Prizes by Erich Segal Read Free Book Online Page A

get back to sleep. I dreamed that I forgot my multiplication tables. I mean I couldn’t even do two times two. Dad got so angry that he made me pack and leave home.
    I wonder what it means.

6
 
ADAM
    After his return from Washington, Adam had wondered whether to tell Max about that final conversation with Hartnell. But his mentor had already been upset to learn that the man for whom he had compromised his principles was not, after all, the President of the UnitedStates. The fact that someone like the Boss had offered to help obtain him a Nobel, might stigmatize the prize forever in Max’s scrupulous estimation.
    In any case, whenever the Nobel had come up in casual conversation and someone suggested that Max had long ago earned it, he always commented dismissively, “Well, if it must come, let’s hope it’s not for a while. T. S. Eliot was right when he said, ‘The Nobel is a ticket to your own funeral. No one’s ever done anything after he got it.’ ”
    “In that case,” Lisl playfully called his bluff, “if the Karolinska Institute should telephone tomorrow, are you in or out?”
    “Well,” he continued to equivocate, “Did you know that some of their smorgasbords have more than twenty different kinds of herring? Not to mention smoked reindeer steak.”
    “Then by all means you have to accept,” Adam interposed, “if only for gastronomic reasons.”
    That round was over. The trio exchanged silent smiles for a moment, then Max said earnestly, “Anyway, they’ll never choose me—I don’t go to conferences. I don’t play the game.”
    Lisl beamed. At times like this he would only accept
her
reassurance. “Darling, granted you’re not a politician, but on rare occasions simply being a genius is enough for the Nobel Prize.”
    The evening continued with small talk—although in the Rudolph household no talk was really “small.” After a heated debate on the artistic virtues of Sarah Caldwell’s revival of Monteverdi’s
Orfeo,
Lisl brought out some more glasses of tea and asked casually, “Now that you’ve cured your mysterious patient, what are you whiz kids going to do for an encore?”
    “Lisl,” Max explained, “this lymphosarcoma was out of our line anyway. They were just borrowing our mice to test other people’s research. After all, the sign on my door does say ‘Immunology,’ and there’s no shortage ofautoimmune diseases to investigate. And of course we still have the ongoing pernicious anemia project.”
    “I know,” she countered. “But your lab is like a circus, and where you two choose to work is always the center ring.”
    “Don’t worry,” Max uttered with mock exasperation. “When we decide, you’ll be the first to know.”
    “No,” Max shouted, “I absolutely refuse—you’re a sadist!”
    “Come on, get in, it’s good for you. Remember, I’m a doctor.”
    “No—it’s insanity to make a normal person jump into freezing water at the crack of dawn.”
    Adam, treading water, continued to coax the distinguished professor to join him.
    “Listen, you did your medicine back in the Stone Age. They didn’t know that exercise was so important for your health.”
    “Very well,” the older man capitulated, “but I’m coming down the ladder.”
    As Max—no picture of grace—huffed and puffed through the water, his self-appointed trainer swam in the adjacent lane shouting encouragement.
    “Good going—the first ten laps are the hardest. How do you feel?”
    “Like an old fish,” he gasped as he struggled along.
    “Great. You’ve never seen an overweight fish, have you?”
    Afterward, as they sat in the locker room drying off, Max confessed, “I hate to admit it, but I actually feel wonderful. Now I only hope nobody from the lab saw me. I feel undignified without a tie.”
    “By all means bring one to the pool next time. Didn’t you notice those two lab technicians who waved at us?”
    “How could I tell what they were, they weren’t wearing white