As soon as visiting hours began, Molly came into Pierre’s room at San Francisco General Hospital. Pierre looked up at her from the bed. The left side of his face was bandaged, and his legs were in traction.

“Hi, honey,” said Molly.

“Hi, sweetheart,” said Pierre. He gestured at all the equipment hooked up to him. “After you left yesterday, somebody said my total hospital bill is going to be in the neighborhood of two hundred thousand dollars.” He managed a grin. “I’m sure glad Tiffany talked me into the Gold Plan.”

“I brought you a newspaper,” said Molly, pulling a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle out of the canvas bag she was carrying.

“Thanks, but I don’t feel much like reading.”

Molly said, “Then let me read it to you. There’s a front-page story by that man we met, Barnaby Lincoln.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh.” She cleared her throat. “ ‘Officials from the California State Insurance Board, escorted by eight state troopers, today seized control of Condor Health Insurance, Inc., of San Francisco, in the wake of startling revelations made last week. ”Condor is out of business, as of today,“ said Clark Finchurst, State Insurance Commissioner. ”The industry’s emergency fund, which was established to handle such things, will take care of current claims until Condor’s policies can be handed over in an orderly fashion to other insurers.“ ’ ”

“All right!” said Pierre.

“It says there’s going to be a full inquiry. Craig Bullen is cooperating with the authorities.”

“Good for him.”

“Oh, and I picked up that printout you wanted.” She took a two-inch-thick pile of fanfold computer paper out of her bag and placed it on the table beside his bed.

“Thanks,” said Pierre.

Molly sat down on the edge of the bed and took one of Pierre’s dancing hands in hers. “I love you,” she said.

“And I love you, too,” said Pierre, squeezing her hand. “I love you more than words can say.”

Pierre lay in his hospital bed that night. His six minutes of CPU time on LBNL’s Cray supercomputer had at last become available, and the simulation he and Shari had coded had finally been run. Pierre started wading through the 384 pages of printout.

When he was done, he operated the hand control that lowered the motorized back of his bed. He stared at the ceiling.

It made sense. It all fit.

The existence of codon synonyms did indeed allow additional information to be superimposed on the standard A, C, G, T genetic code.

Yes, AAA and AAG both made lysine, but the AAA form also coded a zero into what Shari had already dubbed, in a note jotted in the margin, “the gatekeeper function,” which governed the correction or invocation of frameshift mutations. Meanwhile, the AAG version coded a one.

But that was just the tip of the iceberg. There were four valid codons that made proline: CCA, CCC, CCG, and CCT. For these, the final letter indicated a base-sixteen order of magnitude shift of the splicing cursor, which marked the position where a nucleotide would be added or deleted from the DNA, causing a frameshift. The CCT form moved the cursor sixteen nucleotides; the CCC form moved it 16, or 256 nucleotides; the 2

CCA form 16, or 4,096 nucleotides; and the CCG form moved it l6, or 3 4

65,536 nucleotides.

Other synonyms performed different jobs: GAA and GAG both made glutamine, but they also set the direction of the splicing cursor’s movement. GAG set it moving to the “left” (in the direction leading from the three-prime carbon to the five-prime carbon in each deoxyribose), and GAA set it moving to the “right” (the five-prime to three-prime direction).

Meanwhile, TTT, which made phenylalanine, coded for a nucleotide insertion, while its synonym TTC was the instruction for a nucleotide deletion. And the four codons that made threonine — ACA, ACC, ACG, and ACT — indicated by their final letter which nucleotide would be inserted at the splicing cursor.

The coding based on synonyms moved the cursor, but the timing of when frameshifts would be invoked was governed by certain of the seemingly endless stuttering sequences in the junk DNA. On the smaller scale of the individual, it had already been demonstrated that the number of CAG stutters set the age at which Huntington’s would first manifest itself, and, as Pierre had pointed out to Molly, the number of repeats does change from generation to generation in a phenomenon called “anticipation” — an ironically prophetic name given what Pierre and Shari’s model showed.

Indeed, the computer simulation suggested promising lines of research into manipulating genetic timers — research that ultimately might cure Huntington’s and related ailments. Certainly, no sudden breakthrough was likely, but, at a guess, inside a decade, controlling individual aberrant genetic timers might be possible. It had come full circle: by deliberately choosing not to pursue Huntington’s research, Pierre might have, in fact, made the discovery that would eventually lead to a cure for the disease.

If that had been all that his research suggested, he might have been pleased intellectually, but still profoundly sad, crushed by the cruel irony: after all, anything but an immediate cure would be too late to help Pierre Jacques Tardivel.

But Pierre didn’t feel sadness. On the contrary, he was elated, for the genetic timers pointed to something beyond his personal problems, beyond the problems — however real, however poignant — of the one in ten thousand people who had Huntington’s. The timers pointed to a truth, a fundamental revelation, that affected every one of the five billion human beings now alive, every one of the billions who had come before, and every one of all the untold trillions of humans yet to be born.

According to the simulation, the DNA timers, incrementing generation by generation through genetic anticipation, could go off across whole populations almost simultaneously. The multiregionalists were more right than they’d ever guessed: Pierre’s research proved that preprogrammed evolutionary steps could take place across vast groups of beings all at once.

A quote came to Pierre, from — of course — a Nobel laureate. The French philosopher Henri Bergson had written in his 1907 work Creative Evolution that “the present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.” The junk DNA was a language, just as that article Shari had found had suggested: the language in which the master plan for life had been written by its designer. Pierre’s heart was pounding with excitement, and adrenaline was coursing through his system, but finally he drifted off to sleep, the printout still resting on his chest, dreaming of the hand of God.

Molly pushed the office door open and barged in. “Dr. Klimus, I—”

“Molly, I’m very busy—”

“Too busy to talk about Myra Tottenham?”

Klimus looked up. Somebody else was passing by in the corridor. “Close the door.”

Molly did so and sat down. “Shari Cohen and I have just spent a day at Stanford going through Myra’s papers; they’ve got stacks of them in their archives.”

Klimus managed a weak grin. “Universities love paper.”

“Indeed they do. Myra Tottenham was working on ways to speed up nucleotide sequencing when she died.”

“Was she?” said Klimus. “I really don’t know what this has to do—”

“It has everything to do with you, Burian. Her technique — involving specialized restriction enzymes — was years ahead of what others were doing.”

“What does a psychologist possibly know about DNA research?”

“Not much. But Shari tells me that what she was doing was close to what we now call the Klimus Technique — the very same technique for which you won the Nobel Prize. We looked through your old papers at Stanford, too. You were flailing about in completely the wrong direction, trying to use direct ion-charging of nucleotides as a sorting technique—”