The Prize Read Free Page A

tourists—’
     
    ‘It is for us first, the way the Seine is.’
     
    ‘Yes. Some night, let us do it. I almost feel like a tourist anyway—everything new—’
     
    They observed the boat again, and then, automatically, without the exchange of a word or pressure of their hands, they resumed walking toward Notre-Dame. The air seemed cooler now, and for Claude, this was evocative, conjuring up the first night that he had met Gisèle. Actually, he had seen her before he had met her. He had seen her in the late summer.
     
    It was a time when his life had become directionless and monotonous, and he had been possessed of a nervous restlessness. The preceding six years had been different, for there had been a luminous goal, and a total dedication to its achievement. Going back the six years, he remembered that the goal had been established by a chance remark Denise had happened to make one noon.
     
    He and Denise had become interested—possibly an unconscious reaction to their own personal inability to conceive offspring—in genetics, in the biological processes of perpetuating the race, and specifically in the effect of chemicals on chromosomes and genes. They had, as so many scientists before them, experimented with the Drosophila fly. They had attempted to induce artificially changes of the genes, as a means of predetermining or controlling the future sex of offspring. This work in mutations had not gone far, and had not been original, and Claude and Denise were discouraged on that fateful day when they joined several fellow workers lunching in the office next to the laboratory. During the repast, someone had mentioned a Russian paper devoted to advances made in transplanting a female ovum, and this had stimulated a heated discussion on heredity and sperms and fertilized eggs. Denise, in one of her infrequent fanciful moods (occurring whenever she was quietly desperate), had remarked playfully, ‘Suppose it were possible to preserve the living spermatozoon of a Charlemagne or an Erasmus, or the unfertilized egg of a Cleopatra, and implant them today, by modern means, centuries after their donors were dead?’ The fancy had been electric. Claude and Denise had continued to speculate upon it first, romantically, and, at last, scientifically.
     
    The first years had been drudge years of collecting facts. From this handful of facts had grown a tentative hypothesis, and then had followed crude experiments with lower animals. During these experiments, they had made a startling discovery, whose validity was soon verified by the statistics from mass experiments. After their joint paper had been read and published, and widely hailed, and popularized in the press, and Claude and Denise had been exposed to a brief burst of publicity, they had suddenly found themselves at a curious dead end of existence.
     
    The six years of absolute concentration on one subject, without any life or social intercourse beyond that of the laboratory and each other and the spermatozoa, had left them mentally and physically debilitated, drained to the marrow, and without resources to interest themselves afresh in anything else. Weary of their work after victory, they had left its routine development to other eager minds around the world. For themselves, they had been brought to rest in a vacuum of accomplishment. After discussing, and quickly discarding, several new projects, they had by mutual consent agreed to relax, fulfil workaday demands in connection with their discovery, and wait mystically for another inspiration. For the first time in years, Denise had busied herself about the old apartment, sorting, repairing, replacing, and had caught up on correspondence and relatives and the few friends left. Claude found his own vacuum more difficult to fill: tennis and boule , of course, and lunches on the Right Bank, some speeches, investigation of investments, an effort to catch up on reading long neglected. But it was dull and not man’s