Nothing So Strange (35 page)

“No, I’m not. I’m glad. You’ve had enough drama for one lifetime. Or don’t
you think so?”

“Yes, I think so too.”

“What was it like to live at this place? Tell me all the unscientific
things about it.”

He answered grimly: “That would certainly get to the root of the
matter.”

“What do you mean?”

“Never mind…. I know what
you
mean. The everyday details. Well,
that’s fairly easy. The place grew to have a population of sixty or seventy
thousand—mostly laborers on the actual construction of buildings. They
had to be housed, with their families, so there were shops, banks,
schools—just like any other town. But you couldn’t drive in and look
round. You had to have some business there before they’d give you a permit,
and even then you couldn’t get in the plant without another permit. And
inside the plant you had to have extra permits to go from one part to
another. One got used to it after a time.”

“Where did you live?”

“In a sort of two-by-four apartment—just a room and bath—or
rather, it was a stall shower which I shared with three other men. I shared
the room with one other. Rather primitive, but that couldn’t be
helped—the place was impossibly crowded, you were lucky to have a roof
over your head. The rent was low—the government fixed it that way; and
we also got our meals at government cafeterias—cheap and fairly good.
And there were movies and dances and tennis courts and everything else you
could wish for in the way of normal recreation. I’ve no complaints against
the physical conditions of living—they were as good as could be
expected in the circumstances. My roommate was a nice boy out of Harvard.
Presently he was drafted into the army, put through basic training, then sent
back to the Project on army pay—that was done with a good many of the
younger men. Some of them resented it, but compared with the boys who were
doing the fighting overseas I couldn’t myself see what they had to kick
against, except, of course, that munition workers and longshoremen weren’t
treated that way—only scientists. I half expected the authorities would
do the same to me, because I was sure I was quite fit again, and I wouldn’t
have minded at all, but I was thirty-one and I guess that put me over an age
limit they must have had. I got quite friendly with this Harvard boy—he
had the same keen and almost emotional interest in science that I had had at
his age, and so he was less able than I to accept our common fate—which
was routine work far beneath our capacities. An even harder thing for him was
that there were no facilities to continue study—no classes to attend
that would have given him the feeling of not entirely wasting his time. There
was a library in the place, but it contained no books of any advanced
character in his field—in fact I was told that all such books were
quietly withdrawn from every public library throughout the country. Anyhow, I
taught him some tensor analysis in the evenings, and I think it was a relief
to both of us while it lasted. When he came back from the army he was put on
another job—not better, just different— and I didn’t see much of
him then. It wasn’t easy to make or keep friends except by the coincidence of
working or rooming with them—times and places were hard to arrange,
unless you were just satisfied to see a movie or watch a football game.
Personally I’d been somewhat schooled to an isolated life by working with
Framm, though there had been the compensation in that of doing a job that
taxed me fully. And of course there were certain things that never did bother
me at all anywhere—the regimen of work and sleep, plain meals, little
social life, long walks in the country—it was all the kind of thing I’d
been used to, and I was far happier with it than some of the others were. One
thing it did—it gave me a chance to read, and I filled up some
deplorable gaps in my general education—history, economics, literature,
political science. You’ll find me not quite so stupid as I used to be.”

“I’d already noticed it,” I said dryly. “And I’ve also noticed that you’re
a bit on the defensive about this place. You didn’t really like it, did
you?”

He demurred; it wasn’t quite so simple as that. It was true there was an
atmosphere there that weighed irksomely at times—an atmosphere hard to
describe except by the negative word “unscientific”—which, of course,
for a scientist was a very bad word indeed. All the paraphernalia of secrecy
and counterespionage—possibly quite necessary—got on one’s nerves
after a while— and especially on a scientist’s nerves. Maybe it didn’t
get so much on a soldier’s nerves or a lawyer’s.

“Why a lawyer’s?” I asked.

He said there were a good many bright young lawyers working on
counterespionage—the type that would have been forging ahead in
district attorneys’ offices but for the war. “I expect your Mr. Small is one
of them.”

“And you didn’t like them?”

“I rarely met them. You may be right, though—their presence didn’t
make life any smoother. And yet, when I come to think of it, the only two
lawyers I’ve ever known personally—Julian Spee and Hans
Bauer—were men I liked very much.”

“Tell me some more about the place.”

“There’s not much more. As I said, nothing exciting happened—nothing
in the personal sense. Plenty, of course, in every other sense, though I
wasn’t high enough up to be told anything.”

“But you knew what was being done?”

“More or less. I knew what it was a race for between us and the
Germans.”

“And you stayed on the job because of that?”

“Well, partly. It wasn’t hard to hope that we should win. And yet….”

“Yes?”

“I can’t quite put into words the feeling I had—and which others may
have had, though I never discussed it with them. We didn’t want the Germans
to get the thing first—that was firm enough in our minds to build a
cathedral on. But, assuming that the Germans didn’t get it, did we want to
get it ourselves?
Did
we?… Perhaps some of us did—I don’t
really know. I can only confess that a sort of cynicism grew in me as I saw
the whole place getting bigger and bigger and costing more and more—I’d
have guessed the truth from that, even if I hadn’t known it from any other
source. I’d have been sure that no government on earth could afford so much
for anything except destruction. And I half wanted the thing to turn out to
be a gigantic dud—not from mere technical mistakes, but because of some
basic factor that would rule out the whole thing forever as an impossibility.
There wasn’t much hope of that, I already knew, but I clung to it, and if in
the end the damned thing hadn’t gone off and all the billions had been proved
wasted I think I should have joined quite a few of my co-workers in the
thankfulest horselaugh that ever was heard on government property.”

He got up then and stretched himself. “Wind’s dropped,” he said, staring
into space. But the still air was hotter. He walked a few paces, then came
back to lie against my side.

“Oh well,” he went on, “we’ve practically won the war and that’s quite a
thing. If I were on a Pacific island or an aircraft carrier I’d help myself
to some strength through joy tonight.”

“So will thousands at home who have boys out there.”

“Sure. Looks like there’ll be a surrender in a day or two. Must
be—if we have a few more things like this up our sleeve. You’re a sap,
Mr. Jap. I guess we’ve proved it.”

“But as a scientist you feel that isn’t quite everything?”

“Oh, forget the scientist. As a draftee I feel it’s a hell of a lot.”

“I know. And it is. And yet….”

“And yet what, for God’s sake?”

“You were saying ‘and yet’ just now. Can’t I?”

He didn’t answer. He lay back again, face to the sky. He looked old-
young, like so many men these days; premature age and retained youth neatly
packaged and telescoped into the standardized product, the sort of man you
would like to be seen with, the sort that smiles at you in cigarette ads, or
wisecracks from the screen in the zany comedies. All that on the surface.
Beneath it there’s something you have to discover for yourself, if it
exists— the freakishness or the frailty, occasionally the
sainthood.

I said: “Go on telling me what happened even if nothing happened.”

He pondered. Then he said that one day he had grown mildly excited at a
development in his work that seemed to offer scope for a promising though
quite minor piece of research. It was mainly theoretical and required no
special equipment, only time and patience, of which he had both to spare. So
he began to work late, after most of the men in the same building had packed
up for the day; and this went on for some time till he realized that his
behavior was attracting notice.

“You mean you were being watched?”

He said they were all watched, but that in his case there seemed something
a bit extra about it. Anyhow, he’d made no secret of what he’d been doing, so
he went to the head of his department and explained the whole thing fully.
Then he received a graphic demonstration of the size and character of what
was going on, for this head of a department, quite a big shot in his way,
proved to be only a somewhat larger cog in the complicated machine—he
revolved with just as much precision and with a conditioned distaste for
extraorbital behavior. All he said was—“H’m, very interesting.” And a
few days later he called Brad to his office and asked if he would please
discontinue the research.

“He sounded rather embarrassed,” Brad said, “especially when he gave me
some reason about keeping the guards on duty after hours, which I knew was
nonsense, since guards were on duty everywhere at all times. However, I said
that naturally I’d give it up if those were his instructions, and he didn’t
like the hint that he’d been instructed, and because he didn’t like it I knew
he
had
been instructed. That was the way one was apt to get to know
many things, and it didn’t add to one’s mental or spiritual comfort. But of
course the Project wasn’t designed for our mental and spiritual comfort. One
had to remember that.”

“And did you—always?”

“I think most of us managed to, though there were moments when you felt
you’d raise a little hell when the war was over.”

“Which is practically now.”

“Let’s hope so.”

He was silent and I tried to bring him back to the subject. “Well, so you
were asked to stop the research and you did. Then what happened?”

“Nothing. That’s the end of the incident. There were a few
others—not similar, but equally unimportant. And nothing dramatic, as I
warned you. No Central European high jinks. I just went on with the job.”

“Getting more and more bored and cynical all the time.”

“Not even that.
At
times, not
all
the time.”

“Anyhow, you gave the job up and joined the army. What finally drove you
to it?”

“There again it’s hard to point to any specific cause. Perhaps meeting
Sanstrom had as much to do with it as anything else….”

“
Sanstrom
?” The name struck an echo in my mind; I tried to remember
where I had heard it before; then suddenly I knew. It was Mr. Small who had
asked me, during our first interview, if I had ever met one of Brad’s London
friends named Sanstrom.

Brad caught my look. “What’s the matter? Heard of him?”

“Yes.” And I told him when.

He said grimly: “I see.”

He relapsed into another silence and I had found there was no better way
to start him again than by simple pestering. “Go on,” I said. “Tell me about
this meeting with him.”

He called his thoughts to order. “Yes, Frank Sanstrom. I hardly recognized
him at first. A man suddenly rushed up and began pumping my hand one day as I
was walking to the cafeteria for lunch. As I say, I hardly recognized
him—he’d changed a good deal in ten years. We’d been friends at
University College, partly because we were both Americans and studying
physics, but chiefly because you couldn’t help being friendly with Frank. I
think he left college the same year you came—that would be 1936. He had
the lab next to mine before Mathews took over with those stinking animals….
We hadn’t kept in touch, but I’d followed his career sketchily—I’d read
a few papers of his in scientific journals, so I knew he was doing advanced
work and establishing a reputation. And here he was, full of the same warmth
and geniality, though about thirty pounds heavier than he ought to have been.
We said the usual things one does on such occasions—how good it was to
see each other again, and what were we doing there, and how had life been
treating us—all the questions that aren’t intended to be answered at
the time they’re asked. ‘I’m just on a visit,’ he said, beaming. ‘The Cook’s
Tour … and these gentlemen are the cooks.’ He had to say something, I
suppose, because two army officers had by this time come up; I realized
afterwards that they had been escorting him and he had broken away from them
on seeing me. They didn’t look too pleased at his little joke. He seemed to
think they’d know me, and when they didn’t he made the necessary
introductions—explaining that I was an old friend of his London
University days. I can’t remember their names or even their rank. They didn’t
find his affability infectious, so he ended the conversation by shaking hands
again and telling me to look him up if I happened to be in Washington during
the next few weeks—he’d be at the Carlton Hotel….

“I don’t know quite why, because I’m not usually sensitive to the glad-
hand kind of reunion, but meeting Frank Sanstrom like that had a big effect
on me. Of course the warmth of our early friendship came back, and I was
pleased to have been so well remembered; but I think also it was the
contrasting iciness of the military gents and the way they looked at
me—the officer- private look plus something else that wasn’t any more
palatable. Anyhow, I had vacation time due me and I made up my mind to take
Frank at his word and call on him in Washington.