Part Four
A Result in Private
27: An Uneffaceable Afternoon
Big Ben had just struck, it must have been the half-hour, when Martin said: ‘I disagree.’
He continued to look at me.
‘I oughtn’t to have stopped Arthur Mounteney sending his letter,’ said Martin. Just then, that was the focus of his remorse.
‘It wouldn’t have done any good,’ I said.
‘It would have done the trick,’ said Martin.
I shook my head.
He said: ‘So now I shall have to send a letter myself.’
He added, in a tone that was casual, cold, almost hostile: ‘Perhaps you’d better have a look at it.’
He opened his wallet, and with his neat deliberate fingers unfolded a sheet of office paper. He leaned across and put it on my blotter. The words were written in his own handwriting. There were no corrections, and the letter looked like a fair copy. It read:
To the Editor of The Times (which failing, Daily Telegraph, Manchester Guardian). Sir, As a scientist who has been employed for four years on the fission bomb, I find it necessary to make two comments on the use of such a bomb on Hiroshima. First, it appears not to have been relevant to the war: informed persons are aware that, for some weeks past, the Japanese have been attempting to put forward proposals for surrender. Second, if this had not been so, or if the proposals came to nothing, a minimum respect for humanity required that a demonstration of the weapon should be given, e.g. by delivering a bomb on unpopulated territory, before one was used on an assembly of men, women, and children. The actual use of the bomb in cold blood on Hiroshima is the most horrible single act so far performed. States like Hitler’s Germany have done much wickedness over many years, but no State has ever before had both the power and the will to destroy so many lives in a few seconds. In this respect, our scientists and our government have been so closely interwoven with those of the USA that we have formed part of that power and that will…
‘You’ve not sent this?’ I said, before I had finished reading.
‘Not yet.’
‘How many people know you’ve written it?’
‘Only Irene.’
That was the reason, I thought, that he had not wished me to go to Barford.
If this letter were published, it meant the end of his career. I had to get him out of it. From the moment he said that he was proposing to act, I had known that I must prevent him.
Even though I agreed with almost all he said.
As I began to make the first opposing moves, which he was already expecting, I was thinking, his was a letter which an able man only writes when he is near breaking point. Only his mask was stoical, as he sat there, his fingers spread like a starfish on the arms of his chair. In his letter — whatever he had written I should be trying to suppress it — he had not made the best of his case.[1] Yet I agreed with him in all that mattered. Looking back years later, I still agreed with him.
I felt it so, that afternoon, when I set myself to make Martin keep quiet. I shut away the sense of outrage, my own sense of outrage as well as his, and brought out the worldly wise official’s argument, such as we had displayed at Barford in July, such as he had used himself. It was not worthwhile making gestures for no result. One such gesture was all you were allowed; you ought to choose a time when it could do good. We had found ourselves in responsible positions; we could not give them up overnight; for everyone’s sake we had to get through the next few years without a war; then one could make gestures.
There was something in what I said, but they were not the reasons, they were nowhere near the reasons, why I was calling on each ounce of nature that I possessed to force him to conform. It was, in fact, incomparably more simple. For a brother as for a son, one’s concern is, in the long run, prosaic and crude. One is anxious about their making a living; one longs for their success, but one wants it to be success as the world knows it, reputation among solid men. For myself, my own ‘respectable’ ambitions had damped down by now, I should perhaps have been able, if the choice was sharp enough, to throw them away and face a scandal. For myself; but not for him.
I had seen friends throw away what most men clung to, respectability, money, fame. Roy Calvert: Charles March: even old Martineau. I understood why they had done it. I should have been the last to dissuade them. But they were friends, and Martin was a brother. The last thing you want with a brother is that he should fulfil a poetic destiny.
Martin met my argument point by point; we were getting nowhere. All of a sudden he began looking down beside his chair, under the desk, by the hat stand.
‘Did I bring in a briefcase?’ he said.
I said that I had not noticed, and he went on searching.
‘Does it matter?’ I was put out.
He said that it contained notes of the new method for extracting plutonium: it was top secret. He must trace it. He thought he remembered leaving it in his car: would I mind walking to the garage with him? Irritated at the interruption, I followed beside him, down Whitehall, across Victoria Street: Martin, his forehead lined with anxiety was walking faster than usual, and we were both silent. The offices, the red-brick houses of Great Smith Street, glowed shabby in the sunshine. Just as on the night before, I felt a tenderness for the dirty, unfriendly, ugly streets such as I had never felt before. I even felt something like remorse, because what had happened to another town might happen here.
The briefcase was not in the car. Martin said nothing, except that he must ring up Barford from my office. Back there, he sat leaning forward, as though by concentrating he could make the call come through. It was minutes before the telephone whirred. Martin was talking to his secretary, his words fast but even then polite. ‘Would you mind looking…?’ He waited, then cried out: ‘Thank God for that! With elaborate thanks he put the receiver down, and gave me a sharp, deprecating grin.
‘I never moved it. It’s sitting there in its proper place.’
‘It seemed a curious thing to worry about,’ I said.
For an instant he looked blank. Then his face broke into a laugh, the kind of noiseless laugh with which as children we used to receive family jokes. But soon his expression hardened. He asked, had I anything more to say before he sent the letter?
‘A good deal more,’ I said.
‘I wish you’d say it.’
His tone was so inflexible that I became more brutal.
‘How are you going to live?’ I said.
‘A decent scientist can make some sort of a living,’ he said.
‘Whatever trouble you get into?’
‘It wouldn’t be a good living, but I can make do.’
‘What does your wife think of that?’
There came a surprise. Martin smiled, not affectionately, but as though he held a trump which I had miscounted. He said: ‘As a matter of fact, she wants me to do it.’
He spoke with absolute confidence. I had made a stupid mistake. I should have remembered the way she welcomed his first risk. I tried another tack.
‘Have you thought of your son?’
‘Yes, I’ve thought of him,’ said Martin, He added: ‘I’ve also thought of you. I’m sorry if it harms you, and I know that it must.’ He said it formally.
I cast round again. He and I took too much responsibility on ourselves, I said. That was true in our human relations.
He stared at me, and for an instant I was silent.
I went on with the argument. We should be better men if we took less upon our shoulders. And scientists as a class had the same presumption. They thought too much of their responsibility. Martin that day had no more guilt to carry than any other man.