The New Men (12 page)

‘Otherwise,’ said Martin, ‘there is a finite danger that the reaction would be uncontrollable.’

That meant – I knew enough to follow – the pile might turn into something like a nuclear bomb.

Both Luke and Martin were themselves working on the circuits. A couple of radio engineers wanted Luke to let them improvise a switch.

‘Think again,’ said Luke. ‘That cut-off is going to work as we intended it to work, if it means plugging away at the circuits until this time tomorrow.’

Someone went on arguing.

‘Curtains,’ said Luke.

As Martin returned to the labyrinth of wires, both he and Luke ready to finger valves for hours to come, I wished I had stayed away or that they had a job for me. All I could do was drag up a chair to Mary Pearson’s bench. She was self-conscious, perhaps because I had been brusque, perhaps because, with her husband away, she was uncomfortable in the presence of men. Already that morning I had seen some of the youths, gauche but virile, eyeing her. When I sat beside her, though she was not comfortable herself, it was in her nature to try to make me so.

In front of her were instruments which she had been taught to read; she was a competent girl, I thought, she would have made an admirable nurse. There was one of the counters whose ticking I had come to expect in any Barford laboratory; there was a logarithmic amplifier, a DC amplifier, with faces like speedometers, which would give a measure – she had picked up some of the jargon – of the ‘neutron flux’.

On the bench was pinned a sheet of graph paper and it was there that she was to plot the course of the experiment. As the heavy water was poured in, the neutron flux would rise: the points on the graph would lead down to a spot where the pile had started to run, where the chain reaction had begun:

‘That’s going to be the great moment,’ said Mary

The tap and rattle, the curses and argument, the dashes of light, went on round us. I continued to talk to Mary, lowering my voice – though there was no need, for the scientists were shouting. Once or twice she contradicted me, her kind mouth showed a touch of sexual obstinacy. She was totally faithful to Pearson; like many passionate women she was chaste; but she was not chaste because she did not know the temptation; she could have made many men happy, and been happy herself with many men. She would stay faithful to her husband, however long he was kept away, and she was edgy when her eyes brightened in his absence. Again like many happy, passionate, good-natured women, she had just a trace more than her fair share of self-regard. The morning ticked on, midday, the early afternoon, none of us had spoken of eating. It must have been after two o’clock when one of the refugees discovered the fault.

At once a conference sprang up, between Mary Pearson’s bench and the pile. If they wanted a ‘permanent solution’, so that they need not worry about the control rods for the next year, it would take twenty-four hours; on the other hand it would be very little risk to patch up a circuit for a trial run, and that could be ready by evening.

Luke stood by himself, square, toeing the floor, his lips chewed in. ‘No,’ he said loudly, ‘there are some risks you have got to take and there are some you haven’t. A week might possibly matter, but a day damned well can’t. We’ll get it right before we start.’

A voice complained: ‘We said we should be running on the twenty-second.’

Luke said: ‘Well, we now say that we shall be running on the twenty-third.’

He was right. They all knew it. It was only Martin, who, as he and Luke came out of the scrimmage towards me, said, in a tone that the others could not hear: ‘It’s a pity for the sake of public relations.’

‘You’d better look after them,’ said Luke. For a moment, his energy had left him. Everyone who was working there trusted him, because they felt (as his seniors did not) that underneath his brashness there was a bedrock of sense. But for Luke himself it took an effort for the sense to win.

‘Tell them we’ve called it a day,’ said Luke with fatigue. ‘They can see the fireworks about teatime tomorrow.’

‘Not earlier than eight tomorrow night,’ said Martin.

For an hour, Martin went off to play politics: explaining to the senior men at Barford, Drawbell, Mounteney, and the rest, who were expected to come to the ‘opening’ that night, the reason for the delay; telephoning Rose and others in London. I offered to get the news through to Rose myself, but Martin chose to do it all.

Mary Pearson left to fetch sandwiches, voices blew about the hangar, Luke and his team were stripping a lead on top of the pile, and I was able to slip away.

Out of duty, I visited Irene and the child, who was just a year old. Irene said nothing of our last meeting, but as I was playing with the baby she remarked, all of a sudden: ‘Lewis, you’d rather be alone, wouldn’t you?’

I asked what she meant.

‘You and Martin are very much alike, you know. You’d like to hide until this thing is settled, wouldn’t you?’

With her eyes fixed on me, I admitted it.

‘So would he,’ said Irene.

With the half-malicious understanding that was springing up between us, she sent me off on my own. I did not want to speak to anyone I knew at Barford, not Mounteney, not Luke, Martin least of all. I made an excuse to Mrs Drawbell that some old acquaintance had asked me out to dinner, but in fact I took the bus to Warwick and spent the evening in a public house.

There I saw only one person from Barford – young Sawbridge, whom we had interviewed twelve months before. Somehow I was driven to be friendly, to get some response of goodwill out of him, as though he were a mascot for the following night.

I stood him a drink, and said something about our native town,

‘I’ve not got much use for it,’ said Sawbridge.

It would have soothed me to be sentimental that night. I mentioned some of my friends of the twenties – George Passant – no, Sawbridge had never heard of him.

I kept affectionate memories of the town then, and said so.

‘You just lump it down anywhere in America,’ said Sawbridge with anger, ‘and no one could tell the difference.’

I gave it up, and asked him to have another drink.

‘I don’t mind if I do,’ said Sawbridge.

The next day I got through the hours in the same fashion, sitting in the library, walking by the riverside. The afternoon was quiet, there was no wind; it would have been pleasant to be strolling so, waiting for nothing, with that night’s result behind me. The elm twigs were thickening, the twigs in the hedges were dense and black, but there were no leaves anywhere. All was dusky, just before the break of the leaf – except for a patch where the blackthorn shone white, solid, and bare, standing out before the sullen promise of the hedgerow.

I went straight from the blackthorn blossom and the leafless hedge back to the hangar, where the shadow of the pile lay black on the geometrically levelled floor. Martin and Luke were drinking tea on a littered bench close to Mary’s and someone was calling instructions by numbers.

They told me that all was ready ‘bar the juice’. The juice was heavy water, and it took the next hour to carry it into the hangar. I went with some of the scientists in the first carrying party; they walked among the huts in the spring evening laughing like students on their way back from the laboratory. The heavy-water depot stood on the edge of the airfield, a red brick cube with two sentries at the door; there was a hiatus, then, because the young men had no sense of form but the storekeeper had. He was an old warrant officer with protruding eyes; his instructions said that he could not deliver heavy water except on certain signatures. Against curses, against the rational, nagging, contentious, scientific argument, he just pointed to his rubric, and Martin had to be fetched. He was polite with the storekeeper; to me, he smiled, the only smile of detachment on his face in those two days. The scientists followed into the depot one by one, and came out with what looked like enormous Thermos flasks, which were the containers of heavy water.

Casually the young men joggled back, the silver flasks flashing in the cold green twilight. About it all there was an overwhelming air of jauntiness and youth; it might have been a party of hikers carrying bottles of beer. It was a scene that, even as it took place, I felt obliged to remember – the file in sweaters and grey flannel trousers, swinging the silver flasks, the faces young, thin, disrespectful, masculine.

‘Each of those flasks cost God knows what,’ said Martin as we watched. He did some mental arithmetic. ‘About two thousand pounds.’

By seven o’clock some hundreds of flasks were standing behind the pile. When I discovered that the heavy water from those flasks was going to be poured in by hand, it did not strike me as foreign. It was like much that I had picked up in the air at Cambridge and which Luke and Mounteney and Martin had carried with them. The pile, engineered to a thousandth of an inch; the metals, analytically pure as metals had not been pure before; the whole structure, the most perfect example of the quantitative accuracy of the age; and then Martin and his men were going to slop in the heavy water as though filling up a bath with buckets. They did not mind being slapdash when it did not matter; they took a certain pride in it, like the older generation of Cambridge scientists; the next pile they made, they conceded, they would have the ‘juice’ syphoned in.

‘All set, I think,’ said Martin to Luke. Mary Pearson was sitting at her bench, an assistant watching another instrument at her side. Martin’s team formed a knot by the pile door. The wall close by was filling with the rest of Luke’s staff, for word had gone round that the experiment was due to begin. Drawbell was also there and – it seemed a gallant gesture – Rudd. Mounteney had sent a message that he would come ‘as soon as things got significant’ (all knew that, for an hour or so, till the pile was half full of heavy water, no one could tell whether it was about to ‘run’).

Drawbell and the security officers had thought it unrealistic to keep the experiment secret within the establishment. Anyone was allowed in the hangar who would normally have been let in there in the course of business – so that several of the wives, employed in the Barford offices, came in.

The women in the hangar were wearing jerseys and overcoats to guard against the sharp night. Among the blur of faces I saw Hanna Puchwein’s glossy head close to young Sawbridge’s. Nora Luke, her hair piled up in a bun, had gone pallid with the months of tension which had not lined, but puffed out, her face.

At half past seven there were about seventy people in the hangar, perhaps a third of them spectators. They occupied a crescent that left the pile and the instrument tables free, encroached nowhere near the ranks of heavy-water flasks and the filling station, and which marked out a kind of quarter deck where Luke could walk to and fro, from the pile to Mary Pearson’s graph.

He was there alone, now that Martin had gone to the filling place.

Luke had slept three hours the night before. He was still wearing the windjacket and crumpled trousers, but he made the quick exercising movements of a man about to start a long-distance race.

‘Anything stopping you?’ he called to Martin.

‘Nothing at all,’ said Martin.

‘
Then let her go
.’

For an hour it was anticlimax. We could not see much of it, just the scurry of Martin and the others behind the pile, pouring in flask after flask. ‘A quarter full,’ Martin said at eight o’clock.

Mary Pearson read the flux and made a point on the graph. Luke and Martin nodded; all was as it should be. Martin said: ‘My turn to do some more pouring.’

‘Glug glug,’ said Luke.

As the level of heavy water rose, they poured more slowly. At last: ‘Half full.’ Mary scrutinized the indicator and inked in another point. Did she know, I was thinking, exactly where those points should fall to mean success? Luke looked over her shoulder.

‘There or thereabouts,’ he said quietly to Mounteney, who had come in a quarter of an hour before.

Although he had spoken in a low tone, somehow the crowd picked up the first intimation of good news. The excitement was sharper, they were quiet, they were on edge for something to cheer. Once more Martin came round and also studied the graph. ‘Not so bad,’ he whispered to Luke, raising an eyebrow, and then called out to the man at the filling place: ‘Slowly now. Only when I say.’

Flask by flask, the level went up from half way. Mary was reading the flux each minute now. To the first points after half way, neither Luke nor Martin paid much attention. Then, as the minutes went on, they both stood by her watching each point. No one else went near the instrument. The excitement stayed, they were ready for Luke to say – ‘In — minutes from now the chain reaction will begin.’

Luke and Martin were staring down at the graph. I could not see their faces. I had almost no fears left. Certainly I did not watch Mary’s hand as the level went up to 0.55 inserting a point as though her fingers were weighed down. As her pen stopped above the next point, Luke and Martin straightened themselves and looked at each other. Still the mood round me, the expectancy and elation, had not changed. Luke’s glance at Martin might have told me nothing; but Martin’s at Luke in one instant let me know the worst.

As Martin and Luke looked at each other, no one round realized what the graph had told them. Someone threw in a scientific jibe about ‘cooking’ and Luke replied. He said to the men at the filling place: ‘Hold it for a minute.’ Even then, no one, not even Mounteney suspected.

He left Mary’s bench, pushed through the crowd, and, his stiff strong back straight, walked rapidly to his little office at the hangar side. That was nothing startling; he had done so three times since the experiment began. Martin remained on the ‘quarter deck’ space, strolled over to the pile and back to Mary’s instrument bench, then, with an air of casualness, as it were absent-mindedly, followed Luke. The scientists were chattering round me, relaxed until Luke came back; I did not attract attention, when in a moment I also followed.