Charles Snow - The New Men

I nodded. ‘Yes, that’s all right.’

‘Good work,’ said Francis.

I asked: ‘Is anything new happening?’

‘Slightly,’ said Francis. He added: ‘We’ve just had a signal from New Mexico.’ That meant the trial.

‘It went off?’

‘Oh yes, it went off.’

Neither of us spoke, then I said: ‘What happens now?’

‘I wish I knew.’

He had telephoned the Barford scientists (who heard this kind of official news later than we did in the London offices) and they asked him to go down. As we were driven out of London, in Francis’ departmental car, along the Bayswater Road, I asked: ‘Why do they want me too?’

‘I don’t know that they do,’ Francis said. ‘But I thought you might help.’

‘Why?’

‘In case they try to do something silly. I don’t mind them doing something silly if it achieves the object — but I’m afraid they might do it just because there’s nothing else to do.’

The shabby streets, the peeling house fronts, shrank under the steady sun. In that wet and windy summer it was one of the few halcyon days — out in the country the hedges were still as though they were painted, over the river meadows the air quivered like a water mark.

Suddenly, after neither of us had spoken for some miles, Francis said: ‘They can’t be such fools.’

For an instant, I imagined he was still thinking of the Barford scientists, but he went on: ‘You can’t expect decency from any collection of people with power in their hands, but surely you can expect a modicum of sense.’

‘Have we seen much of that?’ I asked.

‘They can’t drop the bomb.’

The car drove on, past the unshaded fields. Francis went on to say that, even if we left moral judgements out, even then it was unthinkable for a sensible man to drop the bomb. Non-scientists never understood, he said, for how short a time you could keep a technical lead. Within five years any major country could make these bombs for itself. If we dropped them first.

At the establishment, which lay well ordered in the sunlight, by this time as neat, as hard, as a factory in a garden suburb, Francis left me in the room where we were to meet. It was a room in a red-brick range, a single storey high; between the ranges were lawns, lush after the weeks of rain, with standard roses each few yards looking like presentation bouquets wired by an unimaginative florist. I remained alone in the room, which was trim, hygienic, as the rest of the establishment had become, with a blackboard on the wall in a pitch pine frame. From the windows one saw the roses, the lawns, the next red-brick range, the roof of the new hot laboratory, all domesticated, all resting in the sun.

Martin was the first to join me; but before we had done more than greet each other, Hanna Puchwein followed him in. She came so quickly after him that she might have been keeping watch — and almost at once there was another constraint in the room.

‘Where have you been these days?’ she said to Martin. ‘You knew I wanted to see you.’

As she spoke, she realized that I was also there. She gave a smile, curiously tomboyish for anyone so careful of herself. I found Martin guiding the conversation, leading me so as not to mention her husband’s name. I could not tell whether he just guessed that she and Puchwein had finally parted.

Then I found him guiding the conversation in another sense.

‘What brings you down here, Lewis?’ she asked in a light tone.

Quickly, but as though indifferently, Martin replied for me:

‘Oh, just an ordinary visit from headquarters.’

‘I didn’t know we had much to visit, till you and Walter had got going again,’ she said. She said it with a toss of her head that made her seem both bad-tempered and young. In fact, she was standing the years better than any of us, with her small strong bones, her graceful Hamitic head.

‘I don’t think there is much to visit,’ said Martin, telling her it was no good going on.

‘Why are you wasting your time?’ she turned on me. But, as I was replying, she flashed out at Martin: ‘Do you really believe that no one has any idea what’s in the wind?’

‘No, I don’t believe that,’ he said, and in the same breath began to talk of what we should do the following day.

Hanna’s eyes filled with what seemed like tears of anger. Just for a second, as Mounteney and others entered the room and she left us, Martin glanced at me. He was frowning. Even when he had been snubbing her, he had sounded as though they had once been in each other’s confidence, to an extent which came as a surprise.

The room was noisy, as the scientists sat themselves at the desks, one or two banging the lids, like a rowdy class at school. Most of them wore open-necked shirts, one or two were in shorts.

It struck me that all the top scientists sat Barford were present, but none of the engineers. As an outsider, it had taken me years to understand this rift in technical society. To begin with, I had expected scientists and engineers to share the same response to life. In fact, the difference in the response between the physicists and engineers often seemed sharper than the difference between the engineers and such men as Hector Rose.

The engineers, the Rudds and Pearsons, the people who make the hardware, who used existing knowledge to make something go, were, in nine cases out of ten, conservatives in politics, acceptant of any régime in which they found themselves, interested in making their machine work, indifferent to long-term social guesses.

Whereas the physicists, whose whole intellectual life was spent in seeking new truths, found it uncongenial to stop seeking when they had a look at society. They were rebellious, questioning, protestant, curious for the future and unable to resist shaping it. The engineers buckled to their jobs and gave no trouble, in America, in Russia, in Germany; it was not from them, but from the scientists, that came heretics, forerunners, martyrs, traitors.

Luke was the last to arrive, a stick supporting him on one side and his wife on the other. If one had seen him near his worst, one no longer thought of him as ill, though the improvement made him look grotesque, for his hair had begun to grow again in tufts, shades fairer than the wings over his ears. With an attempt at jauntiness, he raised his stick before he sat down, while men asked him if he had heard details of the New Mexico explosion.

Luke shook his head.

‘All I know is that the bloody balloon went up all right.’

Someone said, with more personal sympathy than the rest: ‘It’s a pity it wasn’t yours.’

‘Ours ought to go a bit higher when it does go,’ replied Luke.

Francis Getliffe sat on a desk, looked down the small room, began to talk about reports from America — the argument was still going on, the scientists there were pressing the case against using the bomb, the military for; and all the statements for and against most of us knew by heart.

Then there was an interruption.

Mounteney leaned back, protruded his lean prow of a chin, and said, with unexpected formality: ‘Before we go on, I should like to know who invited L S Eliot to this meeting.’

‘I did,’ said Francis Getliffe. ‘I take it no one objects.’

‘I do,’ said Mounteney.

For a second, I thought it was a scientist’s joke, but Mounteney was continuing: ‘I understood that this was a meeting of scientists to find ways of stopping a misuse of science. We’ve got to stop the people who don’t understand science from making nonsense of everything we’ve said, and performing the greatest perversion of science that we’ve ever been threatened with. It’s the general class of people like Eliot who are trying to use the subject for a purpose none of us can tolerate, and I don’t see the point in having one of them join in this discussion. Not that I mean anything against L S Eliot, of course. I don’t suppose he personally would actually authorize using the fission bomb.’