Charles Snow - The New Men

Luke and Sawbridge went alone into the hot laboratory on a morning in March. The next that Martin heard, just three hours later, was the sound of the bell. That same evening I received news that Luke and Sawbridge were both seriously ill. Luke much the worse. The doctors would have said not fatally, if they had known more of the pathology of radiation illness. So far, they looked like cases of severe sunstroke. It might be wise for their friends to be within reach.

Sawbridge had carried Luke away from the rods, and it was Sawbridge who had pushed the bell. The irony was, they had been knocked out by a sheer accident. They had got safely through the opening of the aluminium cans, in which the rods were taken from the pile; the cans had been stripped off under ten feet of water. Then something ‘silly’ happened, as Sawbridge said, which no one could have provided against. A container cracked. Luke went down, and Sawbridge — a matter of minutes afterwards.

The next day’s news was hopeful. Sawbridge seemed scarcely ill, and was a bad patient; Luke was able to talk about the changes they could make in the hot laboratory, before he or Martin had ‘another go’.

They went on like this for several days, without anything the doctors could call a symptom. Several times Luke wanted them to let him out of bed. Eight days after the stroke, he broke out: ‘ What is the matter with me? ’ Though he could not explain how, he felt physically uneasy; soon he was said to be low-spirited, a description which shocked anyone who knew him. He was restlessly tired, even as he lay in bed.

Within three more days he was ill, though no one had seen the disease before. His temperature went up; he was vomiting, he had diarrhoea, blood spots were forming under his skin; the count of his white blood cells had gone steeply down. In two more days, he was bleeding inside the mouth.

Sawbridge escaped some of the malaise, and the blood spots had not formed. Otherwise his condition seemed a milder variant of the same disease. I was ready to go to Barford at short notice to visit Luke, but during those days he was so depressed that he only wanted to be alone. Once a day he saw his wife; he sent for Martin but spoke very little when he came; he tried to give some instructions, but they were not intelligible. His chief comfort seemed to be in following the scientific observations of his illness. He and Sawbridge had been moved into a special ward at the establishment hospital; not only the Barford doctors, but others studying the clinical effects of radiation watched each measurement. There was a mutter from Luke’s sickbed which spread round Barford: ‘The only thing they (the doctors) still don’t know is whether to label mine a lethal dose or only near lethal.’

Mounteney told me that much, one afternoon in my office. More physically imaginative than most men, Mounteney was enraged at the thought of Luke’s illness. His eyes burnt more deeply in their sockets, his face looked more than ever Savonarola-like.

‘It oughtn’t to have been let happen, Eliot,’ he said. ‘It oughtn’t to have happened to anyone, let alone a man we can’t spare. Some of you people ought to have realized that he’s one of the men we can’t spare.’

Although his distress was genuine, it was like him to turn it into an attack. Somehow he implied that, instead of Luke being ill, Whitehall officials ought to be. But, as the afternoon went on, he became gentler though more harassed.

‘I should like anyone who’s ever talked about using the nuclear bomb to have a look at Luke now,’ he said.

I was thinking of that night in Stratford, which now seemed far away and tranquil, when Martin fed the swans.

‘It would teach them what it means. If ever a nuclear bomb went off, this is exactly what would happen to the people it didn’t kill straight off.’ He added: ‘There are enough diseases in the world, Eliot. It’s no business of science to produce a new one.’

That visit from Mounteney took place three weeks after Luke and Sawbridge were pulled out of the hot laboratory. In another few days — E + 29, as the scientists called it in the jargon of the day, meaning twenty-nine days after the exposure — Luke was said to be brighter, the bleeding had lessened. It might only be an intermission, but at least he was glad of people at his bedside.

Although I arrived in Barford the day I got that message, I was not allowed in the ward until the following morning. And, just as I was going inside, Mrs Drawbell, watching from the nurses’ anteroom, intercepted me. Her husband detested Luke; when he was healthy she herself had never shown any interest in him; but now — now there was a chance to nurse. Triumphantly she had argued with Nora Luke. Nora had a piece of mathematical work to finish: anyone could do part-time nursing, only Nora could complete that paper. The wives who had no careers of their own criticized Nora, but it was Mrs Drawbell who became installed as nurse.

‘You mustn’t tire him, Mr Eliot,’ she said accusingly. She (Nora Luke) was already in the ward, Mrs Drawbell said. She went on, stern and obscurely contented: ‘They used to be such fine strong men!’

I had not heard her so articulate. She said: ‘It’s a case of the wheel of fortune.’

The first time I heard Luke’s voice, it sounded husky but loud and defiant. I was only just inside the door; the ward was small, with a screen between the two beds, Sawbridge’s in the shade and further from the window. The light spring sunshine fell across Nora sitting by the other bed, but I could not see Luke’s face.

‘I’ve got a bone to pick with you, Lewis,’ he said.

It was the kind of greeting that I used to expect from him. He went on: ‘We must have more bods.’

‘Bods’ meant bodies, people, any kind of staff: scientists were bods, so were floor cleaners, but as a rule Luke used the words in demanding more scientists.

I felt better, hearing him so truculent — until I noticed Nora’s expression. At a first glance, she had looked, not cheerful, certainly, but settled; it was the set tender expression one sees in many wives by a husband’s sick-bed, but that some would have been surprised to see in Nora. But, as Luke shouted at me, pretending to be his old rude, resilient self, that expression changed on the instant to nothing but pain.

As I moved out of the sunlight I saw Luke. For a moment I remembered him as I had first met him, in the combination room of our college, when he was being inspected as a fellowship candidate ten years before. Then he had been ruddy, well fleshed, muscular, brimming with a young man’s vigour — and (it seemed strange to remember now) passionately self-effacing in his desire to get on. Now he was pale, not with an ordinary pallor but as though drained of blood; he was emaciated, so that his cheeks fell in and his neck was like an old man’s; there were two ulcers by the left-hand corner of his mouth; bald patches shone through the hair on the top of his head, as in an attack of alopecia.

But these changes were nothing beside the others. I said, answering his attempt to talk business: ‘We’ll go into that any time you like. You’ll get all the people you want.’

Luke stared at me, trying to concentrate.

‘I can’t think what we want,’ he said.

He added, in a sad, exhausted tone: ‘You’d better settle it all with Martin. I am a bit out of touch.’

He could not get used to the depression. Into his sanguine nature it seemed to grow, as though it was seeping his spirits away; he had never had to struggle against a mood before, much less to feel that he was losing the struggle.

Propped up by his pillows, his back had gone limp. His eyes did not focus on Nora or me nor on the trees in the hospital garden.