In the Dutch traders’ common room on Deshima, Dr. Nicolaes Huygens sat with Assistant Director deGraeff and their three colleagues. They’d been there for six hours, since the East India Company ship had entered the harbor. Now the remains of their noon meal littered the table; the air was foul with tobacco smoke, burning lamp oil, and the stench of a wastebucket in the corner. The guards stationed outside wouldn’t let them leave the room. As Huygens watched deGraeff get up to pace the floor, dread sickened him; sweat drenched his clothing.

“Why must they keep us locked up like this?” the trade secretary whined for what must have been the hundredth time. “When are they going to tell us what’s going on? What was that big bang a while ago? What will become of us?”

DeGraeff snorted. “As I’ve said before, it’s safe to assume that our ship entered the harbor without permission and fired on the Japanese. We can also assume that we’re prisoners of war.”

At times when Huygens couldn’t ease his homesick misery with nature studies, he drew comfort from the past. Now, to calm his fear of what was to happen, he pictured his old laboratory at Leyden University, the world’s greatest institution of learning, with faculty and students from all over Europe. He envisioned walls lined with shelves of books, anatomical models, and preserved specimens; the glassware, lamps, microscopes, and other scientific apparatus; caged animals; his research notes on the pathology and treatment of diseases. The laboratory was always crowded—Huygens’s reputation attracted scientists who came to consult him, and scholars seeking tutorials.

Next Huygens conjured up the great, echoing Anatomical Theater, its tiers packed with doctors, medical students, and curiosity seekers. He recalled lecturing on the physiology of the dissected corpse on the table beside him, answering questions spoken in German, English, French, Swedish, and Hungarian accents.

For last he saved the image of his narrow stone row house beside a tree-shaded canal. On fine summer evenings, he and his wife Judith relaxed on a bench by the door. At their feet played Pieter, aged eight. Tiny-eyed, thick-featured, he acted like a toddler; he couldn’t speak clearly, or dress and feed himself. Huygens, with all his scientific expertise, could find neither explanation nor cure for this malady, and he’d worried about Pieter’s future. But Pieter’s angelic nature had given his parents a joy that compensated for the sorrow. …

Today the happy memories seemed faded and remote. Like a medicine taken too often, they’d lost the power to ease pain. Now Huygens’s thoughts carried him back farther, to the youthful days he kept sealed off in a corner of his mind.