulls going all the way from Homo erectus through Neanderthal man and into fully modern humans in Java and China. It does look like independent evolution toward Homo sapiens went on at least in those locations, and possibly elsewhere, too.”

“But that’s evolutionarily absurd,” said Molly. “Surely the classical model of evolution says that, through mutation, one individual in a population spontaneously gains a survival advantage, and then his or her offspring, because of that advantage, outcompete everyone else, eventually creating a new species.”

Pierre got up to help Molly serve dessert — a chocolate mousse she had made. “I’ve always had a problem with that method,” he said. “Think about it: it means that a few generations down the road, the entire population is descended from that one lucky mutant. You end up with a very small gene pool that way, and that tends to concentrate recessive genetic disorders.” He handed a glass bowl to Klimus, then sat down. “It’s like Queen Victoria, who carried the hemophilia gene. Her offspring inbred with the royal houses of Europe, devastating them. To suppose that whole populations are reduced to a single parent every time a major mutation-driven advantage occurs would make life extraordinarily precarious. If an accident didn’t kill off the lucky mutant, his or her offspring might die off anyway through genetic diseases.” He sampled the mousse, then nodded, impressed. “Now, if evolution could somehow occur simultaneously across widely dispersed populations, as the multiregionalists are suggesting, well, I suppose that would avoid that problem — but I can’t think of any mechanism that would allow that kind of evolution, although—”

Amanda started crying. Pierre immediately got back on his feet and hurried over to her, picking her up, holding her against his shoulder, and bouncing her up and down gently. “There, there, honey,” he cooed. “There, there.” He smiled at Klimus, back in the dining room. “Sorry about this,” he said.

“Not at all, not at all,” said Klimus. He pulled out his notebook and jotted something down.

“Look at Mommy, sweetheart. Come on, look at Mommy. There’s a good girl. Now, Daddy’s got to prick your arm a little bit. It’ll hurt, but not too much, and it’ll only last a second. Okay, sweetheart? Here’s my finger. Give it a good squeeze. That’s right. Okay, here we go. No, no — don’t cry, honey.

Don’t cry. It’s over now. Everything’s going to be all right, baby…

Everything’s going to be just fine.”

Pierre checked a small sample of Amanda’s DNA. His daughter lacked the frameshift mutation on chromosome thirteen, and so presumably wouldn’t grow up to be a telepath. Molly seemed to have curiously mixed feelings about this, but Pierre had to admit he was relieved.

Pierre’s earlier work had shown that only one of Molly’s two chromosome thirteens had the telepathy frameshift, meaning Amanda had had only a fifty-fifty chance of inheriting it from her mother (Amanda, of course, would have received one of Molly’s thirteens and one of Klimus’s thirteens). So there was really nothing remarkable about baby Amanda not having inherited her mother’s frameshifted gene, and yet—$

And yet, during simple PCR amplification of Molly’s DNA, the frameshift had been corrected, so—$

So was this a case of Amanda actually, by the luck of the draw, receiving the non-frameshifted chromosome thirteen from her mother, or—$

Or did none of Molly’s eggs contain the frameshifted DNA?

Had it been somehow corrected there, too, just as it had in PCR replication?

Obviously, the frameshift couldn’t be corrected every time it appeared, or it would have been fixed when Molly herself was developing as an embryo thirty-odd years ago. But still, somehow, it was being corrected now. Pierre had to know whether the correction was present in Molly’s unfertilized eggs, or whether the correction was only made after the egg was fertilized and had started dividing.

Thanks to the pre-IVF hormone treatments, Molly had brought a large number of eggs to maturity in a single cycle. Gwendolyn Bacon had extracted fifteen from her for the IVF attempt, but she had told Klimus to only attempt to fertilize half of them, meaning seven or eight of Molly’s unfertilized eggs were presumably still here in building 74.

After phoning Molly to get her permission, Pierre left his own lab and walked down to the same small surgical theater in which Molly’s eggs had been extracted over a year ago. Pierre knew one of the techs there: the guy was a San Jose Sharks fan, and the two of them often argued hockey.

Pierre had no trouble getting him to find and hand over Molly’s eggs, seven of which were indeed still in cold storage.

Of course, it was possible that a random selection of seven eggs might all have the same maternal chromosome thirteen, but the odds were against it. The chances were as slim as a family having seven children and all of them being boys: 50% x 50% x 50% x 50% x 50% x 50% x 50%, which was 0.078% — a minuscule likelihood.

And yet that apparently had happened. Not one of the eggs had the frameshift.

Unless—$

Molly’s two chromosome thirteens differed from each other in other ways, of course. Pierre started testing other points on the chromosomes extracted from the eggs, and—$

No. The eggs had not all gotten the same chromosome thirteen.

Four of them had received one of Molly’s chromosome thirteens — the one that, in Molly’s body, didn’t have the frameshift.

And three had received the other one of Molly’s thirteens — the one that, in Molly’s body, did have the frameshift.

And yet, incredibly, the frameshift had been corrected out of every one of the eggs…

A month later, Pierre and Molly drove to San Francisco International Airport. Pierre was about to meet his mother-in-law and sister-in-law for the first time. Amanda was going to be baptized the next day; although the Bonds weren’t Catholic, Molly’s mother had insisted on being on hand for this, at least.

“There they are!” said Molly, pointing through a sea of people, all struggling with their bags and luggage carts.

Pierre scanned the crowd. He’d seen pictures of Barbara and Jessica Bond before, but none of the faces leaped out at him. But now two women were waving at them from the back of the group, wide grins across their faces. They jostled their way through the little exit gate the crowd was funneling out of. Molly rushed over and hugged her mother and then, after a moment of sibling awkwardness, hugged her sister, too.

“Mom, Jess,” Molly said, “this is Pierre.”

There was another awkward moment; then Mrs. Bond moved in and hugged him. “It’s wonderful to meet you at long last,” she said, just the barest hint of a dig in her voice. She’d not been pleased when Molly had gotten married without even inviting her.