The Prize

fun.’

‘Forget Craig,’ said Hammarlund curtly. ‘I have told you to devote time to Claude Marceau.’ He addressed Lindblom. ‘And as for you, Oscar, you know your duties.’ Hammarlund took Lindblom and Marta Norberg by their arms. ‘Come. Let us begin before they are involved.’

The three advanced across the room to where the Marceaus stood together, moodily drinking, speaking neither to each other nor to anyone else. Irritation between the Marceaus had mounted in the past twenty-four hours. Claude chafed under the relentless new speaking schedule Denise had imposed upon him, through the Foundation. And Denise was tense because she had read of the arrival of the French mannequins in Copenhagen early that morning. Under these circumstances, the appearance of Hammarlund, with glamorous Marta Norberg and young Lindblom, was not entirely unwelcome.

When he put his mind to it, Hammarlund was a master of social tactical diversion. With practised ease, he paired Marta Norberg and Claude Marceau, and pointed them towards the sideboard-bar to obtain a cocktail for Marta. Relieved to be free of his wife’s abuse, and, indeed, impressed by the attentions of the renowned actress, Claude had gone off too willingly to please Denise.

Alone with Hammarlund, and his skinny, youthful employee whose name she could not remember, Denise decided to make the best of a bad thing. She imbibed her dry martini and left the burden of sociability to be borne by her repulsive host.

‘You met Dr. Oscar Lindblom, I believe,’ Hammarlund was saying.

‘Yes, of course I remember,’ said Denise. ‘He was the one who blushed when we were introduced tonight.’

Now that Lindblom had once more been identified, Denise considered him objectively, as he stood beside his employer. Lindblom and Hammarlund were physical opposites-one an ectomorph and the other an endomorph-yet they seemed to blend because of one characteristic held in common. Both were supremely colourless. If Hammarlund resembled a mound of mash, Lindblom’s aspect was that of a blank human figure outlined in a juvenile colouring book, not yet filled in with crayon. Except for a mop of dark brown hair, and insomnia traces under his grey eyes, Lindblom’s regular Nordic features, thin but handsome, were bleached out by a personality that was tentative and and introverted.

At once, Denise realized that Lindblom’s blanched face was tinged with pink, and she remembered that she had accused him of blushing, and here he was blushing again. He had started to say something gallant, stuttered, and then said to Denise, ‘It is not every day, Dr. Marceau, one can meet a genius in one’s own field whom one idolizes.’

Denise inclined her head. ‘I thank you, Dr. Lindblom.’ She gave regard to Hammarlund’s pleased reaction. ‘You must be lax with him, Monsieur Hammarlund. When a chemist has time to learn pretty compliments, he cannot be giving enough time to his test-tubes and mice.’

‘Good,’ said Hammarlund. ‘Then you recall my telling you that Dr. Lindblom is head of my private laboratory?’

‘Certainly I remember.’

‘But you do not recall my telling you that he is one of the most promising chemists in Scandinavia? Mark my word, he will one day have the Nobel Prize like your husband and your-’

Lindblom blushed once more, and his bow tie danced nervously on his prominent Adam’s apple. ‘Mr. Hammarlund, really-’

Hammarlund brushed aside his protest with a gesture, even as he would brush aside a gnat. He continued addressing Denise intently. ‘You are quite wrong about the time he gives his test-tubes and mice. He gives all of his time to his experiments. He is on the verge of an important breakthrough in synthetic foods. Only now, just recently, he has become bogged down.’

‘I am sorry, but it happens,’ said Denise to Lindblom with fervent disinterest.

‘I do hope he will tell you all about his work,’ said Hammarlund energetically. ‘I know he wants to. And as for gallantry, you will find him charming.’ He looked off, as he had planned. ‘I see I am wanted by General Vasilkov. Excuse me for a moment, please. You will enjoy each other.’

Quickly, Hammarlund left Denise and Lindblom. He had grafted them. He hoped the graft would take.

Denise watched her host depart with a relief that she made no effort to disguise. But what she was left with was equally boring. She considered the straw man before her, a Swedish oaf, a science amateur, and she wondered how long it would be before she could gracefully escape from him.

‘I must apologize for Mr. Hammarlund,’ Lindblom was saying with some mortification, his bow tie jigging. ‘Everything he possesses must be the best, and he permits these enthusiasms to include his employees.’

‘I have no idea what you are talking about,’ said Denise tartly.

‘I mean-I mean-his prediction that some day I may earn the Nobel Prize like your husband and you. I would not allow myself to imagine this, or let you think that I believed I was on the uppermost plane of science with two great laureates. I am relatively a beginner, a student almost, in comparison to your genius. It embarrasses me to have-to have my name brought up in the same conversation with yours. That is why I apologize for Mr. Hammarlund’s extravagance.’

Denise’s eyes narrowed, and she considered her companion more keenly. His lean face, the grey eyes, not entirely unattractive, were sincerely abject, but the one thing that Denise could not bear in a male was weakness. ‘Never mind that,’ she said. ‘We each have our work, our place.’

She knew that she would have to give an ear to his work, before she could be free of him. She might as well get it out of him and over with as speedily as possible. She could see her husband, at the bar, speaking too animatedly to Marta Norberg, and standing too close to her. Now that Claude’s moral balance was gone, and he had sunk to the depths of philandering, there was no telling how far he would let himself slide. If he could not have Gisele Jordan in Copenhagen, the old fool might try to have that overpublicized iceberg, Merta Norberg, right here in Stockholm. It would be just like that old roue, that pitiful Casanova, to feed his vanity with another affair.

Denise bit her lip in resentment, and then knew that she was marring the lipstick, and quickly opened her evening bag to repair her face. She was not yet alarmed by Claude and the actress, but it would be foolhardy to let the flirtation go on at length. She would do her face, and finish her drink, and hear this oaf out, and then take herself to the bar and break that new thing up.

As she worked with her lipstick, and then her powder puff, Denise said, ‘Mr. Hammarlund told me something of your work. Do you wish to tell me more? Of course, this is no place for laboratory talk-but a little might be interesting, just what are you up to, Dr. Lindblom?’

Denise’s peevish tone inhibited Lindblom and, at the same time, made him venerate her the more. This female genius, so other-worldly, her head doubtless teeming with a hundred projects requiring talents beyond his mundane limitations, had actually encouraged him to speak of himself. He wanted to, desperately, and yet feared her impatience. What forced him to speak, at last, was a remembrance of Hammarlund’s command earlier in the day: ‘Oscar, when you are alone with her, interest her in your work-that is one of the main purposes of the party.’

For an introvert, the assignment was as impossible to envision as daring to monopolize the time of a Marie Curie, but the necessity of reporting back to Hammarlund enforced a superhuman effort. ‘I am sure Mr. Hammarlund told you the motivation behind our research into synthetics?’

‘Yes. Personal aggrandizement.’

‘His motive, for the most, but not my motive. He is a vegetarian, as you know, and he did not want to consume foods-meats especially-that came from the corpses of once-living animals. Yet he knew also that the proteins of meats were necessary to his survival. He posed the problem of synthetic proteins to me, some meat substitute with the same values that would be morally and aesthetically acceptable. I pointed out that with time and money, anything was conceivable in the area of synthetics. When soldiers suffered from malaria in the last war, the cure was quinine. But not enough quinine, from tree bark, was available. This vital necessity mothered the invention of synthetic quinine, known as Atabrine. I pointed out to him that when there is an important need, there is always a possible solution.’

‘And you felt your employer’s vegetarianism was an important need?’ remarked Denise acidly.

‘By no means. While his need was for a solution to squeamishness, and later, a chance to make added millions, my motives were entirely different. For one thing, as I worked in the laboratory, I saw that natural foods were not at all as efficient and wholesome as people imagined. Synthetic foods could be made free of nature’s