(1961) The Prize Read online

  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 r
eturn 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.