Prizes (40 page)

He was the
only
author.

All the usual collaborators’ names were relegated to the first footnote and prefaced by the demeaning platitude, “I owe my deepest thanks to …”

At first Sandy thought it was a bad dream. It was tantamount to discovering that the saintly Albert Schweitzer was a werewolf.

In a move without precedent, Gregory the fair, Gregory the altruist, Gregory the self-effacing, had taken sole and unique credit for what should not even have been called a team effort, but was really the fruits of Sandy’s own sweat and brains.

He suddenly felt dizzy and then desperately sick. He barely made it to the men’s room in time.

Fifteen minutes later, having composed himself sufficiently, he appeared chalk-faced in front of Greg’s secretary. “Where is he?” Sandy mumbled.

“I don’t know,” the woman replied, attempting to be offhand, but without sufficient conviction.

“Marie-Louise—you don’t have any experience at lying.” Sandy slammed her desk and demanded, “Now, tell me where he is.”

Frightened, she stammered, “He and Ruth are going to Florida for a few days. That’s all he told me.”

Sandy’s temper was swiftly reaching boiling point. “When? What airline?” he asked, browbeating her. “I
know you must have made the reservations. You always do.”

Marie-Louise glanced downward, partly to avoid his gaze and partly to check her watch.

“Delta at noon. He’s probably on his way there,” she answered, still unable to look at him.

Sandy checked his own watch, raced out the door, down the steps, and into the parking lot.

It was just after eleven, and the Callahan Tunnel was relatively quiet. He drove like a demon.

When he reached the Delta terminal, he simply abandoned his car and ran inside.

As Greg Morgenstern and his wife were arriving to join the other first-class passengers to board, he spied a figure hurtling toward them down the corridor.

He tried to hurry Ruth into the passageway.

Suddenly, a hand grabbed his shoulder and spun him around.

“Greg, you thieving sonovabitch,” Sandy cried out.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Morgenstern responded, cowering.

Sandy had never before lost his temper. But now he was so consumed with anger that he was shaking the older man and shouting, “You stole it. You stole my work.”

As airline personnel and a police officer rushed toward them, Sandy held him tightly and continued to demand, “Why, Gregory? Why?”

“Please try and understand,” Morgenstern pleaded. “It was like a stroke of madness. I’ve been playing second fiddle my whole life. And Sandy, whatever you may think, this project
was
my life. All I could see was the chance of getting honor, respect—instead of all those condescending backhanded compliments I’ve heard for thirty years. You’re young, Sandy, your time will come—”

This facile consolation cut the last thread of Sandy’s
self-control. “My time is
now,
” he insisted. “You should have given me credit.”

“Oh, shut up, will you,” Greg countered, matching fury for fury.

Then Sandy shocked even himself by unleashing a blow aimed at Greg’s head. Fortunately, it was deflected by a large policeman. Instantly, they were surrounded by uniformed figures.

“Now, what seems to be the trouble here?” the cop demanded in a Boston-Irish accent.

Sandy and Greg glared silently at one another. In the end, it was Ruth who rescued them.

“It’s just a family argument, officer,” she said, her voice strained. “My husband and I are on our way to Florida. This other gentleman is our son-in-law and …” Her verbal powers failed her.

She grasped her husband by the arm and led him off down the gangway toward the airplane.

Sandy stood rooted to the spot. Then he realized that he had been left in the “custody” of the various officials. He took a deep breath, scanned their faces and capitulated. “Like the lady said, it was just a family argument.”

Though he would not have believed it, the worst part of Sandy’s day was yet to come.

Judy’s reaction was the coup de grâce.

Indeed, the most painful discovery was the fact that, first and foremost, she was not really his
wife
as much as Greg’s
daughter.

She was furious at him. “You struck my father,” she repeated in a hysterical litany. “How could you dare even touch him?”

Sandy could not explain his own loss of control. Indeed, a very small part of him was ashamed of his behavior. But his greatest preoccupation was with the low blow that Greg had just dealt him.

“He stole what was rightfully mine,” Sandy insisted.

“You presumptuous bastard,” Judy shrieked. “Whatever you did was nothing compared to the years my father put in.”

“Jesus Christ, this has nothing to do with time. It has to do with brainwork. I ‘owned’ the best ideas—the ones that led to the solution. But even so, I would never have dreamed of not sharing the credit with him. He’s as much a common thief as a guy who mugs an old lady.”

“Stop it! Stop it!” she screamed. “I won’t let you talk about him that way!”

The fires of Sandy’s own temper were being stoked by indignation—and incredulity.

“I don’t believe this. You’re actually defending his dishonesty—his theft of my solution?”

“For God’s sake, Sandy,” she shouted back, “he earned it! I mean, he deserves recognition.”

“Dammit, I do too. Judy, there was room for another name on that article. What Greg did was patent an invention that was not completely his. I mean, the courts recognize intellectual property—and your father’s just robbed me of mine.…”

They fumed in silence for a moment, each waiting for the other to lash out.

Sandy was gradually coming to an agonizing realization.

He suddenly did not recognize the woman he had married.

“I’ll tell you one more thing,” he said quietly. “You can’t have it both ways anymore. You can’t be
his
daughter and
my
wife.”

“Good. I agree,” she hurled back.

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” he demanded.

“Isn’t it clear?” she answered, softly but sternly. “After what you did today, I don’t want to be married to you, Sandy.”

42
 

Isabel da Costa woke up one morning to find herself living face-to-face with harsh reality.

Throughout the first sixteen years of her life, Raymond had succeeded in cocooning her from intrusions and distractions. Indeed, that was the source of his greatest pride.

To the best of his knowledge she had never known pain, denigration, or hostility of any sort, although, to a large extent the secret talisman had been her precocity. But it was no protection from attacks on her intellect.

As Raymond rightly expected, the publication of her article on the Fifth Force had created a storm. But however magisterial her argument, it did not convince those scientists who had spent their working lives trying to prove precisely what she had demolished.

Pracht kept a respectful silence, but colleagues in universities all over the world did not feel any such noblesse oblige. If the girl was old enough to attack, she was old enough to
be
attacked.

For young Isabel, the articles published in the
International Journal of Physics
as well as in other distinguished periodicals were tantamount to hate mail. It was not merely that her adversaries were trying to refute her conclusions, it was the style in which she herself was referred to.

Some of the essays reeked bile. One went as far as to
sneer, “But what can one expect from a mind so young? She has not had time to learn her physics properly.”

Naturally she would be accorded space by the editors of these various publications to defend herself. But who could assist her?

Raymond could not really be of any help. In fact, un-wittingly, he increased her tension by voicing his worries. And Karl Pracht, who had so magnanimously allowed her to dig his scientific grave, could not be expected to help pour earth on it as well. Besides, he and his family were caught up in the complexities of moving their household across the American continent.

She felt isolated, except for what moral support Jerry—who was away at a tournament—could give her by telephone.

At the outset, the newspapers had once again trotted out the old stories about the Berkeley Child Prodigy and updated them. But this time they were not all patting a bright little girl on the head. Her antagonists had their own conduits to the press, who were more than willing to quote them when they spoke daggers.

Isabel was so busy formulating her counterattacks that she decided not to attend the ceremony to receive her master’s degree and thereby risk exposure to the media.

Indeed, the storm dissolved Isabel’s aura of infallibility and replaced it with one of controversy. She was now perceived as such an enfant terrible that some members of the Physics Department let it be known that under no circumstances would they supervise her doctoral dissertation.

But of course not all the reaction was negative. A good many scientists wrote to congratulate her on her achievement, and the journals printed many replies from distinguished physicists who were won over by her arguments.

Just prior to his departure for Boston, Karl Pracht invited Isabel to lunch at the faculty club. He could not
hide his astonishment—nor mask his displeasure—when he saw that Raymond had come along as well.

“With due respect, Mr. da Costa,” he said with exaggerated politeness, “this was supposed to be a meal for a student and her adviser.”

It suddenly dawned on Pracht that Raymond was desperately anxious to make sure that he did not divulge to Isabel anything of the unpleasant altercation that had taken place between the two of them. And realizing that he could never dislodge the adhesive father, Karl relented and asked his nemesis to join them.

The conversation was friendly, though delicately avoiding any mention of the Fifth Force debate. Over coffee, Karl revealed the principal purpose of his invitation.

“Isabel, I have a gut feeling that you’re going to find Berkeley a little less congenial from now on. Obviously, I’m pitching for my new team now, but I really think you should let me arrange that fellowship for you at MIT. I promise you’ll find somebody world-class to direct your thesis, or failing that, humble has-been that I am, I’ll do the job myself.”

Raymond listened in contemplative silence. Yet he could see on his daughter’s face a certain unmistakable reluctance, and knew when she told Pracht “We’ll think about it,” it was something she definitely did not want.

His instinct was confirmed when they walked out into the bright summer sunlight and Isabel did not say a word. Something made him suspect that although the youngsters had not seen one another, she was somehow tied to Berkeley by the
idea
of the presence of Jerry Pracht.

“I think he made a lot of sense, Isabel,” her father commented. Thinking to himself, not only is MIT the Olympus of science, but I’ve outmaneuvered the guy after all. Instead of having his son shipped to Cambridge, we can go there ourselves and leave him here.

He then remarked out loud, “I’d say if Pracht comes
up with a big enough offer, we should take it and go to greener pastures.”

43