The Third Twin - Ken Follett [35]
He saw her hesitate. They had had dinner together once before, at the International Congress of Twin Studies, where they had first met. Since she had been at JFU they had had drinks together once, in the bar of the Faculty Club on campus. One Saturday they had met by accident in a shopping street in Charles Village, and Berrington had shown her around the Baltimore Museum of Art. She was not in love with him, not by a long shot, but he knew she had enjoyed his company on those three occasions. Besides, he was her mentor: it was hard for her to refuse him.
“Sure,” she said.
“Shall we go to Hamptons, at the Harbor Court Hotel? I think it’s the best restaurant in Baltimore.” It was the swankiest, anyway.
“Fine,” she said, standing up.
“Then I’ll pick you up at eight?”
“Okay.”
As she turned away from him, Berrington was visited by a sudden vision of her naked back, smooth and muscular, and her flat ass and her long, long legs; and for a moment his throat went dry with desire. Then she shut the door.
Berrington shook his head to clear his mind of lascivious fantasy, then called Preston again. “It’s worse than we thought,” he said without preamble. “She’s written a computer program that searches medical databases and finds matched pairs. First time she tried it out, she found Steven and Dennis.”
“Shit.”
“We’ve got to tell Jim.”
“The three of us should get together and decide what the hell we’re going to do. How about tonight?”
“I’m taking Jeannie to dinner.”
“Do you think that may solve the problem?”
“It can’t hurt.”
“I still think we’ll have to pull out of the Landsmann deal in the end.”
“I don’t agree,” Berrington said. “She’s pretty bright, but one girl isn’t going to uncover the whole story in a week.”
However, as he hung up he wondered if he should be so sure.
8
THE STUDENTS IN THE HUMAN BIOLOGY LECTURE THEATER were restive. Their concentration was poor and they fidgeted. Jeannie knew why. She, too, felt unnerved. It was the fire and the rape. Their cozy academic world had been destabilized. Everyone’s attention kept wandering as their minds went back again and again to what had happened.
“Observed variations in the intelligence of human beings can be explained by three factors,” Jeannie said. “One: different genes. Two: a different environment. Three: measurement error.” She paused. They all wrote in their notebooks.
She had noticed this effect. Any time she offered a numbered list, they would all write it down. If she had simply said, “Different genes, different environments, and experimental error,” most of them would have written nothing. Since she had first observed this syndrome, she included as many numbered lists as possible in her lectures.
She was a good teacher—somewhat to her surprise. In general, she felt her people skills were poor. She was impatient, and she could be abrasive, as she had been this morning with Sergeant Delaware. But she was a good communicator, clear and precise, and she enjoyed explaining things. There was nothing better than the kick of seeing enlightenment dawn in a student’s face.
“We can express this as an equation,” she said, and she turned around and wrote on the board with a stick of chalk:
Vt=Vg+Ve+Vm
“Vt being the total variance, Vg the genetic component, Ve the environmental, and Vm the measurement error.” They all wrote down the equation. “The same may be applied to any measurable difference between human beings, from their height and weight to their tendency to believe in God. Can anyone here find fault with this?” No one spoke, so she gave them a clue. “The sum may be greater than the parts. But why?”
One of the young men spoke up. It was usually the men; the women were irritatingly shy. “Because genes and the environment act upon one another to multiply effects?”
“Exactly. Your genes steer you toward certain environmental experiences and away from others. Babies with different temperaments elicit different treatment from their parents. Active toddlers have different