‘Yeah, amazing. Congratulations! Whitehead must be so pissed.’
‘It’s certainly one for the little guys.’
Julia glanced at Jennifer’s laptop. Jennifer’s doctorate was on a link between dyslexia and genetics, but she was in her fourth year and Julia was beginning to suspect that she might be just another perpetual student.
‘There’s a position available—I’m looking for an assistant. Are you interested?’ she asked.
‘I’d love to, but the university’s just issued an ultimatum—I have to have the doctorate finished by the summer. I’m really sorry, Julia.’
Julia glanced around the office; another postgraduate was tucked into the corner, studiously avoiding her eye.
‘Is anyone free?’
‘Well, Hank’s swept up with his slime moulds and Phong’s rushing to get an article published in the Scientific and Shawn’s on sabbatical until April. You know how it is.’
Swinging around on her swivel chair, Jennifer returned to her laptop. Grabbing the chair, Julia pulled it back to face her.
‘Is this about working for the Defense Department, or is this about genuine commitment to our own individual pursuit? I mean, I’d love to think I had a lab full of potential Nobel prize winners, but I suspect not.’
Jennifer looked sheepish. ‘Look, some of us have issues, and some of us are actually busy.’
‘Great.’
‘Don’t worry, the goddess will provide. She always does,’ the student concluded philosophically.
Julia winced. Through her work she had come to the discomfiting conclusion that there was quite probably a gene for religion or spiritual faith and it was one she seemed to lack. It wasn’t the concept of faith itself that irritated her, more the surrendering of control and determinism she felt it implied. Perhaps Marx was right: religion is the opium of the masses—and Buddhism the ecstasy of the middle classes, she concluded as she fought the temptation to slam her office door behind her. The room was a narrow rectangle lined with bookshelves, the large window at the end looking out over the university grounds. Facing the window was the desk; its black polished surface was impeccably neat, the state-of-the-art desktop computer—the nucleus of all her thinking. Against the wall opposite sat several locked filing cabinets, the files inside obsessively numbered and up to date.
Sitting at the desk, Julia retrieved the Defense Department file from her briefcase. It contained two computer disks. She slipped the first disk into the computer, then, as she waited for it to boot up, rang home.
The tone rang out; the answering machine had been switched off. That’s odd, she thought. Klaus was usually writing by this time, having completed his eight-thirty morning run. He compensated for the unpredictable nature of his employment by structuring his days into a rigid timetable. Surprised, Julia decided to ring again in an hour.
She scanned the computer screen. The files contained a list of five hundred twins from the ex-veterans database. This was the most extensive database available to geneticists and one of the largest twin studies in the world. Half the men on the list were monozygotic or identical twins; the other half being dizygotic or non-identical twins. Using twins in the study would make it easier to discern which traits were genetic and which were more likely to be environmental.
At least half of the twins were combat soldiers with experience of intensive frontline combat—Delta, rangers, special forces, soldiers who’d seen extreme service in places such as Afghanistan, South America, Rwanda and Bosnia and all of the twins had been in the forces. Their age range ran between nineteen and sixty, which meant that many of the inherent genetic traits would have emerged by now. As Julia read down the list she began dividing the subjects into four main categories: Anglo–American, Latino–American, African–American and Asian–American. This was for sociological uniformity only. External physical differences, including race, accounted for such minor changes in the overall genome sequence that they didn’t count. Homo sapiens really were all the same under the skin—a fact Julia often considered advertising on the internet to counteract racism.
The study’s procedures involved testing the men’s DNA (to ensure the exact status of the twins as well as screening for possible genetic determinants), a brain scan, and a series of tests to gauge physiological and psychological reactions to combat and violence. These consisted of measurement of heart rate, blood pressure and particularly blood composition while the subject viewed images of violent combat. There was also to be an interview to research the nurturing and other environmental influences on the twins’ early life.
When Julia looked up from the computer a couple of hours later, the sun was already high over the eucalyptus trees. Hating the incessant air conditioning and wanting fresh air, she pushed open one of the windows. Outside, she could hear the students milling around; snippets of conversations, bursts of young laughter, a guitar being strummed, the banally bright chorus of a mobile phone and the smell of freshly mown grass, all drifted in. It made Julia remember her own student days: her exhilaration at her first discovery, her first published paper, the pride that infused her whole body the first time she walked into her own laboratory. Out of twenty graduates from Julia’s year only eleven had stayed working in the field, and of the six female graduates she was the only one who had gone on to a career in science. The hours were long and the work highly competitive as well as extraordinarily tedious; great swathes of repetitious research stretched between moments of inspiration.
Julia’s professor had always reminded the students as they started leaving for the day, sometimes as late as ten at night, ‘Scientists in France, Germany and Japan are just starting their day, all striving to make the same discovery you’re working on. Sleep on it.’
It took resilience, obsession, obstinacy and selfishness to make a good scientist—and maybe narcissism, Julia reflected guiltily.
Most of the young women she’d graduated with had given up research and laboratory work when they married. Even her nemesis, a young woman Julia knew was brighter than her, a scientist she had been convinced would have a meteoritic rise through the ranks, had retired at twenty-six to marry a British hedge-fund manager. Others had resorted to part-time commercial laboratory work or other mindless conveyor-belt-style research when they’d had families. The hours and the poor pay meant it was virtually impossible to have a family and a career in science.
Were there any role models for her as both a scientist and a mother? Julia had met one scientist at a seminar who’d taken eight weeks off work to have her baby before returning to complete her doctorate. ‘Motherhood actually sharpens your mind,’ she’d told Julia. ‘It’s all the multi-tasking you have to do. It forces you to become a master of time management—at least, that’s the delusion I function under. Otherwise forget it.’
Julia reached for the phone again. There was still no answer at the house. She tried Klaus’s mobile phone. It was switched off. Strange, he never switched his phone off, ever. A nagging anxiety began to play at her mind as she tried to concentrate on the list of research subjects. The irrational notion that he might have had a car accident lurked beneath the written description of each case history. By the end of the chapter she had convinced herself that Klaus’s corpse lay congealing on some mortuary slab.
She rang their neighbour Gerry, a scriptwriter who was inevitably home. Today he was attending to the vast collection of bonsai trees he kept on his deck, murmured incoherently about a van.
‘I thought you might be having a garage sale or something. I mean, I think I saw Klaus helping the guys out with something so I figured it wasn’t, like, you know, a burglary.’
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Stoned again, Julia thought cynically. He was hardly ever lucid.
‘Thanks, Gerry. I guess I’ll see you later.’