Prizes (52 page)

It scarcely made a column of newspaper space, but it wrote headlines in their lives.

When Jerry Pracht, citing cartilage problems, withdrew from the 1991 Wimbledon tournament, there were modest expressions of disappointment, of curiosity deceived and hopes frustrated. But hardly an uproar or a dirge.

After all, 127 other players did appear, and there was no guarantee that he could even have gotten through the quarterfinals. On the other hand, Michael Stich, the underdog, not only reached the finals, but defeated Boris Becker to win the title that year.

“You see, Pracht,” Isabel chided him playfully. “That could’ve been you out there after all.”

“Would you believe I’m happier right here—next to you?”

She smiled at him, and answered, “Yes.”

So much had changed in just a single night.

As Isabel slept in a flat infused with genuine and profound affection, Raymond was alone in the cold, impersonal atmosphere of Cambridge City Hospital.

Unlike his previous experience, he was not eager to go home. He realized how irrational—and foolish—his behavior had been. Part of him was terrified that he had
already lost Isabel for good. But it was unmistakably clear to him that if henceforth he was to play any part in her life, it would be a minor—and supporting—one.

At one juncture in his sleepless wanderings in the long corridor of the night, he was tempted to call her up and plead forgiveness. But he could not muster the nerve. Now he prayed for only one thing—the dawn, and an end to the ordeal of uncertainty.

In the natural order of things, this was the moment when girls of Isabel’s age would ordinarily be leaving their own families. They, in turn, would then have to suffer one of the normal traumas of parenthood, the empty nest.

The only problem was that Raymond da Costa
had
no nest of his own.

She officially became Dr. da Costa in late June. In two separate communications she was notified that although she would not receive her Ph.D. till the next graduation ceremony, she was already entitled to the privileges of that rank.

She also received an offer to be instructor of physics at MIT, effective immediately—with automatic elevation to assistant professor when her degree was awarded. The starting salary would be $45,000 per annum.

Isabel knew that the charade of parent and child to which she had been a willing accomplice for so many years had inevitably to end.

But how?

Ray returned from the hospital chastened and docile. But he had nonetheless returned.

He still spent his time taking care of the household chores—even reading and going through the journals to mark articles for her to read. But Isabel was too young and energetic to need a maid, and too junior an academic to need a research assistant, a post for which, in any case, her father did not have the credentials. Still,
his behavior made it very clear that he was grateful to be welcomed on whatever level she would take him.

Two days after Jerry had called, a couriered package arrived for Isabel containing no fewer than five reels of computer tape. Her boyfriend had enlisted the help of a Physics Department computer consultant as they transferred the data into Isabel’s computer.

As he’d sat in Isabel’s office finishing the setup, Jerry murmured, “See how easy this is, honey? Electronics will do all the work for us. Say, I hope you don’t mind my bivouacking in your cell?”

“No.” She smiled. “It’s nice to have you in such close quarters.”

“Just to keep us both sane,” he suggested, “why don’t I work the night shift and you can have your own office during the day?”

“That’s very generous of you.”

“Isa, I’m a generous kind of a guy.”

She laughed. “You’re also crazy.”

“But crazy nice,” he responded, his eyes twinkling.

She and Jerry had a business meeting every morning at seven-thirty. He reported his progress as he went through the painstaking process of studying the Sanduleak tapes. Yet their conversation always seemed to come around to Raymond.

“My dad’s told me that from time to time he’s come across all sorts of jobs that would have suited Ray perfectly—stuff like technician or science teacher, but your father just didn’t want to hear about them.”

“That was in a different life,” Isabel observed. “I honestly think he’d jump at the chance to make a graceful exit. Anyway, I’ve got this sudden urge to have a place of my own with a view of the river. But I can’t simply ask him to move out. I mean, frankly, I’d be worried about him living alone.”

Their dialogue even spilled over into their lunch break.

“You know, strictly speaking, Raymond shouldn’t be your concern,” Jerry counseled gently.

“I know,” she conceded. “I’m just telling you straight out I’d be uneasy.”

Jerry nodded. “I understand, Isa. What you’re saying in so many words is that you’re a human being.”

“Then there’s the question of money,” she continued. “I have no idea what he has in the bank, but my salary will be plenty. And there’s also the cash from the Fermi Prize. I’ve got almost thirty-eight thousand left. What if I transferred it to his account?”

“I’d say it’s more than enough to ransom your freedom.”

“Do you honestly think so?” she asked anxiously.

“Isa, the real question is whether
you
do.”

By early July, Karl Pracht deemed the 985-word abstract of Isabel’s thesis suitable enough to qualify as a letter. He immediately faxed it off to the editor of
The Physical Review,
who—such is the speed of modern science—accepted it within the hour.

Its appearance a month later caused a stir that re-echoed in every physics lab in the world. The daring young girl on the flying trapeze had done it again. This time, at an ever greater height, and with no net below.

Isabel da Costa, former child prodigy, now grown-up and an assistant professor of physics, might have changed in many ways, but she had not lost her intellectual audacity.

And, in fact, her formation of the Unified Field Theory was the closest the human mind had yet come to solving this ultimate conundrum.

She was aware that her own sleeplessness would be matched by radioastronomy groups around the world, who were even now searching for the minutest telltale sign that would give support to her theory.

In the first weeks after publication, she lived her life on automatic pilot. She jogged at daybreak and stopped
at the department on her way home, to await the morning mail and see if any of the journals had printed a response.

She would then meet Jerry in the lab to continue their frustrating investigation of every centimeter of tape. And yet the tension mounted to such a degree that Isabel could not even concentrate on the search for evidence that could silence her critics with irrefutable proof.

Sometimes she was so nervous by the afternoon that she would drag him to endless classic films at the Brattle, just to pass the time.

Since he knew she was worried about her father’s recuperation, Jerry always insisted that they rejoin him for dinner, and then pray that there was a ball game on TV so that he and Ray had something superficial to talk about.

Afterward, when he left the apartment, he was unable to go home. Instead he returned to study the microwave radiometer data.

When the bouquets finally came, they were all theoretical. In the ensuing months, scientists throughout the world, whether grudgingly or admiringly, came out in print to acknowledge Isabel’s brainstorm. But none was able to suggest an empirical manner in which to
test
its validity.

Jerry was nothing if not diligent. As his tennis rackets gathered dust in the closet, he continued his obsessive scrutiny—but without success. In fact he grew so monomaniacal in his quest, there were times when Isabel urged him to capitulate. As she joked, “Just let me be a genius in the abstract.”

“No dammit, remember Einstein.”

“Ohmigod, him again?” she cried with mock exasperation. “When in doubt—trot Albert out!”

“Listen, Isa, it took nearly forty years before his general relativity theory made it out of pure math into real
physics. Then at last when they came up with the quasars, pulsars, and possible black holes, it suddenly became very relevant.”

“Okay, Jerry, maybe you’re right. If you want to keep on banging your head against a stone wall—keep at it, as long as it’s
our
stone wall. But I just don’t want to put the rest of our lives on hold even for the sake of proving the best idea I’ve ever come up with.”

“Even if it means a Nobel?”

“There are one or two more important things in the world,” she countered.

“Really?” he asked with a teasing smile. “Like what?”

“Like maybe having one or two nontheoretical children with you.”

“Oh.” Jerry beamed. “That’s a nice idea. But since I seem to be involved in both projects, I’d like to see you have your cake and eat it.”

It was nearly four in the morning when the phone rang. Isabel picked it up drowsily.

“Isa!” Jerry was in a state of unbridled euphoria. “I’ve got good news and bad news.”

“What’re you talking about?” she asked groggily. “Where are you?”

“Where I’ve been every night for the past half century, at ‘our’ office—and that’s the bad news. Last night while you were snoozing, I came to the absolute end of the Aussie tapes. I can now tell you with certainty that they give us mega zilch.”

“God, that’s a downer. What’s the good news?”

“The good news was my sudden notion that they didn’t catch the explosion early enough. Our last possible chance was to get the data right from the source. So I did what I should have done long ago. Somewhat misleadingly referring to myself as ‘Pracht from MIT,’ I contacted Las Campanas in Chile, where the blowup
was first spotted. And down there they’ve got tapes starting only an hour after the event began.

“I got them to send the data on Internet, from the moment they saw the blast. I’ve looked it over, and guess what?”

“Please hurry, I’m going to faint.”

“There was a small peak at—would you believe—4.0175 centimeters, which faded into the noise after a few hours. But it was there. The guy calculated that, based on the decay rate, it must have had a pretty high amplitude at the beginning.

“What’s more, none of the theorists he consulted could explain why the peak should have been where it was in the first place. But your theory takes care of all that, doesn’t it?”

“Oh, Jerry. I’m so excited I don’t know what to say—I owe you so much. Thank you, thank you for everything.”

“You may not believe this, Isa,” he joked, “but I’m actually happier than you … since I don’t have to see any more of those crazy expressionistic films.”

Isabel laughed. And then—if such were possible—he endeared himself to her even further by saying softly, “Hey, listen, let me speak to Ray, he deserves a bit of congratulations too.”

She glanced at her father’s bedroom door, and was sorely tempted to tell him the news. But she realized that since he was on such strong medication, it might be dangerous to wake him.

“He’s zonked at the moment. If I let him rest, he’ll enjoy it more later. But I will call my mom.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right. But if you want to know the truth, I’m beat too. I’ll drop over tomorrow morning at eight sharp with an assortment of pastries. Well, Isa, as they say in California, have a nice day.”

The moment he hung up, she dialed the West Coast.

Muriel’s number seemed to ring endlessly. Isabel assumed that her mother was in deep slumber and would
wake slowly, but to her surprise, the sleepy voice that finally answered was Peter’s.

“Hi,” Isabel said jauntily. “What’re you doing home?”

“Terri and I are just house-sitting for Mom,” he answered. His tone seemed strangely subdued. And even when she told him the news and he congratulated her, he did not perform his characteristic verbal cart-wheels.

Isabel began to sense that something was wrong. “Where’s Mom?” she asked anxiously.

“I wasn’t supposed to tell you, but she’s taken the red-eye to Boston.”

“Why?” Isabel asked. “Did someone from Berkeley—”

“No,” he cut her off. “It’s nothing to do with you. There’s a … a kind of problem. I’m sure she’d want to talk to you herself.”

“You’re scaring me. What’s going on?” Isabel persisted.

“Listen, I’ve said too much already. I think you’d better hear the rest from her.” He reluctantly conveyed the details of Muriel’s flight. She would, in fact, be arriving within the hour.

“Peter, is this something very serious?”

Her brother hesitated and then said gravely, “Yeah, sort of.”

“As in life-and-death serious?”

There was silence, followed by a whispered, “I guess so. Just try to stay loose till you see her.”

Isabel put down the phone. She, who had been so exuberant scarcely an hour earlier, was now shaken to the core of her being.

Her mother was flying to Boston with ominous news. Whose life, she wondered, was in danger?

55
 

Sandy forged professional links with as much zeal as he avoided sentimental ones. Since he was based on the West Coast, it was only natural that he established ties in the Pacific science community.