ON THE LIFEBOAT, before the sun rose, when the night was at its coldest and the waves were tossing them about and when, having long since thrown up everything he’d eaten the previous day, Sam was retching painfully and Bessie’s hand was lightly patting the back of his neck, he had thought about his calm hand bringing the needle’s point so lightly, so deftly, to each Drosophila eye. How the flies’ wounds had sometimes stuck to the food, and to each other; how those that lived were weak for several days, some unable to eat. Here on the ship, shaken about like a fly in a test tube, he too was having trouble eating. One evening he learned that while most of the geneticists who’d been on the Athenia with him had been picked up by the British destroyers, two were apparently lost. And on the eighth day of the crossing, while he scored patterns in the oatmeal that was one of the few things left to eat, Sam learned that the little girl who’d been in a coma had finally died.
Gloom spread through the ship as each seating heard the news, and later Sam saw Bessie, near the bow, comforting her son, Aaron, who was crying. He and the girl had been friends, Sam thought, or at least known each other the way children even of different ages do when confined together. He couldn’t stop himself from walking over to Aaron and squatting down beside him. He rested his hand on Aaron’s back, his fingertips moving gently.
“Shh,” he said. “It’s all right.” Which was what he’d said in the boat, when Aaron was so cold and sick that he was crying. Also this was what Bessie had said to Sam. Now she said, “He’s taking this very hard.”
“Were they close?” Sam asked. The two geneticists who’d drowned, husband and wife, had worked at a small Minnesota college and traveled only rarely to international gatherings. Sam hadn’t met them at the congress, but he had on the ship, and he’d envied them when they came down hand in hand to what would be their last dinner. Axel had said, at that same meal, how much he’d been missing his wife and son.
“She used to take him for walks around the deck, when she was bored,” Bessie said, gesturing toward their own crowded railings, so packed with passengers eager for air — they were expecting rain — that strolling was out of the question. “They played make-believe. You know, the way children wilclass="underline" I’ll be the mommy and you be the little boy, and I’ll get you ready for school …”
“She sounds sweet,” Sam said. The figures crowding the railings separated, moved together again, bunched, and dispersed, long lines forming only to condense into shorter segments.
“Not always — once she pinched him hard enough to leave a mark.”
Aaron shrugged off Sam’s hand and pushed himself more firmly into Bessie’s legs. “Do you have children?” she asked, smoothing her son’s hair.
“I don’t,” Sam said, and if Duncan and Harold hadn’t joined them just then, he might have told Bessie how pained he’d been when he understood that he likely never would have any. Ellen, who couldn’t get pregnant with him, had gotten pregnant instantly with Duncan; no woman he’d been with since had had so much as a scare. Sometimes, when he’d had too much to drink (throughout Prohibition, he and his friends had always had access to lab ethanol), he used to joke around with a toothpick-and-gumdrop figure he called Mr. Heredity. Look at me! he’d have the figure say. Interested since childhood in how we inherit traits, but I can’t reproduce! But although he laughed as hard as anyone when Mr. Heredity drooped his gumdrop head, later, when he began to grasp the fact that no one would ever have his hair or his blocky nose, his height or his big hands, he felt quite otherwise. The day his heart stopped, the day he got hit by a bus (the day a torpedo sank the ship that was taking him home), everything that had led to his father and mother and converged in him would be extinguished.
But here were his colleagues, bearing down. He managed a smile as they greeted him and, looking at Bessie and Aaron, asked if they could do anything to help. Sam introduced them only by name, without explaining how he knew them.
“We’re fine,” Bessie said.
Impossible to focus on her and Duncan at the same time. Instead, Sam kept his eyes on the unusually turbulent sky. Great soft gray clouds piled one atop the other, pushing each other aside like wrestling dogs.
Bessie said, looking only at him, “Margaret’s death made Aaron miss his father more than usual. He keeps thinking something’s happened to him, that he won’t be there when we get home. Those men we saw in the water …” She picked Aaron up and left.
Duncan watched them walk away and then turned back to Sam, eyes bright with curiosity. “You were in the same lifeboat?”
Sam nodded. He’d told Duncan nothing about the night in the boat; what Duncan knew of the torpedo, the flames, the boats in the water, he knew from other survivors, not from him.
“If you ever want to talk,” Duncan said, pushing aside his floppy hair, “I’m happy to listen.”
AFTER SAM GRADUATED from college, he mostly kept his work to himself. Axel, busy with his new wife and son, also had new students to train and increasingly relied on his connection to Duncan, who was doing very well as part of his advisor’s group. Duncan and his colleagues shared fly strains with Axel’s lab; Axel and his students collaborated on papers with them, which helped them all. Sam worked alone, steadily and quietly, throughout his years in graduate school, doing nothing without his advisor’s explicit approval, choosing a thesis project closer to his advisor’s heart than to his own and committing to it entirely. He kept in close touch with Avery, who’d gone to England by then, and Avery helped him modify an X-ray source so he could radiate his Drosophila and look for mutations. The experiments he completed were nowhere near as flashy as Muller’s work in this area, nor did he and his advisor gather anywhere near as much data — they were working along parallel tracks at first and then, after Muller had yet another big breakthrough, in support of what he’d already shown — but Sam knew it was solid work, a bandage for his dented reputation. By 1930, when he got his degree, he was able, despite the growing effects of the crash, to find a position in Missouri. In between teaching sections of general biology, he worked every spare minute in his own lab, grateful for what he’d been able to salvage and trying not to envy Duncan, who had followed his advisor out to California and had a much better job.
Half his salary he sent to his mother, who, in the wake of both her parents’ deaths, had taken in boarders but even so was still struggling to hang on to the Philadelphia house. When he lost his job in 1933, he knew she felt the blow too. Although he wrote to everyone he’d ever met, there were no positions to be had. Axel, who temporarily had to close his own lab, could find him nothing, and Duncan couldn’t, or wouldn’t, help, despite being the protégé of someone who’d just won a Nobel Prize. When Sam had nothing to lose and was on the verge of going back home, he appealed to the man whose paper had so inspired him that first winter at college, and whose field he now shared.
He’d written to Muller a few times during graduate school, sending results that confirmed or extended Muller’s own and asking about his latest work. At a conference, Muller had tracked Sam down and inspected his most recent data closely; after that, they’d continued to correspond about interesting questions. If a quantum of light could, as Niels Bohr suggested, trigger photosynthesis, was it also the case that an individual ionization caused a mutation? Did chromosome breaks result from radiation’s direct or indirect effects? After Muller left Austin in the wake of a scandal involving his support of a Communist-leaning student newspaper, he went to Berlin, where, he wrote to Sam, he was collaborating with a brilliant Russian scientist who shared his interest in using the tools of physics to explore the nature of the gene. The work was intriguing, the company stimulating, but just as he was settling in, Hitler was appointed chancellor and soon his colleagues began to lose their jobs. Muller accepted his Russian friend’s invitation to help set up a research program and most recently had written to Sam from the Institute of Genetics in Leningrad.