Charles Snow - The New Men

‘We shall never see that again,’ I said to Martin.

Usually he would have been amused, but now he only gave a token smile.

We walked along the path.

‘By the way,’ said Martin, in a tone dry and without feeling, ‘I heard one story about tactics that might interest you.’

He had heard it from someone present after the bomb was made.

‘There was a good deal of discussion,’ he said, ‘about how to drop it with maximum results. One ingenious idea was to start a really spectacularly pretty flare a few seconds before the bomb went off.’

‘Why?’

‘To make sure that everyone in the town was looking up.’

‘Why?’

‘To make sure they were all blinded.’

I cried out.

‘That’s where we’ve got to in the end,’ he said. He added: ‘But I agree with you, now I’ve got to let it go.’

We walked on, set apart and sad.

Two days later, as we drove down to Barford in the afternoon, Martin and I talked civilly of cricket and acquaintances, with no sign on the surface of our clash of wills.

In Banbury I bought an evening paper. I saw that another bomb had been dropped. Without speaking I passed the paper to Martin, sitting at the wheel, the car drawn up in the marketplace beside the kerb. He read the paragraph under the headline.

‘This is getting monotonous,’ he said,

His expression had not changed. We both took it for granted that the argument was not to be reopened. He was too stable a character to go back on his word. Instead, he commented, as we drove into Warwickshire, that this Nagasaki bomb must have been a plutonium one.

‘The only point of dropping the second,’ said Martin, his tone neutral, the last edge of feeling dried right out, ‘must have been for purposes of comparison.’

As soon as we went inside the canteen at Barford he made a similar remark, and was immediately denounced by Luke as a cold fish. Martin caught my eye; just for an instant, his irony returned.

Inside that room, four floors up in the administration building, so that one looked out over the red-brick ranges towards the dipping sun and then back to the tea cups and the white linoleum on the tables, the voices were loud and harsh.

There were a dozen people there, Mary Pearson, Nora Luke, Luke himself, erect and stiff-backed as he had not been for a year; I had never seen them so angry.

The news of Hiroshima had sickened them; that afternoon had left them without consolation. Luke said: ‘If anyone had tried to defend the first bomb, then I might just have listened to him. But if anyone dares try to defend the second, then I’ll see him in hell before I listen to a single word.’

They all assumed, as Martin had done, that the plutonium bomb was dropped as an experiment, to measure its ‘effectiveness’ against the other.

‘It had to be dropped in a hurry,’ said someone, ‘because the war will be over and there won’t be another chance.’

‘Not just yet,’ said Luke.

I had known them rancorous before, morally indignant, bitter: but it was something new to hear them cynical — to hear that last remark of Luke’s, the least cynical of men.

Eric Pearson came in, smiled at his wife, nodded to others, threw back his quiff of hair. He sat down at the table, where most of us were standing. Suddenly I thought I should like to question him. Of them all, he was the only one who had worked directly on the actual bombs, that is, he had had a small part, a fractional part, in what they would call ‘the hardware’, the concrete objects that had been dropped on those towns. Even if it was only a thousandth part, I was thinking, that meant a good many lives.

‘How do you feel about it?’ I asked.

‘Nothing special,’ said Pearson.

As usual he irritated me with his off-hand manner, his diffidence, his superlative inner confidence.

‘I should have thought,’ I said, ‘you might wish it hadn’t happened?’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I haven’t lost any sleep about it.’

Suddenly his wife broke out, her face flaming, tears starting from her eyes: ‘Then you damned well ought to have!’

‘I’m sorry.’ His manner changed, he was no longer jaunty. ‘I only meant that it wasn’t my business.’

She brushed away the tears with the back of her hand, stared at him — and then went out of the room. Soon Pearson followed her. The others dismissed him as soon as he had gone, while I wondered how long that breach would last. Pitilessly they forgot him, and Luke was shouting to me: ‘Lewis, you may have to get me out of clink.’

He stood between the tables.

‘It’s no use bellyaching any more,’ he cried. ‘We’ve got to get something done.’

‘What is to be done?’ said a voice.

‘It stands out a mile what is to be done,’ said Luke. ‘We’ve got to make a few of these damned things ourselves, we’ve got to finish the job. Then if there’s going to be any more talking, we might have our share.’

In the midst of their indignation, the proposal did not startle them. Luke was a man of action, so were many of them. Political protests, associations of scientists — in their state of moral giddiness, they were looking for anything to clutch on to. For some, Luke was giving them another hold. He had always been the most nationalistic of them. Just as old Bevill kept the narrow patriotism of the officer elite, so Luke never quite forgot that he had been brought up in a naval dockyard, and kept the similar patriotism of the petty officer.

That afternoon the scientists responded to it.

‘Why is it going to lead you in clink?’ I cut across the argument.

‘Because if we don’t get the money to go ahead, I don’t mean next month, I don’t mean tomorrow, I mean now , I’m going to stump the country telling them just what they’re in for. Unless you old men’ — he was speaking to me — ‘get it into your heads that this is a new phase, and that if we don’t get in on the ground floor there are just two things that can happen to this country — the best is that we can fade out and become a slightly superior Spain, the worst is that we get wiped out like a mob of Zulus.’

Nora said: ‘When you see what the world is like, would that matter so much?’

‘It would matter to me,’ said Luke. Suddenly he gave up being a roughneck. ‘I know it seems as though any chance of a little decency in the world has been wiped out for good. All I can say is that, if we’re going to get any decency back, then first this country must have a bit of power.’

Someone asked how much time he needed.

‘It depends on the obstacles they put in our way,’ said Luke. He said to Martin: ‘What do you say, how long do we need?’

Since we entered the canteen Martin had been standing by the window, just outside the group, and as I turned my eyes with Luke’s question, I saw him, face half-averted, as though he were watching the western sky, the blocks of buildings beneath, rectangular, parallel, like the divisions in a battle map. It was many minutes since he had spoken.

He gazed at Luke with a blank face. Then, businesslike, as in a routine discussion, he replied: ‘Given the personnel we’ve got now?’

‘Double it,’ said Luke.

‘Two years, at the best,’ said Martin. (By this time, even Luke admitted that his early estimates had not been realistic.) ‘About three, allowing for an average instalment of bad luck.’

All he had promised me was to keep quiet. Now he was going further. He was taking the line I had most urged him to take. They began arguing about the programmes: and I left them to it.

As I walked along the path to Martin’s flat, where Irene had been told to expect me, the evening was serene; it should have been the end of a calm and nameless day. The sky was so clear that, as the first stars came out, I could distinguish one that did not twinkle, and was wondering which planet it was, as I made my way upstairs to Irene.