If, if, if. Sam tried to think of these two middle-aged men 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 look unusually defenseless. He smiled at Sam and tapped the spot next to him at the dinner table, but before Sam could get there, Harold, George, and Duncan swarmed in, leaving Sam 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 underwater, 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 until he reached the ship? 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 Kraków. 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 being rescued, if they were among the lucky, 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 he couldn’t escape Duncan?
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?