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 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 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; 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 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 experience. 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 an immortal stream; that was the germplasm. 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 Spacek, 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: the ancestor of the Woods Hole labs. 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.
Now 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 as he listened to Axel summarize that extraordinary paper from 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 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 that 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 dissolved in the perpetual chatter. Duncan and Harold and George invariably settled close to Axel, who then would watch, ruefully, Sam thought, as Sam found a separate place.
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 reality of what had just happened to them? The meals seemed doubly hard when Sam thought of how much better he’d done recently with his old roommate, Avery. On the inexpensive pre-congress 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 Cambridge on Sunday, Sam had felt like he knew his 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 expressions, 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.
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