(1961) The Prize

by Irving Wallace

  ‘Yes, in that sense it is true,’ Claude said, too quickly, too uneasily, suspecting danger and trying to avert it and keep the peace. ‘Six years ago—we were having lunch, with colleagues—a new paper on the female ovum was being bandied about. The talk turned to heredity—heredity control—’

  ‘—and I looked at Claude,’ interrupted Denise, determined to have the attention of the press, and concentrating on the Le Monde reporter, ‘and I said—I remember the very words this day—I said, “Suppose it were possible to preserve the living spermatozoa 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?” Those were my words, and that was our beginning.’ She turned sweetly to her husband. ‘Remember, dear?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said dully, ‘it was a fortuitous remark. It was then that I suggested—’ Ah, thought Denise, he is irritated. Good, good. ‘—that we look into the matter further.’ He turned to the reporters. ‘And we did, for six years, together.’

  Denise beamed at the rows of faces. ‘I could never have done it alone. My husband was wonderful. It was a work of devoted collaboration. There is a telepathy between us, you might even call it a mystique bond. I know what he thinks, he knows what I think, and we save precious time by these perceptions.’

  Claude shifted uncomfortably on the divan, and reached for his sherry on the end table, as the reporters bent their heads and scribbled on their pads.

  The Agence France-Presse man lifted his hand, and then posed the next inquiry. ‘Dr. Marceau,’ he asked Denise, ‘I wonder if you could clarify for all of us—not in scientific detail, necessarily—we are laymen—but clarify what your discovery is all about. Were you the first in this field or had others worked on the same problem?’

  ‘Now, that is two questions, but I will do my best with both of them,’ Denise replied with a charming smile. ‘Let us take the last one first. What made our discovery possible was the successful application of artificial insemination to humans. This was first attempted in London a century and a half ago. The greatest advance in artificial impregnation was made in 1939, by Dr. Gregory Pincus of America, Clark University, if I recall correctly. He transplanted the egg from the ovum of one female rabbit into another female rabbit, and an offspring was successfully produced. Now, despite religious opposition, and sometimes legal barriers, artificial insemination is widely practised. In America alone, I am told, there have been fifty thousand so-called test-tube children, that is, children conceived without intercourse. Once this artificial means of procreation was possible, and acceptable, the next step was—well, the step my husband and I took—controlled heredity.’ She turned to her husband. ‘Before I inveigled you into this field, Claude, how many others, would you say, were researching along the same lines?’

  Claude did not deign to look at her or reply directly to her. He addressed the Agence France-Presse man. ‘In France, our own Dr. Jean Rostand, back in 1946, kept a frog’s seminal cells alive. In London, a bull’s semen, treated with glycerine and carbonic snow, was kept alive. You must understand, sir, that the problem was to keep the male sperm from perishing, so that it could be transferred. In artificial insemination, the donor’s sperm was rarely more than two hours old. The problem was—how to keep this same human sperm alive not for two hours but two months or two years or two centuries, and still preserve its power to fertilize the female egg. The Dr. Pincus of whom my wife spoke, with Dr. Hudson Hoagland, both Americans, made remarkable experiments in this field. They thought it possible that a genius could sire a family of several hundred and do it a century after he was in his grave—by leaving behind him vitrified sperms. The hopes this opened for humanity were staggering. Our own Dr. Rostand remarked, “Under a system of artificial selection, the proportion of human beings of high quality would be bound to become greater—and, indeed, much greater—than it is in our time,” It was our problem to make this dream a reality, and I am proud that we have succeeded.’

  ‘And the means?’ repeated the Agence France-Presse man.

  ‘I promised to answer that,’ said Denise Marceau, deliberately taking over again. ‘After I convinced Claude it was more than a fancy—he is at heart a sceptic, like all fine investigators—he joined me wholeheartedly in tackling the problem of vitrification. We followed the leads of other geneticists—that is, applied glycerol to protect the sperm before freezing and later thawing. We found glycerol little more than sixty per cent effective. Only six out of ten human sperm cells survived this freezing at one hundred degrees below zero Fahrenheit. The problem that haunted us was to get a higher percentage of sperms to survive freezing, and to have them survive not a few months of cold storage but many years. After ceaseless trial and error—I suspect Claude wanted to throw up his hands many times, but I had a woman’s persistence, abetted by intuition, about the project—we finally discovered the compound that we call P-437—our private joke is that the P stands for patience—and our experiments have proved that we can keep a male sperm in storage, and alive in suspended animation, for more than five years, probably ten.’

  ‘Magnificent,’ said the Agence France-Presse man, writing furiously.

  ‘Doctor,’ the Svenska Dagbladet reporter called to her from the third row, ‘you originally suggested that the living spermatozoa of a Charlemagne or Erasmus could be implanted in a modern-day woman. Dr. Marceau, your husband, spoke of dead geniuses giving the world today newborn children, families of hundreds, from their frozen sperms. Do you honestly believe this will become a reality?’

  ‘I believe so,’ said Denise, flatly. ‘Now it is possible, at last. There is a practical obstacle, of course. It requires fifty million sperms for a single human artificial insemination. Most geniuses, unfortunately, are recognized when they are old, less fertile than in their youth, sometimes sterile or impotent in their last years.’

  ‘Mozart was a genius at six,’ said the Svenska Dagbladet reporter.

  ‘Voilà,’ agreed Denise. ‘And he lived until thirty-five. The perfect subject. Had our discovery been made in the eighteenth century, what a heritage the world might now have from its Mozarts.’

  ‘Did you entertain such notions during your six years of research?’ inquired the Reuters man who sat in front of Jacobsson.

  ‘Constantly,’ said Denise. ‘I am a scientist first, but also a woman and a romantic.’ She glanced playfully at Claude’s stern face. ‘My husband, perhaps to our advantage, is less tolerant of romantic fairy tales. His life is the test tube.’ She turned towards the Reuters man. ‘When we had almost succeeded, I was beside myself with my imaginings. And now that our work is a reality, I am as thrilled as before by the human possibilities. Consider. If our P-437 had existed in the sixteenth century, Anne Hathaway might have loaned your Shakespeare to the cause. Today Shakespeare’s actual sperms might be taken out of storage, thawed, and a dozen of your English ladies impregnated with them and in nine months these ladies would bear his children. Consider further. If our P-437 had existed in the last five hundred years, we would today have a storage bank containing the living reproductive sperms of Galileo, Pasteur, Newton, Darwin—Voltaire, Milton, Goethe, Balzac, Guy de Maupassant—Garrick, Casanova, Napoleon Bonaparte, Nietzsche, Benjamin Franklin—and tomorrow morning, I could go to this storage bank, remove and thaw the sperms of any of these geniuses, impregnate selected women in Sweden, England, America, or in my native France, and by next autumn, there would be delivered squealing sons and daughters spawned decades or centuries ago by Galileo or Goethe or Benjamin Franklin. Had we made our discovery earlier in our own lifetime, we might have in the storage bank the living sperms of Luther Burbank or Professor Einstein or Paderewski or, for that matter, Rudolph Valentino.’

  ‘Or Judas Iscariot,’ muttered the Die Weltwoche reporter from Zürich.

  ‘Oh, we need never take him out of the storage bank,’ said Denise. ‘Or we could thaw his sperms and throw them away.’

  ‘When do you
start collecting the sperms from our present day geniuses?’ asked the Associated Press man.

  ‘Not yet, not so soon,’ said Denise. ‘But perhaps soon enough. More work must be done, more experiments by others. Claude and I have finished our work. Others must carry on, find the limits. And then we will be ready.’

  ‘What new field are you going to enter into next?’ asked the Associated Press man.

  Denise demurely gestured towards Claude. ‘I prefer that my husband give that reply.’

  Claude was caught off guard. ‘I—I do not know what we will try next. We have some ideas, but it is too early—we shall see.’

  ‘Madame—that is, Docteur—Marceau,’ called the Reuters representative, ‘to return, for a moment, to your rather optimistic hopes about the value of storing the sperms of the genius—do you mind?’

  ‘Go ahead, please.’

  ‘I could not help but remember a well-known anecdote about George Bernard Shaw. One day, the wild, uninhibited Isadora Duncan suggested to him that they cohabit in order to produce a perfect child. “Think of it,” I believe she told him, “our child would have my beauty and your brains.” Shaw replied, “But suppose, my dear, it turned out to have my beauty and your brains?”’ Everyone in the room laughed, including Denise, and then the Reuters man added, ‘Well, Dr. Marceau, in the case of your sperms, what if the result were the other way around?’

  When the laughter subsided, Denise assumed a solemn demeanour. ‘Yes, I understand. It is really a serious matter. Of course, genius does not always, or even frequently, produce genius. Lincoln’s son, Robert Todd, did not automatically inherit the abilities of his illustrious father. And Lord Byron’s surviving daughter, Ada, what did she produce in maturity? A system for betting on horse-races that was a failure, and she died at thirty-six, shattered and deranged. On the other hand, John Adams, the second American president, gave the world John Quincy Adams, the sixth American president. And consider, also, Dumas père and Dumas fils. Here, genius was passed on. No doubt, it is a gamble. Yet controlled breeding, as applied to bulls and cows, has shown gratifying results in England. From the standpoint of modern eugenics, we can improve the human race by skilful mating of pedigreed human beings, men and women physically fit and of measured high mentality. Genius may not always be the result. Borrowing the heredity of Erasmus may not give us another Erasmus centuries later. But the odds would favour the possibility. Certainly, by using the sperms of brilliant men or physically healthy men, and implanting them in young women with the same characteristics, we will improve our chances of populating the world, one day, someday, with a superior people. There is no guarantee, but this is the hope, and for myself, I believe it is a promising one.’

  An aged waiter, in a white jacket, appeared with a tray crowded with glasses, some filled with sherry, the rest with whisky. He glanced at Denise, and she nodded, welcoming the respite.

  She accepted a whisky from the waiter, and settled back on the divan, pleased with herself. She watched him pass before the members of the press, and saw them taking drinks and whispering among themselves.

  Suddenly, she was aware that Claude had moved closer to her, and that his features revealed cold anger.

  ‘I see you have taken over completely,’ he said in a low, harsh shaking voice. ‘What in the hell are you trying to do to me?’

  It was a moment that she had fancied for weeks, and now she savoured it. She smiled at him with her lips. An American vulgarism came to mind, and she cherished it. She had first heard the vulgarism as the ending of an off-colour story told at a reception—months ago—by the intoxicated and raucous wife of a visiting chemist from Pennsylvania. Were she to abandon refinement, Denise told herself, how perfect could be her retort. At once, Claude’s brutal persecution of her filled her mind, and, at once, she thought, ‘Au diable!’ and abandoned refinement.

  Her lips still smiled. ‘What am I trying to do to you? Why, dearest, I am simply trying to do to you what your darling Balenciaga mannequin has already done.’ Her smile broadened, ‘I, too, am trying to screw you.’

  Delighted with Dr. Denise Marceau’s reversal of form, her sudden display of verbal pyrotechnics, Count Bertil Jacobsson used the interlude of the serving of refreshments to transfer his presence to the Stratman press conference progressing in the rear half of the hall, behind the series of screens.

  Finding an empty chair at the periphery of the gathering, Jacobsson was not surprised that the attendance here exceeded, by one-third, the conference that he had just left. Physics and literature, he had observed in past years, almost inevitably out-drew chemistry and medicine. He had always assumed that this was because physics and literature were more publicized and controversial, and therefore more comprehensible to the layman.

  What did surprise him, when he revolved slowly in his chair the better to observe the circle of journalists, was to find that he was sitting beside Carl Adolf Krantz.

  ‘Well, this is unexpected,’ he said in an undertone. ‘What brings you here? Are you writing for the newspapers? I thought you and Ingrid were happy to have the afternoon off.’

  Krantz, absently manipulating a crooked metal puzzle in his hands as he sat absorbed in the questions and answers, acknowledged his older colleague. He brought a finger to his lips to indicate that silence must be observed in this holy place. ‘I could not miss the opportunity to hear the great Stratman,’ he whispered.

  ‘How does he handle himself?’ Jacobsson wanted to know.

  ‘With understandable assurance,’ said Krantz. ‘But they plague him with nonsensical questions. Our Swedish reporters are becoming as foolish as the Americans.’ He returned his gaze to the front of the room. ‘Soon we will arrive at the essentials.’

  Looking from Krantz beside him to Professor Stratman almost out of sight in the recesses of a deep leather chair, Jacobsson was fascinated by the general similarity between his colleague and the Nobel laureate. Both were stunted men, almost dwarfish, like Charles Steinmetz, the electrical engineer, whom he had once met. Both, when seated, gave the impression of the human embryo curled within the amnion in the female womb. Both resembled round and wrinkled infants, incredibly advanced in age. This was the first and general impression—perhaps the one that unconsciously drew Krantz to his more celebrated counterpart—but, Jacobsson could see, the similarity dissolved when specific differences were considered at a second glance. Krantz, in his pinched suit, seemed the disapproving pedagogue; Stratman, in his baggy coat and trousers, seemed above criticizing or criticism. Krantz’s hair, dyed black, the porker features of his face, his sour mouth caught between moustache and goatee, gave one the feeling that here was disputer and complainant, analyzer and annotator, all but creator. Stratman’s outsized cranium, shiny red and almost hairless, his amused eyes all-seeing behind steel-rimmed bifocals, his nose as prominent as a Christmas tree decoration, the ready smile, gave one the feeling that here was genius so simple and assured and secure that it dwelt high above all mundane carpings and concerns and criticisms. Here was the originator. Here was the Maker. No wonder at Krantz’s reverence.

  Jacobsson tried to concentrate on the laureate as mere man, not Maker, and momentarily regretted that he had to subject such a one to the low curiosity of the press.

  How, he speculated, could a Stratman bring his lofty brain processes down from the rarefied summit to consider earthly matters of a telegram from Stockholm, a sea passage on a Swedish ship, a reaction to a Baltic community? Could Jacobsson have known the reality of the brain processes of the laureate, he would have had his answer and have been astonished.

  For Professor Max Stratman, folded into the leather chair, one hand rubbing the meerschaum pipe, legs comfortably crossed, had his mind on matters of less than cosmic interest. Earlier, replying to questions about his trip from Atlanta to New York to Göteborg, he had been reminded that for the first time since the end of the war he was in a foreign country, no more than two or three hours from his native land, the land of his
birth, and upbringing, and learning, and sorrow. Proximity evoked ancient memories: taking turns with Walther at the keyhole of the library for glimpses of the peasants his physician father treated in their country home; he and Walther running and skipping, beside his father, through the pungent grass, to the stable; Walther and Rebecca and the infant Emily—no, not infant, she had been older and hitting a rattle against the high chair—gathered about the table, to partake of the roast chicken, on Christmas Day when dinner was not lunch but dinner at noon, and he was there, glowing with pride in his family and with pleasure in the woollen muffler that Rebecca had knitted for him.

  His thoughts had turned to his Emily—could he have imagined then that she would be his Emily?—and now he fixed on her, once more, as he had with compulsive regularity since the arrival in Stockholm. It was for Emily that he had made this long, risky journey, or perhaps less for Emily than for Walther and Rebecca and the remembrance of that Christmas noon.

  Only after his arrival in Stockholm had Stratman authoritatively learned that the trip had not been necessary. The Nobel Foundation made occasional exceptions to the rule that their winners appear in person. He was told that when Ernest Hemingway won the literature prize, he had been recovering from a skull fractured and a spine broken in an African aeroplane crash, and he had been permitted to accept the $35,000 reward by post in Cuba. Had the Nobel givers known his own heart condition, they would, Stratman was sure, have granted him the same consideration as Mr. Hemingway. He decided for the tenth time, despite Dr. Ilman, that the trip had been worth the chance, rather than make public—to his colleagues and to Emily—his impairment.