Free Prizes by Erich Segal

emotional independence. “I’ll be all right on my own.”
    He missed her the moment he got back into his car. For he suddenly realized he couldn’t go home. Not only was his apartment too full of Max, it was now bereft of Toni.
    Instead, he went to the single place where he knew there would be fellow feeling and—what he needed most—talk of Max Rudolph.
    His instinct proved correct. Not only had many of the staff chosen to go to the lab under the professional pretext of communing about Max, but by the time he arrived, they were all in a kind of forced good humor, remembering “the good old days,” their boss’s idiosyncrasies and gruffness.
    Some had had a bit too much to drink, and Rob Weiner, a biochemist, spluttered, “If I know Max, wherever he is, he’ll still make those surprise Sunday visits.”
    Adam then overheard a conversation he wished he hadn’t.
    “They’ve got to give it to Coopersmith,” Cindy Po was saying. “I mean, that’s what the old man would’ve wanted.”
    “I’m afraid you’re still wet behind the ears,” Clarissa Pryce, a veteran “mouse mother,” retorted. “A person’s ability to influence Harvard is limited to his lifetime. They’ll choose whoever they want to run the lab. And, to be frank, Adam hasn’t got the age or the publications to get the top job.”
    “Well I still say he deserves it,” the younger woman insisted.
    “Listen, honey, you may know your microbiology, but you have a lot to learn about academic politics. I’d say the biggest thing going against Adam—outside of sheer envy because a lot of the older men resent him—is that he was too close to Max.”
    At precisely midnight, his lab phone rang.
    “Am I starting to haunt you?” Toni said, trying to sound casual.
    “No, in fact I owe you an apology. Even during this ‘wake’—and that’s what it is, booze and all—while I’m missing Max, I’m missing you too.”
    “Thank you. I know that wasn’t easy for you to say. If it means anything, I almost left the plane again before it took off.”
    “By the way, Lisl thought you were very nice.”
    “Oh,” Toni said, unable to hide the satisfaction in her voice. “Give her my love.”
    It was in the evenings that Adam missed his teacher most. Especially since, after a decent period of mourning,only the night shift, the most introverted of all researchers, were at the benches.
    The coldness of the Boston winters was intolerable without the warmth of Max Rudolph’s intellect and friendship. Work was the only palliative, and Adam threw himself heart and soul into his mentor’s last and most important project.
    For Adam was now afire with an all-consuming dream—he wanted to complete this work so that he could mount the podium in Stockholm and tell the world, “This award belongs to Max Rudolph.”
    And yet the ache in his heart would still not go away.
    When Harvard lured Ian Cavanagh from Oxford to take over Max Rudolph’s chair and the directorship of the lab, the staff naturally transferred its wholehearted allegiance, closed ranks, and proceeded with research as usual.
    Though Lisl urged him to be conciliatory—“even slightly sycophantic wouldn’t be out of place,” she said—Adam kept a cool distance. He had great difficulty bringing himself into the glass-walled office where the Englishman lorded it over the domain that had once been Max Rudolph’s.
    This was less deference than Cavanagh had expected from someone he still regarded as a junior man. It was immediately clear to everyone in the lab that he had set Adam in a special category. Whereas he called other members of staff by their first names, he always referred to his predecessor’s favorite merely as Coopersmith.
    Ignoring Lisl’s protestations that he had better things to do, Adam insisted on taking her to dinner at least once a week. She was touched and flattered, and made every effort to succeed her husband as the young doctor’s counselor.
    “Have lunch with