But, Even if Hilda had shown willing, there still wouldn’t have been much time for fancy motoring. That was because young Mellon had been doing better than ever on de-sporulation. And someone else had been doing even better than young Mellon. That someone else was Gillett. And as the work proceeded he gradually emerged as senior midwife. Despite all indications to the contrary, there must have been something or other propping up that profile from behind. And the fact that Bodmin was able to confirm a new, streamlined birth process for B. anthracis was really Gillett’s own personal triumph.
He was certainly the Institute’s blue-eyed boy when the Old Man called us all together. And Gillett knew it. He was therefore careful to keep his profile turned towards us throughout. That may have been because he suspected that, full-face, the old hatchet stock came out a bit too strongly.
The Old Man weighed in straight away. He crossed over to the safe, fiddled with his keys and finally produced a test-tube rack with the tubes all nicely stoppered down with cotton-wool and sealed off with metholin.
“This is what we might call our Exhibit A,” he said proudly. “So far as we know these are the only anthrax cultures grown with the aid of M-substance in the country. Their multiplication rate is something between five and six times above normal. They may be the only cultures of that kind in the world. We don’t know. And it is no part of our duty to find out. We are merely scientific workers.”
The “merely” really meant that he could not think of any higher occupation for Man. And, with that, he put the rack down on the table in front of us, and then turned to face his audience again.
“And now I’m sure you’d all like Dr. Gillett to say a few words,” he remarked sweetly.
We all clapped politely. Then we sat back for Gillett to give us his electoral address. And I must say that he did it beautifully. Almost too beautifully. First he thanked the demure one for the part that she had played in it, and there would have been tears in our eyes if he had lingered for a moment longer on the theme of love-in-harness. Next he paid a tribute to Dr. Mann which was probably perfectly justified. He thanked Rogers, the ex-lab. boy, and brought in Bansted in the same breath. He mentioned Hilda, who murmured: “No, that’s too much.” He even went out of his way to salute Kimbell and Swanton, which you could see upset them because they both loathed him. He referred to young Mellon. And he offered me a personal crumb of his admiration—for not having dropped something that he had once handed me, I think it was. Then he looked very carefully round the room, and said: “I don’t think I’ve left out anyone, have I?”
He had. He had left out the great Dr. Smith, and the omission was obvious and deliberate. I felt rather inclined to admire him for it. Or at least I might have admired him if I had liked him better. But, at any rate, it didn’t surprise me. All research workers above a certain level are a pretty jealous lot of queens. And just to make sure that he wasn’t given time to correct himself in case the omission had been accidental. I started up the clapping.
That was the end of the prayer meeting. The Old Man put the test-tube rack back into the safe, locked it carefully and restored the key to his key-ring.
Dr. Mann simply sat there staring at the door of the safe long after the key had been put away again. He reminded me of a picture in the old nursery at home of a hungry schoolboy sitting outside the larder door.
Elevenses that morning were rather more lively than usual. I wished afterwards that I could have kept a recording of the whole conversation because there were one or two rather useful pointers left carelessly lying around amid the general litter. I was the first to arrive. And I had my own good reason for that. It was simply an attempt to get to my coffee while it was still in the black state. The Phoenician had a healthy country girl’s prejudice against black coffee, and at eleven hundred hours precisely she used to go up and down the line with her milk jug like someone doing the honours in a dairy show. When I snatched my cup away from her I saw the expression in her eyes of brute nature stupefied: it was as though a favourite bull-calf had just told its mother that it had gone on to the water-waggon.
Then Dr. Mann came in. He did not look well. I had noticed that earlier. There was a sort of frozen waxiness to his complexion, and his eyes were staring. I think that he was already saying something when he came into the room. And if he was, he must have been talking to himself because there was certainly no one else there. As soon as he saw me he came over, and all that I got was the tail-end of something.
“ . . . it must not happen. It must not happen,” he said slowly and with increasing emphasis. “There must surely be some way of stopping it, no?”
“Only by taking the milk jug right away from her,” I told him.
Dr. Mann did not seem to have heard me, however. Or, if he had heard, he had not understood.
“It is not even sufficient to think that the Russians possess it also,” he said. “They do not know the extent of our knowledge. Therefore, they may be tempted to think of us as ignorant. And, if they do think so, they may be tempted to make use of this weapon believing us to be unprepared, no?”
“That would seem to be about the general picture,” I agreed with him.
“But that is what must not happen,” he said again. “And there is only one way of stopping it. Only one.”
“Which way’s that?” I asked.
The strain of telling me was almost too much for him. He was trembling as he stood there, and he was shaking his little egg-shaped head so violently from side to side that I knew that the chick was due to be delivered almost any moment now. But when it came it had a rather old-world appearance. It was Easter-all-the-year-round for that kind of chick.
“By publishing our results internationally,” he said.
“Then there would be no more danger from it. International results would neutralise themselves. There would be no more spying, no more counter-spying, no more fear in the minds of men. It would be the end of war if results were published.
“But suppose the other fellow was a bit absent-minded and forgot?” I asked.
“The choice,” said Dr. Mann solemnly, “is between possible failure and inevitable disaster. I would sacrifice my life to see it happen.”
“I get your point,” I told him. “But I still don’t think that it would be a good risk on Lloyd’s.”
“Lloyd’s, plees?” he asked.
I did not enlighten him. I must have taken part in precisely that conversation at least a couple of hundred times before. And when I had been younger I had, God forgive me, started about half of them. In fact, it is the basic attitude of every serious scientist, this sharing of results. There is also a higher mystique to it. Pure knowledge knowing boundaries of neither race nor creed, and that sort of thing. And Dr. Mann was just getting ready for that part.
But by now we had been joined by the two King Street emigrés. And the level of the conversation took a sharp slant downwards.
“ . . . there is only one country in the world in which such knowledge would be really safe,” Kimbell was saying. “And that’s the . . . ”
“U.S.S.R.,” Swanton put in almost automatically.
These two boys had done their double act for so long that I had begun to doubt whether they ever knew exactly which had said what in their particular line of cross-talk.
“Imagine a weapon like this in Truman’s hands,” Kimbell went on, without even noticing that he had been interrupted. “Can you see a free Europe if he possessed it? It all fits so perfectly into the old peace-through-fear formula.”
Rogers, meanwhile, had gone one better. He had Bansted with him, and the pair of them were extraordinarily reminiscent of my old employer.
“And in time of peace just think of the commercial possibilities,” he pointed out. “There’d be tremendous possibilities in all sorts of fields for the first firm that gets working on it.”
There was a lot more from him in the same vein, and you could watch the mind of the ex-lab. boy working. I think that he was already seeing himself as the head of a retail chemists’ chain with branches in all seaside towns, complete with tearooms and lending libraries in every one of them.
But it was left to the great Dr. Smith to score the absolute top-high somewhere down at the wrong end of the scale.
“Always assuming that there is something in it, and, personally, I am expressing no opinions either way”—he could really hardly have said less after the way in which Gillett had snubbed him—“let us only pray that we keep it to ourselves. I have reason, good reason, to believe that the Americans are only passing on a fraction of the atomic knowledge that they possess. If we can offer a threat every bit as terrible as theirs, we may be able to sit down at Lake Success as equal partners, and not as poor relations.”
This was Hilda’s turn.
“Hear, hear,” she said, looking more pre-Raphaelite than ever. “Only we should use it as a bargaining instrument rather than as a threat. We must always remember that the alliance of the English-speaking peoples is the most important thing in the long run. It’s simply that we mustn’t let the Americans trample on us.” When she had finished, I made a vow that as soon as we were married—and I made my mind up on that point—I would get her interested in bee-keeping or babies or something, and off international politics altogether. That is, if I was in time.
The way she was heading, she was due for the British Information Services to fix her up for a trans-Atlantic coast-to-coast goodwill mission tour almost any moment now.