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.
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, clinging to 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’s response 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. Sam was almost 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 had recently made two American lecture tours; his sensational work—VIENNA BIOLOGIST HAILED AS GREATEST OF THE CENTUR: Proves a Darwin Belief, one newspaper blared — was so interesting, and so controversial, that even Sam’s mother had interviewed him for one of her articles. 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.