Nothing So Strange (36 page)

“Which I did—without notifying him ahead, because I didn’t want to
make the visit seem more than casual. I just went to Washington, found my way
to the Carlton, and called him up on the house telephone. If he’d changed his
plans by that time and gone, or if he weren’t in, it didn’t matter. I’d never
been to Washington before and I could enjoy some sight-seeing. But he
was
in. And I caught a note of surprise in his voice when he heard
mine—well, perhaps surprise was natural, even in spite of his
invitation—but there was another note which I could almost diagnose as
dismay. I had time to think things out in the elevator going up to his room;
I said to myself—Something’s happened but he probably won’t say what. I
was used to that sort of thing—we all were. It was part of the
technique of secrecy—do what has to be done, don’t talk, don’t explain,
don’t accuse, don’t confirm or deny. When the Harvard boy was drafted, for
instance, I couldn’t help wondering whether it had been partly my own fault-
-but I knew I should never find out, and that he wouldn’t either.”

“I thought you said they did that to be able to put people on army
pay?”

“Often it was the only reason one could think of. But they didn’t treat
everyone like that … and I knew it had been noted that I’d been working out
mathematics problems with the boy in the evenings—nothing was said
about it to either of us, but I had a suspicion—quite
unprovable—that my wastebasket had been examined…. On the other hand,
that might have been just routine. Watching was also routine. It carried no
stigma.”

He was on the defensive again. He said that I mustn’t get him wrong; he
wasn’t complaining about the system. “When pure science becomes a war weapon,
you’re bound to have secrecy, espionage, counterespionage, and all the
tricks. If a scientist feels less happy in the atmosphere of an Oppenheim
novel than a college lecture room, it’s just too bad, isn’t it? And there
are
secrets, no doubt, that it’s in the national interest to
safeguard—and therefore the system can be held justifiable. I don’t
know whether it kept the spies in the dark, but it certainly kept the outside
public—you, for instance— and to a large extent the unimportant
insiders, such as me.”

“And you didn’t like it,” I said, as I had said once before.

“Hell, no … how could I?” he replied, less cautiously. “When you’ve been
brought up to an idea of scientific truth as something that transcends
frontiers—something that can’t be bought or sold or patented or
hidden—when you’ve been used to wandering about from one laboratory to
another and asking questions about another man’s work—or submitting a
problem to someone in another country to see if either of you can save the
other’s time … it’s a bit hard to get the viewpoint that you’re working for
Macy’s or Gimbel’s but not for both…. Mind you, I’d had a part training for
that sort of idea in Berlin. Only somehow there it was Nazi stuff—easy
to hate and therefore easier to discount. Over here it was harder to hate
because you knew it might be necessary, but being harder to hate didn’t make
it much easier to forget…. Is that too complicated?… Anyhow, where was I
before I began all this?… Oh yes, on my way to see Frank Sanstrom at the
Carlton. He had a small suite on one of the middle floors—elegant and
impersonal till he’d littered it up, just as he’d always littered up his
rooms in London. He was that sort of man. As soon as he greeted me I knew
again that something was wrong. He offered me a drink and mixed one for
himself. I had a feeling he wanted time to make a decision. Then he began to
talk about the weather and Washington and the war news in a way I simply
couldn’t stand. I’m afraid I … I rather lost my head. I realized then the
effects of the strain that I’d perhaps not entirely recovered from, and that
the plant life—h’m, I didn’t mean that, but it’ll do— the plant
life hadn’t helped. I realized also how much I’d been looking forward to an
utterly free conversation with someone in my own field. I flew off the handle
a bit—I said he couldn’t deceive me, I knew something was the matter,
and I challenged him to tell me what it was, to forget for one moment the
never- confirm, never-deny technique that filled the air at times so that one
couldn’t breathe…. He looked at me for rather a long time, then suddenly
motioned me into the bedroom. ‘We’d better talk in here,’ he said. The
bedroom was on an outside corner; the inside walls were against the bathroom
and the sitting room. I knew what he meant, but the fact that he should be so
cautious magnified the concession he was making in treating me like a human
being, an old friend, and a fellow scientist. It moved me almost to tears. He
sat on the bed while he told me what he knew. He said that after our chance
meeting at the plant he had been questioned about his early knowledge of me
in London, and he had gathered that for some reason I was under a cloud. They
didn’t say why—of course they wouldn’t. He then asked me what my
particular job was, and I saw no reason not to tell him. ‘Good God,’ he
commented. I asked if it surprised him, and he answered: ‘No. I guessed
something of the sort—that’s why I asked. It’s probably their idea of
how to keep an eye on you with least trouble and risk.’

“‘You mean it’s
deliberate
? They know the sort of thing I’m
qualified for, yet they prefer to waste….’

“‘It isn’t a question of waste. They probably don’t want you to know too
much about what’s going on.’

“‘But why?’

“‘Perhaps because they think you know too much already. Ever hear the old
Russian proverb—“Those who know enough are my friends; those who know
too much are my enemies”?… Tell me about your association with Framm.’”

“So I told him.”

“
Everything
?” I asked.

“Pretty well,” he answered. “He’d heard about Pauli already—but of
course from a rather different angle.”

“So you put him right?”

“Yes. I explained the arrangements about the trial and my suspicions when
she died, and the way I went a bit out of my mind afterwards.”

“Did you tell him you planned to kill Framm?”

“Yes, and that the war started before I got a chance—”

“And that you gave him false results instead?”

His face clouded. “No, I didn’t tell him that. I’ve never told anyone that
except you.”

I wanted to ask why, but another question seemed more urgent. “What did he
say? I’m curious to know how it would strike another person.”

What I really meant was that I wondered how far his not quite complete
story would seem plausible to anyone who, unlike me, had no personal
verification of any part of it.

Brad answered: “He said he thought it explained why the authorities
weren’t so sure about me.”

“I’m surprised he was even sure of you himself.”

He laughed. “Oh, I’d be sure of Frank, so I guess he’d be sure of me. We
were really friends, you know, in London. Besides, he’d met Framm
once—at a scientific congress somewhere. He hadn’t liked him—he’d
got the impression that the man was just a shyster. Of course I told him he
was far more than that in both directions—a crook, and also a very
great scientist.”

“So once again you found yourself defending Framm?”

“
Defending
him?… Heavens, no—but I knew Frank hadn’t sized
the man up properly. After all, I’d
worked
with him.”

I was a little moved by that, because it seemed to give me, in a flash,
some central vision of Brad’s personality as well as the clue to what had
often made trouble for him, and doubtless would again. I suppose if you
concentrate on getting one thing into clear focus, as he did, everything else
gets a little bit out of focus; and the sort of thing that comes naturally to
you, as a mere instinct of fairness or logic, carries an air of eccentricity
or even untrustworthiness elsewhere.

“All right,” I said. “Go on.”

He went on:

… I asked Sanstrom what he thought the authorities suspected me of, and
he answered: “Nothing—which is probably the worst thing to be suspected
of if you’re suspected at all. Because it means there’s nothing you can do
about it. They’re not accusing you, so you’ve nothing to refute or disprove.
You’re like the coin that the automatic machine refuses—not necessarily
bad, maybe only bent.”

“Except that they didn’t refuse me, Frank.”

“That’s so. For bent ones they have another automatic machine that
combines the most effective methods of Henry Ford and Sherlock Holmes…. Of
course you can always quit if it gets on your nerves, and with a good
conscience, I’d say. Matter of fact if I were you I
would
quit. Why
don’t you? You might be doing far more useful work somewhere
else—teaching, for instance—I seem to recollect you had a real
aptitude for that. I could fix you with a job if you like.”

He then told me he had been “loaned” to the government for liaison work
between the educational world and the Project; in other words, to steer into
it young scientists fresh out of college. “Sometimes,” he said, “I feel like
the Judas animal they use in the stockyards to lead the other animals to the
slaughter—except that I’m saving some of them from another kind of
slaughter, there’s always that consolation. I only hope we’ll get a good many
of them back in the colleges when the war’s over. Assembly lines aren’t
educational, even when you staff them with Ph.D.‘s.”

And then, with extraordinary freshness and freedom, he began to argue the
whole issue. Perhaps it wasn’t really so extraordinary, but after the
atmosphere I’d lived in it seemed so. One hardly ever discussed what we were
doing in the place where we were doing it. There had been a sort of social
taboo. Some moment must have come when even the least intelligent guesser had
an idea what was shaping up, but the chances are he wouldn’t share his guess
with anyone else, or if he did, the other fellow would neither confirm nor
deny…. So now, in this hotel bedroom with Sanstrom, I felt that something
like a miracle was taking place. He assumed I knew plenty, and of course I
did; but for him to take a chance of telling me something I mightn’t know was
a return to sanity that made me gasp with relief. He even discussed some of
the details, scoffing at the idea that any secrets should exist between one
accredited scientist and another. “In any case,” he said, “most of this
secrecy concept has been built up by nonscientists. It tickles their vanity.
Some of them enjoy stamping ‘restricted’ on stuff that might as well be sold
for junk for all the harm it could do. Every time they show a badge or
whisper a password it gives them a kid thrill straight back from their
boyhood. Their private opinion of scientists is that we’re a bunch of
irresponsible long-hairs with queerly subversive and international ideas
who’re at last being made to toe the line and behave. Secrecy makes a good
excuse to put us in separate cages where we can do what we’re told like good
little boys and leave the grand strategy to the short-hairs….” I began to
laugh at that, because it was in Frank’s old familiar vein of exaggeration,
and he laughed too, recognizing what had always been my own impulse to check
his wilder extravagances. We had been good foils for each other that way.
“Don’t mind me,” he continued, “I’m in a mood to let off some
steam—just as you were too just now. Because—my God— don’t
they realize that about 90 per cent of the whole thing’s no more secret than
yesterday’s weather? Einstein’s equation dates from 1905, the spectograph’s
nearly as old, so is the principle of gaseous diffusion, even chain reaction
goes back to 1939—yet from the way some of them behave you’d think it
was Lydia Pinkham’s formula for a magic dandruff remover!”

I said soberly that there was a good deal of difference between knowing
how a thing was done and knowing how to do it, and that the real secrets were
probably in the field of engineering and production methods.

He waved that aside; oddly like Framm, he had the purist’s disregard for
the nontheoretical. “The real secret,” he said, “is what’s going to be done
if and when we’ve made the thing. Is it to be
delenda est
Berlin or
Tokyo, or will there be a trade show on some uninhabited place? That’s the
sort of secret that keeps a sane man awake at nights. Because it seems to me
that if we
do
use the thing ruthlessly, then we can never again call
anything in warfare an atrocity, and the fact that we finish the war with it
and so save life numerically is merely the end-justifying-the-means argument
that Hitler used when he machine-gunned refugees on the roads during
blitzkriegs. Of course you can say that our war’s righteous and his isn’t,
which is true enough comparatively, but it’s an argument that won’t make it
easy to outlaw the total use of the thing when the war’s over and other
allegedly righteous nations want to use it for
their
wars. So frankly
I hope we don’t use it. Which means I devoutly hope the war ends before we
can.”

There was always something about the way Frank Sanstrom presented an idea
that made you want to dispute it, if only as a devil’s advocate. I replied
that, the way I saw things, all countries in war adopted an
end-justifies-the- means policy, because the use of physical force implied
that. The real problem wasn’t the technics of war but war itself.

“True in theory,” he answered, “but in practice the use of atomic energy
for destruction makes such a difference in degree that it constitutes a real
difference in kind. For the first time in human history it becomes possible
to destroy whole cities and populations in an instant.”

I said that the slow death of thousands by economic blockade didn’t seem
to me more merciful than the quick death of thousands by bombs.

“It isn’t a question of mercy. The humanitarian approach was always wrong-
-“

“That’s why I say, Frank, the real problem is war itself. And the
scientist should tackle that not only as a scientist but as a citizen. What I
dislike about the present setup is not so much that the powers-that-be want
us to make bombs, but that they don’t seem to want us to do anything else.
They never invite us to use the scientific method plus unlimited funds on the
general problems of world affairs or the organization of society.”