Charles Snow - The New Men

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.