Robert Sawyer - Frameshift

Molly’s mother came out of the kitchen carrying a cake — a carrot cake, Paul’s favorite, crowned with the requisite number of candles, including one for good luck, arranged just like the stars on an American flag. Jessica helped Paul get his presents out of the way.

Molly couldn’t resist. While her mother fumbled to get her camera set up, she moved in to stand right beside her stepfather, bringing him into her zone again. Molly’s mother said, “Now make a wish and blow out the candles.”

Paul closed his eyes. I wish , he thought, that I hadn’t gotten married .

He exhaled on the tiny flames, and smoke rose toward the ceiling.

Molly wasn’t really surprised. At first she’d thought Paul was having an affair: he often worked late on weeknights, or disappeared all day on Saturdays, saying he was going to the office. But the truth, in some ways, was just as bad. He wasn’t going off to be with someone else; rather, he just didn’t want to be with them.

They sang “Happy Birthday,” and then Paul cut the cake.

The thoughts of Molly’s mother were no better. She suspected Molly might be a lesbian, so rarely was she seen with men. She hated her job, but pretended to enjoy it, and although she smiled when she handed over money to help Molly with university expenses, she resented every dollar of it. It reminded her of how hard she’d worked to put her first husband, Molly’s dad, through business school.

Molly looked again at Paul and found she couldn’t really blame him. She wanted to get away from this family, too — far, far away, so that even birthdays and Christmases could be skipped. Paul handed her a piece of cake. Molly took it and moved down to the far end of the table, sitting alone.

Wrapped up in his personal problems, Pierre failed all of his first-year courses. He went to see the dean of undergraduate studies and explained his situation. The dean gave him a second chance: McGill offered a reduced curriculum over the summer session. Pierre would only manage a couple of credits, but it would get him back on the right track for next September.

And so Pierre found himself back in an introductory genetics course. By coincidence, the same pencil-necked Anglais teaching assistant who had originally pointed out the heritability of eye color was teaching this one.

Pierre had never been one for paying attention in class; his old notebooks contained mostly doodled hockey-team crests. But today he really was trying to listen… at least with one ear.

“It was the biggest puzzle in science during the early 1950s,” said the TA. “What form did the DNA molecule take? It was a race against time, with many luminaries, including Linus Pauling, working on the problem.

They all knew that whoever discovered the answer would be remembered forever…”

Or perhaps with both ears…

“A young biologist — no older than any of you — named James Watson got involved with Francis Crick, and the two of them started looking for the answer. Building on the work of Maurice Wilkins and X-ray crystallography studies done by Rosalind Franklin…”

Pierre sat rapt.

“… Watson and Crick knew that the four bases used in DNA — adenine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine — were each of a different size. But by using cardboard cutouts of the bases, they were able to show that when adenine and thymine bind together, they form a combined shape that’s the same length as the one formed when guanine and cytosine bind together. And they showed that those combined shapes could form rungs on a spiral ladder…”

Rapt.

“It was an amazing breakthrough — and what was even more amazing was that James Watson was just twenty-five years old when he and Crick proved that the DNA molecule took the form of a double helix…”

Morning, after a night spent more awake than asleep. Pierre sat on the edge of his bed.

He had turned nineteen in April.

Many of those at risk for Huntington’s had full-blown symptoms by the time they were — to select a figure — thirty-eight. Just double his current age.

So little time.

And yet—

And yet, so much had happened in the last nineteen years.

Vague, early memories, of baby-sitters and tricycles and marbles and endless summers and Batman in first run on TV.

Kindergarten. God, that seemed so long ago. Mademoiselle Renault’s class. Dimly recalled celebrations of Canada’s centennial.

Being a Louveteau — a Cub Scout — but never managing to finish a merit badge.

Two years of summer camp.

His family moving from Clearpoint to Outrement, and he having to adjust to a new school.

Breaking his arm playing street hockey.

And the FLQ October Crisis in 1970, and his parents trying to explain to a very frightened boy what all the TV news stories meant, and why there were troops in the streets.

Robert Apollinaire, his best friend when he was ten, who had moved all of twenty blocks away, and had never been seen again.

And puberty, and all that that entailed.

The hubbub when the 1976 Olympics were held in Montreal.

His first kiss, at a party, playing spin the bottle.

And seeing Star Wars for the first time and thinking it was the best movie that ever was.

His first girlfriend, Marie — he wondered where she was now.

Getting his driver’s license, and smashing up Dad’s car two months later.

Discovering the magic words Je t’aime , and how effective they were at getting his hand under a sweater or skirt. Then learning what those words really meant, in the summer of his seventeenth year, with Danielle. And crying alone on a street corner after she had broken up with him.

Learning to drink beer, and then learning to like the taste. Parties.

Summer jobs. A school play for which he did lighting. Winning season’s tickets to the Canadiens home games in a CFCF radio giveaway — what a year that had been! Walking, unmotivated, through high school. Doing sports reporting for L’Informateur , the school newspaper. That big fight with Roch Laval — fifteen years of friendship, gone in one evening, never to be recovered.

Dad’s heart attack. Pierre had thought the pain of losing him would never go away, but it had. Time heals all wounds.

Almost all.

All that, in nineteen years. It was a long time, was a substantial period, was… was, perhaps, all the good time he had left.

The pencil-necked teaching assistant had been talking last class about James D. Watson. Just twenty-five when he’d co-discovered the helical nature of DNA. And by the time he was thirty-four, Watson had won the Nobel Prize.

Pierre knew that he was bright. He walked through school because he c ould walk through school. Whatever the subject, he had no trouble.

Study? You must be joking. Carry home a stack of books? Surely you jest.

A life that might be cut short.

A Nobel Prize by age thirty-four.

Pierre began to get dressed, putting on underwear and a shirt.

He felt an emptiness in his heart, a vast feeling of loss. But he came to realize, after a few moments, that it wasn’t the potential, future loss that he was mourning. It was the wasted past, the misspent time, the hours frittered away, the days without accomplishment, the coasting through life.

Pierre pulled up his socks.

He would make the most of it — make the most of every minute.

Pierre Jacques Tardivel would be remembered.

He looked at his watch.

No time to waste.

None.

Avi Meyer’s father, Jubas Meyer, had been one of the fifty people to escape from the Treblinka death camp. Jubas had lived for three years after the escape, but had died before Avi was born. As a child growing up in Chicago, where Avi’s parents had settled after time in a displaced-persons camp, Avi had resented that his dad wasn’t around. But shortly after his bar mitzvah in 1960, Avi’s mother said to him, “You’re a man now, Avi. You should know what your father went through — what all our people went through.”