For the first time that afternoon, I was able to tell him something. The Superintendent, Drawbell, the engineering heads –
‘Good God alive,’ Luke interrupted, ‘Lewis, who are these uncles?’
A list of names of refugees — and then I mentioned Arthur Mounteney.
‘I’m glad they’ve got hold of one scientist, anyway,’ said Luke. ‘He did some nice work once. He’s just about finished, of course.’
‘Do you feel like going in?’ I asked.
Luke would not reply.
‘Why don’t they get hold of Martin?’ he said. ‘He’s wasted where he is.’
‘They’re not likely to ask for me,’ said Martin.
‘Your name keeps cropping up,’ I said to Luke.
Usually, when I had seen men offered jobs, they had decided within three minutes, even though they concealed it from themselves, even though they managed to prolong the pleasure of deciding. Just for once, it was not so.
‘It’s all very well,’ said Luke. ‘I just don’t know where I can be most use.’ He was not used to hesitating; he did not like it; he tried to explain himself. If he stayed where he was, he could promise us a ‘bit of hardware’ in eighteen months. Whereas, if he joined this ‘new party’ there was no guarantee that anything would happen for years.
There was nothing exaggerated in Luke’s tone just then. I was used to the rowdiness with which he judged his colleagues, especially his seniors; it was the same with most of the rising scientists; they had none of the convention of politeness that bureaucrats like Sir Hector Rose were trained to, and often Rose and his friends disliked them accordingly. Listening to Luke that afternoon, no one would have thought, for instance, that the poor old derelict Mounteney was in fact a Nobel prizewinner aged about forty. But on his own value Luke was neither boastful nor modest. He was a good scientist; good scientists counted in the war, and he was not going to see himself wasted. He had lost that tincture of the absurd which had made Martin smile. He spoke without nonsense, with the directness of a man who knows what he can and cannot do.
‘I wish some of you wise old men would settle it for me,’ he said to me.
I shook my head. I had put Bevill’s request, but that was as far as I felt justified in going. For what my judgement of the war was worth, I thought on balance that Luke should stay where he was.
He could not make up his mind. As the three of us walked across the Park towards my flat in Dolphin Square, he fell first into a spell of abstraction and then broke out suddenly into a kind of argument with himself, telling us of a new device in what we then called RDF and were later to call Radar. The evening was bright. A cool wind blew from the east, bringing the rubble dust to our nostrils, although it was some days since the last raid. Under our feet the grass was dust — greyed and dry. I was worried about the war that evening; I could see no end to it; it was a comfort to be with those two, in their different fashions steady-hearted and robust.
On the way home, and all the evening, Martin kept putting questions to Luke, steering him back to nuclear fission. I could feel, though, that he was waiting for Luke to leave. He had something to say to me in private
At last we took Luke to the bus stop, and Martin and I turned back towards St George’s Square. The full moon shone down on the lightless blind-faced streets, and the shadows were dark indigo. Flecks of cloud, as though scanning the short syllables in a line of verse, stood against the impenetrable sky. Under the moon, the roofs of Pimlico shone blue as steel. The wind had fallen. It was a silent, beautiful wartime night.
‘By the way,’ said Martin, with constraint in his voice.
‘Yes?’
‘I’d be grateful if you could get me in to this project somehow.’
I had never known him ask favour of this kind before. He had not once come to me for official help, either at Cambridge or since. Now he was driven — scruple, pride, made his voice stiff, but he was driven.
‘I was going to suggest it,’ I said. ‘Of course, I’ll—’
‘I really would be grateful.’
My manoeuvre had come off; but as he spoke I felt no pleasure. I had taken it on myself to interfere; from now on I should have some responsibility for what happened to him.
Now the trigger had been touched, he was intent on going: why it meant so much, I could not tell, His career? — something of that, perhaps, but he was not reckoning the chances that night. Concern about his wife? — he would not volunteer anything. No: simple though the explanation might seem for a man like Martin, it was the science itself that drew him. Though he might have no great talent, nuclear physics had obsessed him since he was a boy. He did not know, that night, what he could add at Barford; he only knew that he wanted to be there.
He admitted as much; but he had more practical matters to deal with. Having swallowed his pride, he did not intend to prostrate himself for nothing.
‘You’re sure that you can get me in? I should have thought the first move was to persuade someone else to suggest me. Walter Luke would do…’ Could I write to Luke that night? Could I, as an insurance, remind Mounteney that Martin and I were brothers?
It was late before we went to bed; by that time Martin had written out an aide memoire of the people I was to see, write to, and telephone next day.
5: Advice from a Man in Trouble
MARTIN’S transfer went through smoothly, and he had begun work at Barford by June. With Luke, it took months longer.
In November I paid them an official visit. The Superintendent was still demanding men, and some of his sponsors in Whitehall had become more active; they even began to say that one of the schemes at Barford might give results within two years.
Francis Getliffe and the other scientific statesmen were sceptical. They were so discouraging that the Minister did not feel it worthwhile to inspect Barford himself; but, with his usual desire to keep all doors open, he sent me down instead.
I spent a morning and afternoon walking round laboratories listening to explanations I only one-tenth comprehended, listening also to the clicking, like one-fingered typewriting, of Geiger counters. But I comprehended one thing clearly. There were two main lines at Barford — one which Luke had set up on his own, with a few assistants, mine the other led by a man called Rudd. Rudd was the second-in-command of the establishment; his line was, in principle, to separate the isotope, and they were attempting several methods; it was one of these, on which Martin and a team of scientists were working, which Rudd was trying to sell. As an official, I had been exposed to a good deal of salesmanship, but this, for unremitting obsessive concentration, was in a class by itself.
It was having an effect on me. Next morning I was due for a conference with the Superintendent, and I needed to clear my head. So, as an excuse, I went off by myself to call on Luke.
It meant a walk through a country lane leading from the mansion, which had been turned into the administrative headquarters, to the airfield. The hedges were brittle and dark with the coming winter, the only touch of brightness was the green of the ivy flowers. At the top of the rise the mist was shredding a way, and suddenly, on the plateau, the huts, hangars, half-built brick ranges, stood out in the light of the cold and silvery sun.
Inside Luke’s hangar, the vista was desolate. A quarter of the roof was open to the sky, and a piece of canvas was hanging down like a velarium. The only construction in sight was a cube of concrete, about six feet high, with a small door in it standing slightly ajar, through which a beam of light escaped. The afternoon had turned cold, and in the half-light, lit only by that beam on the wet floor and a naked bulb on the side of the hangar, the chill struck like the breath of a cave. No place looked less like an engine room of the scientific future; it might have been the relic of a civilization far gone in decay.