(1961) The Prize

by Irving Wallace

  As she listened to the predicament of a fellow laureate, and to the Count’s soothing but firm replies, Denise once more examined the latest development in her own predicament. Without hesitation, she would have traded predicaments with Craig. His were minor, and of easy solution. He need only fortify himself with aspirins, or something stronger, and mumble a few words before two meetings of students, throw the lecture open to questions, answer them briefly, and he was done with it. Her own dilemma was far more pressing, and there was no easy solution.

  Before yesterday’s sightseeing tour, and after, in the fleeting moments that they had alone, Denise had finally made it clear to Claude that if he dared to see Gisèle Jordan for so much as an hour, tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that, in Copenhagen, it would mean an immediate separation and divorce. And more than that, Denise had warned her husband, knowing his main vulnerability, his bourgeois fear of disgrace, she would make the separation a public matter through the press before the final Nobel Award Ceremony.

  Her threat had been delivered so passionately that Claude did not doubt her or attempt to conciliate her, as he had been doing, with vague promises of working out their problem in the future. He had vowed, invoked the name of the Lord, that there would be no assignation with his mannequin in Copenhagen.

  Yet, sitting here now—they had not had time on yesterday’s tour to visit the place where they had been voted their chemistry prize, and Jacobsson had informally invited them over for this morning—Denise felt no relief from or security in her husband’s fervent promise. She wanted a guarantee. She could conceive of none. He had proved before she had discovered the affair, and again following it, that the flesh was weak. The arrival of his young mistress tomorrow, in a location only an hour or two away, would be a temptation.

  Denise remembered the visit to Balenciaga, remembered the lithe ash-blonde with the high cheekbones and pouting lips and sensuous walk, and remembering this, she knew that Copenhagen might just as well be a room adjacent to their suite in the Grand Hotel of Stockholm. What bothered her was a hypothesis, with no scientific evidence to support it, that if her husband copulated with his mistress on this trip, in glamorous surroundings, their relationship would become permanent and unbreakable, and all Denise’s hopes would be in vain. Claude had given his word that this would not occur. Denise wanted not his word but a bond.

  She became aware that Jacobsson’s conversation with Craig was almost at an end. Apparently, Craig had come around and was ready to conform to his schedule. Jacobsson was reminding him of the place of his lectures.

  ‘Do you recall the situation of the Swedish Academy, Mr. Craig?’ Jacobsson was asking. ‘There was a large auditorium—the Stock Exchange Hall—right before we went into the voting-room. Well, that is where you will be taken for both addresses. I am positive you will not regret it. Many of those students are promising writers, and all are tremendously appreciative of advice from a great author. As to your remaining schedule, I shall send you another copy of the programme for yourself. There are other events you will have to remember to attend. We do not wish to overwhelm our honoured guests, but you can understand the demand for their presence. . . . Yes, any time, Mr. Craig. I am here to serve you. And thank you very much.’

  For want of anything better to do, Denise Marceau had listened attentively to the last of Count Jacobsson’s telephone conversation. During the last of it, something creative had begun to arouse itself inside her head, something useful, something hopeful. The exact moment that Jacobsson’s receiver had clicked into place, Denise had been struck by an idea. Quite by accident, Craig’s call to Jacobsson had given Denise Marceau what she had sought since yesterday—the guarantee that would keep her husband apart from Gisèle Jordan, at least for the critical present.

  Jacobsson had set the telephone to one side of his desk, and now he swivelled his chair towards the Marceaus.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he said, ‘and I am grateful for your patience. I can sympathize with Mr. Craig. There are days when our programme does seem heavy.’

  ‘I do not find it so,’ said Denise quickly. ‘I feel that when one is abroad little more than a week, one owes it to oneself and one’s hosts to put every moment to use.’

  ‘I wish everyone was as—’ Jacobsson began to say.

  ‘As a matter of fact, Count Jacobsson,’ Denise hurried on, ‘I do not think my husband and I have enough to do here. I am sure Claude agrees with me—’

  Taken unawares, Claude was too perplexed with her opinion to make any comment.

  ‘—and that was why I wanted to request a favour of you this morning,’ continued Denise to Jacobsson. ‘I should have brought it up the first day. Perhaps you will think it presumptuous.’

  ‘Anything, anything,’ said Jacobsson.

  ‘I notice by the programme, we have two unoccupied evenings in the next three days. There is the Hammarlund dinner tomorrow, and then the two free evenings. Also, there is one open afternoon. Claude and I would like something scheduled for those times. Nothing frivolous. Rather, appointments that would bring closer ties between us and your scientists in Scandinavia.’

  Jacobsson clucked his approval. ‘Most admirable of you, Dr. Marceau. I had turned aside many invitations tendered to you for fear that you might be exhausted.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Denise firmly. ‘We are eager to meet as many Swedish chemists and Nobel personnel as possible. You cannot keep us too busy.’

  Dimly at first, and now clearly at last, Claude perceived his wife’s strategy. Since he had had no intention of seeing Gisèle in Copenhagen—it had seemed unnecessarily risky when he had considered it in bed last night—there was no reason for Denise to build this cage of activity around him. It was wearisome and foolish. ‘Denise,’ he said quietly, ‘are you not being over-ambitious? I want to participate as much as you do. But I will not have you tax yourself to the limit.’

  Denise flashed her husband a hypocritical smile, and returned to Jacobsson. ‘Is he not considerate, Count? He has always been thus. It has made our collaboration possible.’

  Jacobsson had tried to understand the nuances of the exchange between the couple, but without further information, he could not have full understanding, and so he gave the lady the benefit of the doubt. ‘I shall contact the Royal Institute of Technology,’ he said, ‘and the Institute of Inorganic and Physical Chemistry at the University of Stockholm. They had been pressing for you to conduct a seminar. However’—he glanced at Claude Marceau’s weary face, and offered him a palliative—‘if you should have a change of heart, find the strain too much, I can always cancel the meetings I intend to arrange.’

  ‘We will not have a change of heart,’ said Denise firmly. ‘Inform us of our new schedule, and we will both comply.’ She opened her bag for a cigarette. ‘Enough of that. Before the telephone rang, you were speaking of the first chemistry award.’

  ‘Ah, yes, yes,’ said Jacobsson, relieved to be returned to a subject less controversial. ‘I was trying to brief you on the background of the chemistry award, before showing you the conference room where the Nobel Committee for Chemistry debated your candidacy this past year.’ He tilted back in his chair, his fingertips touching and hands making a pyramid on his chest. ‘As I was saying earlier, Alfred Nobel left one-fifth of the interest on his prize fund to the person or persons “who shall have made the most important chemical discovery or improvement”. That was all the guidance that he gave us. In 1900, the Academy of Science sent letters to ten institutions and to three hundred well-known scientists in every corner of the world, inviting them to make nominations for the first Nobel Prize in chemistry. Out of this, only twenty nominations were made and of these, eleven suggested the name of one man—Jacobus Hendricus van’t Hoff, of the Netherlands, who had founded stereo-chemistry, as you know. He became the first chemistry laureate. Our choice was universally praised.’

  Jacobsson was lost in thought a moment. ‘In those early years, we committed only one serious bl
under in chemistry. We neglected the American, Professor Willard Gibbs of Yale University.’

  ‘Gibbs was an absolute genius,’ agreed Claude. ‘I read his monograph, “On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances”, with complete absorption. However, you can have no shame in overlooking him. I am told that his fellow countrymen did not appreciate him either. One American scientist who visited our laboratory in Paris told me that when Gibbs died—in 1903, I think—his American colleagues and students hardly noticed it. They considered him an eccentric old man. The majority of condolences came from scientists around the world, who had read him and understood his worth.’

  Denise addressed Jacobsson. ‘Why did the Royal Academy of Science neglect him?’

  ‘He was too far ahead of his time, and no one here understood his abstractions,’ Jacobsson said simply. ‘As I told Mr. Craig yesterday, our judges are only too human. They make mistakes. Usually, though, they are right.’

  ‘Yes, usually they are right,’ said Denise. ‘Have any of your chemistry judges won the Nobel Prize?’

  ‘Professor The Svedberg was elected in 1926, most deservedly, and he has balloted on many awards. A remarkable man, Svedberg, a one-man faculty, library, student body, all condensed in a single brain. He spoke seven languages, read poetry in Latin, learned Spanish in two months before taking a trip to South America. We have had our share of geniuses. The annual balloting is in good hands.’

  ‘How do your judges determine if a certain candidate should be honoured in chemistry or physics?’ inquired Claude. ‘To my mind, there is often considerable overlapping.’

  ‘You have touched upon one of our major problems,’ agreed Jacobsson. ‘When such a decision has to be made, the chemistry and physics committees of the Academy of Science exchange their views and make an arbitrary judgment. I would guess that such a decision might have been made in 1944, when Dr. Otto Hahn was a candidate for discovering nuclear fission, which affected physicists everywhere and led to the atom bomb. But Hahn’s experiments were actually in chemistry, and so he received the chemistry award. I suspect that our chemistry judges are happiest when there is no overlapping, and they can vote for candidates whose findings are unquestionably in the chemical realm. Many such clear-cut decisions come to mind at once—Sir William Ramsay’s discovery of helium, Henri Moissan’s isolation of fluorine and adoption of the electric furnace and his production of artificial diamonds. Actually, in the case of Moissan, a majority of the Academy had favoured the Russian, Dmitri Mendeleev, for inventing the periodic system—but one minority judge impressed the others with Moissan’s versatility, and those artificial diamonds carried the day. Other clear-cut decisions? Richard Willstätter’s work, and later Hans Fischer’s, on chlorophyll, and, in 1960, Willard F. Libby’s atom time clock, which could tell the age of fossils fifty thousand years old, dating even the hair of an Egyptian mummy. Those are the chemistry awards our judges like the most.’

  ‘And you, Count Jacobsson,’ said Denise, ‘what do you like the most?’

  Jacobsson was startled, and then he smiled. ‘I concur with the majority. I am only an innocent bystander.’ He considered this a moment, and recollected his Notes, and then he added, ‘As a matter of fact, the 1957 medical award—which was a case of overlapping and might very well have been the chemistry award, instead—that one gave me a good deal of satisfaction, because it was deserving, and, as one advanced in years, I had profited by it. I am sure you know of Dr. Daniel Bovet’s discoveries. He was a Swiss who became an Italian citizen. For a while, I believe, he worked at your Institute in Paris.’

  Denise nodded. ‘Yes, shortly before our time.’

  ‘Bovet made three thousand experiments in four years. As a result, he produced the sulphurs, and the great anti-allergy drugs—anti-histamines, and synthetic curare to be used as a muscle relaxant in surgery, and so on. In your Paris, Bovet fell in love with the daughter of a former Premier of Italy—her name was Filomena Nitti—and he told the press, “I proposed immediately. It was a lightning chemical reaction.” After that, they worked together like the Curies, and Joliot-Curies, and yourselves. I think it is wonderful, a man and wife, to have so major a common interest.’

  Claude squirmed, and Denise glared at him, and the last was not lost on Count Jacobsson. Claude fished for his silver cigarette case, and Jacobsson, while mystified, sensed the ferment in the room.

  Instinctively, Jacobsson wanted this couple to be happier, to be drawn closer together. He wanted to inform them of how happy Marie Curie, the first woman to win the prize, had been to share it with her husband, and how sad she had been, when she arrived in Stockholm for her second prize, to come without him, for Pierre Curie had been killed in an accident in 1906. Jacobsson wanted to tell them how well another husband-wife team, Drs. Gerty and Carl Cori, who had won the medical prize for isolating enzymes, had got on together and were a family. But somehow, Jacobsson felt that this might not be the time for such examples. Yet there was his job and the dignity of the awards, and he must think of something to give the Marceaus subtle warning. Then he thought of Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie, who had shared the $41,000 prize in 1935, and with them he thought that he might make his point.

  ‘Indeed, you are in a select circle,’ Jacobsson told the Marceaus. ‘You are only the fourth husband-and-wife pair in our history to win the prize. We are sentimental about such awards, and the winners, with one exception, have made us proud.’

  ‘One exception?’ said Denise carefully.

  ‘I am thinking of your countrymen, Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie, who won the chemistry award for their discoveries in radioactive elements.’

  ‘What of them?’ asked Denise.

  ‘They earned the award for artificial radium, and they received it here in Stockholm, and we would give it to them again. But their subsequent history, after the prize, was—in some respects—unfortunate.’

  ‘They were a devoted couple,’ said Denise sharply, with an eye on her husband.

  ‘Oh, yes, yes, nothing like that,’ said Jacobsson hastily. ‘Indeed, they were heroes of the Second World War. Frédéric Joliot-Curie stole the world’s greatest supply of heavy water—then important in atomic research—from under the noses of the Nazis in Norway. He got it safely to England. And in France, despite the Gestapo, he organized eighteen underground laboratories to make incendiary bottles for the maquis. I have no doubt you know all that.’

  ‘Yes, we do,’ said Denise.

  ‘It was their activity after the war that most Swedes deplored,’ said Jacobsson. ‘Frédéric joined the French Communist Party. And Irène Joliot-Curie told an American visitor that the United States was uncivilized, and that the working-men should overthrow the government. I remember more that she said, for I have recorded all in my Notes. She told the American, “You are deliberately fomenting war. You are imperialists, and you want war. You will attack the U.S.S.R., but it will conquer you through the power of its idea.” I tell you, this caused much headshaking in the Swedish Academy of Science.’

  ‘Unfortunate,’ said Claude. ‘However, surely you judge by the scientific achievement of your laureates, not by their personal activities.’

  ‘True,’ said Jacobsson. And then, he added slowly, ‘Still, our laureates are so much looked up to, so widely respected, that when they commit scandals, we are unhappy—extremely unhappy.’

  The shaft, motivated by instinct and not information, hit its targets, Jacobsson was certain. For Denise regarded her husband coldly, and Claude avoided her gaze and lifted his heavy-set frame from the sofa.

  ‘I am eager to see the room where the chemistry awards are voted,’ announced Claude.

  Jacobsson rose. ‘I had better explain that the room you will see is not exactly where the balloting takes place. In this room, the Committee for Chemistry often holds the preliminary meetings that lead to the recommendation of the ultimate winner. The actual final balloting, ever since 1913, takes place in the session hall of the Royal Sw
edish Academy of Science building, located at Frescati just beyond central Stockholm.’

  Now the three of them walked through the Executive Director’s office into the corridor, and then into what Jacobsson called the conference room of the Nobel Foundation.

  ‘Here,’ said Jacobsson, as they stood inside the door, ‘is where the Nobel committee-men determined upon the two of you as the favourites for the prize in chemistry, and where the physics branch weeded Professor Stratman and several others out as the foremost candidates for the prize in physics.’

  The Marceaus surveyed the green room. It had none of the shine of a tourist showcase and none of the petrified appearance of archives. It conveyed the impression of a room in which living men did living work and did it frequently. Most of the conference room was filled by the table, its surface overlaid with leather, worn and beaten, and surrounded by ten chairs covered with oxhide. Directly across, overlooking the table, hung a large oilpainting of Alfred Nobel, seated, the work executed posthumously in 1915.