Charles Snow - The New Men

On the other side there was no pretence that anyone thought him innocent. As in most investigations, Smith kept on assuming that Sawbridge had done it, that it was only necessary for him to admit the facts that Smith produced.

Smith talked to him like an old friend going over anecdotes familiar to them both and well liked. ‘That was the time you took the drawings…’ ‘…but you had met — before, hadn’t you?’… Smith, trying to understand his opponent, had come to have a liking for him — the only one of us to do so.

Even that morning, Smith was fascinated by the discovery he kept making afresh — that, at the identical time when (as Smith repeated, without getting tired of it) Sawbridge was carrying secrets of the Barford project to a contact man, he was nevertheless deeply concerned for its success. He had worked night and day for it; few scientists had been more devoted and wholehearted in their science; such scientific ability as he had, he had put into the common task.

I remembered the night of Luke’s fiasco; it did not matter personally to Sawbridge, and he was not a man who displayed much emotion; but it was he who had been crying.

Smith shook his head, half-gratified, as when one sees a friend repeat an inexplicable oddity; but to Martin it did not seem an oddity at all. Science had its own imperatives; if you were working on a problem, you could not help but crave for it to ‘come out’. If you could be of use yourself it was unnatural not to. It was not Sawbridge alone, but most of the scientific spies who had their own share, sometimes a modestly distinguished share, in producing results which soon after (like Sawbridge, walking to a commonplace street corner, looking for a man with a daily paper) they, as spies, stole away.

All this Martin understood much better than I did. Watching him and Sawbridge facing each other across the table, I could hear them speaking the same language. The two young men stared at each other without expression, with the faces of men who had learned, more deeply than their seniors, to give nothing away. They did not even show dislike. At that moment, there was a cartoon-like resemblance between them, both fair, both blue-eyed: but Sawbridge’s face was heavier than Martin’s and his eyes glaucous instead of bright. Of the two, though at twenty-nine he was three years younger, he looked — although for the first time his expression was bitten into with anxiety — the more unalterable.

Martin’s eyes did not leave him. He could understand much that to me was alien; to do so, one, had to be both a scientist and young. Even a man like Francis Getliffe was set back by the hopes of his youth — whereas Martin by an effort seemed able to throw those hopes away, and accept secrets, spying, the persistence of the scientific drive, the closed mind, the two world-sides, persecution, as facts of life.

How long had it been since he made such an effort? I thought, watching him without sympathy, though once or twice with a pulse of kinship. Was it his hardest?

I left the room at midday, and saw no more of him for several days, although I knew that he was going on with the interrogation. Irene did not know even that, nor why he was staying so long in London.

One afternoon, while Martin was sitting with Captain Smith and Sawbridge in the paint-smelling room, she had tea with me and asked about him, but casually, without anxiety.

In fact, she showed both enjoyment at his rise to fame, and also that sparkle of ridicule and incredulity which lurks in some high-spirited wives when their men come off. It was much the same incredulity as when she told me that ‘E H’ (Hankins) was at last on the edge of getting married.

‘Caught!’ she said. ‘Of course the old boy can still slip out of it. But he’s getting on, perhaps he’s giving up the unequal struggle.’

Her unrest was past and buried, she was saying — but even so she was not as amused as she sounded. I was thinking that she, to whom marriage had sometimes not seemed so much of a confining bond, regarded it in her old lover with the same finality as her mother might have done. Like most of us, she was more voracious than she admitted to herself; even if he had been a trivial capture, the news of his marriage would have cost her a wrench. As for Hankins — though I listened to the squeal of glee with which she laughed at him, within weeks of being domesticated at last — I felt that she was half-thinking — ‘If I wanted, I should still have time to break it up!’

Although she did not know it, I read that night, as on each night for a week past, what her husband was doing. Evening by evening Captain Smith walked along from the room to my office with the verbatim report of what he called ‘the day’s proceedings’. Those reports had the curious sodden flatness which I had come to recognize years ago at the Bar in conversation taken down word by word. Most of the speeches were repetitive, bumbling, broken-backed. The edge was taken off Martin’s tongue, and the others sounded maundering. There was also, as in all investigations I had been anywhere near, very little in the way of intellectual interchange. Martin and Sawbridge were men trained in abstract thought, and Martin could use the dialectic as well as Sawbridge; but in practice neither of them found this the time to do so.

Over ninety per cent of all those words, day by day for more than a week already, were matter-of-fact. Captain Smith’s organization was certain, from the sources they could not reveal, that Sawbridge had walked down a named street on a named day, and passed over papers. Ninety per cent, probably ninety-five per cent, of the records consisted of questions and answers upon actions as prosaic as that.

Out of the first day’s transcript I read nothing but details. ‘You were in Birmingham, at the corner of Corporation Street and High Street, on October 17th, ’43?’ (that was only a few months after Sawbridge arrived at Barford). Flat negatives — but one or two were broken down by ordinary police facts. Who could remember the events of an afternoon three years ago, anyway? Why not be vague?

Sawbridge denied being in Birmingham on any day that month: then he fumbled: Maxwell produced a carbon copy of a receipt (dated not October 17th but October 22nd) given him by a Birmingham bookshop.

The next impression, of the later days of the first week, was that Martin was taking more and more of the examination. It looked as though Smith and the Special Branch between them had run out of facts, certainly of producible facts. Was Sawbridge experienced enough to guess it? Or did he expect there was evidence to come?

From the first, Martin’s questions were more intimate than the others. He took it for granted that, as soon as Sawbridge knew that Barford was trying to make the fission bomb, he did not feel much doubt about how to act.

E. (Martin). Did you in fact know what Barford was set up for before you arrived?

SA. (In the record, this symbol was used throughout to distinguish Sawbridge from Smith.) No.

E. Hadn’t you thought about it? (i.e. the bomb).

SA. I read the papers, but I thought it was too far off.

E. When did you change your mind?

SA. As soon as I was appointed there and heard about the background.

E. Then you believed it would happen?

SA. Of course I did, just like you all did.

E. That is, you believed this country or America would have the bomb within 3–4 years?

SA. We all did.

E. And you thought of the effect on politics?

SA. I’m not sure what you mean by politics.

E. You thought of the possibility that the West would have the bomb, and the Soviet Union wouldn’t?

(Despite Sawbridge’s last remark, Martin was using ‘politics’ in a communist sense, just as he steadily referred to the Soviet Union, as though out of politeness to the other man.)