Nicholas Mosley - Hopeful Monsters

My father said 'You mean it was by chance.'

You said 'Max needed to get out of prison.'I needed a passport. Yes, it was by chance.'

My mother said 'But anyway, I don't understand, weren't you working for the other side?'

You said 'Yes, it was odd how it happened, wasn't it?'

I said 'She was saving lives.'

My father said 'People nowadays don't seem to know which side they are on in politics.'

My mother said 'And of course no one talks about love.'

My mother was beside me at the other end of the table. She did not eat. I thought — Perhaps she is on the bottle again: or perhaps as a practising analyst she knows about jealousy but not how to use it.

I said 'Yes, it seems to be very difficult to talk about love.'

She said 'Oh it is if you don't have it.'

I said to her 'Did we, you and I, talk about love?'

My mother rang a little bell on the table. A servant came in. This servant was a stranger.

I thought — And my mother is a stranger: whatever we used to be, she and I, is now perhaps in little bits of light in another part of the universe; like Mrs Elgin the cook and Watson the parlourmaid.

— And there are you, my angel, as if flying over rooftops; looking for marks on the doorposts and lintels of this or that house, for who shall be preserved and who shall be scattered in bits and pieces.

After lunch we walked, you and I, on the lawn. I held your hand. You were trembling. You said 'Will I have to come here again?'

I said 'No, you won't have to come here again.'

You said 'You see what they are, parents and children!'

I said 'There are enough in the world: we will find enough children.'

I thought — And perhaps we will pick them up, your children, and carry them out of Egypt.

When we went back to the house my father was waiting for us by the french windows. He said 'Your mother has a headache.'

I said 'Shall I go up to her?'

He said 'No, I don't think that would be wise.'

I said 'Shall we go then?'

He said 'I appreciate your bringing Eleanor here.'

I thought — Perhaps this is the way that mothers, if they are analysts, have to wean their children.

There were things I was not understanding in the experiments I was doing in my work: it was difficult to tell if, in fact, atoms were being split, and if there were any signs of the geometrical progression that might lead to a Bomb. There were certainly transmutations taking place that were the results of neutrons being absorbed into the nuclei of a heavy element; this absorption disturbed particles already there which were then emitted; the element was thus transmuted into one of a somewhat different number or weight (the atomic number of an element being the number of positively charged protons its nucleus is said to contain; its atomic weight being the number of protons together with neutrons); but it was often difficult to tell just what the element had been transmuted into. This classification had to be done chemically: the chemical analysis of an atom depends on the number of electrons it can be said to have in its outer orbits or shells; it is these that make the chemical combinations by which it is tested. However, the atoms of barium and radium, although the former is of almost half the latter's atomic number and weight, have an identical number of electrons in their outer shells; so that in practice it is difficult to distinguish atoms of radium from those of barium. In our laboratory neither Donald Hodge nor I were expert chemists. Sometimes the calculations that one of us made and passed to the other — all arising from the little clicks and bumps of light — made no sense. I would think — But don't we then just make up new names for things that seem to make no sense?

Donald said 'It looks like barium, it sounds like barium, but don't be taken in by that — '

I said 'You insist that it must be radium?*

We had been irradiating an element with an atomic number and weight very close to those of radium. If, in fact, this had been transmuted into barium this could mean that the atom had indeed been split; but it was easier to see it as having undergone the slight transformation into radium, because orthodox opinion still held that as a result of the bombardment of a nucleus only small bits and pieces would be chipped off.

I said 'But you know Bohr's theory that, in fact, the force which holds a nucleus together is like that which holds together a drop of water — '

Donald said 'Or fairies at the bottom of the garden.'

I said 'But why not?'

He said 'You theorists would see a dragon at the heart of the philosopher's stone.'

I thought — But of course what you can't accept is that if what we are getting is in fact barium and even with the chance of a chain reaction -

— That would indeed release the dragon from the philosopher's stone!

Donald sometimes came up to see us in the evenings; he would join us in a chair round the fire. Donald had become more sceptical with age: he was still a bachelor: he was uneasy in the presence of women. He would assume funny voices; do his trick of curling his top lip up underneath his nose.

You said 'But what would be the conditions that would make you believe that it was barium?'

Donald said 'The mathematics.'

You said 'And you can't get the mathematics.'

Donald said'No.'

You said 'Perhaps you don't want the mathematics.'

Donald poked at the fire. I thought — But we, you and I, do we want the dragon?'

I thought — Donald will be needing to make a joke of all this. I said 'But if mathematics is a description of a function of your mind — '

Donald said 'Then is it in my mind that the earth goes round the sun.' He mimed putting a telescope to a blind eye. He said in an upper-class voice 'I say, isn't that an eye that I see out there?'

You said to him, as if you were taking what he said seriously 'But doesn't the earth go round the sun?'

I said to Donald 'But it's you who say that it must be the instruments that are wrong — '

Donald said 'Do you know the story of the frog in the saucepan of water?'

You said'No.'

I thought — But Donald, you do really know what we are trying to talk about: I mean, if it were barium; about the dragon in the stone.

Donald said 'If you put a frog in a saucepan of water, and then raise the temperature of the water very slowly so that there is no decisive moment at which the frog will know that it should jump, then it will boil to death.'

You said 'Is that true?'

Donald jumped up and flapped his elbows up and down. He said 'Me no wan tee boil to deathee!' Then he went to the door. He said 'A bedtime story, children.'

After Donald had gone, you said 'You don't all have to protect yourselves by pretending to be mad scientists.'

I said 'That's right. But I've got you.'

When I lay with you at night we were either face to face with my arms around you so that it was as if what I held were glowing patterns of light: or when you turned with your back to me we fitted into one another like the yin and yang of the universe. Then after a time when you turned again there would be no separate parts of us; my mind had gone out; we were the whole. Then some image might come in — This frog is about to boil! Dear God, this red-hot saucepan is the sun! Jump! What a miraculous universe!

We were some salamander, perfect in the flames.

In the laboratory Donald and I gave up the experiments which presented us with problems for which we could not or would not find answers: we went back to a different and more boring line of checking results obtained by others. I wondered — So where is our task? Our mission? What are we doing, you and I? Then — But there is still the interesting question of what I think I am doing watching for little clicks and bumps of light: what, indeed, in general do humans think they are doing?