by C. P. Snow
I tried to change the subject, but Nora knew him better and had watched beside him longer.
She said suddenly: ‘You’re thinking something worse, aren’t you?’
Very slightly, he inclined his head.
‘Which one is it?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘You’d better say,’ she said.
‘There must be a chance,’ he said, ‘that some of this stuff will settle in the bone.’
There was a silence. Nora said: ‘I wish I could tell you there wasn’t a chance. But no one knows one way or the other, No one can possibly know.’
Luke said: ‘If I get through this bout, I shall have that hanging over me.’
He lay there, imagining the disease that might lie ahead of him. Nora sat beside him, settled and patient, without speaking. Sawbridge coughed, over by the wall, and then the room stayed so quiet that I could hear a match struck outside. We were still silent when Mrs Drawbell entered. Martin had come to visit Dr Luke; only two people were allowed in the ward at a time; when one of us left, Martin could take his place. Quickly Nora got up. She would be back tomorrow, whereas this was my only time with Luke. I thought that she was, like anyone watching another’s irremovable sadness, glad to go.
With a glance towards Sawbridge, Martin walked across the floor towards Luke’s bed. As he came, it struck me – it was strange to notice such a thing for the first time – that his feet turned out, more than one would expect in a good player of games. He looked young, erect, and well. With bright, hard eyes he scrutinized Luke, but his voice was gentle as he asked: ‘How are you?’
‘Not so good,’ replied Luke from a long way off.
‘You seem a bit better than when I saw you last.’
‘I wish I believed it,’ said Luke.
Martin went on to inquire about the symptoms – the hair falling out, the ulcers, the bleeding.
‘That (the bleeding) may have dropped off a bit,’ said Luke.
‘That’s very important,’ Martin said. ‘Don’t you see how important it is?’ He was easier with illness than I was, ready to scold as well as to be gentle. But after he had learned about the symptoms – he was so thorough that I longed for him to stop – he could not persuade Luke to talk any more than Nora or I could. Luke lay still and we could not reach the thoughts behind his eyes.
Martin gave me a glance, for once tentative and lost. He said quietly to Luke: ‘We’re tiring you a bit. We’ll have a word with Sawbridge over there.’
Luke did not reply, as Martin, with me following, tiptoed over to the other bed.
‘I’m not asleep,’ said Sawbridge, in a scornful and unwelcoming tone. We stood by the bed and looked down on him; his skin in health had its thick nordic pallor, and the transformation was not as shocking as in Luke; but the bald patches of scalp shone through, his eyes were filmed over, half opaque. When Martin inquired about him, he said: ‘I’m all right.’
Martin was reading the charts – white blood counts, red blood counts, temperature – over the bed head.
‘Never mind that,’ said Sawbridge, ‘I tell you, I’m all right.’
‘The figures look encouraging,’ said Martin.
‘I’ve never been as bad as he was–’ Sawbridge inclined a heavy eye towards Luke’s bed.
‘We’ve been worried about you, all the same.’
‘There was no need.’ Sawbridge said it with anger – and suddenly, under the shroud of illness, under the familiar loutishness, I felt his bitter pride. He did not want to admit that he was ill or afraid; he had heard the fears that Luke let fall, he could not help but share them; but neither to the doctors nor his relatives, certainly not to his fellow sufferer or to us, would he give a sign.
It was a kind of masculine pride that did not make him more endearing, I was thinking; in fact that it made him more raw and forbidding; it had no style. Until this accident I had heard little of him from Martin. No one had mentioned the security inquiries, which I assumed had come to nothing; the little that Martin said had not been friendly, and at the bedside he was still put off. But he managed to keep, what Sawbridge could not have borne, all pity out of his voice.
Of the three in the ward, the two invalids and Martin, Luke and Sawbridge were beyond comparison the braver men. Like many brave men, they did not bear a grudge against the timid. But, like many ill men, they resented the well. Sawbridge was angry with Martin, and with me also, for being able to walk upright in the sun.
Martin could feel it, but he would not let silence fall. Both he and Sawbridge cultivated an amateur interest in botany, and he mentioned flowers that he had seen on his way to the hospital.
‘There’s a saxifrage in the bottom hedge,’ he said.
‘Is there?’
‘It seems early, but there’s one spire out on the flowering chestnut.’
Then Sawbridge broke out, slowly, methodically, not hysterically but with a curious impersonal anger, swearing at the flowering chestnut. The swearwords of the midland streets ground into the room, each word followed by the innocent tree, ‘–the flowering chestnut.’ The swearing went on and on. Strangely, it did not sound as though Sawbridge were losing his head. It did not even sound as though he were trying to keep his courage up. Somehow it came, certainly to me, as the voice of a man cursing his fate, dislikeable, but quite undefeated.
It must have come to Luke so, for during a break in Sawbridge’s machine-like swearing, there sounded a husky whisper from the other bed.
‘Bugger the flowering chestnut,’ whispered Luke. Somehow the younger man’s brand of courage had tightened his.
We all listened to him, and soon Sawbridge’s voice stopped, while Martin stood between the beds. Luke’s face had changed from blankness to pain, but there was sight in his eyes. He spoke fast and rationally, lying there supine, calling on his fibres for an effort they could scarcely make, calling on the will behind his fibres.
‘How fast are you getting on with the new bay?’ he croaked to Martin.
After a moment’s stupefaction, Martin replied as coolly as though they were in the hangar.
‘How long are you going to take about it?’ said Luke. ‘Good Christ, how long?’
‘The new hot laboratory,’ said Martin, ‘should be ready by June.’
‘It’s too long.’
There was a voice from Sawbridge’s bed. ‘It’s absolutely essential not to let the others get years ahead.’
Luke strained himself to the effort. He and Martin, with one or two interruptions from Sawbridge, talked sharp and quick, words coming out like ‘hazard points’, ‘extracts’, ‘cupferron’.
‘By the end of June at the outside, we must start again,’ said Luke. Hoarsely he went on:
‘I expect it will have to be you this time.’
‘Yes,’ said Martin. He had been studying Luke and Sawbridge with a clinical curiosity that unnerved me, because he wanted to know what might happen to himself. But, as Luke made his effort, as he called on an ultimate reserve of hope when his body had none, for an end which to them all seemed at that moment as simple as getting first to the top of a mountain, Martin lost the last peg of his detachment.
It was not that he felt fonder of Luke or overwhelmed with sorrow for him; just then none of these three men was interested in another; there was something to do, that was all; in this they were one.
Luke was tired out, but as we stood over the bed, he still kept up a harsh whisper.
‘We must have more bods. Tell them we must have more bods.’
23: ‘Events Too Big for Men’
I was in suspense during the last days of the German war. The scientific teams in Germany had reported, months before, that the Germans had got nowhere with their pile; but now, when one could count days to the surrender, I kept thinking could there have been one hidden? In terms of reason, I told myself, it was impossible, it was superstitious nonsense – but during those last few days I became nervous when I heard an aircraft.
&nbs
p; It was not until the formal end that I could go to my flat and sleep twelve hours in anticlimax and relief. It was because the anticlimax stayed with me, because I did not want to share the sadness of the first weeks of peace, that I saw nothing of my Barford friends that May. Later I wished that I had heard them talk, immediately the German war finished. All I heard in fact was that the new laboratories were being built ready for the second attempt in June: that Sawbridge was a good deal better, and that Luke was now definitely expected to live.
Then came the morning of Pearson’s news.
The rain had just stopped; through the windows of Rose’s room drifted the smell of wet leaves from the Park. It was right at the end of May, and the kind of dark warm morning which brought back days of childhood, waiting at the county ground for the umpires to come out again. Instead, Rose was meeting his five senior colleagues on a problem of reconstruction – ‘an untidy one’, he said. We were getting towards the end of the morning, when his personal assistant brought in a note for Rose. He read it, and passed it to me. It said:
Dr Pearson has just arrived back from Los Alamos, and says he wants to see the Perm Sec at once. He says it can’t wait.
Rose glanced at me under his lids. Himself the most ceremonious of men in dealing with others’ dignity, he never stood on his own.
He said: ‘I really am most apologetic, but this is something I probably ought to attend to, and perhaps we’ve got nearly as far as we can go today. I do apologize.’ He asked me to stay, and, when the others had left, Rose and I sat looking out over the rain-washed trees. Just once Rose, who did not spare time for useless speculation, remarked: ‘I wonder if there really is anything in the wind, or whether this man has just dropped in to pass the time of day.’
As soon as the girl brought Pearson in, Rose was on his feet, bowing, showing Pearson the armchair opposite mine, hoping that he had had a pleasant journey.
‘As pleasant as flying the Atlantic in bumpy weather can be,’ said Pearson.
‘When did you actually arrive?’
‘I wanted to get rid of this commission’ (‘commission’ was one of their formal words, and simply meant that he had been asked to give news by word of mouth), ‘so I came straight here.’
‘That was very, very good of you, Dr Pearson, and I can’t tell you how extremely grateful I am. I do hope you’re not too tired?’
‘As tired as I want to be, thanks. I shan’t be sorry to sleep in my own bed tonight,’
Rose, unwearying in politeness, said: ‘We are grateful to you for many other reasons, of course, Dr Pearson. We have heard the most glowing accounts of you from the American authorities. They told us that you’ve been of inestimable value, and it’s very nice to have you and some of our other friends putting up our stock over there. I do congratulate you and thank you.’
It was all true. Pearson had been a great success in America, working on the actual fixing mechanism of the bomb.
‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ he said, with a diffidence that was awkward and genuine, but lay on top of his lazy, invulnerable confidence.
‘You may not know, but we do,’ said Hector Rose. Then lightly: ‘You said you had a little business for us, did you?’
Pearson did not reply at once but glanced edgewise through his spectacles at me. He said to Rose: ‘I’ve got a piece of information that I am to give you.’
‘Yes, Dr Pearson,’ said Rose.
‘I’ve no authority to give it to anyone else,’ said Pearson.
Rose was considering.
‘I take it,’ he said, ‘this information is to go to the committee?’
‘The sooner the better,’ said Pearson.
‘Then I can authorize you to speak in front of Eliot, with many thanks for your precautions. Because you see, Dr Pearson, Eliot is part of the secretariat of the committee, and in any case I should have to pass him this information at once.’
Pearson tilted back his head. He did not care for me, but that was not moving him; he was a rigid, literal, security-minded man. On the other hand, he was a practical one.
‘If Eliot’s got to channel it through the committee, he might as well know now as after lunch, I suppose,’ he said,
‘That would be my view,’ said Hector Rose.
‘As long as it’s understood that this is a time when there mustn’t be one word out of school. I’m not authorized to speak to anyone at Barford, and neither are you. This is for the committee and no one else in this country.’
‘We take that point, Dr Pearson.’ Rose inclined his head.
‘Oh, well then,’ said Pearson, in a flat casual tone, ‘we’ve got a bomb.’
He announced it as though it were an off-hand matter of fact, as though he were informing two people, neither of whom he thought much of, that he had bought a new house.
Rose’s first reply was just as flat.
‘Have you indeed?’ he said. Then he recovered himself: ‘I really must congratulate you and our American colleagues. Most warmly.’
‘We’re just putting the final touches to the hardware,’ said Pearson. ‘It’s nearly ready for delivery.’
Rose looked from Pearson’s face, pale from travel but relaxed, out to the soft, dank, muggy morning. Under the low sky the grass shone with a brilliant, an almost artificial sheen.
‘It really is a remarkable thought,’ said Rose.
‘I always expected we should get it,’ said Pearson.
I broke in: ‘What happens now?’
‘Oh, before we make many more, there are lots of loose ends to tie up,’ said Pearson.
I said: ‘I didn’t mean that. What happens to the bombs that do exist?’
Pearson pushed up his spectacles.
‘They’re going to explode one in the desert soon,’ he said, ‘just to see if it goes off all right.’
‘And the others?’
‘I didn’t have much to do with the military,’ he said, in the same offended tone, ‘but there’s some talk they’ll try one on the Japs.’
I said: ‘How do the scientists over there take that?’
‘Some of them are getting a bit restive.’ He might not have heard the feeling in my question, but he was not a fool, he knew what lay behind it. ‘Some of the people at Barford will get restive, too,’ he said. ‘That’s why they mustn’t hear until there’s proper authority for them to do so.’
It was no use arguing just then. Instead, I asked about friends of mine working on the American projects, O–, S–, Kurt Puchwein.
‘Puchwein moved from Chicago to Los Alamos,’ said Pearson. ‘He was said to have done a good job.’
He yawned, stretched his legs, and announced, ‘Oh, well, I think that’s all, I may as well be going.’
‘Thank you very, very much for coming here so promptly this morning,’ said Rose. ‘I’m immensely grateful to you, many, many, many thanks.’
When Pearson had shut the door, we heard his slow steps lolloping down the corridor. Rose was sitting with his arms folded on his desk, his glance meeting mine; we were each thinking out consequences, and some of our thoughts were the same.
‘I must say I’m sorry we didn’t get in first,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘It’s clear to me that the Pearson man is right. This information is restricted to us and the committee, and that there’s nothing that we can usefully do at this juncture.’
‘When can we do anything?’
‘I think I know what’s on your mind,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
Rose said: ‘Now that the American party has produced this bomb, you’re thinking it’s obviously unreasonable for our people to break their necks trying to save a couple of months. I need hardly say that I agree with you. I propose to take it upon myself to prevent it happening.’ He added in a polite, harsh, uneasy tone: ‘Please don’t think I’m taking care of this arrangement for the sake of your brother. We simply want to avoid unnecessary waste, that’s all.’
I thanked him, uneasy in my turn. Even that morning, we could not be natural to each other. Curiously, although Rose had picked out and settled what was most likely to be worrying me, at that moment it happened to be taking second place.
‘It’s important,’ I broke out, ‘that the Barford people should know what we’ve just heard.’
‘Why is it important, Eliot?’ asked Rose in his coolest voice.
Watching me as I remained silent, he went on, sounding as competent as ever:
‘I think I can go some of the way with you. If there is any temptation to make a practical demonstration of this weapon – on the whole I shall believe that when I see it – then the scientists are likely to have their own views. In fact, they might have more influence with the soldiers and politicians than any of us would have. In that case, I suggest to you that two points arise: first, the scientists concerned won’t be listened to if they get the information through a security leakage; second, that there is every conceivable advantage in the scientists acting entirely by themselves. I put it to you that, even if you and I were free agents, which we’re very far from being, the balance of sense would be in favour of leaving it strictly to the scientists.’
I was looking at him, without being ready to say yes or no.
‘Mind you,’ said Rose, ‘I can appreciate the argument that it’s totally unreasonable for scientists to make a fuss at this stage. A good many people hold the perfectly tenable view that all weapons are scientific nowadays and you can’t draw a division between those we’ve already used and this new one. It’s arguable that any scientific hullabaloo on this affair would be a classical case of straining at the gnat and swallowing the camel.’
‘I can’t see it as quite so simple,’ I said.
I was thinking, this was what official people might come to. Rose was always one jump ahead of official opinion; that was why they called him a man of judgement. His judgement was never too far-sighted for solid men, it led them by a little but not too much, it never differed in kind from theirs.
Yet, as we sat together beside his desk, he gave me a heavy glance.
