Nothing So Strange (37 page)

“You’re darned right they don’t—and why should they? We’d throw most
of them out on their ears as quick as we’d scrap a leaky vacuum pump.”

“To correct the simile, Frank, we wouldn’t scrap a leaky vacuum
pump— we’d repair it. And some of the people who run things aren’t
bad—they just need an educational repair job….”

“Try and do one on them. Suggest an educational qualification for
political office. You’d run straight into the right divine of a democracy to
elect all the shysters and nitwits it wants.”

“An educational qualification wouldn’t keep out the shysters.”

“Then let’s have one for voters. That might do something.”

“Yes, it would give the shysters the best chance they’ve ever had of
fixing elections.”

“Not if it was done properly.”

“It wouldn’t be. The one-man-one-vote idea may have its absurdities, but
in practice it keeps the fixers at bay. And the fools cancel each other out
on either side.”

“That’s the most cynical argument in favor of a two-party system I ever
heard. But what if somebody starts a party that doesn’t have any fools?”

“In the circumstances, Frank, only a fool would do that.”

He laughed enormously, enjoying the argument as much as I did. I wish I
could remember more of it; it lasted several hours, and though I didn’t agree
with him altogether, and he tended to over-stress and overload his points,
much that he said was somehow a crystallization of my own drifting
misgivings. I particularly recall one of his remarks—that if the
development of atomic energy was, as might be claimed, the biggest landmark
in human knowledge since the discovery of fire, then the decision whether or
not to use it for destruction was the biggest ethical question mark since the
one that faced Pilate.

“And the odd thing is,” he added, “that even in a democracy this decision
has been or will be made without the mass of the people having the ghost of
an idea of what’s afoot. Is that bad? Or is it inevitable? Or both?… Mind
you, I’m not suggesting you can hold an election or a referendum about it in
the middle of a war. But if the ethical question should crop up any time in
the future, would it be a valid excuse for an average citizen to plead that
he didn’t know what was going on in his own country? Because that’s the
excuse we’ll get from a lot of Germans when we blame them for the
concentration camps.”

“But in their case it won’t be true.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Middle-class respectable folks are so damned
innocent— what does my Aunt Lavinia know about the brothels that exist
only a few blocks from her house?… But the time’s coming when ignorance
won’t
be an excuse, it
mustn’t
be, it ought to be the last of
all the excuses one can ever accept. Which, incidentally, is why I’m all for
free speech and free education.
Mehr Licht,
Goethe called it.”

I asked what he thought an individual could do, and he answered: “Little
enough, till the war’s ended, except think things out and occasionally talk
them over with a kindred spirit—as we’re doing now. Matter of fact, I’m
very loyally co-operating with the authorities—you noticed how
carefully I brought you into this bedroom before we began to talk? I insist
that when I discuss science with a fellow scientist no bellhop shall be
listening at the keyhole.”

He went on to talk of the future and the possibilities of infinite
disaster to the world. Once or twice what he said reminded me of that old
argument with Julian Spee at your house years ago—it was frightening to
realize how much that had then been purely speculative and philosophical had
since become sober prophecy. And it was frightening also to realize that such
a phrase as “the collapse of civilization” struck an almost stale
note—the sort of subject you’d set for a schoolboy’s essay or a college
debating forum. We’d all been warned so much and so often, the average man
was bored rather than scared. “Yet you can’t exaggerate the mess we’re
in—a technological crisis bringing to a head the moral crisis that
we’ve all shirked for centuries. It’s infinitely beyond any question of how
much can be kept secret by one nation for a few more years at most. I tell
you frankly I
am
scared, and when I talk with people who aren’t I get
more scared than ever. Mind you, don’t think I’m in favor of handing over
secrets, such as they are, to all and sundry as an act of faith. If any
country’s got to get ahead, even in a rat race, let it be ours. But there’s
the whole pity of it. Atomic energy’s such a big thing it’s the curse of Cain
that we should be thinking first of bombs. It could make heaven on earth if
only we’d let it—if only we’d use it for peace with a tenth of the
energy we’ve worked on it for war. And that’s where research comes in—
open research inside a framework of free science. So far as I’m concerned,
Free Science is the Fifth Freedom, and if we don’t get it back and hang onto
it, then count me out of science altogether—I’d rather go fishing for
the little time that’s left—rather anything than be a hired witch
doctor muttering top- secret spells behind barbed-wire fences. Might come to
that in the end—or just before the end. Might come to a point when you
and I stage our sit-down strike— what you might call an
all-war-short-of-aid policy—while our harnessed and muzzled colleagues
carry on till the bombs start falling and they finish up, like everyone else
on that doomsday, Men of Extinction….”

I said I didn’t think a sit-down strike would work, and in any case it was
defeatist; and then suddenly something flared up inside me so that I remember
saying: “By God, Frank, the future’s not a club you can resign from! It’s
part of the whole world’s problem, and as you say, we’ve shirked it for
centuries. But now we’ve got to stop shirking it, and in that fight
count
me in
—both as a scientist and also, if you’ll pardon the
expression, as a good American!”

Sanstrom laughed and patted my arm. We were both good Americans, for that
matter, and therefore a bit shy of striking the patriotic note. The telephone
rang while we were still arguing; it was a girl Sanstrom was having to
dinner; he asked me to stay and make a third, he thought I might find her
interesting. I did; she was English, working for British
Information—rather good- looking and vivacious and well-schooled in
that phony understatement about her country that impresses so many outside
it. She dropped most of the phonyness when she learned I’d been in the blitz;
she was really quite a sincere person. And she didn’t know anything about the
Project, which was a relief; so we chattered on general topics over cocktails
and then went out to a restaurant where they served New Orleans food. The
conversation sank in importance as it rose in agreeableness—I guess
that’s one way of describing the rest of the evening. We returned to the
hotel for more drinks and took her to the British Embassy, where she was
staying; after which Sanstrom and I strolled back along Massachusetts Avenue
in the chill evening air and calmed ourselves down. But we were still a bit
exalted. Finally, as we shook hands at the hotel entrance, he said: “It’s
been good seeing you. Don’t let things get you down. Look at me—I worry
all the time but I don’t lose weight.”

He was a big man, Sanstrom, not unlike Emil Jannings, if you remember
those old films. Everything was rather oversize about him—arms and head
and mouth and arguments and gestures—it had been hard for him to lower
his voice in the hotel bedroom, and when I had told him what Framm had said
about the Buck Rogers strip—“Science is the opiate of the
people”—any cruising bellhop could have heard his laugh as far off as
the elevators.

I asked Brad if he had talked to Sanstrom again, and he
said no; he knew
he was a busy man and he didn’t want to trade on an old friendship. As a
matter of fact, he wandered about Washington on his own the next day, seeing
the sights; and in the evening, because he found he could get a seat on a
plane to Knoxville, he made the return trip with a day to spare before he was
expected back to work. So he set out for a walk in the surrounding country.
The air was cold and the northern slopes of the hills ribbed with
snow—the kind of weather he liked best. He walked a long way—much
further than usual. He felt that the talk with Sanstrom had staged some sort
of revolution in his mind; not that he had entirely agreed with him, but the
unaccustomed freedom of speech and exchange of ideas had shaken loose some of
his own; and he tried to chart out this new mood of his, as accurately and as
scientifically as he would have done any other observed but puzzling
phenomena. Soon he came to one of the road blocks; a soldier stopped him, he
showed his identification papers and chatted for a while, but the
interruption made him ready to walk back. When at last he came to the hill
from which the enormous size of the plant was spectacular, he stopped to
stare as if he had never seen it before. He lit a cigarette and sat on a
fence near an abandoned farm. A phrase came that seemed to fit his
predicament—his own and Sanstrom’s and the world’s—a predicament
symbolized by the identification papers he had to carry and by the soldier
guarding the exit to the vast enclave.
A conspiracy of silence
. He
must have seen that phrase unnumbered times—a cliché if ever there was
one. But then, because he was physically and mentally tired, his mind glided
easily into another phrase, not such a cliché….
Conspiracy of science
… silence … science … silent science
but not exactly
holy
science … and at that he thought he had better pull himself together and
stop the output of what the psychiatrists call echolalia.

He slept badly that night and by morning was certain of at least one
thing—that he was headed for another breakdown if he didn’t get a
change. He realized now that even in spite of the routine character of his
job he had been overworking, or perhaps overworrying; he knew, at any rate,
that he had reached some climax of misgiving hardly to be put into words.

He went to the head of his department that day and offered his
resignation. It caused a small stir.

What was his reason?

He hesitated—he hadn’t really thought out an adequate reason.

Ill-health?

Well no, not exactly.

Overwork?

Partly.

Or perhaps some personal reason?

Well yes, in a sort of way—a personal reason.

The head of the department passed him on to a doctor, who examined him
thoroughly without offering any comment, but said afterwards that he would
gladly certify him in need of a rest. They were very careful (it occurred to
him) in a considerate way, or else very considerate in a careful way. No need
to talk of resigning—how about a leave of absence? All right. To go
where? Oh, anywhere. New York, maybe. For how long? A month? Yes, that would
be fine. He was by that time simply anxious to get away.

He went to New York. Before leaving he was reminded of the penalties under
the Espionage Act for any disclosure of official secrets; he said that of
course he understood all that.

In New York he rested by seeing plays, movies, and walking the streets.
One day in the circular bar of a hotel on Lexington he thought he saw the
same man whom he had seen a few days before walking along upper Broadway. It
might have been, of course.

Then suddenly he made up another part of his mind. He called on his draft
board (he had been registered in New York on his return from Europe). They
listened to what he had to say and promised to get in touch with him at the
address he gave, a hotel on West Forty-fourth, very convenient for the
Algonquin.

A few days later a man came to see him at the hotel. He had the wrong kind
of personality, and the interview ended with Brad exclaiming sharply: “I
guess this is still a free country—a man can choose whether he offers
his brains or his life for it, especially when they don’t want his
brains….”

That, he realized as soon as he had said it, was absurdly melodramatic and
by no means fair.

But he insisted, and rather to his surprise they let him have his way. He
got his calling-up notice, he took his physical (and was relieved to find
himself passed as medically fit); he was inducted, given his choice of the
Air Force, and in due course found he was too old to be a pilot. But he made
a good navigator, passed all his tests in fine style and waited to be shipped
overseas. That was about October of 1944. But they didn’t send him. In fact
he was somehow unaccountably omitted from one overseas outfit after another.
He began to feel sure that this was deliberate. And about this time also he
began to have an additional feeling that he was watched. Additional, that
was, to any earlier kind of feeling. Once in a New Orleans restaurant, for
instance, when he was talking to some civilians, he thought he recognized a
man he had seen before in a movie house in Montgomery. But of course it might
not have been, because when you begin looking round for faces you have seen
before
and seeing them
, a certain danger point has been reached. From
then, doubtless, his special neurosis dated.

And then came the crash in Texas.

We lay back in the warm air, and the story somehow petered
out in random
afterthoughts prompted by my own questions, but presently both question and
answer followed at longer intervals till there was at last a silence; and it
was then, without any words between us, that I knew he loved me. It wasn’t
entirely love-making that had made me sure of that, because love-making isn’t
so very unique, but there was something quieter and rarer that showed in the
way he looked at me—the deep unspoken assumption that all was well
between us, no matter what was ill with the rest of the world.

The sun dipped behind the ridge and it was time we were beginning to
return. We walked to the plane, still without speaking; he climbed in and
gave me the signals; I swung the prop and got in the seat behind, willing for
him to do the flying if he wanted, though there had been no arrangement about
it. He taxied across the lake bed into what wind was left; it was almost a
glassy calm by now; the mountains looked like stage scenery. He made a sharp
take-off, the professional kind, and set an immediate course for Lost Water,
climbing till the sun was visible, then higher than necessary till the far
ranges came in sight, pink-tipped with snow. Nothing moving caught the eye
except the long shadows of the wings, crawling over rock and sand; and all
the time I was thinking over what he had said, till suddenly the effort of
thought broke through a barrier and I wasn’t thinking at all, but just living
the moments through with him, whether he knew it or not.