The New Men (14 page)

‘Do,’ said Martin.

Neither of us said much, as we walked along the footpath in the cold, slow dawn. What we had said could not be taken back; yet it seemed to have passed. Once Martin made a formal attempt to console me. He said: ‘Don’t worry too much: it may turn out all right.’

A little later, he said: ‘If I had the choice about Luke to make all over again, I should do exactly the same as before.’

The hedges smelled wet, the blackthorn blossom was ectoplasmic on the morning dark. We came to the little road that led to Martin’s. In front of us, stretching from the path to a cottage roof, was the dim shape of a ladder. As I went under, I could feel Martin hesitate and then take three quick steps round. He said, with a sarcastic smile: ‘I need all the luck I can get.’

Making out his face in the twilight, I was wondering whether he, too, in that moment of superstition, had thought of our mother: who also had been superstitious: who, with her toes pointed out, would go round any ladder: who possessed just his kind of stoicism, invented to conceal an insatiable romantic hope: and who in his place, this morning after the fiasco, would be cherishing the first new pictures of wonderful triumphs to come.

It was strange to think that the same might be true of him.

A Result in Public

As soon as I woke, the night’s fiasco clinched itself out of the morning light. It was midday, not many hours since I left Martin outside his house.

Unable to keep myself away, hurrying to the laboratories to hear remarks that I did not want to hear, I found Luke and Martin already there. They might have been following old Bevill’s first rule for any kind of politics: if there is a crisis, if anyone can do you harm or good, he used to say, looking simple, never mind your dignity, never mind your nerves, but
always be present in the flesh
.

Even that morning, Martin might have had the self-control to act on such advice: but it was more likely, in Luke’s case certain, that they had come in order to argue a way through the criticisms and get to work the same day.

There were many criticisms. There was – to my ears, used to a different climate, less bracing and perhaps more hypocritical – astonishingly little sympathy. Most people had no thought to spare for Luke’s or Martin’s feelings; they were concerned with why the pile had not run last night, whether Luke’s diagnosis was correct, how long the ‘mods’ (modifications) would take.

There were scientists’ jokes. Was this, Mounteney asked, the most expensive negative result in scientific history? It was their own kind of jibing, abstract, not specially ill-natured. I would have preferred to go on listening, rather than return to London and make my report to Hector Rose.

Arriving in the office late that afternoon I found a message waiting for me: Sir Hector’s compliments, and, when I could spare the time, would I make an opportunity to call on him?

I went at once to get the interview over. Rose’s room, which was on the side of the building opposite to mine, looked over the trees of St James’s Park, stirring that evening in the wind, bright in the cold sunshine. Rose was standing up, bowing from the waist, greeting me with his elaborate courtesy.

‘It’s very, very good of you to spare me a minute, my dear Eliot.’ He put me in the armchair near his desk, from which I could smell the hyacinths on the little table by the window: even in wartime, he replaced his flowers each day. Then he offered me his cigarette case. It was like him to carry cigarettes for his visitors, though he did not smoke himself. Had my journey that afternoon been excessively uncomfortable, he asked, had I been able to get a reasonable luncheon?

Then he looked at me, his face still unnaturally youthful, expressionless, his eyes light.

‘I gather that everything did not go precisely according to expectation?’

I said that I was afraid not.

‘You will appreciate, my dear Eliot, that it is rather unfortunate. There has been slightly too much criticism of this project to be comfortable, all along.’

I was well aware of it.

‘It may have been a mistake,’ said Rose, ‘not to take the course of least resistance, and pack them all off to America.’

‘It may have been,’ I said. ‘If so, I helped to make it.’

‘I’m afraid you did,’ said Rose, with his usual cool justice. With the same justice, he added: ‘So did I.’

‘It may have been a mistake,’ he went on smoothly, ‘but it was Dr Luke and his comrades who led us up the garden path.’

Suddenly the smooth masterful official tone cracked: he had a blaze of ordinary human irritation.

‘Good Lord,’ he snapped, ‘they talk too much and do too little!’ But Rose had the gift of being able to switch off his disappointment. Sometimes I thought it the most useful gift a man of affairs could possess, sometimes the most chilling.

‘However,’ said Rose, ‘all that can wait. Now I should like to benefit by your advice, my dear Eliot. What do you suggest as the next step?’

I had been waiting for it.

I said, as honestly as I could, that there seemed to me two possible courses: one, to cut our losses, break up Barford, and distribute the scientists among the American projects (for Luke and Martin, that would be open failure): two, to reinvest in Luke.

‘What is your personal opinion?’

‘I’m not entirely impartial, you know,’ I said.

‘I’m perfectly sure that you can see the problem with your admirable detachment,’ said Rose. The remark had the sarcastic flick of his tongue: but it was not meant as a sarcasm. For Rose it was easy to eliminate a personal consideration, and he would have despised me if I could not do the same.

I tried to. I said, as was true, that most people at Barford believed the pile would ultimately work; it might take months, it might (if Luke’s diagnosis were wrong) take several years. There was a chance, how good I could not guess, that the pile would still work quickly; it meant giving Luke even more money, even more men.

‘If you’re not prepared for that,’ I said, hearing my voice sound remote, ‘I should be against any compromise. You’ve either got to show some faith now – or give the whole thing up in this country.’

‘Double or quits,’ said Rose, ‘If I haven’t misunderstood you, my dear chap?’

I nodded my head.

‘And again, if I haven’t misunderstood you, you’d have a shade of preference, but not a very decided shade, for doubling?’

I nodded my head once more.

Rose considered, assembling the threads of the problem, the scientific forecasts, the struggles on his committees, the Ministerial views.

‘This is rather an awkward one,’ he said. He stood up and gave his polite youthful bow.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m most indebted to you and I’m sorry to have taken so much of your valuable time. I must think this one out, but I’m extremely grateful for your suggestions.’

Though Hector Rose had left me in suspense about his intention, I did not worry much. Despite our mutual dislike I trusted his mind, and for a strong mind there was only one way open.

Thus Luke, in the midst of disapproval, got all he asked for, and went back to playing his piano. There were months to get through before the pile was refitted. He and Martin had to set themselves for another wait.

It was during that wait that I had my first intimation of a different kind of secret. One of the security branches had begun asking questions. They had some evidence (so it seemed, through the muffled hints) that there might have been a leakage.

As men spoke of it, their voices took on that hushed staccato in which all of us, even on the right side of the law, seemed like conspirators. None of us knew what the evidence was, and the only hints we received were not dramatic, merely that a Barford paper had ‘got loose’. We were not told where and the paper itself was unimportant. It was nothing but a 1943 estimate of the destructive power of the nuclear bomb. I looked it up in our secret files; it was signed by a refugee called Pavia, by Nora Luke and other mathematicians, and was called
Appreciation of the Effects of Fission Weapons
.

The typescript was faded, in the margin were some corrections in a high, thin, Italian hand. Much of the argument was in mathematical symbols, but, after twenty pages of calculation, some conclusions were set out in double spacing, in the military jargon of the day, with phrases like ‘casualization’, ‘ground zero’, ‘severe destruction’.

These conclusions meant that, in one explosion over the centre of a town, about 300,000 people would be killed instantly, and a similar number would later die of injuries. This was the standard Barford calculation at that time, and it was the figure that we had in mind when Mounteney, Martin, and I talked by the river at Stratford.

Anyone who worked on the inside of scientific war saw such documents. And most men took it as part of the day-by-day routine, without emotion; it had to be done, if you were living in society, if you were one ant in the anthill. In fact most men did not need to justify themselves, but just performed their duty to society, made the calculations they were asked to make, and passed the paper on.

Once, alone in my office in the middle of the war, it occurred to me: there must exist
memoranda
about concentration camps: people must be writing their views on the effects of a reduction in rations, comparing the death rate this year with last.

I heard of the leakage, I re-read the appreciation, I heard the name of Captain Smith. He was high up, as I already knew, in one of the intelligence services. I also knew that he was a naval officer on the retired list, several times decorated in the first war, the son of a bishop. But when he came to visit me, I did not know what to expect.

He was a man in the fifties, with fairish hair and a lean, athletic figure. His face was stiff and strained, both in the cheeks and mouth. His eyes seemed to protrude, but more exactly had a fixed, light-irised stare. He was dressed with the elegance of an actor. His whole hearing was still and soon after he came in, when a flying bomb grunted and vibrated outside, cut off, and then jarred the floor beneath us (it was by now the July of 1944), all the notice he took was a slight stiff inclination sideways, arms straight by his side.

That impression might have been both putting off and appropriate when one knew in advance his berserk record; but it did not last. It was destroyed, very oddly, by a smile which was so sudden, so artificial, that it might have been switched on. I had never seen a smile so false, and yet somehow it sweetened him.

He had come, he said, for a ‘little confab’ about some of our ‘mutual friends’ at Barford.

‘I’ve been told,’ I said, ‘that you’ve been having a bit of trouble.’

‘We don’t want to blot our copy book,’ said Captain Smith mysteriously, in a creaking and yet ingratiating voice.

‘Nothing very serious has got out, has it?’

‘I wish I knew: do you?’ he said with his formidable stare, then switched on his smile.

‘If one thing gets out, another can. That’s why we get all hot and bothered,’ he added.

Suddenly he asked: ‘Know anything of a young man called Sawbridge?’

I had imagined that he might bring out other names. I felt relief because this one meant little to me. I explained that I had been present at Sawbridge’s interview, and since then I had talked to him alone just once at Warwick, the night before the failure of the pile.

‘I didn’t get much out of him,’ I said.

‘I just thought you might have known him at home,’ said Smith.

He had found out – it was one up to his method – that Sawbridge’s family had lived close to mine, I said that, when I left the town for London in 1927, he could only have been eight or nine. My brother Martin was more likely to know him.

‘I haven’t forgotten M F Eliot,’ said Smith, with his false, endearing smile.

I had spent enough time with security officers to leave the talking to him: but he was too shrewd to do what some did, and bank on the mystery of his job. He stared at me.

‘I suspect you’re wondering what all this is in aid of,’ he said.

I said yes.

‘There are one or two straws in the wind, and we’ve got an idea that the young man may not have been altogether wise.’

He gave me two facts, maybe in order to conceal others. Sawbridge had attended anti-war meetings, organized by the Communist Party, in 1940–1: at the University he had been a member of a pro-Communist group.

‘He’s certainly gone off the rails a bit,’ said Smith.

At Barford they thought that Smith was a fool. They were quite wrong; he was highly intelligent, and very far, much further than many of the scientists, from being a commonplace man. The trouble was, he did not speak their language.

His axioms of behaviour were simple, though his character was not. Duty: obedience: if you were told to make a weapon you did so, and kept it secret. There was nothing more to it than that.

To him, the race in nuclear bombs was as natural as a race in building battleships. Your enemies were in it: so were you, so was Russia. You told no one anything, certainly not the Russians. Good fighters, yes, but almost a different species.

Intellectually, he knew something of communism; but he could no more imagine becoming a communist himself, or his friends or relations doing so, than I could imagine becoming a professional burglar.

He had not lived among scientists, their habits of feeling were foreign to him and his to them. As for his axioms of behaviour, most of the scientists, even those not far to the left, could not feel them so; what to him was instinct, to them meant a moral uneasiness at each single point.

Some days after Smith’s call, I talked to Martin. It was our first serious talk since the fiasco; his tone sounded unwilling and hard, though that could have been the effect of long-drawn-out suspense. For the first time, his face was pallid and carried anxious lines. He was waiting for the last batch of the purified uranium, with unfillable time on his hands.