The Prize

1

THE northern night had come early to Stockholm this day, and that meant that autumn was almost gone and the dark winter was near at hand.

For Count Bertil Jacobsson, as he walked slowly through the lamplit Humlegården park, his lion-headed brown cane barely brushing the hardened turf, it was a happy time, his favourite time of the year. He knew the promise of this cold premature night: the winds would come, and the mists sweep in from Lake Mälaren, and eventually, the snow and ice; and there would be no guilts about locking himself in his crowded, comfortable apartment, hibernating among his beloved mementoes of half a century, and working on his encyclopaedic Notes.

Emerging from the park, Count Bertil Jacobsson arrived at last on the pavement of Sturegatan. The evening’s constitutional was over, and the final exciting business of the night-the culmination of ten months of intensive and abrasive activity-would soon take place. For a moment, almost wistfully, he turned to look back at the park. To any other man, what had recently been so lush and green might now seem stark and denuded, the trees stripped of foliage and outlined grotesquely in the artificial light like gnarled symbols of life’s end in a surrealistic oil. But Jacobsson’s peculiar vision transformed the scene by some special alchemy to a kind of initiation of life, a nativity when nature was reborn, and the old year at last delivered of first life. Again, he told himself, his favourite season had arrived, and tonight, this night, would be a memorable one.

Turning back to the street, automatically glancing to the right and then to the left, and reassured that the thoroughfare was empty of traffic, Count Bertil Jacobsson began to cross it almost briskly, swinging his cane in a wide arc. When he reached the opposite pavement, he stood directly before the narrow six-storey building that was Sturegatan 14.

Tugging open one of the two towering metal doors-it had become more and more a feat of strength in recent years-he entered the Foundation building, and, as ever, felt warm and safe inside the dim hall that led to his office, his home, his museum, his life. Moving forward, he heard his leather footsteps on the marble floor, then paused briefly, as was his habit, before the giant sculptured bust of Alfred Nobel. Studying the sensitive, craggy, bearded face, Jacobsson was again unsure. Was this the way the old man had really looked, the way he remembered his looking, when Nobel was very old and he was very young? At last, with a sigh, he turned left, moved past the sign on the wall reading NOBELSTIFTELSEN, and with effort climbed the marble staircase to what American visitors persistently misnamed the second floor.

Opening and closing one of the glass-paned doors, Jacobsson again found himself in the reception corridor, with its familiar green carpet and rows of tables and chairs. Proceeding along the corridor, he noticed the bookcases on either side, those on the one side packed with investment journals (to which he constantly objected, no matter how often he was told that the Board’s primary job was one of finance), and those on the other side with expensively bound sets of Spanish, French, German and English works of the winners of decades past.

He could see Astrid Steen, his plump secretary, standing at an open file behind the counter of the reception office, her back to him.

‘Mrs. Steen-’

She turned quickly, dutifully, and he saw on her face the same sense of excitement that was mounting within him.

‘Are the telegrams ready?’ he inquired.

‘Oh, yes, sir-on your desk.’

‘Where is everyone?’

‘Up in the apartment. They are drinking your whisky, I’m afraid.’

He chuckled. Every year, the same.

‘For them, the job is over,’ Mrs. Steen added.

‘Not yet-not yet-’

‘The Foreign Office called. An attaché is on his way.’

‘Good. I shall be in my office.’

Count Bertil Jacobsson went into the Executive Director’s room, regretting his superior’s recent illness, but secretly pleased that as Assistant Director the task was wholly in his hands. He hastened through the small office, and entered his own even smaller office, in the adjacent room.

Removing his felt hat and wool overcoat, and carefully placing his cane in a corner, Jacobsson winked gaily at the portrait of his friend, old King Gustaf V, that hung on the facing wall. He saw the large manila folder on his desk, quickly took it, and then sat down heavily on the soft blue sofa.

With rising anticipation, he opened the manila folder. He was pleased that this year, at his suggestion-he could not remember that it had ever happened before-the Royal Academy of Science, the Caroline Institute, the Swedish Academy, and the Nobel Committee of the Norwegian Storting had all agreed to make their choices known to the world simultaneously. It would provide for greater drama, Jacobsson had argued, and he knew that he would be proved right.

Studying the contents of the open folder in his hand, he suddenly frowned. Quickly, he shuffled the typewritten telegram sheets for the one that was missing, and, then, he remembered. The Norwegian Storting had, just as it had sixteen times in the past, informed the Nobel Foundation that it would not give a peace prize this year. Recollecting the decision that had been transmitted yesterday, again he silently nodded his approval. This time for many things, but not for public accolades to peacemakers.

Gingerly, lovingly, he held up the first drafted telegram, and moved his lips as he read it to himself.

IN RECOGNITION OF… IN SUPPORT OF HUMANITARIAN IDEALS… THE NOBEL FOUNDATION OF STOCKHOLM ON BEHALF OF THE SWEDISH ACADEMY IS PLEASED TO INFORM YOU THAT YOU HAVE TODAY BEEN VOTED THIS YEARS NOBEL PRIZE… DETAILS FOLLOW STOP HEARTIEST CONGRATULATIONS STOP…

There was a rap on the door. Jacobsson looked up, as Mrs. Steen put her head in.

‘The attaché is here, sir. He is ready for the telegrams.’

‘Yes-yes-one moment-’

Hastily, Count Bertil Jacobsson counted the telegrams, read and reread them to see that all were in proper order, and at last he rose, and almost reluctantly handed them to Mrs. Steen.

‘All right, they can go out now.’

After the door had closed, Jacobsson, his fragility accentuated by the removal of his burden, walked slowly past his desk to the window. He stared down into Sturegatan, saw the chauffeured limousine waiting, and then lifted his gaze to the vacant park again.

November fifteenth, he thought. Indeed, a memorable day. His watch told him that it was 9.10 in the evening. So late for a memorable day to begin, but then, he knew that while it was late in Stockholm, it was earlier, much earlier, in Paris and Rome and Atlanta and Pasadena and that place called Miller’s Dam in the state of Wisconsin.

Down below, he saw the chauffeur jump out of the limousine, circle it, and open a rear door. By craning his neck, Jacobsson could see the tall figure of the attaché, carrying a briefcase, approach, bend into the car, and disappear from sight.

In a moment, the limousine engine roared, and the telegrams were on their way to the Swedish Foreign Office on Gustaf Adolfs Torg. Within the hour, they would be delivered to Swedish Embassies in three nations, and then be relayed to the winners themselves.

The winners themselves, Jacobsson thought. He knew their names well now, because he had heard them repeated regularly in the long months after their nominations, through the investigations, debates, haggling, and voting. But who were they really, these men and women he would be meeting in less than four weeks? How would they feel and be affected? What were they doing now, these pregnant hours before the telegrams arrived and before their greatness became public glory and riches?

His mind went back to his Notes, to what others in past years had been doing at the moment of notification: Eugene O’Neill had been sleeping, and been pulled out of bed to hear the news; Jane Addams had been preparing to go under ether for major surgery; Dr. Harold Urey had been lunching with university professors at his faculty club; Albert Einstein had got the word on board a ship from Japan. And the new ones? Where and how would the prize find them? Jacobsson wished that he could go with the telegrams, with each and every one, and see what happened when they reached their destinations.

Ah, the fancies of an old man, he thought at last. Nog med detta. Enough of this. He must join his colleagues in the upstairs apartment for a drink to a good job done. Still, it would be something, something indeed, to go along with those telegrams…

It was 8.22 in the evening when the telegram from Stockholm reached the Swedish Embassy in Paris. The Ambassador’s pink and concave male secretary, still busy typing the notes on the African mediation question, opened the wire routinely. But as he scanned the contents, his eyes widened with awe.

The first portion of the telegram was addressed to the Ambassador: PLEASE DELIVER THE FOLLOWING BY HAND TO THE PARTIES ADDRESSED STOP OFFER PERSONAL CONGRATULATIONS ON THE BEHALF GOVERNMENT STOP

The message trembled in the secretary’s grasp as he continued to read. Desperately, he tried to remember where the Ambassador had said that he was going. Not home. Not the Opéra. Not the Palais de Justice. Cocktails-that was it, yes, at the residence of some diplomat, but he had not said which one. And then later he was to be at Lapérouse in the Quai des Grands-Augustins to dine. The secretary recalled making the reservation himself for ten o’clock.

His eyes sought the wall clock. Still an hour and a half before he could inform the Ambassador of the momentous news. For that period, the news, the secret, so important, so desired, was his alone. There was pleasure in this.

He settled back in his chair, like a little boy who had seen St. Nicholas, and began to reread the message that the Ambassador had been charged to convey:

FOR YOUR RESEARCHES IN SPERM STRUCTURE AND YOUR DISCOVERY OF VITRIFICATION OF THE SPERMATOZOON FOR SELECTIVE BREEDING THE NOBEL FOUNDATION OF STOCKHOLM ON BEHALF OF THE ROYAL SWEDISH ACADEMY OF SCIENCE IS PLEASED TO INFORM YOU THAT YOU HAVE TODAY BEEN VOTED THIS YEARS NOBEL PRIZE IN CHEMISTRY STOP THE PRIZE WILL BE A GOLD MEDALLION AND A CHEQUE FOR TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY ONE THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED NEW FRANCS STOP THE AWARD CEREMONY WILL TAKE PLACE IN STOCKHOLM ON DECEMBER TENTH STOP DETAILS FOLLOW STOP HEARTIEST CONGRATULATIONS STOP

The message was addressed to DOCTOR CLAUDE MARCEAU AND DOCTOR DENISE MARCEAU SIXTY TWO QUAI DORSAY PARIS FRANCE…

It was only 8.30, and, except for the proprietors and the waiters, they had the restaurant to themselves.

In fact, Dr. Claude Marceau and Gisèle Jordan had already finished their dessert, gâteau de riz, or rather Claude had finished, and now watched Gisèle daintily spoon the last of her rice caramel with vanilla sauce. It had been a delicious meal: soupe de poissons, followed by the spécialité of the evening, Le Jésu de la Marquise , which consisted of saucisson chaud, pistaché, truffé, salade de pommes à l’huile d’olive et romarin, but the pommes sparingly for both.

Claude was distressed at eating this early. It was barbaric. Gisèle and he had never discussed it, but the necessity was understood by both. Neither could afford to be discovered. At this hour, there was less chance of being seen. Even the restaurant, Le Petit Navire, found during a stroll early in their courtship, had been made their place, because it was in that obscure, dark side street, the rue des Fossés-St.-Bernard. While it was occasionally patronized by some of the finest gourmets and restaurant collectors in Paris, its main clientele consisted of the management and better-paid labourers of the Halle aux Vins across the street. None of these customers, Claude and Gisèle were confident, would be likely to recognize a distinguished chemist of the Institut Pasteur or a Balenciaga mannequin.

Gisèle had finished her dessert. Her napkin was at her mouth.

‘Café?’ Claude asked.

She shook her head. ‘No. But I will have a cigarette.’

He found the thin silver case in his pocket, extracted two English cigarettes, lit one, then lit the second off the first and passed the first to her. She brought it to her lips and inhaled deeply.

‘Perfect,’ she said.

‘Because I kissed it first,’ he said.

She smiled, and impulsively reached her long, tapering hand across the table to touch his hand. He turned his hand, palm up, and encompassed her own.

‘I love you, Gisèle.’

‘I love you,’ she replied softly, but her face wore its professional public mask of beauty, emotionless, seemingly detached, and it always made him momentarily unsure.

Eager to be reassured, to consume the steps of ritual that would bring him to the exact moment of reassurance, he asked, ‘Shall we walk?’

‘After the cigarette.’

‘Very well.’

They sat in silence, Gisèle toying with the matchbox, looking down at it, inscrutable, and he unable to take his eyes off her public face. It was an incredibly lovely face, he decided again, and now it belonged to him. He studied it in an indulgence of self-congratulation. Her hair was ash-blonde and bouffant, the eyebrows pencilled dark and high, and the eyes an icy pale blue, set wide apart. Her nose was straight, as in those Grecian statues in the Louvre, and the lips generous, full, soft, and the deepest hue of red. Her cheekbones were high, leaving shadowed hollows beneath them. The large diamond earrings she always wore made her face seem even narrower.

Suddenly, she ground out the remnant of her cigarette, pushed back her chair, and rose. Taking her purse, she said, ‘I’ll be right back. Don’t go.’

‘Never.’

His eyes followed her across the room. He saw that the three waiters were observing her, too. She moved like a mannequin, with fluid grace, tall, thin, hips slim, thighs and legs long, all elegant and aloof and slithering. As she walked, her legs, close together, provocative, stretched straight before her, the pointed pumps turned slightly outward, her smooth buttocks undulating in the manner of all practised mannequins. At last, she pirouetted around a corner and was out of view. Straight out of Elle or L’Officiel, Claude Marceau thought, all haute couture, clothes, face, figure, all glacial and unruffled and not merely mortal. Perhaps it was this that had attracted him first, the challenge of what was or seemed emotionless and unattainable and too near perfection.

Yes, this had attracted him first, he knew definitely, and what had held him, finally, against all caution and scientist’s reason, was not her public presence but her private behaviour. From the very first time, she had become a different person. Two weeks ago-when it had stimulated him beyond anything he had ever felt before-she had undressed before him, boldly, almost tauntingly, first slowly, the shoes, the long sheer stockings, the dress, the half-slip, and then faster and faster, the bra and garter belt and pants. Wholly naked to him, she had become a different person. Once stripped of fashion and pretence, once basic white flesh, and breasts considerable in circumference but stylishly flat, these accentuated by her elongated bony body, she had become pure animal. She shed with her apparel all vanity and studied sophistication. There remained no single artifice. In nudity, she withheld nothing, became the epitome of the French courtesan, displayed desire rawly, and enjoyed the sexual coupling completely without pretending a special gift in giving but revealing a passionate gratefulness in receiving.

Although Claude had possessed her half a dozen times in the two weeks, the anticipation of it-the transformation-again aroused him more keenly than ever, and he longed for her to return and be off with him. As he called to the waiter for the check, his mind was still on the miracle of their union. He had a certain pride in the affair. It was not only her evident desirability and beauty, which, after all, he could not show the world, but the fact that she enjoyed him.

He was forty-six, and she twenty-seven, and he had been an intellectual and a man of science since his youth. He had been too long devoted to tubes and bottles and counters that smelled of acid, and too devoted to introspections, to regard himself as débonair or attractive, although now, in these last weeks, he had felt attractive. His hair was bushy and greying, his broad face not yet fleshy but regular except for the narrow eyes and beaked French nose, his body inclined to weight and called by one newspaper ‘heavy-set’, but still strong and firm, so that he continued to play tennis once a week and play boule in the Bois twice a week. She could have younger men, gayer men, richer men, and certainly unmarried men. Yet she had him and wanted no more. Here was another mystery of chemistry that he and Denise must investigate. He realized, immediately, that he had subconsciously thought of the name of his wife. That was improper, and he erased her name. He would not think of her on this night. He was in no mood for brooding over his culpability.

Again, attempting to see himself through Gisèle’s eyes, he tried to weigh his value. Assets: intelligence, sensibility, modest fame. Liabilities: age, a certain stodginess, married.

About to continue his reverie, he saw Gisèle approaching, the bouffant impeccable, the bowed lips wine, the long legs crossing in lazy strides against her tight purple skirt. He tried to rise as youthfully as possible, opening his wallet and counting out the necessary francs and despite service compris a generous tip to the serving people who would understand the bribe.

He took up her full-length natural brown mink coat, held it as gallantly as a cloak, and she spun gracefully into it, coolly enwrapped and beauty enhanced.

Outside, in the balmy Parisian night, they stood in the dark, narrow street, her hand in his, gazing at the great fenced Halle aux Vins.

‘I should like to go in there some night and sample everything,’ he said.

‘We do not need that,’ she said, squeezing his hand.

‘Still want to walk a little?’

‘Oh, yes. The Seine.’

There were small dangers in this, he knew, but here was a night in November such as the one during which they had met, really met, in September. So he agreed.

She linked her arm in his, and they strolled leisurely across the rue des Chantiers to the Boulevard St.-Germain, glanced into the corner café to see if there were anyone they might recognize, then crossed and walked to the Quai de la Tournelle. They crossed again to the low stone wall above the Seine, passed several closed wooden bookstalls, and halted to survey the placid river. On the river, like a floating chandelier, one of the bateaux-mouches, its curious glass dome shining in the half-moon, approached. Beyond it, the lights of the city were spectacular, and to the left, they could see the towering bright mass of Notre-Dame.

He nodded at the sight-seeing boat. ‘I have never been on a bateau-mouche. Have you?’

‘Several times. It is wonderful fun.’

‘I had always supposed it was for tourists-’

‘It is for us first, the way the Seine is.’

‘Yes. Some night, let us do it. I almost feel like a tourist anyway-everything new-’

They observed the boat again, and then, automatically, without the exchange of a word or pressure of their hands, they resumed walking toward Notre-Dame. The air seemed cooler now, and for Claude, this was evocative, conjuring up the first night that he had met Gisèle. Actually, he had seen her before he had met her. He had seen her in the late summer.

It was a time when his life had become directionless and monotonous, and he had been possessed of a nervous restlessness. The preceding six years had been different, for there had been a luminous goal, and a total dedication to its achievement. Going back the six years, he remembered that the goal had been established by a chance remark Denise had happened to make one noon.

He and Denise had become interested-possibly an unconscious reaction to their own personal inability to conceive offspring-in genetics, in the biological processes of perpetuating the race, and specifically in the effect of chemicals on chromosomes and genes. They had, as so many scientists before them, experimented with the Drosophila fly. They had attempted to induce artificially changes of the genes, as a means of predetermining or controlling the future sex of offspring. This work in mutations had not gone far, and had not been original, and Claude and Denise were discouraged on that fateful day when they joined several fellow workers lunching in the office next to the laboratory. During the repast, someone had mentioned a Russian paper devoted to advances made in transplanting a female ovum, and this had stimulated a heated discussion on heredity and sperms and fertilized eggs. Denise, in one of her infrequent fanciful moods (occurring whenever she was quietly desperate), had remarked playfully, ‘Suppose it were possible to preserve the living spermatozoon of a Charlemagne or an Erasmus, or the unfertilized egg of a Cleopatra, and implant them today, by modern means, centuries after their donors were dead?’ The fancy had been electric. Claude and Denise had continued to speculate upon it first, romantically, and, at last, scientifically.

The first years had been drudge years of collecting facts. From this handful of facts had grown a tentative hypothesis, and then had followed crude experiments with lower animals. During these experiments, they had made a startling discovery, whose validity was soon verified by the statistics from mass experiments. After their joint paper had been read and published, and widely hailed, and popularized in the press, and Claude and Denise had been exposed to a brief burst of publicity, they had suddenly found themselves at a curious dead end of existence.

The six years of absolute concentration on one subject, without any life or social intercourse beyond that of the laboratory and each other and the spermatozoa, had left them mentally and physically debilitated, drained to the marrow, and without resources to interest themselves afresh in anything else. Weary of their work after victory, they had left its routine development to other eager minds around the world. For themselves, they had been brought to rest in a vacuum of accomplishment. After discussing, and quickly discarding, several new projects, they had by mutual consent agreed to relax, fulfil workaday demands in connection with their discovery, and wait mystically for another inspiration. For the first time in years, Denise had busied herself about the old apartment, sorting, repairing, replacing, and had caught up on correspondence and relatives and the few friends left. Claude found his own vacuum more difficult to fill: tennis and boule, of course, and lunches on the Right Bank, some speeches, investigation of investments, an effort to catch up on reading long neglected. But it was dull and not man’s occupation.

It was at this time, by chance, that several English colleagues had come from Oxford, and since it was late July, and the fifty Paris fashion houses were busy showing their new collections, the English wife of one colleague announced her desire to see such an event. With his recent position of eminence, Claude Marceau had no trouble obtaining the necessary invitations. The invitations were for a Balenciaga collection, to be displayed in the great couturier’s rose stone building off the Champs-Élysées, and because he had nothing better to do, Claude had reluctantly accompanied Denise (who had never been to such an affair either) and the English couples to the showing.

Claude had released his invitations to the head vendeuse on the third floor, and then had passed, with his wife and guests, into the main salon. Two rows of gold painted wooden chairs were distributed around the showroom. Claude and his party took their places before the large mirror at the far end. The sudden barrage from the over bright corner ceiling lights and the dozen lights in the recessed centre of the ceiling had been the signal for customers to remove their coats, and Claude had gratefully imitated the others.

At once, the showing had begun. Claude had watched with mild interest as the animated mannequins, ten working in unceasing tandem, emerged from behind a curtain opposite, paraded across the floor towards him in their outlandish coats and jackets and dresses, carrying in their right hands cards with their costume numbers, spun before him, returned past the three windows towards their entry, and exited by a side opening.

For Claude, at first, it had been restless and tedious nonsense, and then, without being aware of it, he was erect on the edge of his gold chair. Suddenly, all of his senses were engaged. He found himself staring at a mannequin whose breathtaking beauty, chic, haughty manner dominated the functional modern room. This, he would later learn, was Gisèle Jordan.

She appeared and reappeared, with the nine others, and Claude was mesmerized. Once, perhaps on her twelfth presentation, striding disdainfully before his party, pirouetting before the women, sweeping her furs off her daring cocktail gown, her blue eyes had held on his. They offered no message, only a challenge. Or so he thought. Afterwards, riding home, he had dwelt on the moment, cherished it, and let it play out, but then his factual scientific sensibility had taken over. The moment had been illusion, invented by his need, and he decided with finality that he had been mistaken and foolish.

But two months later, still in the doldrums and taking the crisp air on the Champs-Élysées at dusk, he learned that he had not been foolish. Passing Fouquet’s, he had casually glanced at the faces behind the tables, and one of them he recognized at once. What had emboldened him to confront her he would never know. But he had, indeed, halted, made his way to her table, and introduced himself. Her face had reflected immediate recognition-yes, she remembered him from that showing several months ago, and she knew his name through his reputation. She invited him to sit with her, and he did, and she spoke easily. He realized that Balenciaga was nearby, in the Avenue George-V, and that she often came to Fouquet’s for a glass of champagne after work and before dinner. Most frequently she came alone, but sometimes she met her agent for fashion magazines, M. Favre, a slight and dandified latent homosexual who loved her possessively and was important to the advancement of her career.

They had talked and talked, and two hours later had dined at Le Taillevent in the rue Lamennais, off the Champs-Élysées, and later walked, starting and stopping often, the length of the Faubourg-St.-Honoré to the Madeleine. It was nearly midnight when he had put her in a taxi. After that, he had walked the entire distance back to the apartment, his mind boyish and alive and in a turmoil. Denise was listening to the wireless, not at all alarmed by his late return, and he made an unrehearsed excuse quickly and deftly, and was gay and joking with his wife, and for the first time in a year, he had felt no tiredness or depression at all.

In the weeks following, first once a week, then twice, they had met discreetly, with the spontaneity of an accidental encounter, each unsure of the other, and each aware of Denise and M. Favre. But after six weeks, they knew simultaneously, instinctively, that the intimate conversation, the self-revelations, the hand holding, the kissing were not enough. And so she had, at last, given in to the inevitable climax without his urging, and had invited him to her small two-room apartment, exquisitely furnished (the living room pieces were from the best antique shops in the Flea Market), in the rue du Bac, not far from the Boulevard St.-Germain. And there, with little preliminary, she had revealed herself to him, all molten beneath the glacial surface, and that night, he had been stimulated, virile, and attractive again. That night, for the first time in six years, he had not once given a thought to spermatozoa, at least not clinically-or to Denise, his collaborator.

Reliving all of this now, as he strolled along the Seine, had briefly removed him from the present reality. Gisèle’s voice, intruding upon him, was a surprise. ‘Claude,’ she was saying, ‘whatever are you brooding about?’

‘Brooding? Heavens, no. I was thinking back-how we first met.’

She gripped his arm more possessively. ‘I never think of that. Only of now.’

He nodded. ‘It is best.’

Ahead, he could see a taxi disgorging well-dressed men and women into the world of pressed ducks-Tour d’Argent-and he knew that there was the populous danger zone, and that he could continue no farther without risk.

He stopped in his tracks. ‘Let us go, Gisèle. I want you.’

She caught her breath. ‘Right now?’

‘As soon as possible.’

‘Yes. I would like that.’

They waited patiently at the kerb, and he signalled the next free taxi leaving the Tour d’Argent, and once inside, they headed for the rue du Bac. She sat apart from him, in her genteel public way, and they held hands on the seat between them.

He stared absently out of the car’s window, as the old narrow streets of the Left Bank blurred past, and he wondered what would finally happen to them. It was impossible to imagine a life without her, yet it was equally impossible to imagine divorcing Denise after twelve years. Yet, he asked himself, why not? Denise and he were childless, so that would pose no problem. There was adequate money since the discovery, so that was no problem, either. Denise was self-sufficient, too much so, he often thought. She had the capability to survive and adjust. She was not dangerously female-which he interpreted to mean that she was not an emotional hysteric, a leaner, an obsessive neurotic.

Still, why was he so fearful that she might learn of his affair? He examined the question. Was it that he was too sensitive to hurt an old companion? Or-was it because she was more than mere companion and wife? Was it because she was a partner in his work, and thus essential to him? Could Beaumont have been Beaumont without Fletcher? Or Gilbert have been Gilbert without Sullivan? Or Chang survived without Eng? Perhaps, in a dozen years, they had become the Siamese Twins, and to cut one off might mean death to both.

Possibly, divorce was wrong. Why not continue the status quo? Possibly, like Victor Hugo, he could spend his lifetime exactly like this, with a wife in one place and a Juliette Drouet somewhere else. How many years had Hugo openly managed his double life? Claude calculated: Hugo, at thirty-one, had met Juliette in 1833 when she was twenty-seven (Gisèle’s very age!), and kept her for mistress all the rest of her life, which was long, for she did not die until 1883. He had kept his mistress for fifty years, and when she had died, he had remarked, ‘The dead are not absent, but invisible’. But was Gisèle a Juliette Drouet? And was Denise a Madame Adèle Hugo? Or would it finally have to be a divorce, a scandal? Did the Curies ever think of divorce? Questions, questions. The devil with them. There was tonight, and Gisèle beside him, and tonight was all and the only reality. He focused his attention through the taxi window. They had turned into the rue du Bac…

The moment they were inside Gisèle’s living-room, Claude took her in his arms, holding her close and kissing her neck, and ear, and hair, and forehead, and lips. Shivering, feeling his imperative desire and her own, she pushed him off and, without a word, hurried into the bedroom.

Claude secured the door, then moved to the cognac decanter on the marble top of the aged wooden commode. He poured a drink, held the glass between his fingers, rolling it gently, warming the amber fluid with his warm palm. Leisurely, then, he sipped the cognac. Doing so, he surveyed the room. It possessed an air of casual elegance. Gisèle’s good taste was evident in the antique sycamore writing table inlaid with porcelain plaques, in the Louis XV period lamp bases and ashtrays found in the Flea Market, in the matted illuminated manuscript pages framed on the walls.

He could not help but contrast the charm of this with his own tasteless living-room, large, indefinite, disorderly, velvet sofas and chairs clashing with the wallpaper in imitation of the Directoire design, which Denise had furnished. In all fairness, Denise had possessed no more time than he had to devote to furnishings. Like him, she was a full-time scientist. Yet her poor taste extended to the matter of dress. He considered Gisèle’s flawless suits and dresses, and could only remember Denise wearing a spotty linen chemist’s smock, or at her best, ordinary blouses and loose skirts and flatheeled shoes that were usually scuffed. Thinking of his wife’s attire, he was reminded of Jonathan Swift’s description of the woman who wore her clothes as if they had been thrown on her with a pitchfork.

The cognac inspired him to further comparison, odious as this was, and he judged his two women, mistress and wife, side by side in nudity. He tried to be fair. Technically, divested of all clothing, Gisèle was less than perfection. When she was unclad, her lines were too spare, bony, almost skeletal. It was the body required of all mannequins who earned 20,000 francs a week, he knew, for its dimensions were made to display the drape of garments. In full attire, Gisèle was incomparable; in nudity, there was something missing. What made up for her physical deficiencies when disrobed was Gisèle’s impatient fever for love, and this Claude understood and appreciated. By comparison, Denise was shorter, fuller, rounder. Her shortcomings were her hair, shingled in a masculine bob, a nose too pugged, hips too wide, thighs too thick. In full dress, she was not soignée, and bulged and protruded too much to possess the mannequin chic. Stark naked, she was twice as attractive. And in all fairness, and this Claude admitted to himself even now, there was the advantage of her bosom. Denise had enormous pear-shaped breasts, and to this day, in her forty-second year, they hardly sagged at all. Still, he told himself, he had to admit a preference for Gisèle’s flatter breasts, as well as her flat hips and buttocks. They were unpretentious, but more inciting, because Gisèle was more inciting.

Was it caddish to project the comparison into bed? He sipped the cognac. It was wrong, but his mind unreeled the pictures. Sleeping with Denise, so fleshy, so tired, so inert, was like crawling into the womb. It was safe, easy, secure, never unexpected. It was nicely pleasurable. But Gisèle, taut, vibrating, aggressive, her magnificent flesh a wild and memorable offering, was-he considered a conservative description befitting a scientist-surfeiting? No. Enthralling? No. Captivating, yes, more, much more-captivating, satiating, and an indescribable ecstasy.

The memory of what would soon be repeated now aroused him. He finished his cognac, then quickly undressed, laying out suit and shorts on a chair, and stuffing his socks into his shoes on the floor. Naked, he went to the cupboard, found the maroon silk robe Gisèle had recently bought him, and pulled it on, loosely knotting the belt.

As he entered the bedroom, and halted beside the coiffeuse, she had just emerged from the bathroom. She was turning down the lights, all but the dim lamp behind the telephone on her bed-stand. As she moved, he could see the smooth outlines of her straight hips and thighs through the sheer mauve peignoir. When she turned to him, and saw his face, she smiled and straightened deliberately, her nipples revealed through the transparent chiffon.

She sat on the bed, kicked off her mules, and fell back on the pillows, her arms outstretched towards him. ‘What are you waiting for, chéri?’

He went to the bed, and lowered himself beside her, and as always, could hear his heart, as she also heard it.

She reached across and pulled the cord of his robe. ‘Darling,’ she whispered, ‘my own-’ And then, ‘Viens vite-’

Immediately, he slipped out of the robe and pressed against her. Eyes closed, sighing audibly, she parted her peignoir, and showed him herself. He placed his cheek against her breast, and she kissed his hair, and pulled him into her, and thus, in the familiar all-new way, they were joined.

From the bed-stand, the telephone shrilly jangled.

They froze in their embrace, as stiff, immobile, marble as satyr and nymph on a Pompeiian wall fresco.

They listened. The telephone rang a second time, louder, and a third time, a thunderclap.

‘Let it ring,’ he whispered.

‘No,’ she said suddenly, ‘it might be Monsieur Favre-’

She fumbled for the receiver, found it on the fourth ring, and brought it to her flushed face.

‘Hello-’

‘Mademoiselle Jordan?’ It was a woman’s voice. ‘This is Madame Marceau. Let me speak to my husband.’

Gisèle lay petrified, gazing with bewilderment at Claude’s face above her. The telephone was waiting. She tried to find her voice again. ‘But-there is no one here-’

‘Put him on. This is important!’ It was a command.

Gisèle was dumbfounded, helpless. Her poise was gone. She covered the mouthpiece fully, and looked imploringly at Claude. ‘Your wife-she knows-’

‘No, I cannot. Say anything,’ he begged.

Gisèle would not return to the telephone. ‘She says it’s important-’

The length of their exchange had given them away, and Claude knew it. Miserably, he disengaged his body from Gisèle’s, took the prosecuting telephone, and sat up, cross-legged, on the bed.

‘Denise? Listen to me-’

‘You listen, you rotten pig-you pull your trousers on and come home. The press is on its way-we’ve just won the Nobel Prize!’

It was 5.07 in the afternoon when the telegram from the Swedish Embassy in Washington, D.C., clattered through the electric machine of the telegraph office located on West Peachtree Street in Atlanta, Georgia.

The mousy-haired girl, with thyroid eyes, on the machine at the time, pulled the message out with a rebel yell. ‘Lookit who won the Nobel Prize!’ she shouted. The other two girls came out of their chairs running, and the jubilation even attracted the three delivery boys, who had been shooting dice in the rear.

Eventually, the exclamations and buzz of excitement brought Mr. Yancey, the manager, out of his cosy cubicle. He had been reading the Atlanta Constitution and drinking a coke, beside the heater, his favourite occupation on a dirty-grey, rainy afternoon such as this.

He appeared buttoning his trouser top and buckling his belt around his flabby middle, and calling out, ‘What’s up? What’s up? What’s going on here?’

One of the girls passed the strip of tape to Mr. Yancey, and he read it, and grinned broadly. ‘Say now, say now, this is a big day for the capital of the South.’ Although the victor had been born more than three thousand miles from Atlanta, and had only made his home here the last three years, the hero-starved half a million Atlantans considered the great man their own, by adoption. ‘Biggest thing since old J. S. Pemberton concocted Coca-Cola,’ said Mr. Yancey. ‘Biggest thing since Margaret Mitchell.’

‘Lemme deliver it,’ one of the young boys piped up.

‘Not on your life, son, not on your life,’ said Mr. Yancey. ‘This is a solemn occasion. This is somethin’ Mr. Yancey does personally.’

‘Bet you just want to have yourself another look at that Miss Emily,’ said the mousy-haired girl, daringly.

‘Take care, sister,’ said Mr. Yancey. ‘This here message is too important. You get it ready now.’

He waved the strip of tape. ‘Man, oh man,’ he said, and then, before releasing the message, he read it once more.

IN RECOGNITION OF YOUR DISCOVERY AND INVENTION OF A PHOTOCHEMICAL CONVERSION AND STORAGE SYSTEM FOR SOLAR ENERGY AND OF YOUR PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF SOLAR ENERGY TO PRODUCE SYNTHESIZED SOLID ROCKET PROPELLANTS THE NOBEL FOUNDATION OF STOCKHOLM ON BEHALF OF THE ROYAL SWEDISH ACADEMY OF SCIENCE IS PLEASED TO INFORM YOU THAT YOU HAVE TODAY BEEN VOTED THIS YEARS NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS STOP THE PRIZE WILL BE A GOLD MEDALLION AND A CHEQUE FOR FIFTY THOUSAND THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS STOP THE AWARD CEREMONY WILL TAKE PLACE IN STOCKHOLM ON DECEMBER TENTH STOP DETAILS FOLLOW STOP HEARTIEST CONGRATULATIONS STOP

The message was addressed to DOCTOR MAX STRATMAN ONE THOUSAND FORTY FOUR PONCE DE LEON AVENUE ATLANTA GEORGIA…

For Max Stratman, at the age of sixty-two, it was always a pleasure, which few people would understand, to lie on the hard table in the darkened room beside the elaborate electrocardiograph equipment, while an efficient, antiseptic nurse dabbed the paste on his chest, arms, and legs, and then applied the electrodes with their five lead wires-one to his chest, two to his arms, and two to his legs. This experience, in which he engaged twice a year at the behest of the United States government, was soothing, relaxing, and always conductive to clear thinking.

This afternoon, however, as Max Stratman stretched on the table, chest, arms, legs bared, half watching the tall bespectacled, comely nurse attach the cool electrodes to his skin, his pleasure, for the first time in memory, was shadowed faintly by apprehension. He reasoned that the apprehension had entered into the EKG test because today the test was especially important.

In the three years past, since he had accepted the government’s offer to join the high-level staff of the Society for Basic Research outside Atlanta, he had attended these checkups, one in January and one in July, as a matter of routine. But now it was only mid-November and the next checkup was not due for two more months, yet here he was supine on the table, teeming with electrodes and wires, not as a matter of routine but as a volunteer.

Max Stratman was as pragmatical as the Teutonic forebears on his father’s side of the family. He rarely rationalized any position, but met it head on. He knew exactly why he had telephoned Dr. Fred Ilman yesterday, at Lawson General Hospital, a mile from the Society building, and had requested an immediate appointment. In the first place, there was the surprising and exhilarating offer from Washington, D.C. The offer was critical to Stratman because, projected over the next two years, it might fully solve a personal problem, a certain responsibility, that had been weighing heavily upon him. Yet he had been made to realize that accepting the offer would mean changing his way of life, would put more strain on an old, ill-used, and often reluctant physique. Still, the change was something to be desired, a godsent gift, because it would alleviate his one major worry. The question he had asked himself, after the Defence Department call, was this: could he dare to undertake the change?

There would have been no question at all, had he not recalled the results of his last cardiogram in the summer. At that time, Dr. Ilman had cheerfully informed him, displaying the strip of graph paper that bore the curve of his heartbeat, that a minor irregularity was in evidence. But it was minor, Dr. Ilman emphasized, of no importance, provided that Stratman did not drastically change his habits. If Stratman continued to live like a sloth, without peaks or valleys of excitement, without excessive activities or long hours or pressure, he might continue his doubtful way of life-his erratic diet, daily beer, meerschaum pipe, lack of exercise-and possibly live forever.

‘After all, you’re not a youngster any more, Max,’ Fred Ilman had said on that occasion. ‘If you were a much younger man, and you came up with this minor irregularity, I would suggest a special regime against the future-oh, you know, lighter diet and low fat, no drinking, cut down on smoking, moderate exercises. But you are sixty-two, and to suggest any drastic changes, to rock the boat, could be worse then letting you sail along, at moderate speed, as you are now doing. So go back to your drawing-board and your quantum nonsense and your solar sleight-of-hand, and don’t bother me until next January. Just stay as sweet as you are, and my regards to Emily.’

But now, there was suddenly an urgent necessity to rock the boat, and Max Stratman was having a cardiograph test in November, not January, because the decision must be made by the weekend.

The nurse had finished applying the electrode to the first paste spot on his chest, and now she turned back to the EKG machine. ‘All right, Professor Stratman,’ she said, ‘we’ll begin. It’ll only be a few minutes.’

The machine behind his head began to whir. The strip of graph paper, recording the superficial biography of his physical heart, began to emerge with its coded story. Head turned on the pillow, Stratman watched it a moment, unaccountably pleased that the nurse had referred to him as ‘Professor’, in the old-fashioned European manner, rather than as ‘Doctor’, in the less dignified American style. Herr Professor, it had always been, until 1945, when Walther had got him to the Americans, just before the Russian authorities came calling. Still, he had not minded the informality of the Americans, because they compensated for social failings by their genuine friendliness, their appreciation of his small genius, and, above all, because they brought him to a wondrous climate of freedom. Not once, it seemed, since he had been spirited out of Germany, had he glanced back over his shoulder to see who might be listening.

The nurse was manipulating the electrode on his chest, moving it from spot to spot like a chess piece, and Stratman observed her quietly. After a while, he tired of this and stared up at the white ceiling and the glass light fixture. His preoccupation had always been mental, above the shoulders, and hardly ever had he been concerned with his body. Now, he was conscious of his body, that his brain had remained forever young whereas his traitor body had grown old.

Fastening on the last idea, Stratman tried to recollect if he had ever thought of his body as young, that is, young as his brain, and he found it difficult to recollect one instance. Then, at once, he recollected several instances. He had been young that Christmas Day in Frankfurt, when he had skipped through the snow after his father and discovered the new pony shivering behind his father’s distillery shed. And he had been young, later, when the family had the house in the outskirts of Berlin, and one magical afternoon they all drove in the trap to a barn, with makeshift chairs inside, where jumpy images were thrown on a screen, and he heard everyone praise the new invention known as cinema. And he had been young that day on the Ku’damm, holding Walther’s hand, peeking between the rows of people ahead, when he had caught a glimpse of the resplendent Kaiser astride a white horse, followed by the goose-stepping, steel-helmeted troops.

After that, it seemed, especially in the Gymnasium and at the University of Berlin, he had always been old, and he could never quite remember that he had ever appeared different than he appeared today, to himself, reclining on this table. He peered down his chest at the rest of his body and smiled privately: a bleached porpoise, having an EKG.

The numerous photographs of him that appeared in the American newspapers and magazines did not upset him, despite the way they made obvious his ugliness. In fact, it seemed, the Americans rather cherished him this way. He was their image of a German Herr Professor-or Doctor, if you will-of the old school. Max Stratman was five feet seven, but seemed shorter, more diminutive, because he was hunched. His head was massive, too large for his body, and his forehead seemed to recede to infinity because he was bald except for a bristling hedge of grey hair surrounding the extremities of his head. His face was round, red, wrinkled, and his nose perfectly bulbous. He wore thick-steel-rimmed bifocals at his desk, and squinted myopically when he did not wear them. His face was not formidable, but wise and sympathetic, and he was quick to smile, to see the humour of almost anything, himself foremost. He was pudgy and rumpled-‘his clothes look like they have been borrowed from a scarecrow three sizes larger’, a news magazine had recently remarked.

This was as he saw himself in the University days, and this was as he saw himself today. Apparently, nothing about him had grown older than old, through the decades, except maybe his heart. Maybe. Ach, we shall see, he thought.

He heard the nurse’s voice behind him. ‘That’s it, Professor Stratman,’ she said, tearing the graph paper strip from the machine and placing the roll on a small desk.

‘Thank you,’ said Stratman politely.

‘It was an honour, Professor,’ she said, as she removed the electrodes from his chest, arms, legs, and wiped the paste from his body.

He watched her curiously, She had said, so respectfully, that it was an honour. He had thought that he was old hat here. Squinting at her now, he realized that she had not been at Lawson General Hospital, or at least not with Dr. Ilman, when he had been here in the summer. She was new. He admired her tallness, short haircut, pert, intelligent face, trim white uniform. She was not Emily, of course, but still he admired the handsomeness of American young women, and especially the Southern ones.

As she returned to the electrocardiograph machine, he nodded at the instrument. ‘An interesting and valuable toy, gnädige Fräulein,’ he said. ‘One day there will be better machines, deeper probing, more sure. But, for its limitations, it is good. It is a fact I knew quite well the man who invented the EKG.’

‘You actually knew him?’ She was as impressed as if he had said that he had known Pasteur.

‘Yes-yes. Willem Einthoven, a Hollander. I spent several weeks with him once in Rotterdam. He won many prizes for that gadget-even the Nobel money.’

‘I bet you’ve known everyone, Professor. Dr. Ilman says you knew Einstein.’

‘It is true. Albert, I knew well. I met him first in Berlin -ach, what times, what times we had-and then I would see him, occasionally, in Princeton. A terrible loss, not only for science, but for humanity. You know Fräulein, good men there are not many-most men are good, yes, but always, always, for reasons-but Albert, he was a good man, pure and simple, no reasons.’

‘When he talked, could you understand him?’

‘Understand him?’ Stratman sat up. ‘A child could understand him, if she listened. I remember, once, somebody, an ordinary person, asked him to explain his theory of relativity, of time, of why all motions of the universe are relative and not absolute, and you know what Albert said? He said, “My friend, when you sit with a nice girl for an hour, you think it is only a minute-but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute, you think it is an hour. Relativity!” ’

Both the nurse and Stratman laughed, and then he requested his pipe and pouch. While the nurse found them in his unpressed jacket, Stratman went on. ‘I will tell you one Albert Einstein joke for your friends. There was a Mr. Goldberg who wanted to know about the Einstein theory, and when it was explained to him, he nodded. “I see,” he said, “and from this he makes a living?” ’

The nurse screamed with delight, and Stratman chuckled and was happy. At last, he stood up on his bare feet and began to fill his pipe. ‘Now, if you please, enough of Albert Einstein. We must devote ourselves to Max Stratman. I will dress.’

‘No, please, Professor-’ She grabbed up the EKG graph paper. ‘Dr. Ilman must see the results first. He sometimes makes us do it again. Will you please wait, as you are, until I show him this? Excuse me-’

She was gone. Max Stratman shrugged, put a flaring match to his well-seasoned meerschaum, and felt the chill on his feet. Despite her injunction against dressing, he decided to sit down and pull on his socks and shoes. As he did so, slowly, seated on the chair beside the desk, he reviewed with precision the events of yesterday.

The call from Washington had been from the Secretary of Defence. The civilities had been brief. The Secretary had asked him, bluntly, if he would care to undertake a bigger, more vital job, at more than twice the money he was now being paid at the Society. Although Stratman was an international figure of renown, the salary that he received for thinking and speculating at the Society for Basic Research was comparatively modest. The new sum offered him was, by his terms, staggering, and immediately he saw that it would completely cancel his debt to Walther and solve his problem with Emily. He evinced his interest.

‘I know you’re deeply immersed in further researches on the possibilities of solar energy,’ the Secretary had said, ‘and it’s all very promising-I’ve seen your reports-but it’s all way off in the future.’

Stratman had found that he must come to the defence of basic research in general. ‘All research is a dream for the future, Mr. Secretary. Rockets were once way off in the future, and nuclear fission, too. And even my work in converting and storing the sun’s heat for energy, that was once in the future. Yet, if I had been given no time to think about it a few years ago-’

The Secretary had not wanted to be thus engaged. ‘I know, Professor Stratman,’ he said, ‘we are in sympathy with the way you people work. However, the fact is you have harnessed solar energy. It’s a reality. It’s one of the big things we have to work with. And we want to move ahead. We want to exploit our gain before our enemies do-’

Stratman had sighed over expediencies, and then remembered the huge sum that he was being offered, and he had not interrupted again.

The Secretary had gone on crisply. There were competent physicists throughout the nation toiling night and day to develop further Stratman’s recent discovery. The Defence Department had studied the programme, and had felt that it was too scattered, too disjointed, and that lack of direction and cohesion might cause a fatal lag in the work. The facts had been laid before the President, and he, himself, had recommended that Max Stratman be appointed co-ordinator of the vast programme and be well paid out of unassigned Defence Department funds.

Impressed, Stratman had inquired, ‘What would the job entail?’

‘Constant travel around the country. You could headquarter in the Pentagon. But we’d want you in Palo Alto, Boston, Key West, Death Valley, Phoenix, El Paso, out in Libya at Azizia, wherever the solar people are working, to see that they’re getting the most out of their time, to see that they’re on the right track, to straighten them out when necessary, to show them shortcuts, to give them pep talks, when necessary. You know the kind of men they are, and you know that you are about the only person in the world they’d listen to. It could accelerate our programme and be a real contribution to the government. You’d be responsible only to the President, and report to him at monthly intervals.’

‘How long would you need me?’

‘Two years.’

Stratman did not like the job. He saw through the subterfuge. It was really a glorified salesman’s job, one that might be done as well by a politician or militarist or educator. What the government really wanted was his name, possibly to impress the young men on the project, possibly to extort more money from Congress. They wanted his name, and he wanted-nein, he needed-their money. It was a dilemma. It was a dilemma because the work at the Society, which they could not yet understand until it was reality and utilitarian, was far more important. He was on the verge of new breakthroughs in converting solar energy, but he could never give them a date, and so it would have no value to them. Also, capsuled in his office at the Society, he could live on in his old way, undisturbed, free to breathe and think. The new job might demand energy and strength that he did not possess. It was this last that made him remember his summer visit to Dr. Ilman, and at once he knew that his decision would develop not from his wishes but from the oracle that was Dr. Ilman’s electrocardiograph machine.

‘I will need the remainder of the week to decide,’ he had finally told the Secretary of Defence.

‘We must know by Saturday,’ the Secretary had said.

‘You shall.’

‘Please keep in mind that it was the President, himself, who suggested you for this job, Professor.’

‘I am not unaware of it, Mr. Secretary.’

When he had hung up the receiver, he had known that he must accept the offer. It was then that he had lifted the receiver off the cradle again and had telephoned Dr. Fred Ilman for an immediate appointment.

Suddenly, he realized that the door beside him had opened, and that the nurse was standing in the doorway.

‘You may dress, Professor,’ she said. ‘Dr. Ilman will see you now-in his office.’

He searched her bland face for an opinion, but there was none. He rose, took his shirt off the hook, and began to dress.

A few minutes later, he entered Dr. Ilman’s small, grey office. The physician was hunched over his desk, writing on a sheet of paper. He was hardly taller than Stratman himself, a slender, wiry Missourian in his late forties, with crewcut and darting eyes and a reputation for candour. Although he was no longer in the army, he worked for the army as an orthopaedic surgeon in Lawson General Hospital, one of the major amputee hospitals in the nation, and several days a week he doubled as an M.D. to treat government personnel at the hospital as well as the geniuses at the nearby Society for Basic Research.

No sooner had Stratman come through the door than Dr. Ilman dropped his pen, leaped to his feet, and extended his hand.

‘Max-how are you?’

Stratman took his hand cordially. ‘That is for you to tell me, Fred.’

Dr. Ilman waved Stratman to the hard-backed chair across the desk. ‘Sit down, light up your pipe, and we’ll straighten everything out.’

Stratman sat down and put a match to his cold pipe, and Dr. Ilman settled into the swivel chair behind the desk.

‘I’m curious, Max, extremely curious, about what brought you here today. You weren’t due until January. Why the request for a cardiograph today? Didn’t you feel well? Did you have chest pain? What?’

‘I think I told you on the phone. I wanted a checkup.’

‘But why? There must be a reason.’

Originally, Stratman had not planned to go into his motivations for Dr. Ilman. He did not wish to be forced into explanations and family history and mysteries. Still, Ilman was a friend-he met Ilman and his wife socially at least once a month-and a perceptive and penetrating man, and Stratman saw that it would be time-wasting to be devious.

‘I see it is no use to evade you, Fred,’ he said, at last. ‘There is a specific reason, yes.’

Dr. Ilman waited patiently.

Stratman resumed. ‘The government has offered me a bigger job, a better one. It will be a management job, and I will have to be exceedingly mobile. The position would require constant travel and, well, certainly an added burden of work and responsibility. I thought I should have a checkup before accepting-’

‘Why do you need such a job, Max? You are full of honours-’

‘Ach, honours. Did you ever have a cooked entrée of honours? Money, Fred, there is twice the money I am making, and I need it.’

‘I had imagined you were comfortable-’

‘It is not enough. I am thinking ahead-of Emily.’

‘In my opinion, you have done nicely by your niece. And when you are no longer here, I’m sure she will do nicely by herself. I would guess she has problems, whatever they may be, but she is competent, attractive-more than attractive-and young enough to manage for herself, when and if it becomes necessary. I can’t for the life of me see why any decision you make in the present must be based on her future.’

Dr. Ilman waited, but saw that Stratman was not prepared to reply at once. Instead of pressing for an explanation, Dr. Ilman found a cigar in his lower drawer, bit off the end, and made elaborate preparation to smoke it.

Stratman sat meditatively, peering through the shutters, hypnotized by the rain as it splattered against the window, and fanned into rivulets that trickled slowly to the sill. He wondered how he could explain the truth to a physician who was merely a friend and not of his blood.

Could he tell Ilman about the events of 1934? Both he and his older brother Walther had considered themselves agnostics, if anything. Although the mother he cherished had been Jewish, Stratman’s father had been Lutheran. Stratman had grown up between the two faiths, or, as a compromise, outside them, and consequently he had known as little of Judaism as of Protestantism. As an adult, he had not affiliated himself, or interested himself, in any religion, beyond that of Science. He had not believed in a Maker, a Creator of an orderly universe, but had believed that if the universe were truly orderly, it had been an accident of natural forces. He had felt that to ascribe the beginning of the universe, the planets, earth, man, to Something was merely evidence of man’s lack of imagination. Groping mankind had invented words like ‘beginning’. Did there have to be a beginning? Could not the universe have always been here? Could not its existence have been beyond the grasp of man’s feeble understanding and semantics? If explanations need be sought, they could only be sought by Science. Meanwhile, let cretin man satisfy himself with his spiritual playthings-holy books, relics, churches, temples, Jehovah, Zeus, Buddha, Quetzalcoatl, Son of Man, Prophet, and all the rest of the tranquillizers.

But in 1943, one aspect of Max Stratman’s thinking changed. From pure scientist, he was converted to Scientist-Jew by the fanatics of Hitler’s National Socialism. He was found to be tainted, but still valuable to the state, and so he was removed from his teaching position at the University of Berlin and transferred to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in the same city. In this Institute, Germany ’s leading physicists, engineers, chemists were toiling to create fission of uranium. Stratman was assigned to work on heavy water imported from the Norsk Hydro hydrogen electrolysis factory in occupied Rjukan, Norway, with the purpose of constructing a chain-reacting pile. His older brother, Walther, a nuclear engineer less imaginative, more methodical than himself (whose only minor achievement, the result of a youthful avocation, had been a scientific paper on the bubonic plague or Black Death epidemic in history), had been removed from private industry to work on a crude uranium machine-in America, it was being called a nuclear reactor-in the shed behind the Institute. Walther’s wife, Rebecca, and his young daughter, Emily, had fared worse, and been deported to Ravensbruck Women’s Concentration Camp, which had been built to imprison two thousand enemies of the Reich and now held twenty-five thousand of them. Max Stratman and Walther Stratman had been advised that as long as they co-operated in advancing Germany’s atomic programme, no harm would come to Rebecca and Emily, and so they had co-operated, minimally, and were rewarded monthly by a brief letter from Rebecca Stratman.

Now, so long after, sitting and blinking at the rain on the window of a Georgia hospital, Stratman wondered if he could tell Ilman about the events of 1945. With Berlin aflame, and Hitler’s body drenched with petrol outside the concrete bunker in the shadow of Brandenburg Gate, advance units of the Russian army were assigned to ferret out and capture German scientists. They had raided the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and placed its occupants under house arrest in a farm at the outskirts of Berlin, pending arrival of Soviet authorities.

Meanwhile, Walther had made secret contact with a similar advance American unit which went by the code name ALSOS and possessed a file, found in Strasbourg, of every German scientist and his current address. Walther let the members of ALSOS know that neither he nor his more illustrious brother, Max Stratman, wished to carry on their work under a second dictatorship. Immediately, and at great risk, American agents of ALSOS had agreed to rescue the Stratman brothers from their Communist keepers. Max Stratman had been given to understand that there were means to rescue both Walther and himself at the same time-but on the fateful night, at the crucial moment, there had been means to save only one of them. Max Stratman had refused to be that one, but had finally been persuaded to escape after extracting a promise that Walther would follow shortly after. Only later did he learn that there had never been the slightest chance to save Walther, and that Walther had insisted on giving over his place to a brother who he felt had more to offer Science and the free world.

From that moment of Walther’s sacrifice, Max Stratman had realized that he was on earth, a liberated man, as his brother’s proxy, that his obligation was that of Charles Darnay to Sydney Carton. Thereafter, at his passionate insistence, he had remained in the American-occupied zone of Germany, while the authorities had aided him in the search for Walther’s wife Rebecca and his daughter Emily. The Russians, who had overrun Ravensbruck, reported that neither Rebecca nor Emily was there any longer, and Stratman feared the worst. He had continued his search, and in short weeks, Emily, just turned sixteen, surprisingly had been located at Buchenwald-surprisingly because Himmler had earlier ordered Ravensbruck purified and had commanded all Jewish inmates shipped by cattle cars to Auschwitz, the horror compound south-west of Warsaw in Poland. For reasons that Stratman would learn later, Emily had been the sole Jewess to survive the transfer to Auschwitz, and, in the waning days of the war, had been sent south to Buchenwald instead. However, Rebecca Stratman had been less fortunate. Several months before the liberation, with her pink slip of paper, she had been carried off to Auschwitz, and had been one of three million naked women, children, men, to suffer death by gas in the camp’s busy extermination chamber.

And so it was young Emily, alone, who had become Max Stratman’s charge and his conscience, and the more so because of what Stratman had learned (from an American Army psychiatrist, who had confiscated concentration camp dossiers intact) of her existence in the female hell that was Ravensbruck. Emily had been emotionally damaged beyond repair, Stratman had learned-in a manner that he could not, to this day, revive in his own mind-and she had needed her uncle not only then, but now, just as Stratman had decided that she needed the security that he must offer her following his death.

After recovering his niece, Stratman had been placed, along with other rescued German scientists, in detention quarters, Farm Hall, an old country house not far from Cambridge in England. Here he had learned of his brother Walther’s lonely death months before in a Siberian labour camp, where he had been interned after his part in Stratman’s escape had been exposed. Today, for Emily, there was only her uncle, Max Stratman knew, only he, himself alone.

The events had occurred long ago. The traumatic results of those past events were ever present.

Only a minute or two had passed, but for Stratman it had been two decades. He turned from the window and met Dr. Ilman’s gaze.

‘My mind was wandering,’ he said apologetically. ‘Perhaps senility. I forget what you asked me, Fred.’

Dr. Ilman carefully placed his cigar in a tray. His voice was soft. ‘I had only inquired-why it was important to change your life-make more money-for Emily’s future. But you must have your reasons-’

‘I do.’ He nodded at the coiled graph paper on the physician’s desk. ‘You have not given me the results of the cardiograph, Fred.’

‘No, I haven’t.’ Dr. Ilman took up the graph paper, unwound it, and passed his eyes over the jagged line. ‘Max, I’m not going to let you take any new job that requires travel, excitement, worry, no matter how much money is in it.’ He looked up. ‘You can still have a long life ahead, and it’s my duty to see that you don’t throw those years away.’

Stratman waved his hand at the graph paper. ‘Don’t give me riddles, Fred. I’m not one of your old women patients who needs hand holding. What’s wrong with me?’

Dr. Ilman straightened in his chair. His tone was now brisk, professional. ‘There have been changes of T waves in this electrocardiogram-inverted T waves-they clearly indicate an early coronary insufficiency. Do you understand?’

‘I think I understand.’

‘No panic. Behave, and you’ll have years enough to discover ten more uses for solar energy. But take that new job, and-listen, Max-I wouldn’t give ten to one on your lasting more than a couple of years.’

Stratman sat immobile. ‘I don’t need more than two or three years, Fred,’ he said quietly.

‘You need a lifetime, like every human being,’ Dr. Ilman said sharply. ‘Believe me, Max, it’s more important to Emily to have you alive than to have an inheritance after you are dead.’

Stratman shook his head. ‘Verzeihung-Fred, you do not understand, you do not know.’ He pushed himself out of the chair. ‘Thank you. Do you see me again?’

‘Regularly. Next week to start with.’

Stratman smiled faintly and started for the door. At the door, Dr. Ilman’s voice caught him.

‘Max, about the job, what are you going to do?’

‘Think about it.’

‘Well, just think about being a vegetable, a happy vegetable. Much more fun than being a dead globe-trotter.’

Once outside, Stratman hastened through the rain to the parking lot, where the coloured driver was waiting in the government car. He ordered the driver to return him to the Society building. As they passed briefly before the seemingly endless array of low-slung, dull, wooden barracks that were the Lawson General Hospital, Stratman thought how strange it was that this was the only place where Emily could have contact with men. She was in her early thirties now, and he had never known her once to go out with a man, not in high school or university or in their years in New York. And certainly not in Atlanta, where she had been more a recluse than ever, with her books, her records, her piano, her sewing, and her television. The more incredible, he decided, because she was so physically lovely and mentally bright.

As they drove through the rain, he tried to picture Walther’s Emily, his Emily, as she might appear to others of her own age. Her hair was brunette, glossy, cut back in a bob, semi-shingled, but grown long where it covered half her forehead and curled forward under her cheekbones. Her face had a delicate, exotic, Oriental flavour, the impression reinforced by slightly slanted green eyes, so often cast downwards when she spoke to a guest, a small tilted nose, and a pale, ethereal complexion. Her fragility was a rebuke to her German ancestry, and somewhere in the family tree, Stratman was sure, there had been an immigrant Siamese. Her body was slender, but fuller, more substantial than her features promised-the bosom young and deep, and the wasp waist exaggerating the full hips. About her there was an aura of one withdrawn from the turmoils of the world, one unbruised and unmarked by life, with the untouched and unused perfection of a new, life-sized doll. Her mind, and the wry humour seemed too frightened to surface often. Men, Stratman perceived, were enchanted by her. They desired her. Emily did not desire them. Her defences were many. When they approached too closely, she skittered off like a fawn. When they spoke too intimately, she retreated into a shell of silence, or sometimes resorted to sarcasm. She was made for men, but men were not made for her.

Her only contact with the opposite sex was at the Lawson General Hospital. Shortly after they had arrived in Atlanta, she had driven her uncle to visit Dr. Ilman. While her uncle was being examined, she had been taken on a tour of the amputee centre by the doctor’s nurse. Several months later, she had volunteered to do practical nursing at Lawson three times a week, and she did it still. She had learned the language of the amputees-‘amps’, she came to call them, as they called one another. She had learned that artificial limbs were ‘prostheses’, and an arm was an ‘upper extremity’, and a ‘BK’ was a soldier whose leg had been removed below the knee, and a ‘syme’ was one who had lost his foot but not his heel, and that ‘guillotining’ meant crude, immediate surgery of a limb on the field of battle. She mingled with the young men, with their T shirts, jock shorts, and cumbersome leather and metal prostheses, and worked with them, and conversed solemnly with them, and they adored her, and she adored them and was not repelled. If Emily did not understand her devotion to Lawson, or would not face its true motives, her uncle understood it completely. These were not males, and she was not a female. These were amps-physical cripples-and she was an amp-an emotional cripple-and harmony was natural.

‘Here we is, Professor.’ The chauffeur had spoken, and they had come to a halt before the Society building. Stratman emerged from his reverie, opened the door, and saw that the rain had ceased. He studied the leaden sky briefly, then closed the door, climbed the four stone stairs, and entered the foyer of the Society building.

The moment that he was inside, he heard his name. The switchboard girl removed her earphones. ‘Professor Stratman-your niece has called three times. She seems terribly anxious to get hold of you.’

Stratman felt his heart thump. Emily had called three times. Unusual and ominous. He asked the girl to connect him, and as he started for the telephone booth, he realized that his heart was still hammering and that Dr. Ilman would disapprove, for the T waves had been inverted, and he now had ‘a condition’. Closing himself inside the booth, he removed the receiver and listened. What he heard was an engaged signal. He opened the booth and put his head out, questioningly.

The girl shrugged. ‘Busy.’

Stratman left the booth. ‘Keep trying.’

For ten minutes, as Stratman paced the inlaid floor, the operator tried his number, and every time, the response was a busy signal. Stratman’s mind worried: she had fainted, and the phone was off the hook; someone was using the phone to summon an ambulance; the police were on the phone ordering all squad cars on the alert.

At last, he could endure the suspense no longer. ‘Send for my car,’ he commanded the operator.

In short minutes, the automobile was waiting for him. The drive from the Society building along Peachtree Road to the five-room bungalow on Ponce de Leon Avenue that he and Emily rented was fifteen miles. To Stratman, it seemed fifty miles, especially since the chauffeur refused to speed over the rain-slicked asphalt highway.

It was twenty-five minutes before he saw the bungalow. Then, as they approached, he saw Emily. She stood on the small porch, a scarf around her head, a leather windbreaker over her blouse and skirt. He felt the knot in his abdomen unwind. She was alive. She was well. Nothing else mattered.

As they drew up before the bungalow, he dismissed the chauffeur. Stepping out of the car, he saw Emily running down the walk towards him.

‘Uncle Max-!’ she cried.

He slammed the door and waited, again concerned. But he saw that she was beaming, and that was unusual, too.

‘Uncle Max!’ She reached him breathlessly, and blurted the next. ‘You won the Nobel Prize!’

He stood, head cocked sideways, uncomprehending. ‘What? What? I do not-wiederhole, bitte-’

‘You won! The telegram came an hour ago!’ She fished inside the windbreaker and showed it to him.

He held it in both hands, close to his nose, for his spectacles were still in his pocket.

‘Oh-Uncle Max-imagine-the Nobel Prize!’

He lowered the telegram and looked at her, dazed.

‘I-I cannot believe it,’ he said.

‘But it’s true. All the newspapers know. They’re all in the living-room right now-reporters, photographers-they say it was announced from Stockholm on the news wires.’

He tried to focus on the telegram again. ‘Fifty thousand three hundred dollars,’ he murmured. ‘Gott im Himmel.’

‘You’re rich-’

‘We are rich,’ he corrected, meticulously. And, at once, he realized that he could call the Secretary of Defence tomorrow and turn down the new job-that it was not necessary any more, that he had won Emily’s buffer against life, that Walther would rest in peace, that he could keep his old sedentary cubbyhole with its promise and contentment-and he knew that Dr. Ilman would be pleased.

Suddenly, something occurred to him. ‘Where do we get this prize? In Stockholm?’

‘Oh, yes. You must go. The newspapermen said so. It’s a rule you must pick up the money within one year-except if you’re sick-or you can’t have it. Several Germans couldn’t pick it up once, because of Hitler, and later, they couldn’t get it.’

Stockholm was a long way, Stratman realized. The journey, the activities, the ceremony would be strenuous. By all rights, he should consult Dr. Ilman first. But then he remembered what awaited him in Stockholm, and he saw Emily’s enthusiastic face, and he knew that no imminent heart attack or stroke could keep him from the prize that would solve everything.

He took Emily firmly by the elbow and started her toward the house. ‘Tell me, liebes Kind,’ he said happily, ‘what are you going to wear when you curtsy before the King?’

It was 1.51 of a hot, sunny afternoon when the telegram from the Swedish Embassy in Washington, D.C., automatically typed itself out on the tape of the electric receiving machine in the telegraph room located on Colorado Street in Pasadena, California.

The harassed fat girl at the machine hardly read the message, as she snipped it free. Expertly, using the cutter on her finger, she sliced the message into short lines, moistened them, and neatly glued them to the blank. The message formally prepared for delivery, and before her, she suddenly realized the import of its contents.

‘Migawd,’ she said aloud, ‘twenty-five thousand dollars!’

The two men at the counter overheard her. One, the skinny young man in frayed blue suit who was an employee of the telegraph office, turned away from the pencilled words he had been counting and asked, ‘Who got rich?’ The customer, across the counter, a middle-aged man with rimless glasses who resembled a lesser bank executive, also displayed interest.

The fat girl lifted herself from her chair with a grunt. ‘It says here-somebody in Pasadena -never heard of him-just won the Nobel Prize.’

She went to the counter and showed the telegram to her skinny co-worker. As he read it, he whistled. He handed the wire to the customer, who pushed his glasses higher on the bridge of his nose, and said, ‘If I were you, I would not wait to deliver a message of this importance. I would telephone it to the party concerned.’ Importantly, he began to read the telegram.

FOR YOUR PART IN THE DISCOVERY OF ANTIREACTIVE SUBSTANCES TO OVERCOME THE IMMUNOLOGICAL BARRIER TO CARDIAC TRANSPLANTATION AND YOUR INTRODUCTION OF SURGICAL TECHNIQUE TO SUCCESSFULLY PERFORM A HETEROGRAFT OF THE HEART ORGAN INTO THE HUMAN BODY THE NOBEL FOUNDATION OF STOCKHOLM ON BEHALF OF THE ROYAL CAROLINE MEDICO CHIRURGICAL INSTITUTE OF SWEDEN IS PLEASED TO INFORM YOU THAT YOU HAVE TODAY BEEN VOTED THIS YEARS NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSIOLOGY AND MEDICINE STOP YOUR SHARE OF THE PRIZE WILL BE A GOLD MEDALLION AND A CHEQUE FOR TWENTY FIVE THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY DOLLARS STOP THE AWARD CEREMONY WILL TAKE PLACE IN STOCKHOLM ON DECEMBER TENTH STOP DETAILS FOLLOW STOP HEARTIEST CONGRATULATIONS STOP

The message was addressed to DOCTOR JOHN GARRETT NUMBER FOUR HILLSIDE TERRACE PASADENA CALIFORNIA…

As usual, the drive from Pasadena on the ever-crowded freeways to the Miracle Mile section of Los Angeles took Dr. John Garrett longer than he had expected. What made the trip even slower, this early afternoon, was the fact that Garrett was deeply engaged with his thoughts, with the new speech that he intended to deliver tonight, and with the rights and wrongs of it.

By the time he had arrived at Western Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard, and parked the black Jaguar (his first lavish purchase, on payments, after his sudden ascent to prominence) in the familiar petrol station, he had made up his mind (no matter what Dr. Keller advised him) that he would present the new speech unedited and unexpurgated.

Striding the short distance to the seven-storey medical building, Garrett observed his reflection several times in shop windows. He was not displeased with what he saw: an arresting, forceful young man of resolution. He had almost forgotten his pleasure, a decade before, when Saralee had shown him an article based on a poll taken by the American Institute of Public Opinion on the average American male, and he had learned that he conformed almost exactly to the norm. According to the statistics, the average American man was five feet nine inches tall, weighed one hundred and fifty-eight pounds, had brown hair, wore spectacles, caught one and one-half colds in winter, smoked cigarettes, drank liquor socially, preferred brunettes to blondes, demanded that his wife be a good companion rather than a good cook, enjoyed baseball above all other spectator sports, liked beefsteak and French fried potatoes more than any other single dish, awoke at six-thirty on weekdays and went to bed by ten at night, and would rather live in California than any place on earth. Incredibly, John Garrett had found that these statistics described him almost exactly-the one exception being that he preferred French fried onion rings to French fried potatoes.

In the past two years, however, John Garrett had taken less pride in regarding himself as average, much to Saralee’s bewilderment at the sudden change of party line. More and more often, Garrett liked to think of himself as a unique entity, special, nonconforming, and somewhat set apart from ordinary specimens of homo Americanus. Whether or not this personal rebellion against the average was due to his recent renown in professional circles, or due to his liberating sessions with Dr. Keller, Garrett could not say. On the other hand, his wife Saralee could say, but she said it only to herself: John deserves to be bigheaded once in a while, because he discovered something that will help ‘the human community’-the last she had read in a magazine-but in her eyes, and most of the time in his own, she suspected, John Garrett was still five feet nine, one hundred and fifty-eight pounds, and hair brown as ever at forty-nine, and he was still as unsure and insecure and dependent upon her as ever, thank God.

Having reached the entry arch of his destination, John Garrett quickened his pace, rapidly climbed the single flight of stairs, and found himself face to face with the glass-paned door that bore the black legend, L. D. KELLER, M. D. As before, he wondered why psychoanalysts did not print PSYCHIATRIST instead of M. D. beside their names, and then decided that as long as there remained so much fear and resultant hostility toward analysts, discretion was the better part of honesty.

Opening the door, Garrett stepped into the office, then paused to close the door softly behind him. He moved through the empty blond reception room, and entered the spacious main office as unobtrusively as possible. He could see at once that they were all present, sitting, compulsive and neurotic, in the same chairs as ever, and that the session was in full swing. No one turned to greet Garrett as he tiptoed to his chair, for it was understood that he was always late (‘tardiness may often be a resistance to the embarrassment of discussing taboo topics in the presence of others,’ Dr. Keller had once remarked), but now Dr. Keller, from behind his oak fortification of a desk, acknowledged his arrival with the slightest flicker of his eyes.

Garrett sat stiffly a moment, then consulted his watch. The group therapy session always lasted precisely one hour and twenty minutes. Since Garrett paid ten dollars for his weekly attendance, this meant that he was paying twelve and a half cents a minute. Because he had been sixteen minutes late, there remained only one hour and four minutes. The delay had cost him two dollars. Still, there was eight dollars’ worth of time left. He needed part of that time, today, especially today, but there were six others who needed it, too. Perhaps a close search of the faces of his fellow patients, he decided, would tell if their urgency matched his own.

They were seated in a crooked semicircle before Dr. Keller’s desk, and Garrett began reading from left to right. On the beige divan to the far left were Mr. Lovato and Mrs. Perrin. Mr. Lovato, a slight, homosexual artist with a growing reputation for painting children in the chocolate box style of Thomas Gainsborough, sat with his knees awkwardly crossed. Garrett recalled that when he had first come into group therapy four months ago, Mr. Lovato had always sat with his knees pinched together, like a prim parochial-schoolgirl. But a month ago, apparently somewhat liberated by analysis, he had begun to cross his legs in the more masculine manner. Mrs. Perrin, a top-heavy matron in her fifties with purple grey hair, sat with lips compressed, worrying a small handbag with her hands. She was recovering from a nervous breakdown. Although married to a wealthy citizen of Van Nuys, her problem was a neurotic inability to spend a penny, even on the necessities of life, even on laundry or a loaf of bread, without becoming agitated. She rarely spoke, perhaps once in three weeks, but when she did speak, it was about her tiny triumphs in managing a purchase for fifty cents or a dollar.

Garrett shifted his gaze to the next patient, handsome, young Adam Ring, the rising actor, now slumped lazily in the easy chair, monotonously swinging a charm which was a rabbit’s foot. Ring, whose bronzed face in profile resembled that of a head on a Greek coin, was in therapy because of a sexual difficulty. He spoke of it lightly, jokingly, but Dr. Keller was not deceived. Adam Ring’s virility was redoubtable when he seduced young women of foreign race or colour-Oriental, Indian, Mexican, Negro-but his virility was questionable and impaired when confronted by a Caucasian.

Directly to Garrett’s left, in a straight chair, sat the incredible Mrs. Zane. A plain and freckled housewife in her middle thirties, given to gingham and shirtwaisters and a certain helplessness, she had been complaining steadily (at least as long as Garrett had been in the group) of the sexual excesses forced upon her. A Catholic with five youngsters in junior school, she had revealed that her cross was an economically inept husband, too incompetent to hold a job a month. At last, by chance, this husband had obtained a well-paid job with a garment manufacturer. When it had appeared that he would lose this job too, Mrs. Zane had desperately tried to prevent the catastrophe by inviting her husband’s employer, and his wife, to dinner. The result had been that the employer, long disinterested in his mate and bored with golf and high finance, had been sufficiently moved by Mrs. Zane to make her his extracurricular activity. Instead of being fired, Mr. Zane was promoted to chief salesman, at a higher salary, and sent out of the city four times a year on extended trips. In return, although it had never been spelt out in so many words, Mrs. Zane was expected to be receptive to the advances of her husband’s employer. A pliable and generous young woman, Mrs. Zane had not resisted. For the past year, she had entertained her husband’s employer regularly, and because he was insatiable, her view of him was curiously horizontal. Her guilts kept the church confessional busy, and her doubts led her to Dr. Keller.

John Garrett enjoyed Mrs. Zane, but today he was in no mood for her. She had the appearance of one who had much on her mind, and was restlessly awaiting her turn, and Garrett knew that he would have difficulty obtaining the time that he required. Turning slightly in his chair, he saw Mr. Armstrong, the stocky, beetle-browed compulsive gambler, rocking slowly, lost in his own deep broodings. Garrett always regarded the gambler as an ill-starred Branwell Brontë doomed by circumstance. He liked to consider Mr. Armstrong in soap opera serial terms: Will Armstrong’s new roulette system smash the Nevada syndicate tomorrow? Will he save his job in the nick of time? Will he rescue his mortgaged house? Will he win the respect of his complaining wife and children and relatives? Will he ward off debt and destruction? Alone, of all of them, Mr. Armstrong recorded and read aloud his fantastic nocturnal dreams.

Beyond Mr. Armstrong, leaning intently forward, sat Miss Dudzinski, who had a mare’s face and a body all unpadded bone, and who chattered on with the rapidity of one who feared to be overtaken by interruption. Miss Dudzinski was in her late twenties, and definitely old-maid material. She lived in a three-room apartment with her frail, hypochondriac mother, who had a worn heart and bad bladder and practised the savage tyranny of the weak and the old. Miss Dudzinski supported them both by working as stenographer in a large real estate office. She was in group therapy because she was in the midst of a triangle-the dramatis personae consisting of a shy bachelor, who toiled as a drugstore assistant and was sufficiently lonely to consider Miss Dudzinski as beautiful; of Miss Dudzinski, whose entire life had been a search for a shy bachelor who was a drugstore assistant; and of Mrs. Dudzinski, enjoying her fortieth year on the brink of death.

Considering Miss Dudzinski now, and conjuring up the appalling picture of someone wishing to sleep with her, and in action with her, John Garrett suddenly realized that Miss Dudzinski was leaning forward because she was speaking and probably had been speaking for some time. With an effort, for he had his own problem, one less trifling than these, Garrett pretended to listen.

‘-well, I tell you, Dr. Keller, I’m at the end of the rope. I don’t know which way to turn,’ Miss Dudzinski was saying, the words tumbling out, each one close on the heels of the last. ‘It’s the horns of a dilemma. Clarence told me plainly last night, he’s not going to wait another six months to see if I make up my mind to marry him or not. He was pretty outspoken for somebody who’s an introvert. He said if I wouldn’t tell him right away-well, he was going to quit his job and go back to Cleveland. He said you’ve got to choose between your mother and me, or something like that, but that was what he said. I told him it’s easy for you to say, but I’ve still got my responsibilities to Mother, she’s human, I can’t abandon her just like that to run off and marry and only think of myself. What’ll happen to Mother? If she died, I’d never forgive myself. I’d carry it to the grave. But still there’s on the other hand-Clarence-’

She looked around the room, almost imploringly, at the others, and before anyone could speak, she resumed, addressing the group as well as Dr. Keller. ‘You all know me. I don’t have to lie. I’m not beautiful and I know it, besides I don’t think that’s the important thing because spiritual is more important. But we all know men hold more store by looks than anything, and Clarence-I’m not ashamed to admit it-I guess I’ve told you-he’s the first man who ever proposed to me, and besides he’s nice and I want to have a respectable husband, too, like everyone.’ She swallowed. ‘But what’ll I do with Mother?’

She sat back, and eyed the others hopefully. Dr. Keller straightened his bulk, put down his pencil, and pinched his broad nose. ‘Well, now, Miss Dudzinski, this anxiety-’

Before the analyst could continue, Adam Ring, from deep in his chair, swinging his rabbit’s foot still, spoke up. ‘I’ll tell you what to do with Mother,’ he said. ‘Drown her.’

Miss Dudzinski gasped and Ring was pleased, for he liked to shock. Irreverence was his attention getter and his protective barrier, Dr. Keller had told him several times. Before Miss Dudzinski could protest, Adam Ring went on. ‘Your old lady’s no different than all the rest, Miss D. She’s got you by the cord, and she’s not letting you cut it. Why should she? You’re her meal ticket. You’re also her nurse and full-time companion. You listen to me. Blow her off. Stick her in some sanitarium-your husband’ll pay to keep her out of his sight. She’ll be happier in the end, and you’ll have your guy. Look, you said it, kid, you’re no Miss V. di Milo. There’s at least one guy for every girl on earth. For you, figure that’s the limit. Here’s the guy. Grab. Hold him like a sweepstakes ticket. Let him go and what have you got left? Mother’s Day for the rest of your life.’

Mr. Lovato waved his hand in a flutter, and spoke in a gentle, effeminate voice. ‘Although I think Mr. Ring put it crudely, even threateningly, I concur with his sentiments all the way. As Dr. Keller has often implied, we can’t have our cake and eat it, too. I believe you have to approach your decision coldly and logically, Miss Dudzinski. If you leave your mother for your young man, your mother has an alternative. She can find some other elderly woman to live with or move into a sanitarium or busy herself in many ways. Moreover, she’s had a full life of her own and need not consume yours, which my mother tried to do, too. On the other hand, if you give up the young man, you may have no alternative. You may remain unwedded for a lifetime. I feel you simply have no choice but to accept your young man’s proposal.’

Listening, John Garrett determined to add his own opinion, which was no different from the others, only so that he could lead from his opinion into his own problem, and in that way, be sure that he would have his needed time. But before he could speak, Mrs. Zane, to his left, quickly made herself heard.

‘I don’t think it’s as easy as everyone is making out,’ said Mrs. Zane. ‘It’s all well and good for single men like Mr. Ring and Mr. Lovato to say make Clarence your choice and forget your mother-but Miss Dudzinski’s mother is a responsibility, a human responsibility, and must be considered. You all know I can speak feelingly of this, because I can see all sides. Miss Dudzinski’s problem is an exact parallel to my own. I’m caught between two people, also, and do you think it’s easy? Do you think I enjoy being forced to have sexual intercourse with Mr. Zane’s boss every night, while Mr. Zane is out of town?’

‘Well, cut it down to twice a week,’ Adam Ring called out cheerfully.

‘Oh, please, Mr. Ring,’ replied Mrs. Zane, ‘this is no joke. I know you think I’m sexually promiscuous-’

‘My only objection is that you don’t share the wealth, wonder girl,’ said Ring with a grin. ‘You’ve got me real curious about what’s under those panties. I’d like a piece of the action whenever you find time-’

‘I wouldn’t have you, you impotent egotist!’ flared Mrs. Zane. She turned towards the desk. ‘Dr Keller, why is he so hostile towards me?’

Dr. Keller, eyes hooded, remained imperturbable, and Adam Ring retained his set grin.

Mrs. Zane shook her head. ‘I know you’re thinking that, too, Dr. Keller. You’ve made it plain I should try to curb my outside actions during my therapy, and you think I’m only increasing my sex life to defy you.’

‘You know better than to bait me, Mrs. Zane,’ said the analyst quietly. ‘Don’t try to speak for me. When it is necessary for your good, for what is best for you, when it is necessary for me to articulate for you certain emotions you do not understand, I will be less impersonal, I will speak. Now-you were saying, Mrs. Zane-?’

‘I was saying I’m tormented constantly by my situation.’ She addressed her co-patients imploringly, her temper receding. ‘You all know what I go through. I have Miss Dudzinski’s anxieties. What should I do? What is right? If I stop, Mr. Zane will be fired. I know that. He’ll be shattered. If I go on-well, I feel sinful. I lie awake nights, night after night, and ask myself all the questions. Am I being disloyal to Mr. Zane? Or am I truly helping him at great sacrifice? I pray to the Lord, and pray someday He will answer me. Heavens knows, I don’t enjoy the act that much. I can see Mr. Ring smirking-but I don’t, you all believe me. I’m exhausted. I have five children and a husband, too-and his boss, every night. I’ll give you an example. Let me tell you what happened last night-’

John Garrett knew that Mrs. Zane had done what he had intended to do-interrupt so that she might have the floor. His admiration was mingled with annoyance. He was impatient with Mrs. Zane’s prolific and perspiring acrobatics, and her secret pleasures and atoning guilts, and he wanted to voice the exigency of his own immediate problem. He glanced at his watch once more. There were thirty-four minutes remaining to the session. He hoped that Mrs. Zane’s indulgence of the night before had been brief, silent, hedonistic, but he doubted it.

Waiting his turn, he thought back to how he had got into this damn group thing. It had begun with the increasing periods of depression and the persistent headaches, of course, the pressures against his forehead and the back of his skull coming daily with regularity, intruding on his achievement, and work, and home life. He had seen his physician, and subsequently an ear man, and then a neurologist, and suffered all the tests, but nothing pathological had been indicated. At last, upon the suggestion of his physician, he had reluctantly called upon a psychoanalyst in Pasadena.

There had been three months on the couch, ridiculous and wasted. Then, one morning, the psychoanalyst had recommended analytic group psychotherapy. The reasons given for this suggested change, which Garrett found senseless, were that persons like him, who hated and retreated from social contacts, who performed poorly in social situations, could most benefit by group therapy. Moreover, Garrett learned, his hostility towards the psychoanalyst (an extension of his ancient resentment of his father, whom his mother had worshipped and to whom she had given all her time), made person-to-person therapy difficult. Garrett learned that, attached to a group whose members suffered similar hostilities and anxieties, his anger might be modified, and that more progress might be made. The Pasadena psychoanalyst had then suggested that a Dr. Keller, of Los Angeles, was one of the best men in the field. And so, after an undecided week, Garrett had joined the group.

True, with the months of group psychotherapy, despite his shame at the public exposure, and the frustrations of competing with others for time and Dr. Keller’s attention and approval, the head pressures had become more irregular, sometimes disappearing for several days in succession. But the source of the headaches still remained a partial mystery to him. Despite Dr. Keller’s occasional remarks to the contrary, Garrett chose to believe that his discomfort had started with the entrance of Dr. Carlo Farelli into his life.

Certainly, in the period before the advent of Farelli, John Garrett had reached a peak of personal happiness, a summit of satisfaction, that he had never dreamed of attaining. Now, daydreaming in Dr. Keller’s office, he had no trouble slipping backward into the recent past, to the events that led to his triumph and the event that led to its decline and fall. You pushed a button in memory, and lo, you slid back…

He was, he knew (for now he could afford a certain candour with himself), a drab, colourless and withdrawn research workhorse in the Rosenthal Medical Centre in Pasadena. He possessed the degrees, and the knowledge and techniques that had earned him the degrees, but he was neither imaginative nor creative. Nothing about him soared. A thousand colleagues would have agreed that his epitaph would one day be one word: competent.

Yet, for some inexplicable emotional reason, he became interested in a dramatic phase of medicine-that which dealt with tissue transplantation, the technique of replacing the missing or damaged parts of a human being’s body with new parts. Mulling over old medical journals, Garrett learned that the field was not a new one. Almost two thousand years before, a Hindu surgeon, Suśruta, had used cheek skin to help create new noses for his patients. In more recent times, in 1870 to be exact, Dr. J. L. Reverdin, of Paris had introduced modern free skin grafting. Early in the twentieth century, Dr. Charles Guthrie, of St. Louis, had successfully grafted the head of a donor dog to join the head of a host dog, thereby fashioning a two-headed canine.

To Garrett, in his earliest enthusiasm, it appeared that anything was possible in this field. But not until he left his reading, and participated in actual experiments, did he fully realize the nature of the obstacle that hindered progress. The obstacle was not in surgery, where advance in techniques had been sufficient to make possible the replacement of an old, dying organ in the human body with a new, living organ. The obstacle was biochemical. As a self-defence against germs, the human body threw up an immunological barrier that not only warded off invading diseases but also destroyed foreign tissues that might be helpful.

Once he perceived the problem, Garrett devoted more and more of his energies and time to studying it. Figuratively, Saralee became a widow, and the children orphans, due to his work. Where colleagues were satisfied with eight hours given to research, Garrett was not satisfied with twelve or fourteen or sixteen hours. The medical laboratory became his Santa Maria, Pinta, Niña rolled into one, and he was as single-minded in his exploration as had been their admiral.

Soon, he was sated with knowledge of the human body’s rejection or immunity mechanism. This was the reticulo-endothelial system. It consisted of antibodies and powerful white cells known as lymphocytes in the blood that protected man by killing off bacteria, viruses, or any strange or foreign cells that entered the body. This rejection mechanism was everyman’s friend, but Garrett came to regard it as his personal enemy. For if the rejection mechanism warded off diseased cells, it also murdered healthy new cells, since it could not tell the difference. This, then, was the difficulty. If a man were dying for want of new kidneys, or small intestines, or lungs, or heart, you could not transplant a fresh vital organ for the old, because the rejection mechanism, antagonistic to foreign tissue, would murder it-and its host.

The rejection mechanism became Garrett’s target. And what confirmed his aim were the exceptions to the rule. Toiling side by side with his colleagues in the Medical Centre, he found that transplants of pieces of artery, sections of bone, the cornea of the eye were long-practised grafts that had nothing to do with the rejection mechanism. A new cornea in place of an old one survived because antibodies and assaulting white cells could not get at it. As to transplanted blood vessels and bones, they did not need to survive for they were merely scaffolding across which normal host tissue could grow.

What interested Garrett even more was another exception to the rejection mechanism. There had been case after case of successful organ transplantation in identical twins. Chemically, identical twins were the same person. They emerged from the same fertilized egg. Their tissues were not foreign to each other. A kidney from one identical twin could be grafted into his ailing brother, and it would endure, because the rejection mechanism would not recognize it and would leave it alone. But the moment that the same transplantation was tried on non-identical human beings, the kidney, or any other organ, would die.

During 1958, in Boston, a risky non-identical transplantation had been desperately attempted. A young woman from Ohio had lost her only kidney and was dying. A courageous team of physicians had taken the healthy kidney of a four-year-old and grafted it into this young woman. To thwart the rejection mechanism, the physicians had given the young woman massive treatments of X-rays. The young woman lived twenty-eight days. The rejection mechanism had, indeed, been neutralized, but the excessive radiation was fatal.

For a brief period, Garrett was discouraged. Then came a major breakthrough. Sir Macfarlane Burnet, of Australia, and Dr. Peter B. Medawar, of England, proved that the rejection mechanism in one human being could be taught to accept tissue transplants from another, under certain circumstances. Experiments with rodents showed that if a mouse embryo were injected with cells from a non-identical donor mouse, then later, when the embryo was an adult, it could accept skin grafts from the same donor without rejection. For this, Burnet and Medawar won the Nobel Prize in 1960. And, at once, John Garrett, along with hundreds of others in his field, was encouraged to believe that soon it might be possible to make a homograft of legs, kidneys, lungs, and hearts.

In that optimistic period, Dr. Robert A. Good, of the University of Minnesota, was saying, ‘Though much more basic research is needed, the first successful organ graft between non-identical human beings could conceivably, with luck, take place tomorrow.’ And Garrett, one midnight in bed beside Saralee, was telling her, ‘I believe it, I absolutely believe it-and I’m going to be the one to do it-with a living heart.’

The days spun ceaselessly past, and he had no knowledge of date or week or month. It was as if he were on a perpetual hamster’s wheel. He isolated himself from his colleagues, because he had no time for small talk or relaxation. He went ahead alone against the enemy, trying to find a weapon to overcome the immunological barrier, the rejection mechanism. He experimented with massive X-ray treatments, with steroids, with nitrogen mustards. Each led to a dead end. No matter how slight or drastic the modifications that he made, these weapons, while they did indeed neutralize the rejection mechanism, also destroyed white cell production, stripped the body of immunity to disease, killed in other ways what he was trying, after all, to save. The problem remained as large as ever: to discover a treatment or serum that was selective, that would not destroy all reactive or immunity mechanisms, that would neutralize whatever it was that rejected a foreign graft, and leave unharmed that which protected the body against disease.

Once, depressed by the impossible maze, Garrett tried to find a path around it. In that time, he fancied that he could simply ignore the rejection mechanism by circumventing it, by inventing a compact artificial heart of plastic material, that could be grafted inside the chest cavity and that would be accepted because it would be non-reactive. For months, the idea excited him. A plastic heart replacing a failing or damaged natural heart inside the human body would give its host-literally-a new lease on life.

Methodically, he studied all the mechanical hearts then in existence. These ranged from the heart pump and oxygenator created by Dr. Clarence Dennis in 1951, to a two-chamber pump run by batteries (it had kept a dog alive nine hours) produced by a team at the University of Illinois. Garrett saw that these mechanical heart-lung devices all had one factor in common-they were used outside the patient’s body to keep the patient alive during cardiac surgery. What Garrett envisioned was such a device inside the body-the natural heart removed, the machine heart substituted-located in exactly the same place: orthotropous transplantation, with an external power pack. But there were question marks here, too, not the least being how to keep the plastic bag, between the two lungs, contracting and relaxing without failure. It might be resolved in the future, Garrett decided, but he preferred to grapple with the present, the probable.

Unhappily, he returned to his maze. He must find his way on the battlefield where the familiar enemy, now so well known to him, was the rejection mechanism that barred his transplantation of a living heart, either animal or human. He abandoned the radiation treatments, the nitrogen mustards, and plunged into unknown byways. And then, it happened, came to him, as simply and undramatically as waking or walking or laughter.

It was late morning. He had been toiling over his laboratory specimens-the mice, dogs, calves-checking, noting, noting again, modifying, when he discovered the new substance that apparently-yes, it was clear, plainly evident-neutralized the rejection mechanism but did not, at the same time, destroy all immunity. For a week, Saralee and the children knew nothing of his existence except on the telephone, and after that week he was almost certain. He had a serum-the serum-and with Lincolnian simplicity and straightforwardness he christened it Anti-reactive Substance S.

Once he had his serum, and having proved it out on lower mammalian creatures, not yet on man, he gave parallel devotion to surgical techniques of organ grafts. He considered all aspects of the homograft-an organ moved from one human into another human-and vetoed it as too formidable. More logical, more probable, and his skittering mice and tractable dogs and climbing simians supported him, was the heterograft-the transplantation of an animal heart into a living man. Exulting months followed, and by then he had settled upon the heart of a calf, a calf weighing what a potential patient might weigh, as the likeliest possibility for success.

Twice, he grafted calves’ hearts into dogs, and one dog died and one lived for a while. More modifications of the serum and the surgical technique, and on a black and forbidding winter’s night in Pasadena-he had already telephoned Saralee that he would not be home for dinner, and that she need not wait up for him-he prepared for his third transplantation of the heart of a calf into the chest cavity of a huge dog. He had assistance now, and by eight o’clock all was in readiness. The donor calf’s heart was under perfusion and cooling. The host dog had been treated with improved Anti-reactive Substance S, and was already hooked to the heart-lung bypass machine. What remained was the crucial surgery. But Garrett never accomplished it, not on the dog, at least.

In another room of the Medical Centre, in those hours, an elderly truck driver-later to be known in scientific papers as Henry M.-had been rushed to the hospital, suffering a severe coronary occlusion. In emergency surgery, his heart began to fail, and there was no hope of his survival. In those dark minutes, through the influence of the resident surgeon (an admirer of Garrett’s) upon the patient’s weeping family, John Garrett was encouraged to attempt his transplantation of the calf’s heart into this suddenly available human chest, instead of the waiting canine.

The responsibility was staggering. Garrett had never before introduced Anti-reactive Substance S into a fellow human, let alone attempt a heterograft. But by now, he possessed a fanatic’s belief in his as yet only partially proved findings. The nervous impetus that had geared him for the experiment on a canine was now automatically transferred to the unconscious truck driver. The mass of tissues on the table before him might be man or beast, for all Garrett knew. His conscience was in his fingers. Henry M., who hovered on the far edge of death, was injected with Anti-reactive Substance S. He was hooked to the cardiopulmonary bypass machine. Surgery proceeded. The heterograft, with all its complexity, was made surely and swiftly. And then, the question. Would the patient live?

When the clamps and catheters were being removed, Garrett’s mind went to an old paper he had once read. In 1934, the Russian physiologist, Dr. S. S. Briukhonenko, had applied a mechanical heart and lung to a suicide victim, a man who had hanged himself, and the machine had brought the man back to life. The patient had opened his eyes, been aware of the physician and staff surrounding him, and had then closed his eyes forever. Even though this was different, the all-important serum, a mammalian heart, Garrett feared the same pattern when the truck driver, Henry M., opened his eyes at daybreak and blinked his bewilderment and then his gratefulness.

But Henry M.’s eyes stayed open, then and since, and he lived on with his sturdy calf’s heart, unaffected by the rejection mechanism, and in medical circles and soon in the press Garrett became the Jesus who raised Lazarus from the dead.

In short months, Garrett would learn that only one cardiac patient in twenty possessed the proper blood and tissue qualifications compatible to accepting the sensational serum that would neutralize the rejection mechanism and allow the body to accept the radical transplantation. Nevertheless, encouraged and supercharged by the case of Henry M., Garrett succeeded in grafting his substitute hearts into seventeen more human beings, whose blood and tissue had been screened beforehand. Every one survived. The implications were fantastic.

When Garrett read his definitive paper on his work at the Western Surgical Association in Denver, he was hailed by scientists throughout the world. Despite the limitations of his discovery, everyone seemed to sense that the first giant step towards longevity, even immortality, had been made. It was as if, in his day, Ponce de Leon had actually found the Fountain of Youth and bottled its waters. From a nonentity with a wild dream, John Garrett had become a saviour unique. He held his rarefied position exactly ten days. On the tenth day, he was asked to move over. There was another to share the occupancy of the spotlight with him.

The wire services of America carried the long and dramatic story from Rome, and the newspapers of America paraded it across their front pages. It appeared that Dr. Carlo Farelli, the eminent Italian physician, had just published a brilliant paper claiming and proving the very same discovery that Garrett had made. Farelli had also found a serum that, like Anti-reactive Substance S, made a heterograft acceptable, and had successfully transplanted resurrecting mammalian hearts into twenty-one persons from Italy, Switzerland, and Austria.

Overnight, Lazarus was multiplied, and Jesus was not one but two.

The world rejoiced. John Garrett was confused. His fame, while no less secure, seemed dimmed because his glory was shared. Colleagues abroad made inquiries not only of Garrett, for further work in the field, but of Farelli. The press quoted not only Garrett but also Farelli, and the Italian was quoted more frequently because he was a colourful showman as well as a great scientist, and better equipped than the reticent John Garrett to communicate his ideas to laymen.

Several months after the advent of Farelli, John Garrett’s headaches began.

And here I am, he told himself, conscious once more of his surroundings and that Mrs. Zane’s interminable recital of her libidinous history was coming to an end.

‘-until at last he fell asleep,’ Mrs. Zane was saying in a voice become hoarse. ‘But can you imagine two times in one night? I mean, I wouldn’t mind, I’m not that old, but when you’re tending five children all day, well, enough is enough. Anyway, I got dressed and took a taxi, but it must’ve been after midnight when I finally had the dishes cleared away and changed Joanie’s bed-she’s still wetting-and got to sleep. I’m at my wit’s end, is what I want to say. I think I’m the most depraved person in the world.’

Her voice trailed off on the last, and she settled back in her chair, the sordid saga of infidelity again exorcised, and her features now relaxed as if her tensions had been relieved.

‘You’ll find your way, Mrs. Zane,’ Dr. Keller murmured, as he studiously jotted some notes on the pad before him. ‘You’re further advanced than you think.’

He peered up from beneath his bushy eyebrows, his enormous chest heaving as he inhaled and exhaled, and he studied his group. No one spoke. It was as if the smash main attraction had been on, and no one wished to follow it with a lesser act.

John Garrett saw that it was now or never. He lifted his right hand, partially, like an uncertain schoolboy. Dr. Keller noticed the gesture, and nodded.

‘Well, I guess I have a pressing little matter,’ said Garrett. He made a deferential bow at Mrs. Zane beside him. ‘Perhaps it is not as-as emotional-as involving as what we have just listened to, but it is important to me.’ His eyes met the psychiatrist’s again. ‘As you know, I’m to deliver an address tonight. At the United Forum. I’m told there will be a full house, and that the press will attend. It’s a singular opportunity for me to be heard and to express my views on my-my problem. Now, I’ve written my new speech, as I told you I would. The question remains-should I deliver my new speech-say what I want to say? Or should I settle for the usual one I’ve been giving-you know-“Hippocrates and the Human Heart”? What do you think?’

‘I don’t think the decision should be in my hands,’ said Dr. Keller instantly. ‘You are acquainted with the analytic process. If I make your decision, you will not gain by it. You must learn to make up your own mind, come to your own conclusions.’

Garrett frowned at what he considered a reprimand, although he knew better. The psychiatrist was always saying that people must come to the understanding of themselves, by themselves. He was only a guide, a catalytic agent, sometimes an interpreter. Often, he had once said, he could advise a patient what was wrong with him after two or three visits. But the knowledge would be of no value to the patient, unless the patient found out the same information by himself. This frequently made the route tortuous, but in the end, the repair was more effective and permanent.

‘I guess I have made up my mind,’ said Garrett. ‘I think it was made up before I came here today. I suppose I wanted to hear what you would say first.’ He paused. ‘I’ve decided to give the new speech. I’m going to blast the hell out of Farelli.’

He looked left, and then right, and then at Dr. Keller, for approval. There was interest in his decision, but no obvious support. ‘Yes,’ he said, using the affirmation of silence as a prop, ‘I think I have to do it. I’ve made a discovery, done one important thing in my life, by myself, all by myself, and I don’t think I should lose half the credit for it to some foreign Cagliostro who is indulging in piracy and plagiarism.’

‘Are you sure that Dr. Farelli indulged in-as you put it-piracy and plagiarism?’ Dr. Keller inquired mildly.

‘I have evidence. Circumstantial, to be sure. But juries often convict a man on less. As I’ve told you several times, I had vaguely heard of this Farelli, but knew nothing specific about him. He never published papers, until he published that carbon copy-well, nearly-of my paper. I’ve since learned he is more of a science promoter than a pure scientist. His greatest discovery has been in finding new means of selling himself. Oh, he created an anti-reactive serum similar to mine, and performed those heterografts, and had those successes he boasts about. That’s all been verified. The question is-how did he come upon his discovery? I’ll tell you how. I’ve learned he has all of my published papers-you know, my progress reports from the earliest period. Furthermore, scientists from abroad who visited my laboratories in Pasadena from time to time then went back to Europe and, purposely or inadvertently, revealed to him precisely what I was doing and how I was doing it. I’ll give you an analogy. We invented the atom bomb. Eventually, Russia would have invented one, too. But it might have been much later. What accelerated their work was information that was leaked to them about our work by spies-the Rosenbergs, Fuchs, countless others. In a more blatant way, Farelli must have been learning about my work, putting two and two together, and when I had my findings to tell the world-well, he had his. I contend that is unfair, immoral even, and should be exposed.’

He had been addressing himself to Dr. Keller strongly, emotionally, and now he was out of breath. The psychiatrist, tapping his pencil softly on his pad, used the opportunity to comment.

‘You may be correct in your assumption, Dr. Garrett. I can’t say. At the same time, I do not see any real indicting evidence against Dr. Farelli. You know, as we all know, that, more frequently than not, great scientific discoveries are not made in a sudden, dramatic fashion-in one moment-the Eureka-I-have-found-it type of thing. It occurs, but more often in movies and on television than in real life. Most discoveries are come by slowly, gradually. Dozens of men, through the years, contribute bits and pieces, invaluable findings, and then one day a man or several men, building on the past, integrate the pieces into a useful whole, and the world has a discovery. Many times you, yourself, in this room, have acknowledged the contributions of your predecessors-Briukhonenko, Dennis, Clarke, among others, come to mind in the matter of the heart problem, Medawar, Burnet, Billingham, Brent, Owen, Merrill, Woodruff, the pioneer Guthrie, Shumway, Kaplan, Nossal, and many others, who’ve worked on tissue grafts and reactive mechanisms. You had access to the reports of these people. In a sense, they were your silent collaborators, even though you accomplished the big and final task. Isn’t it reasonable that Dr. Farelli in Italy also had access to the work of these people, and was steered by them as you were? Isn’t it possible?’

‘No, it is not possible,’ said Garrett vehemently. He was shaken and unnerved, and now he was defensive. ‘I’ve never claimed that I did it by myself, that I owe no one a thing. Of course I do. We all do, always. But the Farelli matter is different. The coincidence of it stinks, and there are many who agree with me. If he were an artist, he would be labelled a copyist or a forger, and be drummed out of existence. I don’t think he should be allowed to graft my mind onto his and win adulation for it.’

Dr. Keller remained calm, but surprisingly persistent. ‘Ever since you began telling us about your obsession with Farelli, I took it upon myself to do some historical reading on science matters. Merely to inform myself.’ He smiled at Mrs. Zane and Mr. Lovato, and added, ‘In fact, where I feel I must and can, I do this in most of your cases.’ He swung back to Garrett. ‘Consider the discovery of insulin for human diabetes. A profound discovery. In 1923, Frederick Banting and John MacLeod were credited with the find and jointly awarded the Nobel Prize. But what were the facts? As far back as 1901, L. V. Sobolev was doing work in the field. Based on his work, Banting and MacLeod, as well as C. H. Best and J. B. Collip, pushed the research further. There you have five men. In 1923, only two of them shared the honours and the money. Was this right? Banting did not think so. He resented MacLeod’s getting half the credit and cash, when MacLeod was not even present at the time the crucial experiment was conducted. To express his disapproval, Banting gave half his money to Best, who had not been honoured at all. In retaliation, MacLeod gave half his money to Collip, who had received no credit either. And no one mentioned Sobolev. Now, this does not parallel your situation exactly, Dr. Garrett, but I’m sure you see what I’m driving at-the business of scientific credit is a Gordian knot-’

‘Are you telling me not to make this speech tonight?’

Dr. Keller shook his head and sidestepped the trap. ‘No. I repeat, that decision is your own. I’m simply trying to open your mind to the ramifications. You may cause an international scandal, with what many may consider faulty evidence. I’m trying to make you be as objective as possible about Farelli, and not use him as a whipping boy for motives and neuroses which may go deeper than mere suspicion of plagiarism. Farelli is not your father, Dr. Garrett.’

‘You’re merely upsetting me-’

‘I should hope so,’ said Dr. Keller blandly. ‘But I want you to think-think before you act.’

‘I’m making that speech.’

‘Very well, then.’

Garrett, shaken, became sullen and mute. Dr. Keller glanced about the room. Adam Ring had pulled himself erect in the easy chair, and was beginning to speak.

‘I wish all I had to worry about was some wop,’ said the actor. ‘Me, I love wops. The gals are built like you know what, and I can go the mile with them. It’s those American broads-’ He shook his head, clenched his hands, and went on. ‘Since our last semester, Doctor, I’ve seen the New York broad I was telling you about. She had the hots for me and I don’t have to tell you how I felt. There I was, and there was she, in our birthday suits, and-you guessed it-no score. If it weren’t so crazy, I’d laugh. Two hours later, tail between my legs, I went calling on the Japanese singer again. I was terrific. Ask her. It’s a riddle, I tell you, and I still don’t see where I’m getting any help here. But I was thinking about something you said last week. You called me on that time when I was maybe seven or eight-and the old lady-’

John Garrett hardly heard the deep drone of the actor’s voice. He suffered in silence about what he believed had been a reproach from the psychiatrist. He would make the speech, he knew, but momentarily he was less sure of his ground. He tried to sort out the reasons for his resentment of Farelli. Why did this unknown, distant Roman upset him so? At once, he remembered the fragment of something that Keller had once stated, and he was hit by a ray of illumination. His anger was not solely directed at Farelli, but at what Farelli represented. Garrett had never had anything in life alone, all his own. Nine brothers and sisters had shared his remote parents with him. At the university, in the class election, he had tied in the voting with someone else for treasurer and held the office with the other jointly. Even his wife, Saralee, had been married before. When he had been inspired by one moment of genius in his life-how many moments of genius can one man expect in his span?-when he had been so inspired, and deserved all the honours, his greatest achievement had been obscured by a far-off thief in Italy. And the capping blow. When he finally needed help, he had been forced into group therapy. As ever, as always, he had been made less than a whole man. The plural analysis he minded least. What rankled the most was Farelli, symbol of Garrett’s loss of identity. He was half a man, and there was no justice to it. But this time, he reflected, he would not be overwhelmed or submissive. He would fight back, win credit and identity.

His musings were interrupted by Dr. Keller’s voice, loud and clear. ‘Time is up, I see. This was a fruitful meeting. I hope to meet with all of you next week.’

The others were on their feet and leaving. Garrett was the last to rise. He followed the others through the door. As he departed, he heard Dr. Keller’s telephone ringing. It always rang when the session ended. Apparently, it was then that his answering service called to relay messages left, messages which Dr. Keller would handle in his free ten minutes.

Outside, on the pavement in front of the building, the members of the group took their leave of each other. Mr. Lovato, Mrs. Zane, and Miss Dudzinski remained huddled together for their goodbyes to the rest. They then proceeded, as was their custom in defiance of Dr. Keller’s disapproval, to the cafeteria, where they would have coffee and rolls at a table and continue their postmortem self-analysis together. Mrs. Perrin hastened off to the bus stop, still insufficiently liberated to take the taxi she could well afford. Mr. Armstrong strode off to his chaotic rented bungalow, only two miles away. Adam Ring had his magnificent Aston Martin parked in the street. ‘Good luck, tonight,’ he called to Garrett. ‘Give the wop hell.’ Although the expression made Garrett wince, the actor’s support restored Garrett’s humour. ‘The same to you,’ he replied, knowing that Ring had a mulatto girl friend tucked away in a Sunset Boulevard apartment. The actor slid into his imported car, waved, and was gone. Garrett walked slowly towards the petrol station.

He had reached the kerb, and was waiting for the light to change, when he heard his name.

‘Oh, Dr. Garrett-!’

He whirled about and saw Dr. Keller trotting towards him. Dr. Keller was a massive man, seemingly somnolent, and it was strange to see him in motion.

When the psychiatrist drew abreast of him, Garrett observed that Dr. Keller’s face was as excited as an exclamation mark. ‘Your wife’s on the phone upstairs,’ he said, panting. ‘She has marvellous news for you-you’ve just been awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine!’

Garrett allowed the words to sink in, and he accepted their impact naturally, with hardly any surprise, for he had secretly fantasied this moment for so long. But suddenly the shock of thrill reached his innards, and he felt the goose pimples on his arms and the flush on his cheeks.

‘You’re sure?’ he asked, incredulously.

‘Absolutely. Mrs. Garrett has the telegram from the Swedish Embassy.’ He offered his meaty hand. ‘May I be the first to congratulate you?’

Garrett took the psychiatrist’s hand dumbly, and then released it. ‘I don’t know what to think,’ he said helplessly. ‘What does it mean?’

‘Your discovery is officially honoured. Your fame is now secure.’

‘The Nobel Prize,’ he said, half to himself, savouring the words.

‘Your wife’s on the phone-she’s waiting to speak to you.’

They started back, making their way swiftly through the women shoppers. Inside the building, ascending the stairs once more, Garrett’s methodical mind began to translate the award. There was always money in it, and a trip, and above all-above all else-the international recognition of his work. For the first time, Farelli had been shunted aside. At last, he himself had received the full and exclusive honour that he deserved. His love for those anonymous Swedes, who had been wise enough to see the truth and present it to the world, was boundless.

Upstairs, Dr. Keller pushed Garrett into his office, while he considerately stayed behind in the reception alcove to smoke.

Garrett rushed to the psychiatrist’s desk, and brought the free receiver to his face. ‘Saralee?’

‘Darling! Isn’t it wonderful?’ Her usually mild, modulated voice was pitched out of control.

‘There can’t be any mistake?’

‘No, it’s here! The telegraph office called, and I thought it was a joke and demanded they send the wire over. They did right away, and I have it. I tried to get you-but Dr. Keller’s service wouldn’t put me through until now. It’s all true! Two newspapers called from Los Angeles -’

‘Read me the telegram.’

Apparently she had it in her hand, for she read it immediately. Garrett listened, numbed, and then requested that she read it again, more slowly.

When she had finished, he said, ‘We’ll be going to Stockholm. I’m just wondering about the children-’

‘We can leave them with Aunt Mae. John, this is so marvellous! I’ve dreamt about it so much. I never dared tell you. But you deserve it, and now you have it-forever-a Nobel Prize winner-’

Yes-’

‘Dean Filbrick called. All the faculty at the college and everyone at the hospital knows. They want to have a celebration tonight-impromptu-after your speech-’

Garrett had forgotten the speech. He tried to fasten his mind on it.

He heard Saralee again. ‘One second, there’s someone at the door.’

‘Skip it-’

But she had gone. He held the receiver and enjoyed the glow of success within him. There would never be another day in his life like this, so entirely his own, so fulfilled.

Saralee had returned. ‘It’s another telegram.’ He heard the crackle of paper, as she opened it, and then a dead pause, and then her curious voice again. ‘It’s-it’s a cable from Rome – Italy -’ Her voice faded.

‘Who from?’ he inquired loudly, to bring her back.

‘I’ll read it. “I have just been informed by the Swedish Embassy that we are sharing this year’s Nobel Prize in medicine jointly. I am honoured our work has been so recognized and doubly honoured to receive the award with an American colleague I respect. Please accept my sincerest congratulations. I look forward to seeing my other half in Stockholm. Best wishes.” It is signed, “Carlo Farelli.” ’

Garrett remained very still. There was no anger in him now, no fury, only an overwhelming defeat in this moment of victory. His frustration could not be articulated in language. He knew, finally, that he was being tied to this despicable Italian for life and the hereafter. His mind went back into the baseball lore of his youth-the immortal double-play combination of Tinker to Evers to Chance-how Tinker and Evers hated each other, and would not speak to one another, but were forced to continue their public co-operation and harmony before the world for their entire professional lives.

Saralee’s voice came tinnily through the receiver. ‘John, this shouldn’t spoil anything-’

No, he told himself, he would not let this spoil anything. He would go to Stockholm, for his half moment, and have his confrontation with Farelli, and make the moment whole and his own. Somehow, the Nobel committee and the world would yet know the truth about which was the genius and which the usurper. But not tonight, he realized at last, not on the night of a day like this.

He sighed. The new speech was out. Tonight, again, it would be ‘Hippocrates and the Human Heart’. But there would be a different night, next month, in Sweden, he was sure…

It was exactly 4.30 of a chilly afternoon when the telegram from the Swedish Embassy in Washington, D.C., had arrived in the reconverted drapers store, next door to the Weekly Independent, that now served as the telegraph office in the rural hamlet of Miller’s Dam, Wisconsin.

But that was forty-five minutes ago, and the message, with several others, still lay in the electric receiving machine, unseen by human eyes, untouched by human hands, uncommunicative.

The lone keeper of the office, during the eight day hours, was Eldora Fleischer, eighteen-year-old daughter of a local dairy farmer, who usually divided these hours between original paperback novels and motion picture magazines, or daydreamed of making a sensation in Milwaukee or Chicago, where a wealthy and princely suitor would find her and persuade her to elope. Sometimes, in her more practical moods, the dream took another form. She would be working in the office, when he would enter, distraught. Because his Continental had developed engine trouble, he was delayed in this one horse town and had to send a wire-probably to the Governor or someone important. He was wealthy and princely, as well as young and handsome, and when he saw Eldora, he no longer wanted to send the wire. Smitten, love at first sight, he begged for her hand. At first haughty and remote, Eldora finally allowed herself to be persuaded. And off they went in the Continental-happily repaired-on their elopement, which would astonish the royalty of the Old World. Prepared, always, for this dream to become reality, Eldora adorned herself for her role. Her long hair was freshly bleached, her mascara artfully applied, her make-up ready for the cameras. She wore her best and tightest and thinnest dresses to work, even on cold days, and the necklines were always plunging. Eldora was short, milky, buxom, definitely aphrodisiac, and patiently she worked and waited.

But at 4.15 this afternoon, she had tired of waiting. The week before, she had made the acquaintance of a new boy who had moved to town. His hair was wavy, and his face not unattractive despite the pimples, and he was impressively tall. He had moved to Miller’s Dam from Beloit -a metropolis, after all-and he was twenty-two-along in years and mature-and he was a grocer’s assistant and would be more. His first name was Roger. His last name was unpronounceable. His importance was this: when Eldora saw him, she tingled, and liked the feeling.

At 4.15, he had sauntered into the telegraph office. It was his day off. He had made some amusing jokes, really clever, and had invited Eldora to join him in a smoke. Since Eldora did not dare to smoke publicly-one of her father’s Baptist friends might see her-she suggested to Roger that they retire to the tiny store-room in the rear. The telegraph office was rarely visited at this hour, and if it was, the bell over the door would ring and warn Eldora.

Now it was 5.15, and Eldora was still in the store-room with Roger. She had smoked two cigarettes, and he had smoked three. Not once had the front doorbell disturbed them. They had talked, and finally he had pulled her down on his lap, rocking precariously on the old swivel chair. He had kissed her neck, and the cleft between her breasts, until she thought that she would die of ecstasy, and now he had slid his hand under her dress.

‘Wait,’ she said, ‘wait, Roger-’

She jumped off his lap, and ran to the store-room door, closed it, and bolted it from the inside. She would not be able to hear the bell, but there could be excuses if she was reported, and she did not care, anyway, At once, she returned, and settled in Roger’s lap, and closed her eyes. More boldly, his hand rubbed under her dress again, over her plump thigh, until his fingers touched the fringe of her pants.

Her eyes were still shut. ‘Roger,’ she whispered, ‘you can do that-but nothing else.’

‘Aw honey-’

She opened her eyes. ‘I mean it, Roger. I’m a lady.’

‘Okay, sweetie-’

He kissed the hollow of her neck, and she closed her eyes once more and hugged him tightly, and his hands moved slowly beneath her pants.

Neither one of them heard the front doorbell.

The front door had been opened, and the bell sounded, by Jake Binninger, the stubby, myopic, eager reporter, rewrite man, clipper of exchange newspapers, and advertising salesman of the Weekly Independent, next door.

He always appeared frenetic, but now a new dimension of enthusiastic agitation seemed to have been added. In his hand he carried a slip from the teletype machine, which was fed by a national news wire. He searched the room for Eldora, and could see her nowhere.

‘Eldora?’

There was no response. He quickly reasoned that she had run out for a cup of coffee. Nevertheless, he was determined not to leave without confirmation of the incredible dispatch in his hand. According to the dispatch, the notification had been sent to Miller’s Dam by telegram. There must be a carbon of the telegram. Jake Binninger wanted the confirmation-the story was the biggest thing that had happened to anyone in Miller’s Dam since the Pike’s Creek murder, a decade ago-and, if true, he wanted the exact contents of that wire.

He circled the desk, found Eldora’s list of deliveries-there had been only six this day, and not one the one he sought-and then, almost as an afterthought, he began to read the messages in the machine.

He found it at once, gave an exclamation of pleasure, and speedily brought out his pencil and copied the wording of the wire on the bottom of his teletype sheet.

IN RECOGNITION OF YOUR POWERFUL AND SIGNIFICANT WRITINGS IN SUPPORT OF HUMANITARIAN IDEALS AND IN ESPECIAL APPRECIATION OF YOUR EPICAL NOVELS THE PERFECT STATE AND ARMAGEDDON THE NOBEL FOUNDATION OF STOCKHOLM ON BEHALF OF THE SWEDISH ACADEMY IS PLEASED TO INFORM YOU THAT YOU HAVE TODAY BEEN VOTED THIS YEARS NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE STOP THE PRIZE WILL BE A GOLD MEDALLION AND A CHEQUE FOR FIFTY THOUSAND THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS STOP THE AWARD CEREMONY WILL TAKE PLACE IN STOCKHOLM ON DECEMBER TENTH STOP DETAILS FOLLOW STOP HEARTIEST CONGRATULATIONS STOP

The message was addressed to MISTER ANDREW CRAIG SEVENTY SEVEN WHEATON ROAD MILLERS DAM WISCONSIN…

It was 5.20, and they had been conversing and playing gin rummy for two hours, when Lucius Mack realized that his companion was about to pass out.

Andrew Craig’s long fingers woodenly clamped onto the cards, fanned out erratically, in his hand. Carefully, too carefully, he laid the cards face down, fumbled for the fifth of Scotch, and emptied the last drops in his glass, hitting the rim slightly so that some of the liquor dribbled onto the table. He put the bottle down, then lifted the glass with its inch of liquor, and considered it blankly.

Lucius Mack saw that Craig was too intoxicated to bring the glass to his lips.

‘I think I’ve had about enough, Andrew,’ said Mack tactfully. ‘Let’s pick up this game tomorrow. I’ve got to get back to the shop.’

Craig lifted his head with effort and tried to focus his glazed eyes on his friend. ‘Somebody’s got to keep-to keep-wheels of industry turning,’ he said thickly. He managed to swallow the last dregs of his bottle.

Mack pushed back his chair, and rose. ‘Like to lie down a bit?’

‘Like nothing better, Florence Nightingale,’ said Craig. ‘No games. I’m stoned, and we both know it, an’-and I like it.’

Mack came around the table to Craig, prepared to assist him out of the chair, but in a gesture of self-respect, Craig set his hands on the table and heaved himself upright. Standing, he swayed precariously, and flattened his hand against the wall to stop himself from falling.

He narrowed his eyes, to find Mack, and then smiled. ‘You’re good, Lucius-good guy.’ He remembered his duties as a host. ‘Sure you had enough to drink?’

‘Too much, with a night’s work ahead.’

‘Someday I’d like to say jus’-just that-“Too much, with a night’s work ahead.” ’

‘You will, Andrew, believe me.’

Craig removed his steadying hand from the wall, and tried to take a step toward the bed, but he staggered. Mack caught his arm firmly, supporting him. Craig conceded defeat. ‘Got the dizzies. All the juice gone down to my pins.’

Mack slowly led the author to the bed, then helped lower him to a sitting position. The instant that he made contact with the mattress, Craig fell back on a portion of the pillow. Easily, efficiently, as he had done so many times in the past, Mack lifted his friend’s long legs from the floor and settled them on the bed. Then he removed Craig’s leather moccasins and placed them neatly under the night table.

Briefly, he stood over Craig and examined him. The prostrated figure, rangy and surprisingly muscular for one so committed to self-destruction, was clothed in an old, grey T-shirt and soft corduroy slacks. Mack decided that his friend would be more comfortable this way than in pyjamas. Despite the heat blowing in from the floor furnace vent, the autumn chill crept through the window cracks, and Craig would require warmth.

Lucius Mack returned to the table, and set about cleaning it up-Leah, Craig’s sister-in-law, downstairs, could not tolerate a mess. Mack gathered the playing cards into a deck and stuffed them into the box. He dropped the empty Scotch bottle beside the other one in the waste-paper basket. He took the two glasses into the bathroom, rinsed and dried them, and then placed them on top of Craig’s green file cabinet.

This done, Lucius Mack stood in the centre of the room and surveyed it. He liked the narrow, brown, cosy room, beneath the house’s gable, and it was as much his own as the rooms he kept in the Perkins boarding-house. His eyes took in the rolltop desk, and covered typewriter, so long unused, and the five shelves of books, mostly reference and history, with the uppermost shelf reserved for Craig’s own four novels, in the American, English, and odd foreign editions.

Lucius Mack had known the Craigs, or Craig, more than five years, and for more than two of them he had known Craig intimately. It hardly seemed eight years ago when Andrew and Harriet Craig-he so boyish, with only two novels published and a third one planned-had arrived to make their residence in Miller’s Dam. They had bought the Hartog place, this place, on ‘ Wheaton Road, and renovated it, and in the beginning had kept to themselves, rather like honeymooners. Lucius Mack had met Harriet Craig one morning in the first month of their residence, when she had visited the newspaper to place a classified advertisement for a daily help. Memory usually dimmed with the years, but Mack still retained what had impressed him then: a dark blonde, quiet and self-possessed, with a pleasing, almost gay Slavic face, all features broad but regular-he had guessed that her antecedents were Lithuanian. She had been of medium height, perhaps more, and only seemed smaller side by side with Craig, whose lanky body went up six feet. She had been generously endowed, the full figure of a woman in every way, with a certain solidity that seemed to settle well against the Wisconsin landscape.

A week later, Mack had written to Craig requesting an interview, and almost immediately Craig had called in person. At the time, Mack had been the fledgling owner of the Weekly Independent. He followed the hard-set rule of all small-town newspapers-mention everyone’s name in print at least once during the year and more if possible. This was difficult, since so many members of the community were so dull. The arrival of newcomers from the East, especially a published author of growing reputation, provided an opportunity for Mack to enliven his pages.

What the editor-publisher remembered most about Craig’s first visit were his tousled black hair and quick eyes, amused, encompassing, the implied cynicism of his half-smile, and the general impression of elongated, sunken, brooding features. Craig had proved a fine subject, and an easy, disarming talker. He and Harriet had been married five years, and enjoyed a honeymoon trip abroad, from Scandinavia to Italy, and she had suffered a miscarriage in the East, and they had lived on Long Island for five years, where Craig had written the first two novels. Once, on a trip to Madison, where his wife’s younger sister, Leah, had been attending the university, they had passed through Miller’s Dam. Later both had spoken, in accord, of buying a house in such a small, peaceful town and settling down there, someday, someday when there was an advance large enough. Both had continued living in New York, chafing at the compressed, tumultuous existence-‘millions of people being lonesome together’, Craig had said, quoting Thoreau-for the Craigs had both been Midwest-born-and then Craig’s second book had won sufficient approval from his publisher to guarantee a sizeable advance on his third idea. Without a moment’s hesitation, Andrew and Harriet Craig had moved to Miller’s Dam.

Remembering now that first interview, Lucius Mack recalled that Craig had been a fascinating conversationalist. Most men have one or two specialties, at most a handful of interests, and display vast ignorance of and disinterest in everything else. Not Andrew Craig. He had shown himself to be interested in literally everything, and the custodian of the most bizarre bits of knowledge. In that first interview, in his lively manner, he had discussed the French Jesuits who had sponsored Father Marquette, the trajectory of Three-fingered Brown’s curve ball, the sexuality of Alexander Hamilton’s mistress, Mrs. Maria Reynolds, the peculiar genius of Charles Fort, the joys of pyramidology, and the reasonableness of Kazentsev’s speculations that the meteoric explosion on the Tunguskaia River of Siberia in 1908 had actually been a nuclear explosion from outer space.

Eight years ago, it had been. And now?

Standing in the middle of the room, Lucius Mack gazed down compassionately at the figure of his friend sprawled on the bed, watched the heavy breathing and the deep, deep slumber. Except for the gouged lines of dissipation beneath his eyes and beneath his cheekbones, Craig seemed as he had seemed then, although now he was thirty-nine. Despite the fact that he was sixteen years the author’s senior, Mack felt at one with him, felt a contemporary with no bridge of years between them. Perhaps they had found each other good companions, after that first meeting, because they were alike, their minds galloping the earth and the surrounding universe, and unlike the others who were time-bound and narrow earth-bound by the price of hogs and corn and prairie isolationism and Better Farming.

Almost weekly, in the early times, Craig had ambled into the newspaper office to have a drink or two with Mack and talk and listen and talk. But after Craig’s time of trouble, after the injury, and the breaking down, and the surrender, Mack had taken to calling on his friend four or five times a week. This was usually in the afternoons, before Craig had become too drunk. They would lounge in the upstairs room, the bottle between them, Mack taking one to Craig’s six, and converse as of old, perhaps more recklessly, more fancifully with the heavier drinking. Sometimes, in a desultory way, they would play gin rummy, too. It had been this way for almost three years, and these days ended, during Craig’s bad periods, exactly as this day had ended.

Lucius Mack sighed, and collected his packet of cigarettes from beside Craig’s blue humidor. He heard Craig stir fitfully on the bed, and watched unconcerned. Craig was on his side now, one lank arm outstretched, his legs curled, and he was sleeping hard. Mack wondered if he dreamed. He hoped not, not now, not these years.

Mack let himself out of the room, noiselessly, and went carefully down the two turnings of wooden stairs. The living-room was fully lit against the bleak day, and Leah Decker, her face pinched in the familiar disapproval she always showed at this hour of the day, sat in a corner of the deep plaid sofa, industriously knitting.

With Mack’s entry into the room, she looked up with her eyes. ‘How is he?’

‘Sleeping.’

‘How much did he drink this afternoon?’

‘Oh, a few fingers, no more.’

‘I bet!’

Patiently, Mack struck a match and put it to the cigarette between his lips. He inhaled and blew out the smoke, and dropped the match in a nearby ceramic tray. ‘Look, Leah,’ he said without exasperation, ‘I’ve told you time and again-Andrew’s had a bad time, been through a bitter time, and this is his way of escaping it. He’s not like all other men. He’s a creative person, sensitive as can be-’

‘That doesn’t give him licence to behave like Edgar Allan Poe. Even if he’d proved he is Poe. It’s wrong-drinking all day, passing out every night-’

‘Come now, Leah, you know this thing goes in cycles-’

‘It’s getting worse,’ she said flatly. ‘It used to be two weeks on and two weeks off. Now it’s three weeks on and one week off.’

‘We have to endure it for now. When a man’s lost his wife, the shock-’

Leah put her knitting aside. ‘He killed Harriet with his drinking, and now he’s trying to kill himself. I hate being the witness to two murders.’ She stood up and massaged one hand with the other, turning her back to Mack, and then turning again to face him. ‘Heavens, Lucius, don’t you think I know how it feels? She was my sister-just as much as she was his wife. But you don’t see me, or anyone else, carrying on like this, liquoring up day and night, half the time unconscious from that and sedatives and depression. Harriet was a terrible loss for me, too, but after proper mourning, and thinking about it, I found myself. My God, it’s been three years. Life goes on. On and on. Life is for the living. There’s little enough of it, anyway. We’ll all have our turn, you bet.’ She stopped. ‘Will you have some coffee?’

They always had coffee together, after his visits to Craig. He bobbed his head. ‘Yes, sure, if you don’t mind.’

Leah Decker went into the old-fashioned kitchen, and Mack followed her, finding a chair at the table. He traced the floral design painted on the maple table, and he watched Leah brewing the coffee. She was a handsome woman, he reckoned, by any standard. She might not grow old well, but she was handsome now. She had Harriet’s Slavic features, except that they were tighter, more pointed, and her hair, which was brown, not dark blonde, was swept back tight and bunned in the back. Her body was taller, straighter than Harriet’s had been, and pleasing although more rigid and unyielding. She had none of Harriet’s gaiety or humour. She was practical, sensible, and-too often recently-querulous. Mack forgave her the last, because her lot was not an easy one. After the accident, she had come to help out, to bury Harriet and to nurse Craig, and she had simply stayed on. For all her faults, she was selfless in her devotion to Craig, and always softer and more feminine in his presence. Her harder side, her complaints, were reserved for others.

Mack knew that her life here was lonely. Craig was too rarely sober or mobile or sociable. And Mack understood that things could not be easy, financially. By now, Craig’s meagre savings must have dwindled away, leaving innumerable debts, and there was little hope of salvation. Craig had one hundred pages of a new novel, Return to Ithaca, but only a handful of these pages had been added in six months. Briefly, there had been an opportunity for a teaching job at Joliet College, four miles north of Miller’s Dam. A solemn, scholarly literature professor at the college, Alex Inglis, a frustrated writer in his fifties deeply devoted to Craig’s books, had pulled strings to bring his idol into the college as an instructor. This high-hope had dissolved when, to impress the Board of Regents, Inglis had arranged a literary lecture by Craig, at Joliet, and Craig had appeared too drunk to go on.

The Craig household still survived, Mack was certain, because Leah was economical and husbanded what was left of Craig’s past. Royalties from paperback editions of the novels, and foreign editions, and television adaptations, dribbled in, and Leah made the most of them. Also, she helped keep alive Craig’s limited cult throughout the country, and interest in his old work, by co-operatively corresponding with every fan and critic, by encouraging them to write about Craig and by bedevilling Craig’s despairing agent to press continually for reprints and new editions of his four books. Thus, she maintained Craig-and herself-above water. But for how long?

And why? The last question was the one that interested Lucius Mack. Why had Leah Decker, an eligible woman no more than thirty-four, dedicated herself to this existence? Was it that she was sorry for her brother-in-law? Was it that nearness to a once promising literary figure enriched a potentially drab life? Was it masochism? Or was it-and Mack had often speculated on this point-that she secretly wanted her sister’s husband, the future security and prestige he might provide, even his love? Mack wondered.

‘It’ll just be a minute,’ Leah called over her shoulder, as she took the rolls from the oven.

‘No hurry.’

Watching Leah, Mack wondered about another thing, too. Whenever Mack or other close friends were present, and Craig was not, Leah always decried her brother-in-law’s drinking. She played Carrie Nation, and evoked sympathy and admiration. Yet, Mack wondered. Somehow, there were always fresh bottles of Scotch in Craig’s room, and Craig did not buy them. Somehow, Craig drank before Mack saw him, and after. Mack wondered if Leah actually, in subtle ways, encouraged Craig’s drinking, or at least went along with it, to reduce his potency as a man. In this way, she could have him dependent on her as part nurse, part mother, part wife. Without drink, as once he had been, Craig might leave Miller’s Dam, depart from the place and Leah’s person, and she would be left without him, in a void and an old-maid. Still, there were arguments against such behaviour on Leah’s part, such as the fact that his insobriety meant his inactivity as an artist, and this impoverished him and, in turn, Leah. What was the truth about Leah? Mack revelled in these old man’s games.

She brought two cups of steaming coffee to the table, and then bringing the heated rolls and butter, she sat down across from Lucius Mack.

Stirring sugar into her coffee with her spoon, she said, ‘You know, I’ve tried to talk to him several times these last weeks. I mean, about trying to write a little every day-do something.’ Her eyes stayed on the spoon. ‘I wish you’d speak to him sometime. He might listen to you.’

Mack poured cream in his coffee, and then sipped his drink. ‘We’ve discussed it many times, Leah. What do you think we talk about up there? A good day’ll come, I’m positive. Right now he’s caught up in this pattern of self-destruction. But at the core, he’s too tough to kill himself. He is a writer. He has a mind. One day, these factors will dominate him. One day, he’ll wake up from all of this, and the bottle will be a stranger, and he’ll say to himself-Christ, where have I been? And he’ll say to himself-it’s my turn to live again. And then, he’ll be like he used to be.’

‘Sometimes it never happens. Poe-’

‘Nonsense. Forget Poe.’

‘Well, I’m waiting for that day. Three years is an awfully long time.’ She pushed the plate of rolls toward Mack. ‘Have some. You need filling.’

As if to punctuate Leah’s dietary advice, the wall telephone in the kitchen rang.

There were few calls these days, and Leah was quick to reach the telephone and unhook the receiver. She listened a moment, and, disappointed, told the party to hold on, then held the receiver towards Lucius Mack.

‘For you,’ she said. ‘Jake Binninger at the office.’

Mack got to his feet and went to the telephone. He wedged the receiver between his shoulder and his chin, as was his habit, and listened.

Seated at the table again, Leah, absorbed in her own thoughts, paid no attention. Sipping her coffee, she almost spilt it when she heard Mack’s sudden exclamation. She looked up surprised, to see his creased face opened wide and red with pleasure.

‘Are you sure, Jake?’ he was pleading into the telephone. ‘It’s not a hoax? Read it to me again-the whole thing-slowly-now go ahead.’

Only the hum of the refrigerator could be heard, as Lucius Mack pressed against the telephone, and Leah observed him with curiosity.

Mack broke the silence. ‘All right-that’s enough-what a day! Now, look here, Jake, you just drop everything and hop over, and bring all that with you.’

He hung up with a bang and spun around.

‘Leah, it’s sensational-the news just came through-Andrew’s gone and won the Nobel Prize for literature!’

Her face was puzzled. ‘What do you mean? I don’t understand-’

Mack took her by the shoulders, half lifting her to her feet, and shaking her in his enthusiasm. ‘The Nobel Prize-!’

‘In Sweden?’ she asked blankly.

‘The biggest in the world. Over fifty thousand smackers for Andrew Craig!’

‘Explain it, Lucius. I don’t know. I’m all mixed up.’

‘You know-you know-the annual award to the best author on earth-and they’ve just announced it from Stockholm -they’ve voted it to Andrew.’

‘Oh, my-my-’ She was almost speechless. ‘Is it true?’

‘Jake got it on the Associated Press wire. He checked. The telegram from Stockholm just came into the office on Main Street.’

‘What do we do?’ she asked helplessly.

‘We get Andrew on his feet, and damn quick. AP and UPI are flying their men in from Chicago. Time, Life, and Newsweek are, too. They’ll all be here tonight. And the Milwaukee and Madison papers are sending down special correspondents. They’ve all checked with our office. This is news, Leah-this is big!’

‘But Andrew-he can’t-’

‘He can and will,’ said Lucius Mack. Grabbing Leah by the elbow, he began to propel her out of the kitchen, when suddenly he halted. ‘No, wait. You set up gallons of hot, black coffee, while I wake him. We’ve got to get him partly sober!’

Leah moved her head mechanically in assent, and pointed herself back towards the kitchen. Mack ran through the living-room raced up the staircase, and burst into Craig’s bedroom.

Andrew Craig lay flat on his back now, arms stretched wide, filling the bed as if crucified. His respiration was nasal and difficult.

Catching his breath, Mack crossed to him, and sat on the side of the bed. ‘Andrew-Andrew-’

There was no response. He took Craig by the shoulders and shook him.

‘Wake up-’

Craig wriggled, and then he opened his bloodshot eyes. He searched Mack’s face, trying to orient himself, learning finally who he was, and who was above him, and where he was, and in what condition. He licked his parched lips.

‘What’s going on?’ he muttered. ‘For Crissakes, leave me alone-’

He turned his head on the pillow, but Mack took his face in his hands and brought it back before him.

‘Andrew, this is important-’

‘I gotta sleep it off-’

‘No, listen-now, listen good, man-we’ve just got a flash! You’ve won the Nobel Prize-the real McCoy, I’m not kidding! They cited The Perfect State and Armageddon and your writings in support of “humanitarian ideals”. Andrew, it’s true, and there’s fifty thousand bucks that goes with it!’

Andrew Craig lay unmoved as a cadaver, eyes open, staring past Mack, letting the communication find transmission through his fogged brain.

Mack took his friend by the shoulders again. ‘Did you hear what I said, Andrew?’

‘I heard.’ He did not budge. ‘It’s a gag, isn’t it?’

‘Every word true. Jake Binninger’s on the way from the office with the telegram and AP lead. In a couple of hours, half the press of the country’ll be here!’

‘Why me?’ Craig asked suddenly. ‘I haven’t had anything out in four years-’

‘I don’t know why-I don’t know how-I only know it’s happened. Old Zeus has come down from Olympus and crowned his man. Andrew, do you know what this means-what day this is? This is the day you’ve become a Nobel Prize winner-joined the rest of the big ones-made the majors!’

‘I can’t think of what to say.’

‘You’d better, and fast. You’re going to be doing a lot of talking-to the whole world-tonight.’

‘Lucius, I’m drunk.’

‘We’re going to make you sober. Leah’s in the kitchen now.’

‘What did she say?’

‘She lost her faculty of speech.’

‘I’m glad for her.’ He tried to prop himself on an elbow, groaned, bringing his hand to head, and dropped back on the pillow. ‘Wow. I really hung one on. Lucius, I can’t get up. Lemme sleep a little.’

‘No. Definitely not. You’re no more Miller’s Dam. Now you belong to the ages. Up.’

Mack took Craig’s arm and pulled, and Craig pushed, and was abruptly upright, but in agony. He swung his legs off the bed. Mack knelt and slipped the moccasins on to Craig’s feet. ‘There.’

‘Do I have to dress?’

‘I don’t think so. You’re a famous author now. Nobody gives a damn how you dress. Only I want you to look sober. Better throw some water on your face and comb your hair.’

Grumbling, Craig managed to stand up, holding his head between his hands as if to keep it screwed on his neck. Setting one foot hesitantly before the other, he tottered forward and disappeared into the bathroom. After a brief sound of running water, he emerged, better groomed, but still in agony.

‘I dunno, Lucius. I see three of you, and all look like Simon Legree. The bed is now twin beds, and I want to sleep in both of them.’ Shakily, he took his briar pipe from the table, and then the worn, half-filled pouch. He considered Mack a moment. ‘The Nobel Prize, you said. What does that mean?’

‘I told you. Over fifty thousand dollars.’

‘No-that’s good, but-what do I have to do?’

‘Well, there’s the press tonight. And in three weeks, you go to Stockholm -’

‘ Stockholm? I could never make it.’

‘Sure you can.’

‘No. I did it once-but that was with Harriet,’ he said almost inaudibly. ‘Now, I’m alone.’ He made a move to leave the room, but his knees buckled, and he snatched at Mack and held. His grin was sickly. ‘Guess I need a collaborator, Lucius. Help me down.’

They descended the staircase and progressed through the living-room slowly, and, finally, they reached the kitchen. Jake Binninger had just arrived, his sheepskin coat wildly misbuttoned. He was wiping the thick lenses of his spectacles, as he watched Leah read the telegram and teletype dispatch he had just delivered to her.

Andrew Craig’s entry into the kitchen brought Jake Binninger across the room in two leaps. He grasped Craig’s limp hand and pumped it. ‘Mr. Craig, this is wonderful! I’m proud to know you! A million congratulations!’

‘Thank you, Jake.’

Leah had held back. As the reporter stepped aside, she came forward. She went up on her toes and brush-kissed Craig on the cheek.

‘I’m happy for you,’ she said.

‘Thanks, Lee.’

‘Here’s confirmation.’ She handed him the telegram and teletype message.

Craig’s hand shook as he accepted the sheets, and groped for and found the nearest kitchen chair. He lowered himself carefully into it.

‘You smell like a brewery,’ she said to Craig. ‘That’s not right-in your position. I want you to drink black coffee, lots of it-’

He was reading the telegram. ‘Not now,’ he said absently.

‘And that getup,’ she went on. ‘A Nobel Prize winner in a T-shirt, cords, and dirty moccasins-they’ll be taking your picture-’

Lucius Mack, still in the kitchen entrance, interrupted. ‘I told him it was all right, Leah. It’s what they expect of an author.’

‘They expect dignity.’ She turned to Craig and her tone softened. ‘Please, Andrew-’

‘Lee, I couldn’t climb those stairs again. And if I could, I’d never come down.’ He dropped the telegram and teletype message on the table. ‘I guess it’s official. But I don’t know about Stockholm.’ He looked up at his sister-in-law pleadingly. ‘Lee, I can’t get through this evening without some kind of pick-me-up. There’s a bottle in the cupboard.’

Leah refused to move. ‘Black coffee,’ she said.

‘Awright, dammit, make it coffee then-anything.’

As Leah went to the stove, the wall telephone rang. She had the percolator in her hand, and nodded to Jake Binninger, who jumped to answer the telephone.

It was a long-distance call from Craig’s publisher in New York, and this was their first contact in a year. The publisher’s congratulations were hearty. He had good news for Craig. Tomorrow, work would begin on a de-luxe omnibus containing three of Craig’s four novels-‘we’ll use the old plates, thinner paper, and this time, illustrations’-and it would be called ‘the Nobel edition’ and be expedited to catch the spring list.

The publisher, who had long before written off Craig, the advance on the next novel, and the next novel itself, was now eager to know if Craig had resumed writing. ‘If you mean, have I stopped drinking, the answer is no,’ Craig said harshly. The publisher treated his reply as a joke. He reiterated his faith in Craig. Tangible proof of this would be a cheque going into the post within a week, an advance against the omnibus and an additional advance on the new novel. He was proud that his house was associated with a Nobel Prize winner. He hoped to see Craig before the Stockholm trip. Craig remained noncommittal and, as soon as possible, hung up. ‘Bastard,’ he muttered. Leah admonished Craig. The publisher had every reason to have behaved as he had, before and now. How would Craig have felt, in the publisher’s shoes, towards a writer who took money and did not write? Craig’s good humour returned briefly. ‘I revise my comment,’ he said. ‘Poor bastard.’

Before he could leave the telephone, it rang again. This long-distance call was from Connecticut, and it was Craig’s literary agent, with whom he had been out of personal touch for months, but to whom Leah constantly wrote. Morosely, Craig listened to the faraway effusions and good wishes. The agent also had news. There had been three calls from motion picture story departments in New York, tentative feelers on Hollywood jobs after Craig came back from Sweden. Apparently, all of them wanted Craig, but also, they all wanted to know about his health. Craig was more amused than irritated. ‘Tell them,’ he said, ‘I’ll work for them for five thousand dollars and five cases of Ballantine’s a week.’ The laughter in Connecticut was uncertain.

Ten minutes later, just as Craig had finished his cup of coffee and Leah was pouring him more, there was a third long-distance call, this one from Boston. Craig took the receiver from Jake Binninger, and found himself connected with the most renowned lecture manager in the business. Unlike the others, he was a brusque and forthright man. ‘This Nobel Prize,’ he told Craig, ‘makes you a saleable commodity, now. We can book you for a year solid-women’s clubs-the chicken-à-la-king circuit-at a gross of a hundred thousand dollars. Our commission is half of that. The rest is yours, clear. We pay all expenses, routing you, travel, hotels, food, publicity. It’s yours, if you want it, on one condition.’ Craig’s voice was edgy, as he asked the condition. ‘Women’s clubs are touchy,’ the lecture manager said. ‘Our deal is we deliver our literary people sober. I heard you’re on the booze. Is that true?’ Craig decided that he liked this man. ‘Yes, it’s true,’ he said frankly. The manager was matter-of-fact. ‘Well, if you stop, let me know. Anyway, congratulations. You’re way up there now.’

Back at the table, Craig felt as if his last energy had been suctioned out of him. He could not assemble his thoughts. He drank the second cup of hot coffee, as the others watched him.

‘How do you feel?’ Lucius Mack asked.

‘Lousy. Half drunk, half hung over. Do you think this is the way Ulysses S. Grant felt at Appomattox?’

The doorbell chimes sounded. There was someone outside.

Leah wrung her hands nervously, and started for the door. Lucius Mack blocked her way. ‘Wait a minute.’ He touched Craig’s shoulder. ‘What do you say, Andrew, if it’s the out-of-town reporters? Can you make it?’

‘No,’ said Craig.

‘Okay.’ He spoke to Leah. ‘If it’s the press people, stall them. Say he’s got fever, the flu, and maybe they can see him in the morning. Meanwhile, tell them I’ll be glad to take them out and give them a fill-in, colour, background, et cetera. Have you got it straight?’

‘If you’ve handled Andrew Craig for three years, you can handle anybody,’ she said briskly, and was gone.

Mack studied Craig for a moment. The author had one hand over his cup of coffee, and he swayed gently in his chair, eyes closed. Mack beckoned to Jake Binninger.

‘Jake,’ he said, ‘this is a big story for us and all the papers we’re stringing for. Now, you get yourself down to the library and dig up all the Nobel data you can find, and take it back to the office and bone up fast. Soon’s Andrew can talk, I’ll get what I need from him. Funny, how long you know a man, and you don’t know his vital statistics. I don’t even know where he was born.’

‘ Cedar Rapids,’ said Craig from the table.

‘Well, see, I didn’t know,’ said Mack. He returned to his reporter. ‘Now, you go out the back there and get on it, and I’ll catch up with you later.’

As Binninger left by the rear door, Mack strained to hear the voice at the front door. He waited apprehensively, and then he heard the pad of footsteps on the carpet. Leah appeared, and she was followed by Alex Inglis, the Joliet College professor. Inglis, his Anglo-Saxon face ruddy from the cold, and his expression frozen into permanent awe, entered the kitchen as he might have entered Count Leo Tolstoy’s study at Yasnaya Polyana.

‘It wasn’t the press at all,’ Leah was saying to Craig. ‘It’s Alex Inglis, from the college-’

Craig opened his eyes and acknowledged his admirer with a blink. Hastily, awkwardly, in his heavy black overcoat and muffler, Inglis sat in the chair opposite his idol.

‘I can’t tell you how thrilled we all are,’ Inglis said with reverence. ‘The entire campus is agog. Imagine, a Nobel laureate under our very noses-’

‘Thank you,’ Craig murmured.

‘So few American authors have been honoured,’ Inglis continued. ‘Sinclair Lewis, Pearl Buck, Eugene O’Neill, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Stearns Eliot-if you would consider him an American-John Steinbeck, and now, Andrew Craig.’

Craig, showed no reaction, and Inglis looked up for Leah and Mack to endorse his enthusiasm, and then he continued pedantically, ‘Think of it. Mr. Craig is now in the Nobel company of Kipling, Rolland, Anatole France, Thomas Mann, Galsworthy, Churchill-’

‘An’ Gjellerup an’ Pontoppidan,’ muttered Craig. ‘Know that? Those Joes won it in nineteen-uh-seventeen. Call me Gjellerup an’ shake well before pronouncing.’

‘Please-’ said Leah.

Inglis was confused. ‘Mr. Craig, aren’t you well?’

‘Professor Inglis, I’m drunk.’

‘Well, uh, I can’t blame you-no, indeed not-the award does call for celebration.’ He swallowed hard. ‘I came down here, primarily, to congratulate you-’

‘Pardon me,’ said Craig. ‘You’re a good fellow, Inglis.’

‘-but also to relay some additional good news. I was with the head of the Board of Regents when all of this happened. I have his permission to tell you this. We have received a sizeable endowment to enlarge-immensely enlarge-the Midwestern Historical Society, and it will operate quite independently of the college. This should be completed by summer. There will be an opening for a curator-rather like the position Archibald MacLeish filled in the Library of Congress-and it would be ideal for you, Mr. Craig. It would be ideal, because it would actually be an honorary position, one constituted to give the Society prestige and attract gift collections. The actual workaday tasks would be performed by a staff of librarians. Except for attending one meeting a month-oh, and perhaps making an occasional speech somewhere on our behalf-you would be independent and free to work on your own novels at home. The honorarium would be fifteen thousand per annum. Of course, I know with all that Nobel money-’

‘Won’t be any Nobel money by the time it’s January,’ said Craig, who had squeezed his eyes to bring Inglis into better focus. ‘That’s a good offer.’

‘I’m delighted you think so. The Board of Regents is highly favourable to your appointment. They are most impressed with the Nobel matter. Of course-’ He hesitated, and Craig, sobering for an instant, eyed his visitor keenly.

‘Of course-what?’

‘The Board is willing to make the appointment formally after the Nobel Ceremony-I mean, after you’ve received the honour and made your address.’

‘Why not now, Inglis? Are they afraid I might disgrace them-have another fiasco-like the time I was supposed to lecture up at the college? I bet those greybeards don’t think I’ll make the Nobel Ceremony or get on the Stockholm stage sober. They’re afraid of a scandal, aren’t they?’

Inglis seemed to retreat into his great overcoat, suffused with embarrassment. ‘It’s not that, Mr. Craig-’

‘What else can it be, dammit? I’m on probation. Go to Stockholm, Craig, stand up before the world, display academic dignity, show that you are purged, cleansed, reformed-and come back to us, not only with your laurels, but a new man. I’m on probation. That’s it, isn’t it, Inglis?’

‘Stop badgering him, Andrew,’ said Leah. ‘He’s doing his best. He’s on your side, like everyone else. They just expect more of you now, that’s all.’

‘Well, I’m me,’ he said belligerently. His eyes found Inglis again, and his mood mercurially changed. ‘It’s a good offer, and thank you, and thank them. Maybe I’ll earn it-but don’t put money on me, don’t do that.’

‘Mr. Craig, I know it will work out. You’re a great man. I read The Perfect State eight times. I know you won’t disappoint anyone in Stockholm.’

Craig had closed his eyes, and was rubbing his forehead. He was not listening.

Leah signalled Inglis, and he quietly rose and tiptoed out of the kitchen after her. Mack followed them.

Andrew Craig was alone.

He felt a thousand years tired, and his head felt stuffed and heavy, and his deadened, sodden nerves begged for unconsciousness. He circled his arms on the table, and laid his head in his arms, and tried not to think of the turn of events. But his fatigued brain did not sleep. He thought: I was only trying to die slowly, peacefully, unobtrusively, like a forgotten old plant in the shade. He thought: Why did those Swedes expose and humiliate me by forcing me to die in public? He thought: I’m an immortal now, in the record books, but I’m as sickeningly mortal as I was when I awakened this morning. He remembered George Bernard Shaw’s sardonic remark, when he received the Nobel Prize at sixty-nine: ‘The money is a life belt thrown to a swimmer who has already reached the shore.’ He thought: Only in my case I’d rewrite it… a life belt thrown to a man after he’s drowned. He thought: Nothing.

Andrew Craig had passed out.