Nothing So Strange

by James Hilton

  “I don’t know quite why, because I’m not usually sensitive to the glad- hand kind of reunion, but meeting Frank Sanstrom like that had a big effect on me. Of course the warmth of our early friendship came back, and I was pleased to have been so well remembered; but I think also it was the contrasting iciness of the military gents and the way they looked at me—the officer- private look plus something else that wasn’t any more palatable. Anyhow, I had vacation time due me and I made up my mind to take Frank at his word and call on him in Washington.

  “Which I did—without notifying him ahead, because I didn’t want to make the visit seem more than casual. I just went to Washington, found my way to the Carlton, and called him up on the house telephone. If he’d changed his plans by that time and gone, or if he weren’t in, it didn’t matter. I’d never been to Washington before and I could enjoy some sight-seeing. But he was in. And I caught a note of surprise in his voice when he heard mine—well, perhaps surprise was natural, even in spite of his invitation—but there was another note which I could almost diagnose as dismay. I had time to think things out in the elevator going up to his room; I said to myself—Something’s happened but he probably won’t say what. I was used to that sort of thing—we all were. It was part of the technique of secrecy—do what has to be done, don’t talk, don’t explain, don’t accuse, don’t confirm or deny. When the Harvard boy was drafted, for instance, I couldn’t help wondering whether it had been partly my own fault- -but I knew I should never find out, and that he wouldn’t either.”

  “I thought you said they did that to be able to put people on army pay?”

  “Often it was the only reason one could think of. But they didn’t treat everyone like that … and I knew it had been noted that I’d been working out mathematics problems with the boy in the evenings—nothing was said about it to either of us, but I had a suspicion—quite unprovable—that my wastebasket had been examined…. On the other hand, that might have been just routine. Watching was also routine. It carried no stigma.”

  He was on the defensive again. He said that I mustn’t get him wrong; he wasn’t complaining about the system. “When pure science becomes a war weapon, you’re bound to have secrecy, espionage, counterespionage, and all the tricks. If a scientist feels less happy in the atmosphere of an Oppenheim novel than a college lecture room, it’s just too bad, isn’t it? And there are secrets, no doubt, that it’s in the national interest to safeguard—and therefore the system can be held justifiable. I don’t know whether it kept the spies in the dark, but it certainly kept the outside public—you, for instance— and to a large extent the unimportant insiders, such as me.”

  “And you didn’t like it,” I said, as I had said once before.

  “Hell, no … how could I?” he replied, less cautiously. “When you’ve been brought up to an idea of scientific truth as something that transcends frontiers—something that can’t be bought or sold or patented or hidden—when you’ve been used to wandering about from one laboratory to another and asking questions about another man’s work—or submitting a problem to someone in another country to see if either of you can save the other’s time … it’s a bit hard to get the viewpoint that you’re working for Macy’s or Gimbel’s but not for both…. Mind you, I’d had a part training for that sort of idea in Berlin. Only somehow there it was Nazi stuff—easy to hate and therefore easier to discount. Over here it was harder to hate because you knew it might be necessary, but being harder to hate didn’t make it much easier to forget…. Is that too complicated?… Anyhow, where was I before I began all this?… Oh yes, on my way to see Frank Sanstrom at the Carlton. He had a small suite on one of the middle floors—elegant and impersonal till he’d littered it up, just as he’d always littered up his rooms in London. He was that sort of man. As soon as he greeted me I knew again that something was wrong. He offered me a drink and mixed one for himself. I had a feeling he wanted time to make a decision. Then he began to talk about the weather and Washington and the war news in a way I simply couldn’t stand. I’m afraid I … I rather lost my head. I realized then the effects of the strain that I’d perhaps not entirely recovered from, and that the plant life—h’m, I didn’t mean that, but it’ll do— the plant life hadn’t helped. I realized also how much I’d been looking forward to an utterly free conversation with someone in my own field. I flew off the handle a bit—I said he couldn’t deceive me, I knew something was the matter, and I challenged him to tell me what it was, to forget for one moment the never- confirm, never-deny technique that filled the air at times so that one couldn’t breathe…. He looked at me for rather a long time, then suddenly motioned me into the bedroom. ‘We’d better talk in here,’ he said. The bedroom was on an outside corner; the inside walls were against the bathroom and the sitting room. I knew what he meant, but the fact that he should be so cautious magnified the concession he was making in treating me like a human being, an old friend, and a fellow scientist. It moved me almost to tears. He sat on the bed while he told me what he knew. He said that after our chance meeting at the plant he had been questioned about his early knowledge of me in London, and he had gathered that for some reason I was under a cloud. They didn’t say why—of course they wouldn’t. He then asked me what my particular job was, and I saw no reason not to tell him. ‘Good God,’ he commented. I asked if it surprised him, and he answered: ‘No. I guessed something of the sort—that’s why I asked. It’s probably their idea of how to keep an eye on you with least trouble and risk.’

  “‘You mean it’s deliberate? They know the sort of thing I’m qualified for, yet they prefer to waste….’

  “‘It isn’t a question of waste. They probably don’t want you to know too much about what’s going on.’

  “‘But why?’

  “‘Perhaps because they think you know too much already. Ever hear the old Russian proverb—“Those who know enough are my friends; those who know too much are my enemies”?… Tell me about your association with Framm.’”

  “So I told him.”

  * * * * *

  “Everything?” I asked.

  “Pretty well,” he answered. “He’d heard about Pauli already—but of course from a rather different angle.”

  “So you put him right?”

  “Yes. I explained the arrangements about the trial and my suspicions when she died, and the way I went a bit out of my mind afterwards.”

  “Did you tell him you planned to kill Framm?”

  “Yes, and that the war started before I got a chance—”

  “And that you gave him false results instead?”

  His face clouded. “No, I didn’t tell him that. I’ve never told anyone that except you.”

  I wanted to ask why, but another question seemed more urgent. “What did he say? I’m curious to know how it would strike another person.”

  What I really meant was that I wondered how far his not quite complete story would seem plausible to anyone who, unlike me, had no personal verification of any part of it.

  Brad answered: “He said he thought it explained why the authorities weren’t so sure about me.”

  “I’m surprised he was even sure of you himself.”

  He laughed. “Oh, I’d be sure of Frank, so I guess he’d be sure of me. We were really friends, you know, in London. Besides, he’d met Framm once—at a scientific congress somewhere. He hadn’t liked him—he’d got the impression that the man was just a shyster. Of course I told him he was far more than that in both directions—a crook, and also a very great scientist.”

  “So once again you found yourself defending Framm?”

  “Defending him?… Heavens, no—but I knew Frank hadn’t sized the man up properly. After all, I’d worked with him.”

  I was a little moved by that, because it seemed to give me, in a flash, some central vision of Brad’s personality as well as the clue to what had often made trouble for him, and doubtless would again. I suppose if you concentrate on getting one thing into clear focus, as
he did, everything else gets a little bit out of focus; and the sort of thing that comes naturally to you, as a mere instinct of fairness or logic, carries an air of eccentricity or even untrustworthiness elsewhere.

  “All right,” I said. “Go on.”

  * * * * *

  He went on:

  … I asked Sanstrom what he thought the authorities suspected me of, and he answered: “Nothing—which is probably the worst thing to be suspected of if you’re suspected at all. Because it means there’s nothing you can do about it. They’re not accusing you, so you’ve nothing to refute or disprove. You’re like the coin that the automatic machine refuses—not necessarily bad, maybe only bent.”

  “Except that they didn’t refuse me, Frank.”

  “That’s so. For bent ones they have another automatic machine that combines the most effective methods of Henry Ford and Sherlock Holmes…. Of course you can always quit if it gets on your nerves, and with a good conscience, I’d say. Matter of fact if I were you I wouldquit. Why don’t you? You might be doing far more useful work somewhere else—teaching, for instance—I seem to recollect you had a real aptitude for that. I could fix you with a job if you like.”

  He then told me he had been “loaned” to the government for liaison work between the educational world and the Project; in other words, to steer into it young scientists fresh out of college. “Sometimes,” he said, “I feel like the Judas animal they use in the stockyards to lead the other animals to the slaughter—except that I’m saving some of them from another kind of slaughter, there’s always that consolation. I only hope we’ll get a good many of them back in the colleges when the war’s over. Assembly lines aren’t educational, even when you staff them with Ph.D.‘s.”

  And then, with extraordinary freshness and freedom, he began to argue the whole issue. Perhaps it wasn’t really so extraordinary, but after the atmosphere I’d lived in it seemed so. One hardly ever discussed what we were doing in the place where we were doing it. There had been a sort of social taboo. Some moment must have come when even the least intelligent guesser had an idea what was shaping up, but the chances are he wouldn’t share his guess with anyone else, or if he did, the other fellow would neither confirm nor deny…. So now, in this hotel bedroom with Sanstrom, I felt that something like a miracle was taking place. He assumed I knew plenty, and of course I did; but for him to take a chance of telling me something I mightn’t know was a return to sanity that made me gasp with relief. He even discussed some of the details, scoffing at the idea that any secrets should exist between one accredited scientist and another. “In any case,” he said, “most of this secrecy concept has been built up by nonscientists. It tickles their vanity. Some of them enjoy stamping ‘restricted’ on stuff that might as well be sold for junk for all the harm it could do. Every time they show a badge or whisper a password it gives them a kid thrill straight back from their boyhood. Their private opinion of scientists is that we’re a bunch of irresponsible long-hairs with queerly subversive and international ideas who’re at last being made to toe the line and behave. Secrecy makes a good excuse to put us in separate cages where we can do what we’re told like good little boys and leave the grand strategy to the short-hairs….” I began to laugh at that, because it was in Frank’s old familiar vein of exaggeration, and he laughed too, recognizing what had always been my own impulse to check his wilder extravagances. We had been good foils for each other that way. “Don’t mind me,” he continued, “I’m in a mood to let off some steam—just as you were too just now. Because—my God— don’t they realize that about 90 per cent of the whole thing’s no more secret than yesterday’s weather? Einstein’s equation dates from 1905, the spectograph’s nearly as old, so is the principle of gaseous diffusion, even chain reaction goes back to 1939—yet from the way some of them behave you’d think it was Lydia Pinkham’s formula for a magic dandruff remover!”

  I said soberly that there was a good deal of difference between knowing how a thing was done and knowing how to do it, and that the real secrets were probably in the field of engineering and production methods.

  He waved that aside; oddly like Framm, he had the purist’s disregard for the nontheoretical. “The real secret,” he said, “is what’s going to be done if and when we’ve made the thing. Is it to be delenda est Berlin or Tokyo, or will there be a trade show on some uninhabited place? That’s the sort of secret that keeps a sane man awake at nights. Because it seems to me that if we do use the thing ruthlessly, then we can never again call anything in warfare an atrocity, and the fact that we finish the war with it and so save life numerically is merely the end-justifying-the-means argument that Hitler used when he machine-gunned refugees on the roads during blitzkriegs. Of course you can say that our war’s righteous and his isn’t, which is true enough comparatively, but it’s an argument that won’t make it easy to outlaw the total use of the thing when the war’s over and other allegedly righteous nations want to use it for their wars. So frankly I hope we don’t use it. Which means I devoutly hope the war ends before we can.”

  There was always something about the way Frank Sanstrom presented an idea that made you want to dispute it, if only as a devil’s advocate. I replied that, the way I saw things, all countries in war adopted an end-justifies-the- means policy, because the use of physical force implied that. The real problem wasn’t the technics of war but war itself.

  “True in theory,” he answered, “but in practice the use of atomic energy for destruction makes such a difference in degree that it constitutes a real difference in kind. For the first time in human history it becomes possible to destroy whole cities and populations in an instant.”

  I said that the slow death of thousands by economic blockade didn’t seem to me more merciful than the quick death of thousands by bombs.

  “It isn’t a question of mercy. The humanitarian approach was always wrong- -“

  “That’s why I say, Frank, the real problem is war itself. And the scientist should tackle that not only as a scientist but as a citizen. What I dislike about the present setup is not so much that the powers-that-be want us to make bombs, but that they don’t seem to want us to do anything else. They never invite us to use the scientific method plus unlimited funds on the general problems of world affairs or the organization of society.”

  “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 th
e 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….”