The Prize (138 page)

Authors: Irving Wallace

BOOK: The Prize

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His hat and coat lay across a bench in the vestibule. No one came to see him out. He opened the heavy door and went into the cold and fog to wait.

After he had lit his pipe, he felt better and wondered why. He had lost something tonight. In the eyes of the world, he had lost very much. Yet he was certain that he had gained infinitely more. For the first time since the Harriet years, he realized that he was not only a writer of integrity, but a human being of worth. The evaluation had a pomposity about it, and he considered rephrasing it, reworking it, and then he left it alone, because it was true, and because the feeling deep inside him, in that recess where the soul crouched and watched, the feeling was good, and it had not been that way for a long, long time.

He smoked his pipe, and enjoyed the fog, and waited for the taxi that would take him back to the living.

CASSELL & COMPANY LTD.

35 Red Lion Square
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W.C.1

and at

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eISBN: 1-588-24137-8

This text converted to eBook format for the Microsoft® Reader.

Dedicated to my parents Bessie and Alex Wallace

‘The whole of my remaining realizable estate shall be dealt with in the following way: The capital shall be invested by my executors in safe securities and shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind. The said interest shall be divided into five equal parts. . . .’

—ALFRED BERNHARD NOBEL

November 27, 1895

‘The honours of this world, what are they but puff, and emptiness, and peril of falling?’

—
SAINT AUGUSTINE

c.A.D. 400

THE

PRIZE

‘THE NOBEL FOUNDATION OF STOCKHOLM IS PLEASED TO INFORM YOU THAT YOU HAVE TODAY BEEN VOTED THIS YEARS NOBEL PRIZE STOP THE AWARD CEREMONY WILL TAKE PLACE IN STOCKHOLM’ . . . Six people receive the cable of notification; men and women for whom the only common factor is the Nobel citation—‘for researches in support of humanitarian ideals’.

These are the major actors in Irving Wallace’s exciting, behind-the-headlines story of the Nobel Prize, five men and a woman elected to receive the supreme palm of mankind’s honours, to be fêted as almost superhuman beings, their achievements to be discussed and applauded, their private lives to be spotlighted in the blinding glare of international publicity. As they converge on Stockholm,
The Prize
evolves into an explosive evocation of the maze of political intrigue and personal conflict that surrounds and seeks to influence the awards; of the pressures brought to bear on the juries that decide the awards; of international ploy and counter-ploy for prestige in the Cold War; of men and women with their own private stakes in the greatest prize of all.

Principal characters in order of appearance

COUNT BERTIL JACOBSSON— Assistant Director of the Nobel Foundation

DR.CLAUDE MARCEAU— Joint winners of the Nobel chemistry award

DR.DENISE MARCEAU

GIS
ب
LEJORDAN— Balenciaga mannequin

MAXSTRATMAN— Winner of the Nobel physics award

EMILYSTRATMAN— His niece

DR.JOHNGARRETT— Co-winner of the Nobel physiology and medicine award

SARALEEGARRETT— His wife

DR.L. D. KELLER— American psychoanalyst

ANDREWCRAIG— Winner of the Nobel literature award

LEAHDECKER— His sister-in-law