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.