Charles Snow - The Affair

“Good,” said Martin. But he was less at home with natures like Tom’s than I was. Now that Tom had committed himself, my instinct would have been to trust him. Martin’s wasn’t. He was not as easy as usual, as he said: “Look here, I’d like to get this cut and dried. It would be a good idea to tell Crawford tonight that we’ve got a majority signed, sealed and delivered. I wonder if you’d mind writing me a note?”

Tom flushed. “You’d like it on paper, would you?”

Martin said, “Well, it would be a final piece of ammunition—”

“Very well,” said Tom. He went, shoulders pushing forward, eyes hot, to the writing-desk by the window. He wrote a few lines, signed his name, put the sheet of paper in an envelope. Then, with his back to us, he started laughing. It was a loud laugh, both harsh and hearty.

“I told Nightingale I was going to stay to write a letter, didn’t I?”

THE Court of Seniors was taking its time, so Margaret and I heard in London. Weekly meetings, a summons to Howard to give written evidence, a summons to Francis Getliffe — it all looked, both inside the college and to us, as though they were being stately to save their faces. Laura told Margaret that, when Howard was reinstated, they proposed to stay a couple of years at Cambridge and then move. There seemed surprisingly little gossip about the affair within the college: certainly none reached us. Some of them were beginning to get busy about the autumn election, however, and there were reports that both Brown’s “caucus” and Getliffe’s had already met.

For myself, I received one direct communication from the college. It came from old Gay. He reminded me that I had promised to “take legal soundings” and finished up by a reference to “certain infractions of privilege, of privilege won by a lifetime’s devotion to scholarship, which, for the sake of others, are not lightly to be borne nor tamely to be brooked”.

In April I had to go to Cambridge on official business. On business which was, as it happened, at that time top secret: for Walter Luke, the head of the Atomic Energy Establishment at Barford, wanted to talk to the Cavendish about the controlled thermo-nuclear reaction. There was a slice of the work he planned to divert to Cambridge. It had to be done with what Luke called our “masks and false noses” on, and when he went to negotiate I, as his boss in the hierarchy, went too.

Outside the conference room windows it was a piercing blue April afternoon, a sunny afternoon with a wind so cold and pure that it made one catch one’s breath. As we sat there in the Old Schools, I looked out at the bright light, resentful at being kept in, resentful without understanding why, as though the springs of memory were being plucked, as though once I had been out in the cold free air and known great happiness. And yet, my real memories of days like that in Cambridge were sad ones.

Shaking myself, I got back to the argument. Round the table were the Vice-Chancellor, Crawford as an ex-Vice-Chancellor, three scientists, one of them Francis Getliffe, Walter Luke, and me. Negotiations were going slowly, and not well. They were not going well partly because Luke, as well as being a good deal the youngest man present, was also a good deal the most impatient. Incidentally he was — and that didn’t make it easier either — probably the most gifted. There was a fair amount of ability in the room, two Nobel Prize winners, five Fellows of the Royal Society. For imagination and sheer mental drive, I would have put Luke before any of them. But for persuasive power in a genuinely difficult situation, he wouldn’t have been the first partner I should have chosen.

It was a genuinely difficult situation. In principle, they were all ready for the Cavendish to take on some of the thermo-nuclear work. Luke told them, though one or two knew beforehand, the minimal facts about it. It was peaceful, he said, no one need have any moral qualms. In fact, the reverse. The only people who need have moral qualms were those who in any way obstructed it. For this, if it came off, would meet the human race’s need for energy for ever. If this country got it first, it would stay as a major power for a couple of generations. “I’m not going to sell you something we haven’t got,” said Luke. “It’s not in the bag yet. But if I were going to stick my neck out, I should say the chances weren’t worse than evens.”

So far, so good. Everyone liked the sound of that. The first trouble was that, if any of the research came to a Cambridge laboratory, it would mean a special kind of security. “You won’t like it,” said Luke. “I don’t like it. No one in his senses likes it. It’s mostly bloody nonsense, anyway. But we’ve got to have it. If you want to know why, you’d better ask Lewis Eliot.”

Some of them were uneasy. It wasn’t that they were unused to security. But, as I had to explain what this special kind would mean, they thought it would be not only a nuisance inside the university, but something worse. The Vice-Chancellor and Crawford questioned me. I thought it was bad policy to gloss over the difficulties; I was ready to be as patient as they were, but Luke was getting restive.

“I can’t credit that we’re going to hold it up just because of a couple of flatfoots and a bit of vetting and the other thing—”

Towards six o’clock, negotiations adjourned until the next day, Crawford, Getliffe, Luke and I walked back to the college. Not willing, not able, to let the controversy fade out, Luke was saying that all these doubts and hesitations were anachronisms, they’d forgotten the time they were living in, the first thing we’d got to make sure was that “this country can earn its living”. If this reaction came off, then the country could earn a living till our grandchildren’s time or longer. Anything which got in its way was suicidal. Unless, Luke said, someone else was brighter than he was and could see another way to keep us “a jump ahead”. Luke’s voice, which still kept the rumble of the Devonport dockyard in which he had started, rolled out unsubdued as we entered the first court.

In the bright and dramatic twilight, I looked at him. It was the kind of light which, after a brilliant day, suddenly gives shadows and moulding to faces — so that one has something like an optical illusion that the day, instead of darkening, is getting brighter. Luke’s cheekbones stood out through flesh that was no longer full: his skin was matt, and the colour was washed out: his bristly, strong hair had gone quite grey. Although his backbone was ramrod stiff as he walked, he had a limp that had not left him since a radiation accident. He had aged more quickly than anyone I knew. When the college had first elected him — and it was only eighteen years before — he had been younger-looking than most men of twenty-four. His cheeks had been fresh and high-tinted; he had been quiet, discreet, determined to get on, certain that he would leave a great corpus of scientific work behind him.

It hadn’t gone like that. War and the scientific revolution had played tricks on him. As a young man, he would never, not even in a fantasy, have imagined himself as he was that night, walking into his old college, possessed in his early forties of power, a title, a place in the Establishment. Not that he disliked these things: people did not get what they didn’t want. But he had expected quite different successes, and still valued them more. Compared with these two older men, Crawford and Getliffe, he knew that in natural talent he was their equal or superior; he had got into the Royal Society younger than either of them; he had a touch of genius which they hadn’t. And yet, his creative work was slender by the side of theirs. In fifty years’ time, when students read through the scientific textbooks, there would be pages about Crawford’s discoveries; there would be descriptions of the Getliffe layer and the Getliffe effect; there would be a little, but only a very little, to keep alive Luke’s name.