‘You’ve not given one single piece of evidence that he’s got anything to do with the leakage,’ said Luke.
‘I don’t intend to. That’s not the point.’
‘What is the point?’
‘I’ve made it clear enough before. I’m not prepared to say whether he is or is not connected with the leakage, or whether there’s any danger that he ever will be. I’m saying something quite different and much simpler. For the purpose of anyone running Barford, the world has divided itself into two halves. Sawbridge belongs to the other. If we keep him at Barford, it is likely to do the place finite harm. And it may not be nice for you and me.’
‘I’ve told you before, and I will tell you again,’ said Luke, ‘you’re asking me to throw Sawbridge out because a lot of old women may see bogies. Well, I’m not prepared to do it, unless someone can give me a better reason than that. There’s only one reason that I should be ready to listen to. That is, is he going to give anything away?’
We all knew that Martin was right in his analysis. The world had split in two, and men like us, who kept any loyalty to their past or their hopes, did not like it. Years before, people such as Luke or Francis Getliffe or I had sometimes faced the alternative — if you had to choose between a Hitler world or a communist world, which was it to be? We had had no doubt of the answer. It had seemed to us that the communists had done ill that good might come. We could not change all the shadows of those thoughts in an afternoon.
It had been different, of course, with men like Thomas Bevill and his friends, or many of my old colleagues at Cambridge and the Bar. Most of them, in their hearts, would have given the opposite answer: communism was the enemy absolute: incidentally, it said something for the patriotism of their class that, full of doubts about the German war, knowing what it meant for them, win or lose, they nevertheless fought it.
Now it was men like Luke and Francis Getliffe and me who felt the doubts, the scientists most of all. Often they were sick at heart, although despair was unnatural to them and they believed that the split in the world — the split which seemed to them the anti-hope — would not last for ever.
Martin said: ‘I’ve explained to you, that doesn’t begin to be the point.’
‘For me,’ Luke’s voice became loud, ‘it’s the beginning and the end. Here’s someone who, as far as you know, will never be any closer to a leakage than you or me. And you’re saying we ought to find a bogus reason for putting him in the street — just because some old women might natter. I’m simply not playing that game. Nor would Lewis. If we have to start insuring ourselves like that, we might as well pack up.’
As he knew, my sympathies were on his side. It was he, not Martin, who had insisted on seeing me that night — because he wanted my support. But also he had asked for my advice as an official, and I had to give it. No prudent man could ignore Martin’s case. True, the responsibility for security rested with Captain Smith and his service: true, also, that Martin’s proposal to get rid of the man out of hand was indefensible. But the risks were as great as Martin said.
As I was advising Luke (I wanted him at the least to talk to the new Chairman), I watched them both and thought — yes, Martin’s case was clear, he was showing his usual foresight, and yet there was another motive behind it. Luke was frowning, his head bent over the table; Martin was sitting slightly back, his forehead unlined, more controlled, more like an official, than the other two of us that night. He seemed remote from any sign or memory of the conflict in my office, only three weeks before. But, though he was remote, I believed I could see his motive.
As the hushed voices, his and Luke’s and mine, whispered and hissed under the beams, I saw him for a moment with the insight of kinship: I thought I knew what he was aiming at. If I were right, I did not like it.
We had talked for a long time, when Luke pushed the table away. He had just repeated that he would not budge unless someone gave him new evidence; this was the finish.
‘I’m damned if I get rid of Sawbridge,’ he said, and his force was formidable.
Martin replied, unmoved: ‘In that case I shall send you my views on paper.’
‘Damn it, man,’ for the third time Luke forgot to be quiet, ‘we’ve talked it out, I don’t want any bumf.’
Martin said: ‘I’m sorry, but I want to have it on the record.’
30: A Joyous Moment in the Fog
That autumn it was strange to hear the scientists alone, trying to examine their consciences, and then round a committee table. Outsiders thought them complacent, opaque: of those that I knew best, it was not true.
‘There aren’t any easy solutions,’ said Luke. ‘Otherwise we should all take them.’
He was speaking first of scientists, but also of all others in a time of violence; for the only root-and-branch ‘solutions’ which could give a man an absolute reason for not working at Barford on the bomb, were not open to many. Unqualified pacificism or Communism — if you believed either, your course was clear. But no other faith touched the problem. Among the new recruits to Barford, there were a number who were religious, but none of the churches gave them a direction.
Either/or, said Luke. Either you retired and helped to leave your country defenceless. Or you made a weapon which might burn men, women, and children in tens of thousands. What was a man to do?
‘I don’t think we’ve got any option,’ said Francis Getliffe to me in the club, one night after his return from America. ‘Luke’s right, the Barford boys are right, we’ve got to make the infernal thing.’
After these conversations, I saw the same men in their places on the committees, experienced in business after six years of war, many of them, including Getliffe himself and Martin, having become skilful at the committee arts, disposing of great budgets, all caught up, without so much as a stumble of reservation, on getting the plutonium made at Barford. No body of men could have sounded less introspective; as their new Chairman said, with the jubilation of a housemaster who sees the second eleven at the nets, they were the keenest committee he had ever had.
The new Chairman was — to the irritation of his own friends and the Government backbenchers — old Thomas Bevill. In those first months of office, the Government had a habit of resurrecting figures from early in the war. Bevill was an ex-minister, a Tory, but atomic energy had started under him; now it was in the limelight, he might soften criticism; so he was brought out of retirement like an old man of the tribe. On his side, he havered about taking a job under a Labour administration, but he was by this time seventy-six, they would be in for five years, he might never get another job and he just could not resist it.
At his first committee he slipped unobtrusively, happily into the chair, as though in literal truth, not in his own inexorable cliché, he was ‘glad to be back in the saddle’. He gazed round the table and greeted each man by name. No one was less effusive by nature, but he always felt that effusiveness was called for on such occasions, and so he called out ‘Dr Getliffe! old friend!’ and so on clockwise round the table. ‘Mr Drawbell! old friend!’ ‘Dr Luke! old friend!’ and finally round to me, at his right hand: ‘Our secretary, Mr Eliot! old friend!’
Mounteney, sitting near me, was disgusted. One might have asked why he was there at all, after his disappearance from Barford, never to return. Actually, Mounteney’s self-exile from atomic energy had lasted exactly two months. He remained in his professorship, but accepted a seat on the committee. He was so austere that no one dared to ask why. Duty? Yes. The desire that real scientists should have a voice? No doubt. But for myself, I believed that his chief motive was the same as Bevill’s, whom he so much despised — that he could not bear to be out of things.