Charles Snow - The New Men

SA. I thought if we’d seen that the thing might work then the Soviet physicists must have done the same.

E. But you didn’t know?

SA. What do you take them for? Do you think you’re all that better than they are?

E. No, but there are more of us. Anyway, you’d have felt safer if they knew what we were doing?

SA. I thought it was wrong to keep secrets from allies, if that’s what you mean.

E. The Soviet Union wouldn’t be safe until someone told them?

SA. I didn’t say that.

E. But you thought it might be your duty to make certain?

SA. I thought it was the Government’s duty.

E. You knew that wouldn’t happen. You knew that the Soviet Union might be more at a disadvantage than they’ve been since the civil war?

SA. I didn’t think they’d be far behind.

E. But they would be behind. They had to be kept up to date — even if none of them was able to extend to us a similar courtesy?

(That was the only sarcasm of Martin’s that came through the record.)

SA. They weren’t in the same position.

E. You were thinking all this within a month of getting to Barford, weren’t you? Or it didn’t take as long as a month?

SA. There wasn’t much difficulty about the analysis.

E. You talked to a contact straight away, then?

SA. No.

All through that exchange, Martin assumed that in origin Sawbridge’s choice had been simple. To introduce national terms, or words like treachery, was making things difficult for yourself not for Sawbridge. He did not think of the Soviet Union as a nation, opposed to other nations; his duty to it overrode all others, or rather included all others. It was by doing his duty to the Soviet Union that he would, in the long run, be doing his duty to the people round him. There was no conflict there; and those who, preoccupied with their own conflicts, transposed them to Sawbridge, could not make sense of the labyrinths they themselves invented in him. It was Martin’s strength that he invented none: from the start, he treated Sawbridge as a man simple and tough, someone quite unlike a figure out of Amiel or Kierkegaard, much more like Thomas Bevill in reverse.

In fact, Martin assumed Sawbridge did not think twice about his duty until he acted on it. Then he felt, not doubt, but the strain of any man alone with his danger — walking the streets of Birmingham under the autumn sun, the red brick gleaming, the Victorian gothic, the shop fronts — so similar to the streets of the town twenty miles away, where both he and Martin had waited at other street corners. The cosy, commonplace, ugly street — the faces indifferent, the busy footsteps — no one isolated or in any danger, except one man alone, looking out for an evening paper, the homely evening paper which, not many years ago, he would have bought for the football results. That was the loneliness of action, the extreme loneliness of a man who was cutting himself off from his kind.

From Martin’s questions, he understood that too, as pitilessly he kept on, waiting for an admission.

What had sent Sawbridge on those walks, cut off from the others safe on the busy street? I could not find a satisfactory answer. Nearly everyone found him dislikeable, but in a dull, unspecific fashion. His virtues were the more unglamorous ones — reliability, abstinence, honesty in private relations, In some respects he resembled my bête noire , Pearson, and like Pearson he was a man of unusual courage. He possessed also a capacity for faith and at the same instant for rancour.

No doubt it was the rancour which made him a dynamist. Compare him, for example, with Puchwein, whose communism sprang from a magnanimous root — who was vain, impatient, wanted to be benevolent in a hurry. And, just as with many Romans who turned to Christianity in the fourth century, Puchwein wanted to be on the side of history. He had no question intellectually that, in the long run, the communists must win. But those motives were not so compelling as to drive him into danger; to go into action as Sawbridge did, benevolence was not enough.

Then what was? The hidden wound, people said: the wound from which he never took the bandages and which gave him his sullen temper, his rancour. None of us knew him well enough to reach it.

Did Martin see the wound clearer than I did? Did he feel any resemblance to himself?

If so, he shut it away. Behaviour matters, not motive — doing what he was doing, he could have no other thought.

The visits to Birmingham, the autumn transaction (giving the news that the pile was being built), the three visits in the spring, one just before Sawbridge had accompanied Luke into the hot laboratory: on each visit, what data had he given over?

Denial, denial again.

Martin increased the strain.

He knew, via Captain Smith, the information that had passed. He knew, which no one else but Luke could, that one piece of that information was false; while waiting for the rods to cool, they had decided on which solvent to use for the plutonium — and then, a good deal later, had changed their minds. It was the first method which had been told to the agent; only Luke, Sawbridge, and Martin could know the exact circumstances in which it had been decided on, and also given up.

Martin asked Sawbridge about those decisions. For the first and only time in the investigation, Martin gained an advantage through being on the inside. So far as I could judge, he used his technical familiarity with his usual deliberate nerve; but that was not the major weight with which he was wearing Sawbridge down.

The major weight came from his use of Sawbridge’s loneliness, and his sense of how it was growing as the days dripped by. Against it Martin brought down, not only his bits of technical knowledge, not only the facts of the meetings at the Corporation Street corner — but also all the opinions of Barford, every sign that men working there were willing to dismiss Sawbridge from their minds, so that he should feel separate even from those among whom he had been most at home.

No one knew better than Martin how even the hardest suffer the agoraphobia of being finally alone.

On the seventh day, the record ran:

E. I suppose you have got your notebooks about the work at Barford?

SA. Yes.

E. We shall want them.

SA. I shall want them if I go back.

E. Do you think you will go back?

SA. I hope you realize what it will mean to Barford if I do not.

E. You might have thought of that before.

SA. I thought of it more than you have given me credit for.

E. After you made the first contact with—’

SA. I have not admitted that.

E. After you made the first contact, or before?

SA. I thought of it all along.

For those seven nights running Captain Smith brought the record into my office. He made excuses to stay with me as I read; it looked like a refinement of security, but afterwards he liked to go out with me for a drink, taking his time about it. I discovered that he had a valetudinarian wife, for whom, without letting out a complaint, he had sacrificed his pleasure ever since he was a young man; but even he was not above stealing a pretext for half an hour away from her.

On the eighth night, which was Thursday, September 23rd, he came into my office hand on hip, and, as he gave me the typescript, said: ‘Now we shan’t be long.’

‘What?’

‘Our friend is beginning to crack.’

‘Is it definite?’

‘Once they begin to crack, they never take hold of themselves again.’

He said it in his parsonical tone, without any trace of elation.

I felt — visceral pity; a complex of satisfactions: anxiety that the time was near (I neither wanted to nor could have done it while the issue was not settled) when I must speak to Martin.