The Prize (64 page)

To make this seventy-minute ride more bearable, Jacobsson had deliberately placed himself between Krantz and P
ه
hl. He wished no more bickering. He wanted unity before the final reception duty was performed.

Carl Adolf Krantz, however, was in no mood for bickering this late morning. His spirits were high, his beady eyes bright, his goatee bristling, as he continued the monologue he had begun after they had finished breakfast with Stratman and his niece and left them in the Grand Hotel.

He had been praising, without restraint, Stratman’s findings in the field of solar energy, and now he was extolling the winning physicist’s background and character.

‘Did you ever meet a more remarkable man?’ he asked, and did not wait for an answer. ‘Wisdom shines in his face. And his true modesty. So rare to find in a famous man. One of the marks of greatness, I would say, a humility that confesses, “Yes, I have gone so far, but there are more curtains to lift, let us go on, let us go further.” I tell you both, I cannot recollect another laureate who has impressed me more.’

‘Obviously,’ said Ingrid P
ه
hl.

‘Yes, I liked him,’ Jacobsson agreed. ‘I hope he did not mind our staying for breakfast.’

‘I am sure not,’ said Krantz.

‘I wonder. I had the feeling he was weary—’

‘He is not a youngster,’ said Krantz, ‘and he has had a long trip. Besides, it was not weariness I detected so much as a sense of a genius whose mind is still on his work. After all, as he told us, he is continuing with his solar investigations. He has only begun. We have just come along and interrupted—’

‘He seemed perfectly fine to me,’ said Ingrid P
ه
hl. ‘It was his niece—I thought she was a little strange.’

‘How so?’ Jacobsson wanted to know.

‘Remote—and—oh, scared.’ Ingrid P
ه
hl considered the judgment. ‘To begin with, at the depot. She was separated from him for a moment when the photographers closed in, and she appeared frantic. I saw her face. That was just one thing. For the rest of the time, she was withdrawn. I do not know—as if she were not part of the group, a stranger—’

‘She is a stranger,’ said Krantz.

‘At any rate, an interesting young lady. I studied her face. Flawless. She is going to create quite a stir in our little social whirl.’ lngrid P
ه
hl leaned across Jacobsson. ‘And she does not look a bit like Dr. Stratman,’ she added to Krantz.

‘No reason why she should,’ said Krantz. ‘She is his brother’s child.’

‘What happened to the brother?’ asked Ingrid P
ه
hl.

‘How the devil should I know?’ said Krantz testily.

Ingrid P
ه
hl opened her voluminous handbag and brought out her cigarettes and holder. ‘Well, they are settled, thank God. Now, Bertil, what about this noon’s visitor? I know all about Andrew Craig. But this Dr. Garrett—’

‘You read the typescript I gave you, did you not?’ asked Jacobsson.

Ingrid P
ه
hl had the light to her cigarette, shook the flame off the match, and dropped it to the floor. ‘I read it twice. It was all about his work. What about the man? What are we to expect?’

‘There is little I can tell you,’ said Jacobsson. ‘He lives in this city near Los Angeles, California, and has three children. He had no reputation in academic circles until he and Dr. Farelli made their heart transplantations. I do not think he is wealthy, but I believe he is well off. I have read excerpts of his speeches in the press. They seem fairly routine. I have the picture of a rather single-minded, dedicated man, with few outside interests—’

‘Dull, you mean,’ said Ingrid P
ه
hl.

Jacobsson’s face looked pained. To him, no winner of the Nobel Prize could possibly be dull. ‘I would prefer not to characterize him in that way. Rather, I would say that he is a man whose work is his world. Perhaps he is not so colourful in personality as Dr. Farelli, but more the typical, businesslike American scientist who has collaborated in producing a marvel for humanity.’

Ingrid P
ه
hl’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Collaborated? I did not know he and Farelli worked together—’

‘No, no.’ Jacobsson hastened to amend his statement to lngrid P
ه
hl. ‘I used the word only in its broadest definition. They researched separately, and made their discoveries, of an identical nature, quite apart but at the same time. Not unfamiliar in science, as Carl will tell you. You may recall that Dr. Farelli confessed he and Dr. Garrett had neither met nor corresponded.’

‘Then this meeting in Stockholm will be their first?’ Ingrid P
ه
hl savoured the drama. ‘I wonder what they will have to say to each other.’

‘They will devote hours to discussing immunity mechanism,’ said Krantz, ‘as well as organ banks for the heart, pancreas, and liver. Appetizing.’

‘In any case, you may both have an opportunity to hear what they discuss,’ said Jacobsson. He bent across Krantz for a view through the window. ‘We have not far to go. I presume Dr. Garrett and Mr. Craig have had an opportunity to become acquainted in this last hour since Copenhagen. I rather hope so. It’ll save us the formal introductions. . . .’

The French-made Caravelle jet, that had taken off from Kastrup Airport in Copenhagen at 11.20 in the morning, had been airborne fifty-five minutes and was twenty minutes out of Stockholm.

It was now precisely 12.14, according to Saralee Garrett’s platinum wristwatch, a gift of John’s on their recent fifteenth wedding anniversary, and she wished desperately that it were 12.25 and that they had already landed. She wanted them to be swept up in a busy social programme, so that her husband would have no more time alone with his ulcerating obsession. Tiny and thin as a hummingbird, Saralee’s outward appearance belied her inner resilience. But the last hour with John had proved almost more than she could bear. From the corner of her eye, she espied her husband once more studying the three Copenhagen newspapers, and she knew that he was fuming.

Dr. John Garrett was, indeed, fuming. He would not even allow himself the comfort of sitting back and enjoying the soft leather seat in the aeroplane. Instead, he leaned forward tensely, in the attitude of a pugilist stalking a formidable foe and awaiting an opening. He jabbed nervously at the three newspapers in his lap, as if they were the embodiment of his opponent, and, indeed, they were, for Dr. Farelli’s smiling, cocky Latin countenance mocked him from a photograph on each front page.

Ever since that afternoon seventeen days ago—when he had been lifted to the heights by the announcement that he had been honoured by the Caroline Institute of Stockholm for his achievement, and then dropped into the deepest pit of disappointment by the further knowledge that he had to share this achievement with an arch-enemy he did not know—Dr. John Garrett’s mental and pathological state had been one of simmering resentment.

The high regard of his colleagues in Pasadena, Los Angeles, the entire nation, the celebrations that followed, had not been enough to calm him completely. Everywhere, praise had been tempered by acknowledgement that his victory was a joint one. True enough,
Life
Magazine had published separate half-page photographs of Farelli and him, but
Time
and
Newsweek
, while giving him fifty per cent of the text of their stories, had run photographs of Farelli alone. Worse, by far, were the long accounts in
Science News Letter
,
Scientific American
, and
Science
. They had all assigned special correspondents to interview him at the Rosenthal Medical Centre in Pasadena. The correspondents had been courteous and patient. Garrett had been voluble and winning. He had felt positive that his visitors had been dazzled. Yet, when their stories appeared—so important to him in these, his popular trade papers—between seventy and eighty per cent of the stories were concentrated on the specific accomplishments of Dr. Carlo Farelli. In each account—although possibly he had been over sensitive—he had the definite impression that he had been permitted to tag along as the poor cousin.

Over and over again, he had asked himself—why? Objectivity about his own position was almost impossible, yet he had tried to analyze the results with an investigator’s dispassionate appraisal. First of all—an insight of candour injected, perhaps, by his analyst, Dr. L. D. Keller—he was physically less interesting than his rival. He was simply too conventional, too average, too close to the median in his appearance. His brown hair conspired with his rimless spectacles to create the illusion of Undramatic Man. On the other hand, as photographs gave ample evidence, Carlo Farelli appeared the representation of the eccentric genius. His pitch-black, curly, tangled hair hung down over his broad wise forehead. His piercing, fanatical eyes, classical Roman nose, carefree, white-toothed smile, Hapsburg jaw were all made more distinctive by the faintly pitted cheeks and olive complexion of his broad face.

In the second place, Garrett’s background had seemed too homegrown and too familiar. Born in Illinois, educated in Massachusetts, he had accomplished his researches in California. On the other hand, Farelli had been born in Milan, educated in Geneva, London, and Heidelberg, and had conducted the majority of his experiments in Rome. This background, Garrett had reasoned, was too cosmopolitan to resist. Finally, all of Garrett’s brilliant transplants had been made on unknown, middle-class patients. Almost half of Farelli’s twenty-one heart transplants had been successful on patients who were, in the vernacular of the day, ‘newsworthy’—one a cardinal of the Roman Church, one an Austrian statesman, one a French actress renowned at the turn of the century, one an elderly British playwright. If Garrett saw himself as William Harvey and Joseph Lister, or at least Ambroise Paré, he saw Farelli as only a pale carbon copy of himself made legible, even gaudy, by the methods of Phineas T. Barnum. The fact that the world, or the world’s press, at any rate, did not see this so clearly as he, made Garrett a study verging on the paranoiac.

Before his departure for Sweden, he had paid one more visit to his therapy group in Dr. Keller’s office on Wilshire Boulevard. What he sought, that day, was not illumination but corroboration of his own current beliefs. On this, his only visit after his Nobel Prize had been announced, his reception had been gratifying, to say the least. For once, Miss Dudzinski had left her mother in peace, and Mrs. Zane had confined her account of her gymnastics with Mr. Zane’s employer to ten heated minutes, and Adam Ring had been unnaturally mute and respectful (having decided, no doubt, that his one Academy Award nomination had finally been matched and surpassed by a member of the group).

Unusually agitated, Garrett had accused the Caroline Institute of Stockholm of bias in subtracting half of his honour and giving it to an Italian mountebank. He had railed on against Farelli’s self-serving publicity tactics, his unethical standards, his brazen egotism in agreeing to share a citation that was not rightly his to claim. Dr. Keller, so rarely vocal, had been superhuman in his effort to soothe Garrett with calm reason. The analyst had pointed out that if Farelli had drawn upon Garrett’s creative genius for his own discovery, he would one day be found out, and in the eyes of the world, Garrett would be properly credited. Meanwhile, he had gone on to say, the best experts of the Nobel Committee had made their studies and had determined Farelli’s worth. As a sensible man, it was Garrett’s duty to accept the verdict sensibly. This year, he had been honoured above all men of medicine on earth. Certainly, at this summit, there was room for another to stand beside him. The accomplishment was no less his, and he should be proud of a contribution to the betterment and longevity of the human race.

And Adam Ring, from deep in the easy chair, had capped it in his own terms: ‘When you take the Oscar, you don’t ask questions, Dr. Garrett. It’s the gold medal for life. For the rest of your days, you’re the Nobelman, like being knighted. Nobody’ll give a damn if there were two winners or ten. All they’ll know is you hit the jackpot. Better than an annuity. From now on, no waiting in line, no having your credit checked, no having to pay for it with hookers, no proving anything to anyone. You can’t go higher than up, and you’re up. Be happy. I’ll trade places with you, flat deal, no cash, no questions, right now.’