These elegant short stories take their impulse from the world of science, weaving together the historical and fictional. In "The English Pupil," Linnaeus, in old age, watches as the world he organized within his head slowly drifts beyond his reach. In "The Littoral Zone," two marine biologists wonder whether their life-altering affair finally was worth it. And in the title novella, a young Canadian doctor finds himself at the center of one of history's...