The New Men (15 page)

I asked him if Captain Smith had interviewed him.

Martin nodded.

‘I think we ought to have a word,’ I said.

He would have liked to put me off. Without showing his usual even temper, he went with me into the Park; at times we felt a neurosis of security, and only talked freely in an open space.

The Park was empty. It was a windy afternoon with black and ragged clouds; in the distance we heard, as we took two chairs on to the patch of grass nearest the Mall, the cranking of a flying bomb. I said: ‘I suppose Smith told you about Sawbridge?’

‘Yes.’

‘How much is there in it?’

‘If you mean,’ said Martin, ‘that Smith has cleverly found out that Sawbridge is left wing, that’s not exactly news.’ He went on: ‘If Smith and his friends are going to eliminate all the left wing people working on fission here and in America, there won’t be enough of us left to finish off the job.’

‘Do you think Sawbridge has parted with any information?’

‘I haven’t the slightest idea.’

‘Would you say it was impossible?’

Martin said: ‘You know him nearly as well as I do.’

I said: ‘Do you like him any better?’

Martin shook his head.

‘He’s a bit of a clod.’

That was my impression. Heavy: opaque: ungracious. I asked if Martin could imagine him fanatical enough to give secrets away.

Martin said: ‘In some circumstances, I can imagine better men giving them away – can’t you?’

Just for an instant he was speaking without constraint. At that time, his politics were like mine, liberal, considerably to the right of Mounteney, a little to the left of Luke. He had more patience than either with the practical running of the state machine, he was less likely to dismiss Smith out of hand.

Nevertheless, as he heard Smith’s inquiries, he felt, almost as sharply as Mounteney, that his scientific code was being treated with contempt.

Martin was a secretive man; but keeping scientific secrets, which to Smith seemed so natural, was to him a piece of evil, even if a necessary evil. In war you had to do it, but you could not pretend to like it. Science was done in the open, that was a reason why it had conquered; if it dwindled away into little secret groups hoarding their results away from each other, it would become no better than a set of recipes, and within a generation would have lost all its ideals and half its efficacy.

Martin, who was out of comparison more realistic than Mounteney or even Luke, knew as well as I did that a good many scientists congratulated themselves on their professional ethic and acted otherwise: in the twenties and thirties, the great days of free science, there had been plenty of men jealous of priority, a few falsifying their results, some pinching their pupils.

But it had been free science, without secrets, without much national feeling. Men like Mounteney hankered after it as in a murky northern winter one longs for the south of France. In the twenties and thirties, Mounteney had felt more at home with foreigners working in his own subject than he ever could with Captain Smith or Rose or Bevill.

Some of that spirit had come down to the younger men. Pure science was not national; the truth was the truth, and, in a sensible world, should not be withheld; science belonged to mankind. A good many scientists were as unselfconscious as Victorians in speaking of their ideals as though they were due to their own personal excellence. But the ideals existed.
That
used to be science; if you were ashamed of a sense of super-national dedication, men like Mounteney had no use for you; in the future,
that
must be science again.

Meanwhile, the war had forced their hands; but they often felt, even the most realistic of them, that they were mucking away in the dark. Though they saw no option but to continue, there were times, at this talk of secrets, leakages, espionage, when they turned their minds away.

It was startling to hear Martin break out, because of a violated ideal. In most respects, I thought of him as more earthbound than I was myself. But he would not take part in any more discussion about Sawbridge.

Soon he fell silent, the thoughts of pure science drained away, and he was brooding over the next test of the pile. His nerves had stayed steady throughout the fiasco, but now, within months or weeks of the second chance, they were fraying at last. In the windy August afternoon, the low black clouds drove on.

‘If it doesn’t go this time,’ he said to me, more angrily than he had spoken after the failure, as though holding me to blame, ‘you needn’t reckon on my future any more.’

Night after night that September I stayed by my sitting-room window with the curtains open, watching the swathe of light glisten on the dusty bushes in the square. The flying bombs had ceased, and it should have been easy to sleep; often I was wondering when I should get a message from Barford, giving the date of the second attempt to start the pile.

I decided that this time I would not go – but was the date already fixed? From Martin’s state I felt it could not be far off.

Sitting by the open window, tasting the autumn nights for the first time since 1939, I thought with regret of my own past troubles – with regret, not because I had undergone them, but because I was living through a quiet, lonely patch. Occasionally I thought of Martin: how many months in his adult life had been free from some ordeal approaching? Was this new one the biggest? Sometimes, from my quiet, I wished I were in his place.

One night at the end of the month, the telephone slowly woke me out of a deep sleep. Faintly it burred, in the hall, as though far away. When at last I understood the noise, I went towards it with dread.

The blue paint had not yet been taken from the hall bulb. In the crepuscular, livid light, I found the receiver: I heard Martin’s voice, active, repeating ‘Hallo, hallo, hallo.’ Up to that moment I had not thought of him, just of the pounce of bad news, any bad news.

As I muttered his voice came: ‘Is that you?’

‘Yes.’

‘
It’s all right
.’

I was stupefied, half awake, half comprehending:

‘What’s all right?’

I heard: ‘The pile began to run an hour ago. 3.5 a.m., the night of September 27–28 – just for purposes of reference.’

The words had been steady, but the flourish gave his joy away.

‘Why didn’t you tell me you were starting?’ I answered with exultation, yet heard my temper rise.

‘I thought it was better like this.’

Then I congratulated him.

‘Yes, it’s something. They can’t take this from us.’

In his voice I could hear pure triumph, the words came out with the attack of triumph. At last he held success in his hands. If I had heard a friend speak so, even a most intimate friend, I should have known a splinter of rancour – the jag of the question: ‘Why hasn’t this happened to me?’

Listening to a brother in the pride of triumph, you could not feel even that splinter. It had been the same when I heard the news of his child. Just as in ‘unselfish’ love you can be crueller (as I was in Martin’s failure, which we had neither of us forgotten), so for the same reason you can be less envious. The more unassailable they are in success, the more total your rejoicing: for it is your own.

He could not resist telling me some details, there and then, in the middle of the night. It had been his idea to hold a ‘dress rehearsal’. During the summer, they had built a syphoning plant for the heavy water, so they had not required many hands: even of those present, few realized that this was the ‘real thing’. They had begun just after midnight, and the filling was still going on. For ten minutes, at the halfway stage, the graph points seemed to be going wrong again. ‘That was pretty hard to take,’ said Martin. Then the points began to come out according to calculation. In fact, they were coming out slightly better than calculation. Martin for once forgot his listener, and broke into technical language: ‘The k is 1.2 already, it’s too hot to put in more than three-quarters of the heavy water.

‘It’s embarrassing that it’s gone too well,’ he added. ‘Still, it’s quite a tolerable way to be embarrassed.’

The following afternoon, when he met me at the station, he was just as happy. It was no longer self-discipline that kept his expression firm; one could see the happiness beneath the skin; he was not a man to lose appetite for triumph the moment he had it.

We shook hands, which we did not often do.

‘The pile, I think,’ said Martin, without asking me where we should go first. He said, as we walked along: ‘When it looked as though we were due for another fiasco last night – that was getting near the bone.’

Contentedly browsing over past dramas, Martin led me into a hangar. It was empty, not a single human being in sight; it was noiseless, the pile standing silent in the airy space.

‘There she goes,’ said Martin. But he did not see the curious sinister emptiness of the place. He was thinking not of the silent, blank-faced pile but of the reaction going on within. He took me to the control room, a cubbyhole full of shining valves with one kitchen chair placed, domestic and incongruous, in front of a panel of indicators. Sitting there was the only other man I had seen that afternoon.

‘All well?’ asked Martin.

‘All well, Dr Eliot,’ said the duty officer.

‘I still can’t quite believe it,’ Martin said to me.

As we went out, there was a hallooing from close by, and Luke, who had just tramped in, called us into his office.

‘Well, Lewis,’ he said, ‘this is a bit better.’

‘To say the least of it,’ I said.

‘They ought to have known it was the neatest way to do it.’

‘They’ were Luke’s collection of enemies and detractors, and without malice, or even much interest, he dismissed them. He was sitting on his desk, and suddenly his whole face and body became vigorous.

‘There’s only one thing that matters now, as I’ve been saying to Martin this morning,’ he said, ‘and that is, how soon can we finish it off?’

Martin smiled. For himself, he would have been glad of a breathing space, to luxuriate in the success; to him, it was real success, the first he had had. But then Martin, less humble than Luke as a man, was far more so as a scientist. Luke knew his powers; he knew that this project had not stretched them; it had tested his character, but in terms of scientific imagination, it had needed little. He did not take much pride in the achievement; this was no place to rest; with all his energies, he wanted to push on.

‘We’ve got to make the bloody bomb while we’re about it,’ said Luke. ‘Until we’ve got the plutonium out, I shan’t be able to put my in-tray on top of my out-tray and go back to something worth doing.’

As I already knew, making the pile work was only the first stage, though the most important, in producing a bomb; second by second, the pile was now changing minute amounts of uranium into plutonium. In a hundred and fifty to two hundred days, they calculated, the transformation would have gone far enough: the slugs could then be taken out to cool: in another ninety days Luke and Martin could begin extracting the plutonium. Luke said they might cut a little off those periods, but not much,

‘Perhaps we can begin extracting in March,’ he said. ‘Which leaves one question sticking out, when is the war going to end?’

This was late September 1944: we all agreed that there was no chance of an end that year. The intelligence teams in Germany were reporting that the Germans had got nowhere with their pile – but Luke and others at Barford found it hard to credit.

‘What we can do, so can they,’ said Luke. ‘Which is one reason why I want to whip that plutonium out. It would be too damn silly if they lifted this one out of the bag before us.’

‘What are the other reasons?’

Luke said quietly: ‘To tell you the truth, Lewis, I’d rather we got it first – so that we should have some influence in case any maniac wants to use the damned thing.’

It was the first time I had heard Luke talk about anyone using the bomb.

‘That is a point,’ said Martin.

‘But it isn’t the real point,’ said Luke, his face open and truculent once more. ‘Let’s come clean with you, Lewis. That’s a very good reason, but it isn’t the real reason, and you both know that as well as I do. The real reason is just that I can’t bear not to come in first.’

They could not touch the rods before March 1st; what was the earliest possible date to possess the plutonium?

Martin said: ‘The operative word is “possible”.’

Luke said: ‘I’ll get that stuff out in six weeks from March 1st if it’s the last thing I do.’

Martin said: ‘It may be.’

‘What is the matter?’ I said.

Luke and Martin looked at each other.

‘There are some hazards,’ said Luke.

That was the term they used for physical danger. Luke went on being frank. The ‘hazards’ might be formidable. No one knew much about handling plutonium; it might well have obscure toxic properties. There would not be time to test each step for safety, they might expose themselves to illness: conceivably grave illness, or worse.

‘Is that fair?’ Luke said to Martin, when he had finished.

‘Quite fair,’ said Martin.

There was a silence, which Martin broke: ‘I agree with you,’ he said, speaking straight to Luke. ‘There are good reasons for pushing ahead.’

‘I’m glad you admit it at last, anyway,’ said Luke.

‘I also agree that we’ve got to take certain hazards,’ said Martin. ‘I’m not happy about it, but I’m prepared to take a few modest risks. I don’t think, though, that I’m prepared to take the risks you are. I don’t believe the reasons justify them.’

‘They’re ninety per cent conclusive,’ said Luke.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Martin.

‘I haven’t thought it out yet,’ said Luke. ‘I must get it clear with myself where I stand about the risks. But I think I shall take them.’

‘You’re not the only person involved,’ said Martin.

‘Look here,’ Luke said, ‘this is going to be like walking blindfold, and I am not beginning to answer for anyone but myself’.’