Charles Snow - The New Men

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.

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.