Prizes

by Erich Segal

  THREE EXTRAORDINARY LIVES, THREE EXTRAORDINARY STORIES …

  Adam Coopersmith. He is that rare combination of brilliant researcher and caring physician. His floundering marriage explodes when he falls in love with another woman, jeopardizing a lifetime’s career. And then his own life is threatened.…

  Sandy Raven. A researcher on the cutting edge, Sandy’s devotion is matched only by his genius. Yet at the moment of his greatest discovery, he will experience his most profound betrayal—and the disaster that every scientist fears. Will he now abandon his dreams to pursue more worldly prizes?

  Isabel da Costa. A child prodigy, she is constantly pushed by her domineering father. Though she becomes a world-renowned physicist, all the adulation in the world cannot compensate for her lost childhood. In the end, she is torn between loyalty to her father and the young man who holds the key to her happiness … until a shocking revelation changes her life forever.

  Their stories make PRIZES a gripping, emotionally charged experience, a novel that proves once again that Erich Segal is the unsurpassed master of laughter and tears, tragedy and triumph.

  Ivy Books

  Published by Ballantine Books

  Copyright © 1995 by Ploys, Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Random House, Inc. for permission to reprint an excerpt from Babar and His Children by Jean de Brunhoff. Copyright © 1938 and renewed 1966 by Random House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.

  http://www.randomhouse.com

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 95-95305

  ISBN 0-8041-1427-7

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-5323-2

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  1: Adam

  2: Isabel

  3: Sandy

  4: Adam

  5: Isabel

  6: Adam

  7: Sandy

  8: Adam

  9: Isabel

  10: Adam

  11: Adam

  12: Isabel

  13: Sandy

  14: Adam

  15: Isabel

  16: Sandy

  17: Isabel

  18: Adam

  19: Isabel

  20: Adam

  21: Sandy

  22: Adam

  23: Isabel

  24: Sandy

  25: Adam

  26: Isabel

  27: Anya

  28: Isabel

  29: Adam

  30: Sandy

  31: Adam

  32: Isabel

  33: Sandy

  34: Adam

  35: Isabel

  36: Adam

  37: Sandy

  38: Isabel

  39: Adam

  40: Adam

  41: Sandy

  42: Isabel

  43: Isabel

  44: Sandy

  45: Isabel

  46: Adam

  47: Isabel

  48: Adam

  49: Sandy

  50: Isabel

  51: Adam

  52: Isabel

  53: Sandy

  54: Isabel

  55: Sandy

  56: Isabel

  57: Isabel

  58: Adam

  59: Isabel

  60: Sandy

  61: Isabel

  62: Isabel

  63: Adam

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  What’s the rush?

  Ask the cancer patient who has only a few months to live. Ask the AIDS patient whose body is shriveling … the “rush” arises from our human compassion for our fellow man who needs help now.

  PROFESSOR W. FRENCH ANDERSON

  GENETICS PIONEER

  PROLOGUE

  Diseases desperate grown

  By desperate appliances are relieved,

  Or not at all.

  Hamlet, ACT IV SCENE 3

  The boss was dying.

  He was losing weight, growing paler and thinner. And feeling an exhaustion no amount of sleep could relieve.

  “Skipper,” he confided to his closest friend, “Boyd Penrose is a lousy liar.”

  “Come on. He’s not the White House physician for nothing.”

  “Listen, I’m dying and I know it.”

  “No—”

  “Yes, dammit. There’s a cold black wind tearing down the corridor of my chest. I can even hear the wings of the Angel of Death flapping in my bedroom when I’m left alone.”

  “I’ll call Penrose.”

  “No. If I can’t wring it out of him, nobody can.”

  “We’ll double-team him. He can’t outface both of us.”

  Forty-five minutes later a bedraggled Penrose, looking not at all like the admiral of the Navy that he was, stood straight-backed and tight-lipped in the regal bedroom.

  “You rang, sir?” The physician injected his tone with as much sarcasm as he dared display to his powerful patient.

  “Sit down, you lousy quack,” the sick man snapped.

  The admiral obeyed.

  “Come clean, Boyd,” Skipper demanded. “You’re hiding something. Has he got some fatal condition you’re too chickenshit to divulge?”

  Penrose was cowed. He lowered his head and sighed. “Skip, I wish to God you didn’t have to hear this.” The doctor had to summon the courage to continue. “He’s got lymphosarcoma—it’s a cancer of the blood and tissues.”

  There was a shocked silence.

  “All right, hold the sackcloth and ashes a minute,” said the patient at last, trying to camouflage his fear with bravado. “Let me hear the wretched details.” Turning to the physician, he asked, “What are my chances of recovery?”

  “That’s just it, Boss,” Penrose answered. “This isn’t one of those numbers you get out of alive.”

  Another silence.

  “How long have I got?”

  “About five, maybe six months at the outside.”

  “Great. If I’m lucky, at least I’ll get my Christmas presents. Skip, be a pal and give me a shot of Jack Daniel’s. Pour one for yourself and Penrose too.”

  “No, I can’t,” the doctor protested.

  “Drink it, Boyd, goddammit. Show me I still have some authority around here.”

  The Navy man acquiesced.

  Skipper’s face was gray. “I don’t get it. Why are you guys taking this lying down? There must be some way of fighting this monster.”

  They looked toward the doctor again. “As a matter of fact,” he confessed, “there are three different labs—Harvard, Stanford, and Rockefeller—that are all developing experimental drugs to combat this mother. But they’re still a long way from getting FDA approval.”

  “Screw the formalities, Boyd,” the Boss growled. “The White House can get me anything we ask for.”

  “No, no, it isn’t a question of just having the influence to get it, which I know you could swing. But once we do, there’s simply no way of knowing which of these techniques—if any—will do the job. And even if we could choose the best, we still wouldn’t know how much to administer. We might kill you then and there.”

  “Okay. Strike the carpet-bombing approach. How do you decide which is the best gamble?”

  Some color returned to Penrose’s face, perhaps because he finally felt there was something he could do.

  “Well, I can call up a couple of heavyweights and, keeping tota
l anonymity, find out what they think of the relative merits of the three medications.”

  “Good idea. Why don’t you start right away,” Skipper suggested. “Use the Boss’s office. The phone’s secure. Only get us some answers.”

  The moment the admiral departed, the patient turned to his companion and demanded, “Be a pal, Skipper, let me have a refill of that hooch and turn on my TV.”

  Penrose was back in less than an hour. “I don’t believe it,” he mumbled, shaking his head.

  “What exactly do you find so amazing?” Skipper demanded.

  “The first choice of all the guys I called was the same character—Max Rudolph. He’s the immunologist at Harvard who’s developed those special mice.”

  “Mice?” the sick man asked with exasperation. “What in hell’s name do mice have to do with my goddamn life?”

  Penrose looked his patient straight in the eye and said softly, “They could save it.”

  1

  ADAM

  Max Rudolph sat alone in his darkened penthouse lab at Harvard Medical School, staring into the velvet sky, waiting for signs of daybreak over the Charles River.

  Having been informed that the blood and other tissue samples would be delivered at precisely six A.M., he had arrived early to be sure that none of the conscientious night owls on his staff would be working at their benches when the courier arrived.

  There was a single exception: he had summoned his protégé, Adam Coopersmith, to meet him at five A.M.

  Physically they made an odd couple: Max, mid-sixties, short, bespectacled, and almost bald. Adam, tall, wiry, with a shock of dark brown hair, younger-looking than his twenty-eight years, eyes still disconcertingly innocent.

  “Max, you pulled me out of the operating room—this better be important.”

  “It is,” his mentor announced.

  “You sounded so mysterious on the phone. What the hell is going on?” Adam demanded.

  “My boy,” Max answered gravely. “For the first time in our professional lives we’re going to do something unethical.”

  Adam was startled. “Did I hear you right—you, who sprints after the mailman when he forgets to collect postage due on a letter?”

  “A life is at stake,” the older man answered somberly. “Certain corners will have to be cut.”

  “You’ve never done that.”

  “Yes, but I’ve never had the President of the United States as a patient before.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Admiral Penrose called me from the White House about a patient he described only as ‘a senior Washington personage.’ He insisted that I not ask any more.”

  Max conveyed to Adam verbatim the medical information given on the phone by the Washington physician. And their awesome assignment.

  “God, that’s an enormous responsibility.”

  “I know, that’s why I had to share it with somebody.”

  “Am I supposed to thank you for that?” Adam smiled.

  They were interrupted by a loud grating sound at the end of the hall. They watched mutely as the elevator doors opened and a black-leather-jacketed creature of the night appeared. In one hand he carried a helmet and in the other a carton about the size of a cigar box.

  “Dr. Rudolph?” he asked in a subdued monotone.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have some sort of ID?”

  Max pulled out his wallet and showed the envoy his driver’s license.

  The courier checked it with a quick intense look, handed over the package, and quickly receded into the shadows. The two scientists exchanged glances.

  “And it’s not even Halloween,” Max whispered. “Let’s get to work.”

  They walked slowly down the corridor, an obstacle course of dry-ice chests, refrigerated centrifuges, and tanks of nitrogen, helium, and oxygen splayed chaotically like large metal tenpins.

  Adam snapped on the lights of a room stacked floor to ceiling with cages of mice, all scampering to and fro, blissfully unaware of their unique qualities.

  When transfused with human blood and other tissue, their systems became carbon copies of the donors. This meant reactions to whatever they were subsequently given were miniature but precise reflections of their human model.

  “All right Adam, we have three possibilities. They could cure, kill, or even do nothing. What do you suggest?”

  “Four sets of six mice each. We inject them all with the patient’s blood and then treat each group with varying strengths of the medications. The fourth crew obviously gets placebos.”

  “But they still get their share of good cheese,” Max admonished.

  Adam grinned. “Always the friend of the downtrodden.”

  By seven-thirty, when day staff began to straggle in, they had already infected a third of the mice. To avoid arousing suspicion, they merely handed over case AC/1068/24 to the technicians who normally performed this sort of mundane procedure.

  Adam called the obstetrics ward. He listened for a moment, and then announced with evident pleasure, “All’s well—eight pounds, eight ounces.”

  “Lucky people,” the professor murmured.

  As they descended in the elevator, Max permitted himself the luxury of a yawn.

  “Shall we visit the House of Pancakes before we turn in?”

  “Don’t do this to me,” Adam protested. “I promised Lisl I’d watch your cholesterol.”

  “But we’re scientific outlaws at the moment.” Max laughed. “Can’t you let a nervous old man calm himself with some blintzes and sour cream?”

  “No, ethics are one thing, but I don’t want to lose my best friend to a lipid-soaked pancake.”

  “Okay.” Max sighed histrionically. “To salve your conscience I’ll eat them with margarine.”

  Two weeks passed slowly and painfully. At precisely eleven-thirty each evening the two men would meet at the lab to endure a telephonic dressing-down from Admiral Penrose, whose increasingly strained voice reflected the growing apprehension in Washington.

  At one point Penrose’s tirade grew so loud and acrimonious that Adam snatched the receiver and growled, “Dammit, Admiral. You’ve got to impress on your patient that in a very real sense these mice are acting as his understudies.”

  “He knows that,” the Navy man replied with annoyance.

  “Then perhaps he might just appreciate the fact that we’ve held off treating him.” He paused for effect and then continued quietly, “All the Rockefeller mice died last night.”

  “All?” The physician’s voice quavered.

  “I’m afraid so. But it’s better than a President, don’t you agree?”

  Penrose hesitated. “Yes … yes, I suppose so,” he conceded after a moment. “But what do you suggest I report back?”

  “The truth,” Adam answered. “Only remind him he’s still got two more bullets. Good night, Admiral.”

  He hung up and looked at his mentor. “Well, Max?”

  “Very impressive, Doctor. Now let’s get our lab books up to date.”

  “That’s okay. Why don’t you go home to your anxious wife while I transcribe the unhappy necrology into the computer.”

  The senior man nodded. “I’m not doing my share of the drone work, but I gratefully cede to your excess energy. By the way, what makes you feel that Lisl is concerned about me?”

  “It’s her job,” Adam retorted. “She’s told me hundreds of times: ‘My husband worries about the world, and I worry about my husband.’ ”

  Max smiled, turned up the collar of his trench coat and began to trudge slowly down the hall.

  Adam’s eyes followed the receding figure with an unexpected touch of sadness. He looks so small and vulnerable, he thought. Why can’t I give him some of my youth?

  2

  ISABEL

  ISABEL’S DIARY

  November 16

  My name is Isabel da Costa. I am four years old and live with my parents and big brother Peter in Clairemont Mesa, California. About a year ag
o, Mom and Dad found out that I could read on my own. They got very excited and took me to see a lot of people who gave me all sorts of different things to read.

  I really wish this hadn’t happened. Because Peter doesn’t want to play with me anymore. Maybe if I keep this diary a secret, he might like me again.

  As it is, I mostly play by myself, making up stories—and thinking. Like one of the lines in the song “Twinkle, Twinkle” really bothers me. It asks “How I wonder what you are?”—but never gives an answer.

  Then my dad, who is very smart, explained that stars are big hot glowing balls of gas. They are so far away that we see them as only tiny bits of light. And even though light travels faster than anything else in the world, it might take years and years for it to reach us.

  I wanted to know more. So Dad promised to teach me about the solar system—if I got out of the sand pit and washed my hands for dinner.

  We had chocolate pudding, my favorite.

  It is a terrible thing to be born mentally handicapped. Few people realize, however, that it is also an affliction to be born a genius. Isabel da Costa knew.

  Nothing in her parents’ backgrounds suggested that their child would someday be called a “female Einstein.” Indeed, her father Raymond twice failed the qualifying exam for a doctorate in physics at U.C. San Diego.

  Yet the department admired his unabated enthusiasm and offered him the nonfaculty position of Junior Development Engineer—which involved the preparation of apparatus for lectures and experiments.

  This was not what Ray had dreamed of. But at least he had a legitimate connection with a university lab. He was so dedicated that he soon became indispensable. His reward was Muriel Haverstock.

  One day this plump, vivacious brunette music major, suffering from the common female phobia for science, pleaded for Raymond’s assistance.

  “Oh please, Mr. D.,” she begged the stocky, red-haired supervisor. “I need this course to graduate, and if you don’t help me I’ll never get this oscilloscope to work.”

  By the time Ray had shown her how to measure the resonance of RLC circuits, he was smitten.