now sought.
There it was, black and thick as a Bible; its binding sturdy, its pages yellowing but sound, like a fine vellum.
I took the volume to the table, sat down, and copied to my notebook Lysenko’s infamous, gloating remark toward the close of the conference: “The Central Committee of the CPSU has examined my report and approved it”; and a selection from the rush of hasty recantations—announcements, mostly, of an overnight repudiation of a lifetime’s study—that followed it and preceded the closing vote of thanks to Stalin. I felt pleased at having found— unfairly perhaps—something with which to sully further the heritage of Lamarck. At the same time I felt an urge to wash my hands. There was something incomprehensible about the book’s very existence: was it naivety or arrogance that made its publishers betray so shameful a demonstration of the political control of science? The charlatan’s empty victory was a thing that deserved to be done in the dark, not celebrated in a
But enough. As I stood to return the book to the shelf I opened it idly at the flyleaf, and noticed a queer thing. The sticker proclaiming it the property of the Department overlaid a handwritten inscription in broad black ink, the edges of which scrawl had escaped the bookplate’s obliteration. I recognised some of the fugitive lettering as Cyrillic script. Curious, I held the book up to the light and tried to read through the page, but the paper was too thick.
The books were for reference only. The rule was strict. I was alone in the library. I put the book in my duffel bag and carried it to my bedsit. There, with an electric kettle on a shaky table, I steamed the bookplate off. Then, cribbing from a battered second-hand copy of
To my dear friend Dr. Dav. R. Walker,
in memory of our common endeavour,
yours,
The feeling that this induced in me may be imagined. I started and trembled as though something monstrous had reached out a clammy tentacle from the darkness of its lair and touched the back of my neck. If the book had been inscribed to any other academic elder I might have been less shocked: many of them flaunted their liberal views, and hinted at an earlier radicalism, on the rare occasions when politics were discussed; but Walker was a true-blue conservative of the deepest dye, as well as a mathematically rigorous Darwinian.
The next morning I trawled the second-hand bookshops of the University district. The city had a long, though now mercifully diminishing, “Red” tradition; and sure enough, I found crumbling pamphlets and tedious journals of that persuasion from the time of the Lysenko affair. In them I found articles defending Lysenko’s views. The authors of some, the translators of others, variously appeared as: DRW, Dr. D R Walker, and (with a more proletarian swagger) Dave Walker. There was no room for doubt: my esteemed professor had been a Lysenkoist in his youth.
With a certain malice (forgivable in view of my shock and indeed dismay) I made a point of including these articles in my references when I typed up the essay and handed it in to my tutor, Dr. F. A week passed before I received a summons to Professor Walker’s office.
II. ALCOHOL, TOBACCO, AND ULTRAVIOLET RADIATION EXPOSURE
The Emeritus Professor was, as his title suggests, semi-retired; he took little part in the administration, and devoted his intermittent visits to the Department to the occasional sparkling but well-worn lecture; to shuffling and annotating off-prints of papers from his more productive days with a view to an eventual collection; and to some desultory research of his own into the anatomy and relationships of a Jurassic marine crocodile. Palaeontology had been his field. In his day he had led expeditions to the Kalahari and the Gobi. He had served in the Second World War. In some biographical note I had glimpsed the rank of Lieutenant, but no reference to the Service in which it had been attained: a matter on which rumor had not been reticent.
The professor’s office was at the end of one of the second storey’s long corridors. Dust, cobwebs, and a statistically significant sample of desiccated invertebrates begrimed the frosted glass panel of the door. I tapped, dislodging a dead spider and a couple of woodlice.
“Come in!”
As I stepped through the door the professor rose behind his desk and leaned forward. Tall and stooping, very thin, with weathered skin, sunken cheeks, and a steely spade of beard, he seemed a ruin of his adventurous youth —more Quatermass than Quartermain, so to speak—but an impressive ruin. He shook hands across his desk, motioned me to a seat, and resumed his own. I brushed tobacco ash from friction-furred leather and sat down. The room reeked of pipe smoke and of an acetone whiff that might have been formaldehyde or whisky breath. Shelves lined the walls, stacked with books and petrified bones. Great drifts of journals and off-prints cluttered the floor. A window overlooking the building’s drab courtyard sifted wan wintry light through a patina similar to that on the door. A fluorescent tube and an Anglepoise diminished even that effect of daylight.
Walker leaned back in his chair and flicked a Zippo over the bowl of his Peterson. He tapped a yellow forefinger nail on a sheaf of paper, which I recognised without surprise as my essay.
“Well, Cameron,” he said, through a gray-blue cloud, “you’ve done your homework.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said.
He jabbed the pipe-stem at me. “You’re not at school,” he said. “That is no way for one gentleman to address another.”
“OK, Walker,” I said, a little too lightly.
“Not,” he went on, “that your little trick here was gentlemanly. You’re expected to cite peer-reviewed articles, not dredge up political squibs and screeds from what you seized on as another chap’s youthful folly. These idiocies are no secret. If you’d asked me, I’d have told you all about them—the circumstances, you understand. And I could have pointed you to the later peer-reviewed article in which I tore these idiocies, which I claimed as my own, to shreds. You could have cited that too. That would have been polite.”
“I didn’t intend any discourtesy,” I said.
“You intended to embarrass me,” he said. “Did you not?”
I found myself scratching the back of my head, embarrassed myself. My attempt at an excuse came out as an accusation.
“I found the inscription from Lysenko,” I said.
Walker rocked back in his seat. “What?”
“‘To my dear friend Dr. Dav. R. Walker, in memory of our common endeavour.’” Against my conscious will, the words came out in a jeering tone.
Walker planted his elbow-patches on his desk and cupped his chin in both hands, pipe jutting from his yellow teeth. He glared at me through a series of puffs.
“Ah, yes,” he said at last. “That common endeavour. Would it perhaps pique your curiosity to know what it
“I had assumed it was on genetics,” I said.
“Hah!” snorted Walker. “You’re a worse fool than I was, Cameron. What could I have done on genetics?”
“You wrote about it,” I said, again sounding more accusing than I had meant to.
“I wrote rubbish for
