ONCE HE WAS IN the water, it was easier to see what had happened to the ship. The stern already low in the waves, the empty lifeboat davits and twisted rigging and the blackened, shattered wood on the deck, where the exploding hatches had blown deck chairs and people to bits. They’d been at dinner, spoons clicking on soup bowls, cooks poised over pots, Sam Cornelius thrown from his chair as he pushed aside a bit of carrot. Now it was past nine and fully dark: September 3, 1939. The searchlight picked out bodies floating near the boat, and when the woman crouched behind him gave her life belt to her wailing son, Sam gave her his and then was even more frightened; despite his age—he was thirty-four—he could barely swim.
In the distance a shape, which might have been the guilty submarine, seemed to shift position. The moon disappeared behind a bank of clouds and then it rained, drenching those who weren’t yet soaked; more than eleven hundred people had been onboard. When the rain stopped, the moon again lit the boats scattered around the slowly sinking ship. The three of the Athenia’s crew in Sam’s boat took oars, as did the three least wounded—Sam was one—of the four male passengers. The others, just over fifty women and children, bailed with their shoes and their bare hands, scooping out the oily water rising over their shins.
As the two dozen lifeboats separated like specks on an expanding balloon, one pulled toward Sam’s boat to let them know that several ships had responded to the Athenia’s call for help. Soon, in just a few hours, they’d be saved. Those hours passed. Not long after midnight, a faraway gleam, which might have been a periscope caught by the light of the moon, caused two women to shriek. A U-boat, one said, the German submarine that had torpedoed them rising now to shell the lifeboats. But the last beam of the searchlight, just before the emergency dynamo used up its fuel and the Athenia went completely dark, revealed enough to convince Sam and some of the others that this was a rescue ship.
Steadily, Sam and his companions rowed toward the Norwegian tanker Knute Nelson, which, in the light of occasional flares, popped sporadically out of the darkness. A little string of emptied lifeboats tossed in the swell beside the tanker, the boat closest to the stern still packed with people. Some grabbed at rope ladders while the bosun’s chair went up and down, hoisting those not agile enough to climb until, in the grip of a heavy woman who pushed off too vigorously, it overturned and left her suspended upside down. The crew struggled to retrieve her, but before they were done another boat nudged in behind the one still being emptied.
The man rowing next to Sam muttered, “They should stand out, that’s dangerous,” and when Sam drew his anxious gaze away from the faces he was searching, he could see how little space separated the last boat in line from the tanker’s huge propellers. He turned back to his oars. The sea was rough, the boat’s seams were leaking, many of his fellow passengers were wounded or seasick or both, and Sam was working so hard to keep their boat steady that he failed to see exactly what happened a few minutes later. By the time he heard the screams, the broken lifeboat, impaled on one of the propeller blades, was already rising into the air.
“Row!” said the seaman in charge of Sam’s boat. “Row, row, row, row!”
Sam, the tallest but not the strongest of those at the oars (he was out of shape), lost his grip and banged into the man beside him, who shouted at him; then all of them were shouting at each other while women wailed and children cried. Unbearable to think about what must have happened to those drawn into the propeller. The boat sped into the darkness, headed, once the assistant purser spotted it, toward an enormous, brightly lit motor yacht that had appeared from another direction. Before they were close enough to hail her, Sam saw two lifeboats tangle at her stern, one crowding the other under the angled counter—the swell had increased, making everything more difficult—which, after rising unusually high, crashed down on the gunwale of the inner boat and tipped it over. Suddenly, struggling figures, too small to identify, also dotted the water.
That was enough for the seaman in charge; Sam’s boat pulled away until it was clear of everyone. “Let’s wait,” the seaman said, “until sunrise, when we can see more clearly what we’re doing.” The swell grew heavier; dawn finally broke and three British destroyers arrived. The little boy whose mother was wearing Sam’s life belt pointed at them, smiled for the first time since the ship had been hit, and said, “Ring around the rosy!” Sam couldn’t see what the little boy meant, and then he could: two of the ships were racing after each other, herding within an enormous circle the remaining lifeboats, the tanker, the white yacht, and the third destroyer, which was plucking boatloads of survivors from the water. Twice, he thought it was turning their way, but each time it moved toward another, even more crowded boat.
The sky was red and then pink and then blue; Sam’s hands were numb; he hadn’t been able to feel his feet for hours. Once or twice he either fell asleep or passed out. Once, he lifted his head just in time to see an old woman in a lifeboat not far away leap toward a lowered rope ladder and miss, slipping into the narrow space between the boat and the destroyer’s hull; the boat rose on a swell and the space disappeared. He was barely conscious when, in the middle of the morning, a U.S. merchant ship arrived, cleaned out one boat before taking in a crowd transferred from the motor yacht, and then waved over the boat that Sam was in.
The injured and frail went up in a bosun’s chair, but Sam, jolted awake by the prospect of safety, scrambled up a rope ladder with the other men. A person reached out for him, grabbed his arm, and heaved him over the side—not a stranger, not a sailor, but someone Sam knew: Duncan Finch. Part of him wanted to jump back in the water. Duncan, here? But there was the ship’s name, City of Flint, mocking him from the smokestack.
“You’re all right!” Duncan shouted as Sam dropped onto the deck. “Are you hurt?”
Sam flexed his elbow, which he’d cracked on a thwart but which still seemed to work, and then inspected his shin, where all the blood appeared to be coming from one long scrape. “Nothing serious,” he said.
Duncan pulled him toward a dry corner. “Is anyone else with you?”
Anyone, he meant, from the meeting; they’d been at an international genetics congress in Edinburgh, cut short by the situation. Sam shook his head. Families had been broken apart, siblings had ended up in different boats, and friends had been randomly assorted: where was Axel? Eight other geneticists had been on the Athenia with Sam. One by one, in the thick, dark smoke, they’d climbed into lifeboats, dropped down to the water, and then disappeared.
Duncan said, with apparent enthusiasm, “But at least you’re here. You’re safe.”
Omitting, Sam thought, the fact that on their last day in Edinburgh, Duncan had asked Sam grudgingly, and when it was too late, to join the small group he’d finagled aboard this American freighter loaded with wool and Scotch whiskey.
“I did warn you,” Duncan added now. Still, after eighteen years of annoying Sam, unable to rein in his red-faced, bullying self. “I warned you not to take passage on a British ship.”
Anyone else would have understood how few choices existed. Sam’s booked passage had been canceled, the other ships were quickly commandeered, and on September 1, as he boarded the Athenia in Glasgow, it had still seemed likely that they’d get away safely. They’d had to pick up passengers in Belfast and then more in Liverpool, both ports packed with Americans and Canadians trying to get home, but by the afternoon of the second, the ship was heading north up the Irish Sea, rounding the coast early on the morning of the third. By the time the declaration of war was radioed, they’d almost cleared the most dangerous territory, their ship overbooked but still comfortable and, Sam had thought with a twinge of pleasure, less crowded than Duncan’s. Before Duncan left, not only his handful of stranded friends but also a group of college girls caught midway through a European tour had been stuffed into the City of Flint, making thirty instead of the normal five or six passengers. Now it bulged with another two hundred people, some freezing and still in shock, and among them—
“Is Axel here?” he asked.
Duncan turned, reached back to steady an elderly woman coming over the railing, and then pointed her toward a man who was giving out fresh water. “Of course not,” he said, inspecting Sam more closely. “Did you hit your head?”
For Duncan, Sam realized, Axel was still in Edinburgh, where he’d stayed to visit a friend despite Duncan’s frantic urging that he board the City of Flint. When the situation grew so dangerous that Axel’s friend cut the visit short and delivered him to the Glasgow docks, Duncan had already been at sea.
“He was with me,” Sam said. Two teenage boys tumbled onto the deck, their hair matted with oil; a girl in a tidy jacket rushed over to them. “The Athenia was the only ship that had a berth.” In another situation he would have enjoyed seeing the color drain from Duncan’s cheeks.
“He wasn’t.”
“He was,” Sam said. “We were eating dinner with that couple from Minnesota when we were hit.” One of what should have been many meals; what luck, he’d thought, to have Axel aboard! An unexpected benefit of letting Duncan sail without him. They might walk the decks, share quiet conversations, sit side by side in reclining chairs, and repair what had gone wrong in Edinburgh. At the dock, the sight of Axel’s battered gray hat and unmistakable nose in the crowd had suddenly made everything broken and ruined seem hopeful again.
“But then,” Duncan said, “how did you lose track of him?”
The smoke, the darkness, the wounded people, the babble of different languages as passengers crowded boats already full, launched half-empty ones too early. Sam drew a breath. “We went where the crew told us to go, and they assigned us to separate boats. Then the boats scattered. Can you find out if he’s here?”
Duncan disappeared with a curse, leaving Sam to be herded down below with the newest arrivals. In a long room lined with barrels, they dripped into a growing puddle, which the crew and the freighter’s original passengers tried to avoid as they ferried in spare clothing pulled from their luggage. A plant physiologist from Texas, transferred from the motor yacht, slipped an old sweater over his head as he said that these merchant seamen were a lot more welcoming than the Swedish billionaire who’d originally rescued him. Sam tied his feet into a pair of slippers a size too large, thrilled to find them dry, while his new acquaintance described the smartly outfitted crew who’d handed out soup and hot coffee and blankets and then—the sun was well up, the Athenia had gone to her grave, and the destroyers were making their rounds—told the rescued passengers that the owner couldn’t interrupt his planned trip and needed to transfer everyone who’d been picked up. “To here,” the Texan said, stepping out of his oil-soaked pants and into a seaman’s canvas overalls. “Oh, that’s much better.”
Where was Axel, where was Axel? Maybe he’d been on that yacht, or maybe … he tried not to think about the huge propeller. Around Sam, coats, blankets, overshoes, shawls flew toward wet bodies, something dry for everyone. So many people, everywhere: bodies racked like billiard balls in every corner and companionway, babies calling like kittens or crows as women tried to comfort them. Among them, Axel might be hidden—or he might be in the water still, or safely headed toward Galway or Glasgow on one of the destroyers. Sam pushed through the mass, some faces familiar from the Athenia‘s decks and dining room but many not and none the one he most wanted to see, until, when he came out near the galley, he heard his name and looked behind him. Duncan, who’d always had this way of proving himself astonishingly useful just when he was at his most annoying, waved his hand above the crowd. Beside him, his front hair pushed forward into a kingfisher’s tuft by a gigantic square bandage, was Axel.
Of course Duncan had one of the actual berths; of course he turned it over to Axel, who, after touching Sam’s face and saying, “You’re here. You’re all right,” disappeared into the deckhouse and fell, said Duncan later (himself now modestly moved to the floor of his cabin, where he’d already had two roommates), into an exhausted sleep. Sam, who stayed awake for a while after Axel left, slept that first night on a coil of rope, surrounded by women in men’s shoes and torn evening gowns, men wearing dress shirts over sarongs made from curtains, children in white ducks shaped for bulky sailors. A little girl whose parents had ended up in a different boat—Sam hoped they were now on some other ship—lay on a pile of canvas nearby. Earlier, he’d seen the two women looking after her piece together a romper from two long woolen socks, a pair of women’s panties, and a boy’s sweater. Now the women curled parenthetically around their warm charge.
Sam’s trousers were still intact, and between those, his donated slippers, and a wool jacket generously given to him by one of Duncan’s cabinmates, an old acquaintance named Harold, he was warm enough to sleep. The next morning, after a chaotic attempt at breakfast, he and Harold, along with everyone else who wasn’t injured, helped the ship’s crew spread mattresses in the hold, suspend spare tarpaulins from beams to make rows of hammocks, and hammer planks into bunks until everyone had a place to sleep. Harold had helped the captain organize seatings for meals—eight shifts of thirty people, they’d decided—and as he and Sam cut planks to length, they talked about supplies. Harold’s friend George, also sharing Duncan’s cabin, joined them an hour later and described the list he was making of those who’d been separated from family members and friends; first on it were the seven congress participants still unaccounted for. The captain would radio the list to the other rescue ships, which were returning to Scotland and Ireland—only theirs was heading across the sea, on its original course. But what about allocating medical care and pooling medications? What about basic sanitation? If we had rags, Harold said, we could tear them into squares. If we had a system, George fussed, gathering scraps of paper for the latrines.
If, if, if. Sam tried to think of them as amiable strangers helping to make the best of a hard situation—as if they’d not just been together at a conference where the two of them had looked on blandly as Sam’s work was attacked. As if Duncan, elsewhere on the ship that morning, hadn’t been the one attacking.
He worked all day, as the ship steamed steadily west and the passengers pulled from the water continued to shift and sort themselves, the sickest and most badly wounded settling in the tiny hospital bay with those slightly better off nearby, the youngest and oldest tucked in more protected corners, and the strongest where water dripped or splashed, layering themselves as neatly, Sam thought, as if they’d been spun in a gigantic centrifuge. He claimed one of the hammocks he’d hung himself, glad that at least Axel had a berth and a bit of privacy. Glad too to find, when evening came, that Harold and George had fit him and Axel into their dinner shift, which also included Duncan and the group of college girls.
The big square bandage bound to the top of his head made Axel, seated when Sam reached the table, look unusually defenseless. He smiled at Sam and tapped the seat next to him, but before Sam could get there, Harold, George, and Duncan swarmed in, leaving Sam seated at the corner. The college girls, already friendly with Duncan’s group, filled in the empty seats and introduced themselves to Sam and Axel. One, who had smooth red hair a few shades lighter than Sam’s, pointed to Axel’s gauze-covered crown. “Is that bad?”
“Not really,” Axel said. “A long jagged tear in my scalp, but the doctor said it should heal.”
Not nearly enough information. Sam imagined Axel under water, trying to surface through the debris. An oar cracking down on his skull, a fragment from the explosion flying toward him. When did it happen, who was he with, who took care of him? He leaned forward to speak, but another of the girls, annoyingly chatty—Lucinda was her name—said, “How do you all know each other, then?”
“We work in the same field,” Harold said. His doughy cheeks were perfectly smooth; of course he had a razor.
“Genetics,” George added. Also clean-shaven. Briefly, Sam mourned his lost luggage. “The study of heredity.”
“These two,” Axel said, gesturing first toward Sam and then toward Duncan, “used to be my students.”
“Really?” said the one named Pansy. “That wolf-in-a-bonnet disguise makes you look the same age as them.”
It was true, Sam thought as the others laughed; the bandage covered Axel’s bald spot, his sprouting beard concealed the creases around his mouth, and he was trim for a man who’d just turned fifty. Duncan, ten years Axel’s junior, boasted a big, low-slung belly that, along with his thinning hair, made him look like an old schoolmaster. Straightening up, sucking in, Duncan turned to Lucinda and said, “We were all at the genetics conference I told you about.”
“Where everyone was arguing!” Lucinda said brightly. “See, I do listen. Which side”—she turned to Sam—“were you on?”
“Lucinda,” said a girl named Maud.
“Actually,” Harold said, rubbing his cheek with his thumb, “it was Duncan and Sam here, who were having a disagreement. But that’s all behind us now.”
Sam tried but failed to catch Axel’s expression, while Duncan changed the subject. But as they were clearing out for the next shift of diners, one of the quieter girls approached Sam and said, “Were you really all quarreling about some experiment while the soldiers were gathering? I would have thought …”
“… that scientists aren’t petty? That we’re not as childish as everyone else?”
“Something like that,” she said, with a surprising smile. “Although I don’t know why I should expect that. I’m Laurel,” she reminded Sam.
Straight brown hair, solid hips, pleasant, but, in Sam’s opinion, unremarkable-looking except for her eyes. Up on deck, amid a crowd of people he didn’t know and safely away from the ones he did, he watched the water move past the hull and listened to Laurel talk about what they’d heard on the radio. The Germans were smashing through Poland and had occupied Krakow. An RAF attack on German naval bases had gone awry. Each wave took them farther from what was going on in Europe. On the Athenia, along with the Americans and Canadians bolting for home, had been refugees from Poland and Romania and Germany who’d managed to get to Liverpool and then fought for berths, only to end up floating in the water before, if they were among the lucky, being rescued by a ship that would bring them back to Britain to begin the process of trying to flee again.
The sky was streaked with mare’s tails to the south, dotted with little round clouds to the north; the last edge of the sun had vanished but some color remained. The open deck was so crowded by now that each of them touched at least one other person. Duncan pushed through like a fox through a field of wheat, nodded when he saw Sam, and kept moving. Duncan wasn’t stupid, Sam thought; he knew some things, including what it meant to be part of a field of science still in its infancy. But he didn’t know the new and enormous thing that Sam and Axel now shared. Sam in one boat and Axel in another, but the same sky, the same rain, the same flares and fears and darkness and dawn. Laurel said something about the windows of a church in London and Sam pretended to pay attention. Why was it, he thought, that even here Duncan seemed able to keep him and Axel apart?
In 1921, when Sam went off to college in upstate New York, he was sixteen years old and six feet tall, trying to conceal his age behind his size and so lonely that he might have attached himself to anyone. His father, an astronomer at the Smithsonian, had died when he was four; Sam remembered his smell, his desk at the observatory, his laugh. Afterward, his mother had moved them to Philadelphia to live with her parents, who seemed to be nothing like her. He slept in a bed his great-uncle had once used, near a shelf on which, between two photographs of his dead father, a mirror reflected back a face framed by his father’s thick red hair but otherwise very different. His mother’s mouth, her father’s heavy lower lids, two moles on a jaw that must have come from someone on his father’s side. When he touched that face with hands his father’s size but his grandmother’s shape, he felt a huge, hazy, painful curiosity that he couldn’t put into words. Like his mother, he was good with numbers, but otherwise his mind seemed to leap and dart where hers moved in orderly lines. Perhaps, he thought, like his father’s? He could only guess.
When he turned eight, his grandfather persuaded a friend to admit Sam to a school so good that his mother, who wrote books and articles about astronomy, was just able to pay the fees. Tearing through his classes, eager for more, he skipped one year and then another. A biology teacher, Mr. Spacek, reeled him in when he reached the upper school, introducing him to the study of heredity. In the empty lab, at the end of the day, he’d enter into Mr. Spacek’s fruit-fly experiments as if he were tumbling down a well, concentrating so intently that the voices rising from a baseball game on the field below, or from the herd pounding around the track, shrank to crickets’ chirps and then disappeared. From the books that Mr. Spacek loaned him, Sam finally gained the language to shape what he’d been feeling since he could remember. Who am I? Who do I resemble, and who not? What makes me me, what makes you you; where did we come from, who are we like? What do we inherit, and what not?
Mr. Spacek helped Sam translate his curiosity into hypotheses that might be tested, experiments he might perform. He urged Sam to apply to college a year early, and then got him a scholarship and everything else he needed, including two precious books for the journey up the Hudson River. These, along with the sandwiches Sam’s mother had packed him, helped during the bad moment when he confused the motion of the water rushing alongside the train with that of the train itself. Once he arrived at his new refuge, though, he felt fine. The brick and stone buildings were just as handsome as Mr. Spacek had promised, and his room was excellent too, with a big window, two low beds, two desks with lamps and chairs and space for books. Shirts and jackets were already hanging neatly along one half of the closet rod and these, along with a carton of books and a pair of skis, belonged to a wiry boy who introduced himself as Avery Hayes and asked if he might have the bed away from the window. Sam, who’d never had a close friend, right away liked Avery’s smile and his calm, thoughtful movements.
“Of course you can have that bed,” Sam said. “But are you sure …?”
“Perfectly,” said Avery. “I’m sensitive to drafts. If you don’t mind, I’ll take this desk then, too.”
Which left Sam exactly what he wanted, a view out over the quad, past the beeches and benches and flower beds to the long brick building with limestone lintels, which he’d spotted the instant he arrived: the Hall of Science, the reason that he’d come. This was his place, Mr. Spacek had told him, this and no other: because this was the place where Axel Olssen taught.
Mr. Spacek had also arranged for Sam to join Olssen’s section of general biology his first semester, and Axel transplanted Sam so smoothly from Mr. Spacek’s world into his—soon after the first exam, he hired Sam as a bottle washer, brought him into the lab, and told him to use his first name—that Sam hardly felt the shock. The weeks rocketed by, the work Sam wanted to do crowded by other classes, the regimen of the dining hall, compulsory weekly chapel, and the swimming lessons that were part of the physical fitness requirement. The basement pool was dimly lit, slimy under Sam’s feet at the shallow end, where he stood and tried to follow the instructor’s motions. He was the only one that year who didn’t know how to swim at all, and those first weeks of splashing, coughing, breathing in when he was meant to breathe out, and sinking, perpetually sinking—“You’re remarkably dense,” the instructor said cheerily, trying to support Sam in the water with a hand under his ribs—were humiliating. Thrusting his face back up into the air, Sam lost track of his surroundings and once again was the small, frightened boy who, after his father’s death, was sometimes swept away by tantrums. But then, as soon as he crossed the quad and entered the Hall of Science, everything annoying faded away.
Axel was young himself, just a few years out of graduate school, energetic and delightfully informal; he loaded Sam down with his own books, trusting that he could make sense of the material despite being only a freshman. When he discovered Sam’s age, he laughed and said genetics was a young man’s game—Alfred Sturtevant had been only nineteen, still an undergraduate, when he’d devised the first chromosome map. Calvin Bridges had been an undergraduate too, and a bottle washer, like Sam, when he spotted the first vermilion mutant. Who knew what Sam, the perfect age at the absolutely perfect time, might do? Theirs was a new field, Axel said. A whole new world.
In class, Axel brought new terms and concepts alive with his arms, slicing the air like a conductor, his thick hair sticking up in spikes. They were after more than just the study of vague factors or mysterious unit characters, he said: the gene was not simply an abstract idea; genes were material! Heredity depended on chromosomes, forever splitting and recombining; units of heredity—genes—must be arranged like beads on a string, particles invisible to the eye but visible through their actions, ordered along visible chromosomes. Let the older generation argue about immaterial factors, vitalistic forces, the possibilities of organisms passing on changes caused by will or desire. The truth, Axel emphasized during Sam’s first semester, was that the particles of heredity passed from one generation to the next, and could not be influenced by what happened to the body. Every living individual had two parts, one patent, visible to our eyes—the me you see, the tree you touch; that was the somatoplasm—and the other latent, perceptible only by its effect on subsequent generations but continuing forever, part of the immortal stream that was the germ-plasm. Phenotype, genotype (Sam loved repeating those words). Concepts made visible, Axel said happily, through our own flies.
So Sam couldn’t swim; so he hated his history class. When he listened to Axel talk about his work, now their work, he was entirely alive. If they helped elucidate the way genes were arranged and transmitted, then they’d begin to understand heredity and variation. If they understood that, they’d begin to glimpse the workings of evolution. And if they could understand evolution, then …
“You have a pedigree,” Axel said one day when Sam was mashing bananas, sprinkling yeast, and measuring agar: by then he was the food maker as well as the bottle washer. “Just like our flies. You were trained by Charlie, and now you’re working with me. We were trained by Thomas Morgan, who was trained by William Brooks. Brooks was trained by Agassiz himself, at the summer school for the study of natural history he founded on Penikese Island. One short line: Agassiz, Brooks, Morgan, me, and then you. You’re connected to the new biology just as directly as the flies we’re breeding in here are connected to the original stocks from Morgan’s lab.”
Sam didn’t share that with Avery, who was as interested in physics as Sam was in biology, but who hadn’t yet found the right professor; it would have felt like bragging. But he did love the feel of his own hands linking Mr. Spacek’s Drosophila, whose ancestors had also come from the fly room at Columbia, to the new generations hatching in the bottles he prepared. Forget the litter, the browning bananas, the morgue filled with bodies drowned in oil. The flies swooned docilely at a whiff of ether, moved easily with a touch from a camel’s-hair brush, and then—the variations were marvelous. Eye after eye after eye, all red—and then here were white eyes, and there were pink. Wings all shaped like wings, until one fly produced a truncated set and another a pair curled like eyelashes, each mating yielding surprises, a new generation every ten days: how could anyone think of this as work? Work was waiting for frogs to hatch and pass through their stages until they matured enough to mate. Planting corn and waiting for the seeds to germinate, the stalk to grow, the ear to fill and ripen before one could even begin to guess—that was work; he couldn’t believe the researchers a few hours away at Cornell had the patience. For him it was always, only, flies. In a clean bottle, a courting male held out one wing to his virgin bride and danced right and then left before embracing her: who wouldn’t love that? Let others fuss with peas and four-o’clocks, rabbits and guinea pigs: for Sam, the flies were the key to everything.
That first Christmas vacation, he returned to school early at Axel’s request. As the train rumbled north, he looked up from his stack of journals now and then and noticed the Catskills thick with snow, or a crow flying low above the frozen Hudson, but mostly he kept his eyes on his work. The brindled dog at the train station had to bark twice before Sam stopped to pat him, walking on not to his room—the dorms were still closed—but to a small brick house two blocks from campus, where Axel, unmarried then, lived in happy squalor. Clothes on the floor, sheets on the couch (he always had visitors); Sam was welcome to stay, he said, the ten days until the semester started. A minute after Sam dropped his bag, they headed for the lab, which was warm and stuffy despite the bitter cold outside, electric bulbs glowing inside the old bookcases Axel had turned into incubators. Sam found a path through the tumble of plates and coffee cups and reprints and manuscripts, books lying open everywhere, cockroaches investigating the huge stain—molasses?—on the journal that Duncan, whom Sam then knew only as Axel’s senior student, had left at his place.
Axel, Duncan, and two other students, both juniors, worked at desks pushed into an island at the center of the room; Sam’s place was at the sink, shaking used food from soiled bottles, or at the counter, filling wooden racks with wide-mouthed homeopathic vials. From there he’d watched Duncan mating virgin females in bottles for which Sam had prepared the food, later shaking the etherized offspring onto counting plates, bending over dissecting scopes, shouting happily when he found something unexpected. In November, he’d discovered a new mutant, which Axel had sent to Columbia, and that had made Sam feel—not that he wanted to be Duncan, not even that he wanted to be Duncan’s friend (he was shallow, Sam thought even then, and prone to leap to easy conclusions), but that he wanted a chance to work on his own.
He plunged into the clutter, planning to take over Duncan’s chair the minute he finished cleaning up. Axel asked if he thought maintaining the stock cultures for the Genetics and Heredity course, even as he was enrolled in it, might be too much.
“I’ll be fine,” Sam said, bending to his glassware. Everything stank of overripe bananas. “It’s no problem at all. I could do more, if Duncan gets too busy …”
Axel squashed a fly on the counter and laughed. “You have to sleep sometime,” he said. “Although, personally, I think sleep is overrated. Do you want to hear what went on at the meeting?”
“Please,” Sam said. “I’ve been dying for news.”
Later—at Woods Hole, in Moscow, every place where, after long days in the lab, he’d end up drinking with fellow geneticists—Sam would try to describe what he felt like hearing Axel summarize the extraordinary paper he’d heard at the international meeting in Toronto. As if he’d sprouted extra eyes, which let him see a new dimension. Or as if his brain had added a new lobe, capable of thinking new thoughts. It is commonly said that evolution rests upon two foundations—inheritance and variation; but there is a subtle and important error here. Inheritance by itself leads to no change, and variation leads to no permanent change, unless the variations themselves are heritable. Thus it is not inheritance and variation which bring about evolution, but the inheritance of variation. Surely the name of the man who’d written that—Hermann Muller—deserved a whole separate shelf in Sam’s brain. Whenever he recited those crucial lines, others would chime in with more of Muller’s essential insights: that in the cell, beyond the obvious structures, there must also be thousands of ultramicroscopic particles influencing the entire cell, determining its structure and function. That these particles, call them genes, were in the chromosomes, and in certain definite positions, and that they could propagate themselves. Magic, they all agreed. Magic!
For ten dazzlingly cold days that winter, before Duncan and the other students returned from their holiday, Axel and Sam talked about Muller’s ideas while they worked alone together. Then Duncan returned for the spring semester, Axel showed Muller’s paper to him—and suddenly they were planning experiments while Sam was sterilizing forceps. The whole semester went that way, until Duncan graduated and, for just a little while, got out of Sam’s way.
During the day, when trying to move through the mass of people on deck was like being transported through an amoeba, Sam thought often about those early, blissful months in Axel’s lab. Here, if Axel wasn’t surrounded, he was absent. Reading in his berth, Duncan would say. Or napping, he’s exhausted, talk to him at dinner. Each day would end with nothing Sam had meant to say said—and then it was night, when he kept thinking about the night.
The night in the lifeboat, the night on the water, which Axel had shared and which Duncan could never know. The night floating under the clouds and the moon, Sam’s boat so flooded that it was in the sea as much as on it, everyone packed together as tightly as bodies in a collective grave. Shoulders pressed to others’ shoulders, backs to chests, knees to hips; fifty-seven people who, once they were safely aboard the City of Flint, avoided those with whom they’d been so strangely intimate. The woman, for instance, who’d worn Sam’s life belt: how was it that they didn’t stick together? She had given her chance at life to her son, Sam had given his to her; the gesture might have bound them. Yet she was in one of the bunks near the rear of the ship, nowhere near his cocoon of a hammock, and when he passed her on deck, they nodded politely and kept moving. Each time, he remembered what they’d seen of each other. What that woman—her name was Bessie—had seen of him. Instead of seeking her out, he’d move toward Laurel and Pansy and Maud, who’d turned out to be pleasant company, filled with impressions from their brief time in France and Italy and eager to talk about the news the radio officer relayed.
They kept him company at meals as well, where the questions he longed to ask Axel—who was beside you, what were you thinking, what was the part that most frightened you?—dissolved in the perpetual chatter. Duncan and Harold and George invariably settled close to Axel, who then would look at Sam, ruefully, Sam thought, as Sam found a separate place, and pretend to listen politely to the other three.
They were more interesting? They were safer. Harold and George taught at the same little college in Massachusetts, had roomed together at the congress, and, indeed, had come over together with Duncan, yet they gossiped about common acquaintances and speculated on jobs and funding as if they hadn’t just had weeks of each other’s company. Duncan chimed in with news about colleagues in California, not just from the institute that his former advisor had established and where he still worked, but from Berkeley and Stanford as well. Even Axel, a fixture now at the college where Sam had first met him, offered modest nuggets gleaned from meetings in New York. Whose lab was expanding, who had lost support. Whose marriage had broken up.
What did any of this have to do with science? Or with the real feeling of what had just happened to them? The meals seemed doubly hard when Sam thought of how much better he’d done recently with Avery. On the inexpensive precongress tour, which he’d taken largely so he could see where Avery worked, they’d been scheduled for a day and a half in Cambridge. Sam had skipped all the other sites to visit Avery’s lab at the Cavendish, where he’d admired Avery’s new X-ray facility and studied his lab notebooks. Together, they’d happily discussed their most recent projects.
By the time the motor coach left on Sunday, Sam had felt like he knew his old friend again—and it was this, he thought, staring glumly into his pea soup during one particularly trying lunch, that had made him optimistic about what might happen with Axel in Edinburgh. So they had not, before the meeting, seen each other in seven years; so their correspondence had shrunk to an occasional exchange of reprints. His warm meeting with Avery had convinced him that he and Axel would also slip back into their old, easy ways.
Through Grasmere and Keswick the following day, on to Edinburgh that afternoon: six hundred geneticists, from more than fifty countries! New work, new ideas; a chance to renew old friendships. He’d been horribly disappointed to find that the Russian geneticists, some of whom he knew from his time in Moscow and Leningrad, had been denied permission to travel. After that, nothing else went the way he’d hoped; the session began to unravel almost as soon as it started. Germany and the Soviet Union signed their pact and the German scientists left. Then the delegates from the Netherlands followed the Germans, and the Italians followed them. In ones and twos the British scientists trickled off to join their military units, while the French left all at once.
By Saturday, when Sam gave his talk, the Poles and others from the Continent were also gone, leaving only a spotty crowd of Americans, Canadians, South Africans, Australians, and New Zealanders to listen. Where was it written that they all had to turn against him? That what he said would actually enrage them? Duncan, who spoke later that day, set his own prepared talk aside and instead spent his time refuting every aspect of Sam’s presentation. He was so familiar with the last decade of Sam’s work—he had read all of Sam’s papers, Sam understood then—that he did an excellent job.
Here on the ship, the sound of Duncan’s voice sometimes caused Sam such pain that even if Duncan weren’t always blocking his way to Axel, he would have wanted to strike him. He’d come around a corner, find Axel and Duncan, catch Axel’s eye, see Axel wave—and then Duncan would turn and smile falsely, and he’d keep moving until he ran into Bessie, which would spin him in yet another direction. Then at night, lying like one of a long row of larvae among his canvas-shrouded fellow passengers, he’d return to his night in the boat, when Bessie’s knees and shins had pressed uncomfortably into his lower back. With every stroke of the oar he freed himself briefly from that pressure, only to thump back into her bones. He came to hate her legs, then to hate her. But later, when they stopped rowing and waited for the sun to come up, he grew so cold that he sought her legs on purpose. Her shivering shook Sam’s body too, and also that of Aaron, her little boy, who was pressed into the hollow between her chest and her bent knees. Aaron’s whole right side—shoulder, arm, torso, leg—over the course of those hours also pressed itself against Sam’s back. All the adults faced the same way, unable to see each other’s faces, sensing their levels of misery through the contact of their wet flesh. Bessie’s crying passed from her chest through Aaron’s side and into Sam’s back, and his groans passed the other way, a wave moving through the boat. Her back had to be pressed into someone else’s legs, and that person’s back to the next and the next and the next. Each time he went over this, he imagined that Axel was listening and that he in turn would describe his own night.
Meanwhile, the City of Flint kept steaming sturdily through the waves, miles passing but far too slowly: how to get through the days? A grim-faced doctor, still waiting for word of his wife and daughter, busied himself by organizing the ship’s hospital, stitching up the survivors’ wounds, tending to burns and scrapes. He’d been in a boat that overturned and had spent hours floating alone, draped on a bit of rudder. What, Sam wondered, did he think of when he stopped working? A Canadian girl, ten years old, had been struck on the head by a falling beam when the torpedo first hit the Athenia and, although she’d been conscious during the night in the lifeboats and her first day on the City of Flint, had fallen into a coma; the doctor watched over her closely, and Sam would sometimes sit beside her, reading out loud from a novel Laurel had loaned him.
Eavesdropping at dinner, pretending to listen to Lucinda and Maud but actually straining to hear Axel responding to Duncan’s questions, Sam learned that Axel, when he wasn’t resting, passed the hours reading books he’d borrowed from Harold and George. Harold, meanwhile, kept busy with the little daily newspaper he now posted each morning on a bulletin board, around which people gathered to read his notes of the ship’s progress and bits of friendly gossip. The college girls put on a fashion show, herding good-humored volunteers along an improvised runway as others voted for the most outlandish costume. On a day when the sea was very smooth, pierced now and then by leaping fish, Sam wrote letters to his mother and to the woman he was seeing back home, neither of whom knew that his changed plans had put him aboard the Athenia. The letters, which couldn’t be sent until they reached Halifax, were as useless as curled wings on a fly, but time passed as he tried to describe—not the explosions, not the bodies, not his night in the boat. Not what had happened in Edinburgh, nor what Duncan had done, nor his estrangement from Axel. The shapes the clouds made in the sky, then. The porpoises leaping in sets of three and five. The brave little girl in her improvised romper and the kind women, strangers before boarding this ship, who cared for her.
He found a corner where he could wash his face in the morning, and an exercise route—from the open middle deck in front of the smokestack, around the port side of the deckhouse, to the bow, and back down the starboard side—on which, if he rose early enough to beat the crowds, he could pace like a horse in a mine. No matter what he did, or how he arranged his days, he ran into Duncan. When Duncan stopped near the air scoops to light a cigarette, the solid sheet of hair lying over his forehead flapped up and down in the breeze like a lid. Why was he there when Axel, whom Sam so much wanted to see, was always where Sam was not? And when Sam went down below one night to the talent show that Maud and Lucinda had organized, Axel was there, but there with Duncan.
Men sang “Danny Boy” and “Begin the Beguine,” children tap-danced, a woman pleated an accordion. Two sailors whacked at fiddles as two more whirled about. Axel came over to suggest that Sam do some little tricks involving toothpicks and gumdrops, which he was good at and used to offer up at parties: two minutes to make a model of a locomotive, a minute—Avery had first taught him this—for a sugar molecule. For a moment, Sam was tempted, remembering how at Woods Hole he’d entertained his companions with models of sea squirts and the polymer backbone of cellulose, but then he looked at Duncan, right by Axel’s side and waiting for him to make a fool of himself, and he declined.
Instead, Duncan stepped forward and, in his surprisingly sweet tenor voice, sang a bland version of the song for which, years ago, he used to invent ribald verses, entertaining the students during the summer they’d both spent at Woods Hole. Sam had just finished his junior year at college then; Duncan had been in his second year of graduate school, studying with Axel’s teacher, Thomas Morgan. Almost everyone important in their new field was at the biological station that summer, investigating some aspect of genetics or embryology or both. Sam, one of the few undergraduates taking the invertebrate course, paid his tuition by waiting tables at the mess hall and collecting specimens for his teachers. On nights when the moon was in the right phase, he’d bus his tables, drop his apron, and head for the Cayadetta‘s dock with a long-handled net and a tray of finger bowls. His desire to earn his teachers’ approval was as ruthless as the lantern he held over the water, dooming the mating clam worms that spiraled upward.
Afterward, he skipped the gatherings at the ice-cream parlor and the visits to the movie house in Falmouth so that he could work on the project that had seized him. A scientist named Paul Kammerer, who had recently made two American lecture tours and whose sensational work—VIENNA BIOLOGIST HAILED AS GREATEST OF THE CENTURY. Proves a Darwin Belief, one newspaper blared—was so controversial that even Sam’s mother, who wrote articles for popular-science magazines, had interviewed him, had caught Sam’s eye as well. Kammerer claimed to have shown that when a change in the environment of his toads and salamanders caused an adaptive change in them—altered skin color, different reproductive behaviors—these changes could be transmitted to subsequent generations. A kind of heresy, Sam knew—the exact opposite of what he’d seen in the lab for himself. Although he’d breathed in his Quaker grandparents’ conviction that the world can be improved, first Mr. Spacek and then Axel had trained him out of his unconscious assumptions that when individuals strengthened and developed their faculties, through vigorous use, they then passed that strengthening along. That the ones they stopped using were lost, and lost for good.
At Woods Hole, though, surrounded by interesting strangers pursuing so many different ideas, the truth had begun to seem more complex again, which made him read Kammerer’s claims with real curiosity. Axel had taught him to question everything—didn’t that include the beliefs that were quickly becoming conventions in their field? At night, roasting oysters on the beach, he and his classmates talked about Kammerer and speculated on the reasons why some biologists attacked him so furiously. Even those opposed to his conclusions were disturbed by that. They were all flirting with socialism then, some more than flirting; they sympathized when Kammerer complained that no one gave him a fair hearing. With the war just over, no one wanted to hear that inheritance wasn’t everything, or that race and class characteristics passed on through generations might be altered.
Tiny, darkly tanned Ellen Eliasberg, a fellow student in Sam’s invertebrate course, was moved by Kammerer’s passionate statements about the necessity of man passing on what he acquired in the course of his lifetime to his children and his children’s children. Sam was caught up by her arguments—and, at the same time, fascinated by the bad temper Duncan’s advisor showed whenever anyone mentioned Kammerer’s work.
“The leopard can change his spots?” he’d say mockingly. “Fathers can pass what they’ve learned to their sons? Why not just reject every bit of science done in the last century? Why not go right back to Lamarck and his folklore? Cave fishes and deep-sea dwellers lose their eyes because they don’t need them in the dark; moles have poorly developed eyes because they’re in burrows most of the time; if an organ isn’t used, it conveniently disappears and if it’s used often—why not point to the giraffe stretching his neck to reach for higher leaves?—it gets bigger. How long has that been believed? And yet Payne bred fruit flies in the dark for sixty-nine generations, without the slightest change in their eyes or behavior. In my own lab, we’ve seen well over one hundred new types arise spontaneously, with no environmental influence, each breeding true from the start. Overnight—literally, overnight!—eyeless flies have appeared from normal parents, by an obvious change in a single hereditary factor.”
Then he’d say that the popular press was being fooled, once again, and foolishly misleading the public (here Sam thought of his mother; had she sorted this out?); he’d say Kammerer was a charlatan and a publicity seeker and perhaps even a fraud. He ranted so wildly that even Duncan looked uneasy, and Sam saw, for the first time, what might happen when the passion required to defend a new set of ideas went too far.
But he wanted to work, simply to work, and he tried to stay focused on that. The old wooden house where he bunked that summer was less than a block from the lab, surrounded by sand and scrubby pines, but during his first weeks he went there only to sleep. Every minute he could steal from his course and his jobs he spent designing an experiment that might prove or disprove what Kammerer contended. Instead of Kammerer’s slow-growing salamanders and midwife toads, Sam decided to use his swiftly reproducing flies. And he’d work with their eyes, not only because variations in eye color had been the first and best-documented of the mutations observed in fruit flies but also because eyes and their development had always been central to these discussions.
He used fly cultures he’d kept for Axel, techniques he’d learned in his lab, a procedure he’d seen Duncan do in a different context. With a needle he ground to a very sharp point and then heated, he touched—just touched—the center of the red eye of a lightly etherized female fly; then he touched the other eye and laid the fly on a dry piece of paper, which he put into a little vial. A couple of hours later, he transferred the treated flies to a food bottle. In the few that survived the procedure he watched how the Malpighian tubules, which worked rather like kidneys, turned deep red and stayed that way. So: injury to one organ, the eye, caused what appeared to be a permanent change in another organ: an acquired characteristic.
Later, he mated the treated females to normal males and proceeded as usual. Amid the next generation he found a few mutants—yellow body, narrow eyes, twisted penis—as expected. And also, unexpectedly, seventeen flies, both male and female, with red Malpighian tubules. This was peculiar, and completely interesting: what did it mean? Immediately, he started breeding these to each other. None of their offspring showed the red tubules, but that might mean nothing; the trait was likely recessive, and he had only a small sample.
Duncan and most of the other students had a sense of what he was doing; they wandered in and out of the open labs and they all talked not only while they worked but also during their outings. Still, no one knew the details until the director asked him to give a presentation at one of the season’s last Friday-night gatherings. He was nervous when he spoke—undergraduates were rarely asked to speak in front of the whole community—and he referred to earlier work that he hoped might support his own. In particular, a recent symposium that many in his audience had attended and that had examined this crucial question: could an injury to one generation cause an effect that was inherited by the next?
Swiftly, he moved through those other researchers’ results. One had demonstrated the transmission of acquired eye defects in rabbits, which seemed to have the characteristics of a Mendelian recessive. Others had shown what seemed to be inheritable effects of injury from alcohol, lead, radium, and X-rays. Perhaps, though, this was parallel induction: had a physical agent acted simultaneously on both the germ cells and the somatic cells, producing changes independently in each, or had the change induced in the body actually affected the germ cell? Which was the mechanism at work with Sam’s flies, and would either case argue for evolution directly guided by the environment? Sam saw Duncan in the audience, listening intently and taking notes, although he didn’t ask any questions afterward. Other hands did wave, though, and Sam was pleased with the way he guided the passionate, occasionally contentious, but civil discussion that followed.
In September, when he returned to college and reported all this to Axel, Axel shook his head and said he wished Sam had consulted him before throwing himself at such a controversial issue. He should never, Axel said, have presented this to so many eminent scientists before testing his hypotheses more thoroughly. Then he said that while he didn’t yet trust Sam’s results, they were intriguing and Sam should push the work forward. He’d supply the flies and the other materials; when the time came, he’d help Sam write up the results. “Although it would have been better,” he added, “if you’d done even more while you were still there.”
“I should have,” Sam admitted.
And would have, he knew, if he hadn’t gotten involved with Ellen. Four years Sam’s senior, presently working as a biology instructor at Smith, she’d spent the previous year in England, where she’d cut off her hair, befriended several brilliant women, and taken up feminism and eugenics. One opinion she held strongly was that exceptionally intelligent people—“Like you,” she said to Sam, during a collecting trip at Quisset, “and me”—should have children together, which would improve the world. Later, she and Sam decanted their specimens side by side, and a few nights after that, when a crowd of students got drunk on the beer two chemists had brewed, they ended up entwined in the dusty wooden attic over the supply room.
The next day, when Sam apologized for what had happened, Ellen calmly claimed it as her own idea and said Sam had only done what she wanted. At the beach, she wore a daring wool-jersey bathing suit that clung to her wiry shape and ended midthigh, the white trim disturbingly like underwear, and when she swam, she looked to Sam, with her close-cropped hair, like one of the elegant spiraling clam worms he collected at night. He had no idea how he felt about her; he was nineteen, and she let him make love to her. Sam couldn’t imagine why.
“Because I want to have several children, starting soon,” she told him. “And you’re such a good specimen. You’re tall”—here she tapped one of Sam’s fingers—“big-boned and bright”—tap, tap—“hardworking, sturdy, even-tempered.”
By then she was working on Sam’s second hand, having thrust the first inside her blouse. His hands on her small, pointed breasts, his mouth in the hollow of her throat, her bony feet on his back. He was completely inexperienced when they met; he was astounded. For the last two weeks of his stay at Woods Hole he was with Ellen every night. If I’m pregnant, she said the day they parted, we’ll get married. If not—
Not, as it turned out, although they met as often as they could during Sam’s last year of college, several times near Sam and twice in Massachusetts, the second time just after Duncan proved him wrong.
What kind of a person would, in utter secrecy, interrupt his own project to replicate a fellow worker’s experiments and doublecheck his results? Duncan published a paper noting that the preliminary results of a young student investigator—here he named Sam—presented orally and informally had sufficiently interested him to push those experiments further. When he did, he found that in flies whose eyes had been burned, the Malpighian tubules indeed turned red, and that a small number of the offspring of those flies also had red tubules.
But he also saw something Sam had failed to see, perhaps because he’d been so absorbed with Ellen. In his early work in Morgan’s lab, Duncan had occasionally noticed—or so he wrote; Sam wondered if it wasn’t Morgan himself who saw this—larvae feeding on the eyes of dead flies that had fallen on the food at the bottom of the culture bottle; this had colored the intestines of the larvae red. After seeing the initial data (and this did sound like him; he could test a chain of reasoning like a crow pulling at the weak spots in a carcass), Duncan had suddenly wondered if the pigment might be carried through the pupa stage, possibly appearing in the adult fly.
He crushed the eyes of some flies, mixed them with yeast and agar from a culture bottle, and added larvae; their intestines soon became filled with the red food, and a bit later the Malpighian tubules, visible through the larval walls, became deep red. The larvae pupated; adults emerged; their tubules too were red. Variations with different foods showed clearly that some component of the red pigment in the crushed eyes passed from the digestive tract of the larvae into the Malpighian tubules and remained there into the adult stage. Sam’s larvae had eaten the damaged eyes of dead flies and that—not a response to the injury itself—had colored their tubules. Sam had found not an acquired characteristic, but simply a transient response to diet. Acquired characteristics were not—could not be, Duncan said—inherited.
Sam was wrong, he’d been proven wrong, but at first that didn’t seem so serious—why would people hold his curiosity against him? He was young, he was enthusiastic; he’d seen a big question in Kammerer’s work and explored it open-mindedly, trying to follow the data rather than his own preconceptions; he’d shared his findings honestly. Leaving Woods Hole for his last year of college, he’d sensed that others saw him as a wonderfully promising student, welcome anywhere. Six months later, the recent work he’d done in Axel’s lab rendered pointless by Duncan’s paper, those same people seemed to regard him as a dubious young man who’d overreached himself. Even Axel, after reading the copy Duncan sent specially to him, a little handwritten note—“I’m sorry”—scrawled at the top, groaned and went for a long walk before sitting down with Sam.
“I should have seen that,” Axel said when he returned. “If you’d kept in touch with me over the summer, if we’d been talking about your experimental design … I should have seen that before Duncan did.” Sam couldn’t tell whether Axel was more angry at himself for missing it or proud of having taught Duncan so well.
In the wake of that paper, Sam knew he wouldn’t be welcome at Columbia, where everyone had assumed he’d follow Axel and Duncan to graduate school. But with Axel’s help he found a place in a small program in Wisconsin, run by a sound but middling geneticist. Not one of Morgan’s golden boys, like Bridges or Sturtevant; not even someone at the top of the second tier (which was how Axel disparagingly characterized himself), but a man who knew he was lucky to have a lab and the funding for a few graduate students.
Sam spent that last summer in Axel’s lab, maintaining the cultures and leaving everything in order for Axel’s next helper, wishing, all the time, that he could be discussing new projects with Axel. But Axel, collaborating with a friend in Texas, was seldom there, and Ellen, who might have helped him settle into his new life, instead did the reverse. If she’d gotten pregnant during his last year of college, nothing, Sam knew, could have wedged them apart—but she didn’t, and didn’t, and when summer came and she still wasn’t pregnant, they didn’t see each other for several months. In August, she backed out of her offer to drive to Wisconsin with him, and before Thanksgiving she was gone.
For a long time, Sam was able to avoid her. His luck ran out after seven years, at a big meeting in Washington where Duncan received a prestigious award. Sam was moving toward the back of the auditorium, having just heard a talk by a maize geneticist and hoping to escape before Duncan spoke. He ran into Ellen in the middle of the aisle, herding two boys and a girl, all recognizably Duncan’s, toward the special seats at the front set aside for the prizewinner’s family. She introduced the children awkwardly and asked how Sam was doing.
“Fine,” Sam said. “Just finishing my thesis.” She and Duncan had married before he’d even started that work. After which Axel, as if inspired by them, had married a mathematician he’d met in Texas, moved to a leafy street twenty minutes from the college, and promptly produced a son.
“We miss you at Woods Hole,” she said.
“Handsome boys,” he said, avoiding their eyes.
Tugging at her younger son’s collar, bending to adjust the skirt on the dark-haired little girl who’d inherited her reedy arms and legs, Ellen said that she and Duncan went back every year, always with the children, who loved it. But nothing had ever been as wonderful as her second summer there. When, Sam knew by then, she’d already left him but he didn’t know it. When she and Duncan had both returned and Sam, in the shadow of his big failure, had been unable to join them.
On the lifeboat, before the sun rose, when the night was at its coldest and the waves were tossing them about and when, having long since thrown up everything he’d eaten the previous day, Sam was retching painfully and Bessie’s hand was lightly patting the back of his neck, he had thought about his calm hand bringing the needle’s point so lightly, so deftly, to each Drosophila eye. How the flies’ wounds had sometimes stuck to the food, and to each other; how those that lived were weak for several days, some unable to eat. Here on the ship, shaken about like a fly in a test tube, he too was having trouble eating. One evening he learned that while most of the geneticists who’d been on the Athenia with him had been picked up by the British destroyers, two were apparently lost. And on the eighth day of the crossing, while he scored patterns in the oatmeal that was one of the few things left to eat, Sam learned that the little girl who’d been in a coma had finally died.
Gloom spread through the ship as each seating heard the news, and later Sam saw Bessie, near the bow, comforting her son, Aaron, who was crying. He and the girl had been friends, Sam thought, or at least known each other the way children even of different ages do when confined together. He couldn’t stop himself from walking over to Aaron and squatting down beside him. He rested his hand on Aaron’s back, his fingertips moving gently.
“Shh,” he said. “It’s all right.” Which was what he’d said in the boat, when Aaron was so cold and sick that he was crying. Also this was what Bessie had said to Sam. Now she said, “He’s taking this very hard.”
“Were they close?” Sam asked. The two geneticists who’d drowned, husband and wife, had worked at a small Minnesota college and traveled only rarely to international gatherings. Sam hadn’t met them at the congress, but he had on the ship, and he’d envied them when they came down hand in hand to what would be their last dinner. Axel had said, at that same meal, how much he’d been missing his wife and son.
“She took him for walks around the deck, when she was bored,” Bessie said, gesturing toward their own crowded railings, so packed with passengers eager for air—they were expecting rain—that strolling was out of the question. “They played make-believe. You know, the way children will: I’ll be the mommy and you be the little boy, and I’ll get you ready for school …”
“She sounds sweet,” Sam said. The figures crowding the railings separated, moved together again, bunched, and dispersed, long lines forming only to condense into shorter segments.
“Not always—once she pinched him hard enough to leave a mark.”
Aaron shrugged off Sam’s hand and pushed himself more firmly into Bessie’s legs. “Do you have children?” she asked, smoothing her son’s hair.
“I don’t,” Sam said, and if Duncan and Harold hadn’t joined them just then, he might have told Bessie how pained he’d been when he understood that he likely never would have any. Ellen, who couldn’t get pregnant with him, had gotten pregnant instantly with Duncan; no woman he’d been with since had had so much as a scare. Sometimes, when he’d had too much to drink (throughout Prohibition, he and his friends had always had access to lab ethanol), he used to joke around with a toothpick-and-gumdrop figure he called Mr. Heredity. Look at me! he’d have the figure say. Interested since childhood in how we inherit traits, but I can’t reproduce! But although he laughed as hard as anyone when Mr. Heredity drooped his gumdrop head, later, when he began to grasp the fact that no one would ever have his hair or his blocky nose, his height or his big hands, he felt quite otherwise. The day his heart stopped, the day he got hit by a bus (the day a torpedo sank the ship that was taking him home), everything that had led to his father and mother and converged in him would be extinguished.
But here were his colleagues, bearing down. He managed a smile as they greeted him and, looking at Bessie and Aaron, asked if they could do anything to help. Sam introduced them only by name, without explaining how he knew them.
“We’re fine,” Bessie said.
Impossible to focus on her and Duncan at the same time. Instead, Sam kept his eyes on the unusually turbulent sky. Great, soft, gray clouds piled one atop the other, pushing each other aside like wrestling dogs.
Bessie said, looking only at him, “Margaret’s death made Aaron miss his father more than usual. He keeps thinking something’s happened to him, that he won’t be there when we get home. Those men we saw in the water …” She picked Aaron up and left.
Duncan watched them walk away and then turned back to Sam, eyes bright with curiosity. “You were in the same lifeboat?”
Sam nodded. He’d told Duncan nothing about the night in the boat; what Duncan knew of the torpedo, the flames, the boats in the water, he knew from other survivors, not from him.
“If you ever want to talk,” Duncan said, pushing aside his floppy hair, “I’m happy to listen.”
After Sam graduated from college, he mostly kept his work to himself. Axel, busy with his new wife and son, also had new students to train and increasingly relied on his connection to Duncan, who was doing very well as part of his advisor’s group. Duncan and his colleagues shared fly strains with Axel’s lab; Axel and his students collaborated on papers with them, which helped them all. Sam worked alone, steadily and quietly, throughout his years in graduate school, doing nothing without his advisor’s explicit approval, choosing a thesis project closer to his advisor’s heart than to his own and committing to it entirely. He kept in close touch with Avery, who’d gone to England by then, and Avery helped him modify an X-ray source so he could radiate his Drosophila and look for mutations. The experiments he completed were nowhere near as flashy as Muller’s work in this area, nor did he and his advisor gather anywhere near as much data—they were working along parallel tracks at first and then, after Muller had yet another big breakthrough, in support of what he’d already shown—but Sam knew it was solid work, a bandage for his dented reputation. By 1930, when he got his degree, he was able, despite the growing effects of the crash, to find a position in Missouri. In between teaching sections of general biology, he worked every spare minute in his own lab, grateful for what he’d been able to salvage and trying not to envy Duncan, who had followed his advisor out to California and had a much better job.
Half his salary he sent to his mother, who, in the wake of both her parents’ deaths, had taken in boarders but even so was still struggling to hang on to the Philadelphia house. When he lost his job in 1933, he knew she felt the blow too. Although he wrote to everyone he’d ever met, there were no positions to be had. Axel, who temporarily had to close his own lab, could find him nothing, and Duncan couldn’t, or wouldn’t, help, despite being the protégé of someone who’d just won a Nobel Prize. When Sam had nothing to lose and was on the verge of going back home, he appealed to the man whose paper had so inspired him during his first year of college, and in whose field he now worked.
He’d written to Muller a few times during graduate school, sending results that confirmed or extended Muller’s own and asking about his latest work. At a conference, Muller had tracked Sam down and inspected his most recent data closely; after that, they’d continued to correspond about interesting questions. If a quantum of light could, as Niels Bohr suggested, trigger photosynthesis, was it also the case that an individual ionization caused a mutation? Did chromosome breaks result from radiation’s direct or indirect effects? After Muller left Austin in the wake of a scandal involving his support of a Communist-leaning student newspaper, he went to Berlin, where, he wrote to Sam, he was collaborating with a brilliant Russian scientist who shared his interest in using the tools of physics to explore the nature of the gene. The work was intriguing, the company stimulating, but just as he was settling in, Hitler was appointed chancellor and soon his colleagues began to lose their jobs. Muller then accepted his Russian friend’s invitation to come help set up a research program and most recently had written to Sam from the Institute of Genetics in Leningrad.
Was it possible, Sam wrote him, that given his background and their shared interests, he could be of some use at the institute? Secretly, he thought they also shared a disgust with what was going on in their country, the mad inequities that seemed to be destroying every good thing. In Russia, Sam thought, science might assume its rightful role, and scientists, instead of being separated into little fiefdoms ruled by petty kings, would work under the shelter of the state, free to follow their best ideas. He was thrilled when Muller, so enthusiastic himself about the Soviet experiment, found money for a position in which Sam was, if not quite an independent investigator, more than a student.
Soon Sam was living in Leningrad, investigating chromosomal rearrangements and learning that many of the apparent point mutations caused by X-ray treatment were actually recombinations of broken fragments. Segments were lost, segments were duplicated; he began to get a sense of what size a gene might be, and how it might function when moved to a new position. What if natural mutations were actually rearrangements of the particles in the chromosomes, rather than changes to the particles themselves? Muller proved to be an excellent guide. Not a teacher, as Axel had been; not really a friend; he was clearly Sam’s boss, but he was accessible and kind, and Sam was thrilled to be working with someone he’d admired for so long.
It hardly mattered that, with housing short everywhere, Sam had to sleep in the corners of other scientists’ rooms, for a while in a bed behind a curtain in the laboratory, later in a basement hall. Everything was crowded, everyone was improvising; he was glad to be part of the common flow, and even the struggle to find supplies was worth it—such excitement! Such work, for such a purpose. Surrounded by Russians day and night, he learned the language quickly. And when the institute was moved to Moscow, Sam went too, leaving behind several friends and a woman with whom he’d had a brief affair.
Writing to his mother—he tried to write home twice a month—he described the farmers and engineers he met, the German Jews who’d sought refuge in the Soviet Union as the Nazis rose to power, the ardently socialist Englishmen and discontented Americans. He met men who’d soldiered in several wars, including one who’d fought Germans at the beginning of the Great War and then Americans, later, in Archangel, with the Reds. He showed me the white cotton overcoat he’d worn, Sam wrote, which had made him invisible in the snow. He claimed that once, as he’d been scrounging for food in the streets, he’d seen an American soldier leap from the top of a gigantic wooden toboggan run and onto the ice below. Really, I am living in the most remarkable place.
That winter, as the snow fell and fell—he was never warm, no one had enough fuel—Sam thought often of that soldier suspended in the air. Leaping from or leaping toward? For all the hardships of daily life here, he still felt freer than he had since his time in Axel’s lab, and he moved through Moscow with a sense he hadn’t had in years of everything being interesting. At the Medico-Genetics Institute he saw hundreds of pairs of identical twins—how eerie this was, each face doubled!—being studied like laboratory mice. He visited collective farms, and he met a geneticist named Elizaveta who’d discovered a remarkable mutant fly a few years before Sam arrived. Walking toward her bench was like walking into Axel’s lab for the first time, the air dense with the smells of ether and bananas and flies fried on lightbulbs, the atmosphere of delight. Elizaveta, who had long, narrow, blue-green eyes below the palest brows, said she knew that genes controlled development: but were they active all the time, or did each act only at a particular period of development, and lie dormant otherwise?
At meetings—so many meetings!—he listened to talks about the practical applications of genetics to agriculture and the Marxist implications of the theory of the gene. Once, in a dark room after a day of lectures, he watched a film called Salamandra, about an idealistic scientist who’d demonstrated Lamarckian inheritance in salamanders but then was betrayed by a sinister German who tampered with his specimens to make it look as though his results had been faked. Denounced, deprived of his job, he lived in exile until rescued by a farsighted Soviet commissar who proved his work had been right all along. Partway through, Sam grasped that this was a transposition of the life and fate of Kammerer, who’d killed himself after a researcher proved that some of his results had been faked. By then, his own big mistake seemed very far away.
Working all the time, excited by the new experiments in the lab, he ignored what was happening out on the streets until, after a while, even he couldn’t avoid knowing about the party members being persecuted and executed, those who disagreed with Stalin disappearing. Intellectuals and scientists from different fields began to disappear as well, including geneticists, some of them Sam’s own colleagues. The director of the twins study vanished and his institute was dissolved. Elizaveta, more cautious than some, gave her flies to Sam and then slipped away to her grandmother’s village. Geneticists had failed, Sam read, to serve the state by providing the collectives with new crops and livestock that could thrive in difficult climates and relieve the food shortages. They were stuck in bourgeois ways of thought. If a society could be transformed in a single generation, if the economy could be completely remade, why couldn’t the genetic heritage of crops or, for that matter, of man, be transformed as well?
In this context, Lamarck was a hero; and also Kammerer (Sam could see, now, why he’d been shown that film); and also the horticulturist Ivan Michurin, who’d claimed that through some kind of shock treatment he could transform the heredity of fruit trees, allowing growth farther north. Trofim Lysenko, pushy and uneducated, rose up from nowhere to extend Michurinism beyond what anyone else could have imagined. Lysenko hated fruit flies, he knew no mathematics, he found Mendelian genetics tedious, even his grasp of plant physiology was feeble. How could Sam take him seriously? Lysenko claimed that heredity was nothing so boringly fixed as the Mendelians said, but could be trained by the environment, endlessly improved. At a big meeting Sam attended at the end of 1936, Muller tried to rebuff Lysenko by clearly restating Mendelian genetics and outlining the institute’s research programs. Larmarckian inheritance, Muller explained, could not be reconciled with any of the evidence they’d found.
Sam was amazed when some in the audience actually hissed, and more so when, after Lysenko responded by dismissing all of formal genetics, those same people stood and cheered. Genetics was a harmful science, Lysenko said, not a science at all but a bourgeois distortion, a science of saboteurs. Muller and his like were wrecking socialism, preventing all progress, whereas he would now completely refashion heredity! His Russian was failing him, Sam kept thinking; Lysenko couldn’t be saying that what should be so, must be so. Yet his friends heard the same thing. Those who doubted him, Lysenko said, were criminal. A theory of heredity, to be correct, must promise not just the power to understand nature but the power to change it.
Muller, after making careful arrangements to protect his colleagues, left the country early in 1937, and Sam followed a few weeks later, first destroying the papers and letters he’d received from his Russian friends. Of course I understand why you need me to return to the United States, he carefully wrote to his mother, who’d requested no such thing but could be counted on to understand that his letters were likely being read.
Back in Philadelphia, writing up his last results from the Moscow lab in the small bedroom where he’d slept as a child, the familiar sound of his mother working in the living room complicated by the movements of the two teachers with whom she now shared the house, Sam began another search for work. This time he had better luck, finding a position at a small college near the western edge of Illinois. For a while, as he was trying to set up yet another lab—how many times could a person order glassware, brushes, ether, drying racks, all the bits and pieces needed to do the smallest experiment?—he thought about changing fields entirely. If science in the United States was controlled by a few powerful people, and science in the Soviet Union was nothing but a branch of politics—then what was the point of doing anything? Perhaps he’d do better at farming, or statistics, or auto mechanics.
Soon enough, though, he got caught up in the life of a place that at first had felt to him like nowhere. His better students were curious and eager to learn, and he found—as perhaps Axel had found earlier; Sam longed to talk with him about this but couldn’t afford a trip east—that he had to hurl himself at a problem again, simply to give the students something to do. He started a genetics course in addition to his sections of general biology; he bought a little house with two large trees; he met a woman he liked, who planted vegetables in his backyard and taught him how to cook chard. The college gave him an excellent incubator, as well as some other crucial equipment. Through the fly-exchange network he was able to get some useful stock, which in turn put him in touch with many of the researchers trained in Morgan’s lab: not only Axel but also Harold and George (that was how he first met them) and, inevitably, Duncan, who immediately mailed to Sam’s new address all the papers he’d published while Sam was abroad. Once Sam solved some difficulties with mites and temperature fluctuations, he was back in business and, after hiring a couple of student helpers, began a new set of experiments. For one particular project, he used Elizaveta’s flies.
He’d smuggled breeding stock into the country, and when the cultures were established, he turned, with a sense of recovering his younger self, to investigating them. Like some of the curiosities naturalists had noticed and collected for years—crustaceans with legs where jaws or swimmerets should be, plants with petals transformed into stamens—Elizaveta’s flies shared the property that one organ in a segmental series had been transformed into another. How were those homeotic mutants produced? And were those variations heritable or caused by damage to the developing embryo? An acquaintance of Axel’s had discovered a true-breeding homeotic mutant he called bithorax, in which the little stabilizing structures normally found behind the fore-wings had been transformed into a second set of wings; Elizaveta had worked with that four-winged mutant, and also with an even odder one called aristapedia, which had legs growing where the antennae should be. Endlessly fascinating, Sam thought, and he began to investigate how a mutation to a single gene could cause such massive effects.
Months passed, a year of hard work passed; thousands of cultures and tens of thousands of flies. In the mutant, he learned, the antennal discs developed early, at the same time as the leg discs, allowing the evocator that normally instructed the leg discs to act on the antennal discs as well. Evocator: he loved that word. The chemical substance that acts as a stimulus in the developing embryo. How intriguing, how sensible, really, that the mutant gene didn’t build a leglike structure out of thin air. Instead it acted more simply and generally, altering the rate of development so that a whole pattern of growth occurred at a time and place where it ought not to be.
Others were working on this as well, but there was so much to do, along so many branching paths, that Sam had no sense of racing to solve a problem before someone else. Rather, the whole world seemed to shimmer, a delectable feeling he’d first had as a boy, working with Mr. Spacek: the act of throwing himself at one problem, this problem, lit up every other aspect of his experience in the world. Legs grew out of a fly’s head because of a small change in timing; would his life have been different if his father had died earlier, or later? If he hadn’t met Mr. Spacek when he did, or gone to college at sixteen and found Axel willing to teach him. If he hadn’t met Avery or Ellen, hadn’t met Duncan …
In this state of excitement, he’d gone to the congress, where he presented his results and then connected that work with Goldschmidt’s, with work on position effects and the possibility that the particles of heredity might move around, with the possibility that maybe all genetic changes were changes in development. Maybe genes weren’t particles after all, weren’t arranged like beads on a string, but were more like spiderwebs, susceptible to the influence of events in the cytoplasm; maybe they weren’t quite as impregnable to outside influence as previously thought? He aimed his ideas at his former Russian colleagues, who should have been there but weren’t; at Axel, who was there but had missed all the groundwork; at Muller, who’d found a temporary haven in Edinburgh and who, although distracted by the responsibilities of hosting the congress, still found time to come and listen to him. He sailed past his notes, avoiding the false paths of Kammerer and Lysenko, which, unlike most of his audience, he’d learned for himself, to speculate about the question of timing. When, in the course of development, might a tiny change cause massive later effects? Might inheritance not be far more complex than we’d guessed? When he finished speaking and looked out at the disgruntled faces in the audience—Duncan’s face was red, Axel was poking his notepad with a pencil, Muller was gazing at him quizzically—he had a separate thought, which had nothing to do with inheritance. The first big leap he’d taken, with Kammerer’s work, had turned out to be wrong. Was it possible that now no one could see the rightness of this second big leap, because of his first mistake?
Two bright white ships, crisp and military-looking with broad red stripes across their bows, came out of the distance to meet them when they were still several hundred miles from Halifax. Sailors from the coast guard cutters transferred food, which they needed badly—oranges! Sam saw, and apples and cheese, potatoes and meat, fresh bread!—along with toothbrushes and hairbrushes, soap, shampoo, donated clothing, more blankets. Two doctors, wanting to examine the wounded to see who might need the alignment of broken bones checked with their portable X-ray machine and who should be transferred to the cutters for care, also came aboard.
For the first time in more than a week, Sam brushed his hair, cleaned his teeth with something other than a finger, and along with everyone else dipped into the new supplies to spruce up for that night’s celebration. Officers from the cutters joined them, the captain extracted a case of whiskey from the hold, a few passengers did what they could to decorate the deck while others, beginning to believe now that they’d get home safely, began to relax. All around him, Sam saw groups of people, faces suddenly scrubbed shades lighter, smiling and talking with the friends they’d made on the journey. These women bound to those, these students to those sailors; the college girls—for him, still simply pleasant acquaintances—more closely attached to Duncan and Harold and George than he’d understood.
He felt, for a moment, unusually alone—more so when he saw that Axel, standing only a few feet away as the whiskey was handed around, was barricaded by Duncan and Harold and George. Fanning out from them were Laurel and Pansy and Maud, talking to a young man Sam hadn’t met; Lucinda, playing cards with the plant physiologist he’d first seen the day they were rescued; and Bessie and Aaron, sitting on one of the hatches, watching the constellations rise in the sky. Sam went over to Bessie’s side as Pansy asked the young man what he planned to do when he got home.
“I’m still in school,” he said shyly.
Sam looked up, spotting the stars of Pegasus. He remembered sitting on his father’s shoulders, following the line of his arm as he traced out shapes overhead. Look at the horse, do you see the dolphin? There’s a whale … Or did he remember those shapes from other evenings, much later, with his mother?
“I’m an art student,” the young man continued. “I was traveling on a fellowship. But now …”
“You’ll go back when the war is over?” Maud asked.
“What’s the point?” he said. “Without my friend.”
As Sam continued to pick from the glitter overhead all the constellations he could remember, the student described how he and a dear friend from their school in Boston had split a traveling scholarship meant for one of them so that they could both see Europe. Despite their pinched budget and the signs of war cropping up everywhere, they’d visited Paris, Amsterdam, Verona, Venice, and even Berlin before returning to London, which they’d reached about the same time Sam reached Edinburgh. They too had found their ship home from Glasgow commandeered and later sailings either booked or canceled; they too had boarded the Athenia as a last resort. After the torpedo struck, he and his friend had managed to stay together in one of the last and most crowded lifeboats, which was also the most unlucky—the one that had swung too close to the Knute Nelson and been crushed by its propellers.
“We dove into the water,” the student said, “my friend and I. We dove and then we swam until we found a plank to hang on to. After a while we were picked up by another lifeboat. By then the Southern Cross was near us, so we rowed there. And then we got too close to the back of that …”
As his voice trailed away, Duncan, who had moved closer, said, “That wasn’t the boat …?”
The young man nodded, looking over at Axel and Duncan, then down at the deck, as if embarrassed that others had already heard the story and that some had seen the boat overturned.
“My friend,” he said. “My friend—by the time the crew from the Southern Cross reached us, he was gone.”
How could anyone be so unlucky? Not one but two lifeboats wrecked beneath him, his friend by his side through the torpedoing, through the first lifeboat’s destruction, only to be lost. Sam closed his eyes. The ship rolled beneath him, a long, slow movement that made him dizzy. A hand touched his: Axel?
Bessie, Sam saw, when he opened his eyes. “Are you all right?” she asked.
“The whiskey,” Sam said faintly.
“Let me get you some water,” she said, burrowing through the crowd. Duncan came up on Sam’s other side and poked his shoulder. Jovially, stupidly, looking exactly the same as he had all week—the new supplies had meant nothing to him—he said, “Too much to drink?”
Where had Axel gone?
Duncan stopped smiling. “You don’t look very well.”
“Now you worry about me?” Sam said.
An odd look crossed Duncan’s face. “What went on at the congress—that’s work. I don’t agree with your work; I want it buried. Doesn’t mean I want you buried. Until you came over the side of this ship, when I thought you might have drowned, I felt—”
“Oh, please,” Sam said.
“You’re impossible,” said Duncan. He pushed past Sam and toward Harold and George. Then, finally, Axel reappeared, his face concerned and his hand stretched toward Sam.
“It’s all right,” he said quietly. “It’s all right. It wasn’t as bad as all that.”
“What wasn’t?” Sam asked stupidly.
“When our boat overturned, under the stern of the Southern Cross—I saw you turn pale when that young man was speaking, the one we’d pulled from the water earlier, with his friend. I knew you must be thinking of me, what had happened to me and how much worse it might have been. But it wasn’t so terrible, not really. I was in the water for a while but I didn’t know I was hurt, I couldn’t even feel the gash on my head. And I had an oar to cling to, and it wasn’t too long before the crewmen from the Southern Cross found me and got me aboard. And then once I got here, and Duncan tracked me down, he arranged everything. You mustn’t worry so about me.”
How was he only now learning for sure what had happened to Axel? If they’d had time alone together, if they’d been able to talk … why hadn’t Axel ever come to him? That night on the water, he’d scanned every boat they approached for Axel’s face. Then, it hadn’t mattered that they very seldom saw each other, that since Sam’s time in Russia—no, before that, even—since Axel’s marriage, perhaps, or since Sam had lost that first job and Axel hadn’t been able to help him, they had drifted apart. He’d come to the meeting in Edinburgh hoping to repair this, tracking Axel through the corridors and cocktail parties like a devoted beagle, but although they’d had pleasant moments and caught each other up on the trivia of their lives, they’d never had the one, real, deep conversation Sam had been missing for so many years. And when Duncan attacked him so vigorously, Axel had not defended him. He hadn’t supported Duncan—but he had not, in public, stood up for Sam. Instead, afterward, he’d pulled Sam toward a bench beneath a holly tree and questioned him closely about his results. Then he said—Sam felt this simultaneously as a blessing and a dismissal—that the work itself seemed promising. But why, Axel scolded, would he expose it to the world at such an early stage! If he would only stop speculating in public …
“That’s what happened to you?” Sam said now. “That night in the boat?” It wasn’t so much what changed in the environment that altered a living organism; it was the when. A question of timing. When in the course of development does the event arrive that initiates the cascade of changes? “That’s what happened?” he repeated.
“You knew that,” Axel said. “Didn’t you? I assumed …”
That Duncan had told him, Sam understood. That Duncan had relayed to him whatever Axel, stretched out on his berth, the bandage stuck to his oozing wound, had said. Axel must have told the story of his night on the water to Duncan, who lay on the floor in the place where Sam should have been. Perhaps he’d also relied on Duncan for whatever image he had of Sam’s own night; he’d never asked Sam. “Duncan,” Sam said feebly.
“I know,” Axel said. “Really, I do know—he can be so exasperating sometimes, he probably told you more than he should have, he’s always too dramatic. And he forgets how attached we are. I don’t think it even occurred to him that you might be upset by hearing that something bad happened to me. Any more than he seemed to understand, in Edinburgh, how much he’d hurt me by attacking you.”
Sam stared at him blankly. “But Duncan,” he said, “the way you are with him …”
“I do the best I can,” Axel said. “You must have found yourself in similar situations with students. You know how sometimes you have to treat the one you actually feel least close to as the favorite, just so he won’t lose confidence entirely?”
“I do,” Sam said miserably. Not that he’d ever felt treated as a favorite, but he knew what Axel meant: he’d always acted more kindly toward Sam than he really felt, so that Sam wouldn’t be too crushed to go on.
“I’ve always had to do that with Duncan,” Axel said. His bandage, unpleasantly stained, had shifted farther back on his head. “I still do, I find, in certain situations. And here—what could I do? He wanted so badly to take care of me.”
“You gave him his start,” Sam said, not knowing what he meant.
“It’s a good thing I can count on you to understand,” Axel said. “You’re strong enough to go your own way. That’s part of what gets you into such trouble. And part of why your work is so interesting.”
The next morning, still a day and a half out from Halifax, Axel and five other passengers were transferred to one of the cutters, which had excellent hospital facilities. The wound on his head wasn’t healing properly; the coast guard doctor wanted to debride and resuture it without further delay. Sam, left behind with Duncan and Harold and George, could do nothing but wave goodbye and hope that they’d find each other later.
At the docks, a huge crowd greeted them, Red Cross nurses and immigration officials, family members of some of the survivors, local citizens who wanted to help, reporters from various papers: they were big news. Theirs had been the first ship sunk and theirs the first Canadian and American casualties; when the torpedo struck the Athenia, not even half a day had passed since Britain and Germany had gone to war. Nurses moved in to tend to the wounded; volunteers brought coffee and sandwiches; officials herded them into the immigration quarters, where they arranged baths and offered clean clothes. Scores of reporters moved in as well, eager for stories—what had they seen, what had they felt?—and then all the passengers began to talk at once, a hopeless tangle.
How could Sam be surprised when Duncan stepped forward? Of course it was Duncan who, never having set foot on the Athenia, still somehow managed to simplify, generalize, organize the scattered impressions. The reporters turned toward him, relaxing, already making notes: so much easier to follow his linear narrative, spangled with brief portraits of the survivors and vivid details of the crossing! He’d listened closely, Sam saw, to accounts of what he hadn’t experienced himself. Bits of Axel’s story flashed by, along with elements of the art student’s, the plant physiologist’s, Bessie’s, and more. Bessie looked startled, as did some of the others, but what Duncan recounted wasn’t untrue; it just didn’t match much of what Sam felt, or what he knew to be important. If Duncan were to tell the story of Sam’s working life it would, he knew, be similarly skewed—yet who knew him better than Duncan? Who had been with him for as much of the way?
Only Axel, who, leaving the City of Flint for the cutter, had held his hand to his stained bandage, looked crossly at the doctor, and said, “Really, I’m fine. I don’t know why you want to move me like this. I’d rather stay here with my friends.” And then had gestured toward Duncan and Sam, on either side of him.