“Bacteriophage, the Frenchman calls it. Too long. Better just call it phage. Even got to take his name for it, for my own X Principle! Well, I had a lot of fun, working all those nights. Working—”
He was coming out of his trance. He imagined the flask filled with staph-clouded broth. He plodded into Gottlieb’s office to secure the journal containing D’Hérelle’s report, and read it minutely, enthusiastically.
“There’s a man, there’s a scientist!” he chuckled.
On his way home he was planning to experiment on the Shiga dysentery bacillus with phage (as henceforth he called the X Principle), planning to volley questions and criticisms at D’Hérelle, hoping that Tubbs would not discharge him for a while, and expanding with relief that he would not have to do his absurd premature paper on phage, that he could be lewd and soft-collared and easy, not judicious and spied-on and weighty.
He grinned, “Gosh, I’ll bet Tubbs was disappointed! He’d figured on signing all my papers with me and getting the credit. Now for this Shiga experiment— Poor Lee, she’ll have to get used to my working nights, I guess.”
Leora kept to herself what she felt about it—or at least most of what she felt.
CHAPTER XXX
I
For a year broken only by Terry Wickett’s return after the Armistice, and by the mockeries of that rowdy intelligence, Martin was in a grind of drudgery. Week on week he toiled at complicated phage experiments. His work—his hands, his technique—became more adept, and his days more steady, less fretful.
He returned to his evening studying. He went from mathematics into physical chemistry; began to understand the mass action law; became as sarcastic as Terry about what he called the “bedside manner” of Tubbs and Holabird; read much French and German; went canoeing on the Hudson on Sunday afternoons; and had a bawdy party with Leora and Terry to celebrate the day when the Institute was purified by the sale of Holabird’s pride, Gladys the Centrifuge.