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.