What is happening?
In that instant the sky lights up, the light is brighter, sharper, clearer than any she has ever seen, illuminating every detail, however minute, with an extraordinary clarity. There is nothing that she cannot see. What is it they called this? What is the phrase she has read? ‘The light of a thousand suns.’
Then the whistling starts, a distant, hollow sound, like the drawing of breath before a scream. In the instant of its life, the noise gathers strength and force as it approaches at enormous speed until she is surrounded, then swallowed up in the intensity of its thunder.
The history of the event she is witnessing lasts only milliseconds but she is able to distinguish the phases of its short life. First the light, then the screaming sound, now the breaking roar as firestorms fill the sky, burning the air around her. The Earth is screaming with the pain of the destruction wrought upon it as the air catches fire, mountains split, oceans evaporate and matter vaporizes. Everything burns.
Then the wind, the tempest. The storm drives her back with incredible force, she is flying backwards faster and faster towards the flames, disintegrating with the world she knows, mountain and flesh and bone together, all one again, primeval dust.
Where once there was substance, now there is nothing. Emptiness. A void. The history of the end of the world in a second or less.
This is what you did, the voice accuses. This is what you did.
What have I done? she asks. What have I done?
Her soul cries in anguish into the fire that consumes her.
The light has gone, the scream has vanished, the thunder has faded, the wind has passed, the flames have died. She is suspended in silence, an invisible witness. A huge grey cloud hangs over everything, its stinking poisons raining over the dead land beneath it, contaminating the emptiness. There is no life anywhere. No marks of life. Nothing. Only an empty graveyard hurtling through the endless night of eternity, trapped in the rhythms of the heavens.
Where am I? she cries again. Where am I?
You are in Hiroshima, the voice says before it too vanishes into the darkness and she is alone once more among the poisonous dissolution of the ruined planet. See what you did.
The moment of hallucination passes. Has she died? Gone mad? She opens her eyes. Consciousness returns. She touches her face: her eyes are still there, they have not become empty sockets; her nose, her mouth, her teeth. She is complete and alive (though her fingers are sticky with blood from a wound in her head). Perhaps nothing has happened, perhaps it was all a dream.
Perhaps.
She sees the gate, the glow of the brazier, the night sky with clouds and stars, the dog eating a bone, the policeman putting coals on his fire.
But somewhere, just out of reach, she hears a distant cry, Hiroshima, echoing in her mind.
How long before the guard starts his patrol again? Ten minutes? Fifteen? Every moment is like a century. She is desperate to be away from this awful place, back in the heart of the city again.
The guard has gone. She counts a hundred and twenty seconds and then goes carefully towards the gate. She cannot see if he is in the shadows waiting for her. She counts another minute. There is no sound except her heart beating. Now. She darts forward, climbs once more over the steel bars of the makeshift gate, drops down into the street, adopts the crouching position and runs as fast as she can.
‘All right?’ He has his arm round her. Good, faithful Alexei.
‘Let’s get out of here.’
‘Get the readings?’
‘Yes.’
‘High?’
‘It’s terrible.
‘What did I tell you?’
‘What can they have been doing in there?’
Halfway into the city he stops the car by the side of the road, takes out the Geiger counter and ranges it over her body. It ticks aggressively. He tells her to have a bath when she gets back and to destroy her clothes.
‘You’re all right,’ he says reassuringly, ‘You weren’t in there long enough.’
She knows that, but it is good to hear someone else say it.
11
DANNY
It was late afternoon. The snow had stopped some hours before but dark clouds hung low over us. Before long it would start to snow again. Mika and I were outside splitting logs by the light of a kerosene lamp.
‘How do you find him?’ Mika asked, resting his axe for a moment.
‘Krasov? Frightened.’
‘He has reason to be.’
He picked up the axe again and struck at the wood, splitting it neatly in two. I admired his skill. His pile of logs was much larger than mine.
‘You must get him out as soon as you can. He’ll crack up if he stays here much longer,’ I said.
‘Our people have seen Russian patrols in the woods. We cannot move him at present. It is too dangerous.’
‘One day more?’
‘Maybe two. Who knows?’
‘It’s too long.’
‘Glenn is unhappy but he accepts the situation.’
‘I’m not worried about Glenn.’
‘There is more at stake than the sanity of one man,’ Mika said.
I saw then, in the detachment of Mika’s verdict, the roots of Krasov’s despair. Only Hammerson and I valued him. For Mika and the others with him, Krasov was a parcel, and not a parcel they would ever have chosen to deliver. But Krasov was something they owed Hammerson, and that was why they turned on him the anger they felt at themselves for owing anyone anything, and then for having the debt called in.
I saw too that nothing I said carried any weight. I was powerless – another parcel, like Krasov, though of less value. We continued cutting logs in silence, the sound of our axes striking the wood echoing dully against the snow-laden trees that surrounded us.
‘Were you a soldier?’ Mika asked suddenly. ‘Did you fight in the war?’
‘Yes.’ I hoped the shortness of my reply would put him off any more questions. It didn’t.
‘Where did you fight?’
‘In the desert. Sicily. Normandy.’
‘I cannot imagine dying on a beach.’
‘It’s no different from dying anywhere else. If you’re lucky, it’s quick; if you’re not, it isn’t.’
‘I saw men die too,’ he said.
I looked at him. Perhaps I had mistaken his deliberate way of speaking, his lack of familiarity with English, for coldness. But his questions revealed his search for common ground. Now we had found it. We had both fought, and we had both survived. The survivor always has a tale to tell.
‘We called it the Winter War. We went into Karelia and forced the Russians out. Then they forced us back. We lost our land: There were many dead.’
‘Is that why you hate the Russians?’
‘It is one of the many reasons,’ he said. ‘To us, they are always the enemy. I cannot imagine a day when they will not be. That is the price for living too close to someone more powerful than yourself.’
He stopped talking and concentrated his energies on splitting logs. Then he said:
‘Are you still in uniform?’
‘Yes.’
‘So, we are brother soldiers.’ He smiled at me.
*
A small wooden building stood at one end of the house, a pile of logs to one side of the door. This, Mika explained, was the sauna.
We went into the room and undressed. There were towels piled high on a shelf. Mika, now naked, pointed to the door.
‘First we wash ourselves and then we go into the steam room. After the steam, the snow. Come.’
We washed and then Mika handed me a towel. ‘Spread this on the bench and sit on it. It is to prevent burns. In there is the steam.’ He pointed at the door. ‘At first it is better to lie on the lower benches. It is cooler. As you get used to the heat you move higher. Are you ready?’
‘Yes.’
He opened the door to the sauna and went in. I followed him and walked into a wall of heat. My ey
es closed at once with the sheer intensity of it. Sweat broke from my body and I fought for breath, choking as the air was drawn out of me as I sought, mouth open, chest heaving, to breathe again. I put out my arms to keep my balance, searching like a blind man for something to hold on to.
The moment passed. My body adjusted and I breathed once more. I opened my eyes. In a corner, I could make out the scalding stones over which water had been poured. Steam continued to rise, but my discomfort was limited now. I stumbled towards a bench and threw myself down on its wet wooden surface.
Slowly the perspective of the room came into focus. There was wood everywhere, the light scrubbed spruce I had seen in the house. I could see Mika lying full length on the bench, his hands over his eyes, breathing deeply and slowly.
It was only then that I realized there was someone else in the sauna with us. Sitting opposite me was a young woman. She too was naked. Her body shone wetly in the dim light. She brushed her fair hair back from her face with her fingers and smiled at me. Then, with a scream, she opened the door and plunged out into the snow. I watched her go in disbelief.
She rolled in the snow, then she turned her back and gathered handfuls of snow and rubbed it over her body. It was an extraordinary performance, without guile or intent, wholly private and wondrous to observe.
She saw me watching her and laughed again, throwing snow up in the air so that it fell all over her. Then she ran back into the sauna and closed the door. She leaned towards me.
‘My name is Tanya Alenius,’ she said, and offered me her hand.
I was looking into the most beautiful blue eyes I had ever seen.
12
MONTY
Scrawled in red ink across the top of the letter were the words R.C., Do you know about this? W.G. The unwritten coda to Willy Glover’s question was ominously clear: if not, why not?
The typewritten letter now being passed round the table was addressed to a Dr Christopher Hall of the Engineering Department, Birmingham University, dated 26 February 1947 and signed by Geoffrey Stevens.
I can’t say how I know (forgive my lack of candour) but I have received information that some of our colleagues in the Soviet Union regard the dangers of an unregulated nuclear world with the same horror as we do.
That may surprise you. All I can add is that I find the evidence compelling. I hope you will accept my word that this is truth not propaganda.
I understand that some of these men and women are prepared to risk their careers (perhaps their lives?) for what they believe. They have stopped work on the Soviet bomb until their government agrees to their request for firm safeguards on the political control of nuclear weapons. Their courage and decisiveness puts our unresolved deliberations to shame.
These Soviet physicists are appealing through me to their fellow scientists in the West for support. Without us, they fear they may be isolated and that could lead to their rapid extinction as an opposition. We cannot let that happen. We must add our voices to their cause because it is our cause too. We must use our energies to save these good people.
I have been thinking for some time about forming an association of physicists of like mind, under the banner of some kind of International Association for Peaceful Nuclear Collaboration. This would seem to be the moment to start. By using the brave image of these Soviet scientists, we can capture the imaginations of our co-physicists around the world. Maybe we will gather enough momentum to influence governments. Who knows? But try we must. For the safety of these courageous men and women in the Soviet Union, we must do something.
Will you be at the Smith Street meeting on Thursday? Would you have time for a drink afterwards? Do let me know. We could have a talk that evening before we return home.
‘Do we know if Stevens spoke to Hall last week?’ Gardner asked.
‘They were seen leaving Smith Street together after the meeting,’ Maitland said. ‘So we must assume he did.’
‘Did anything come of it?’
‘We’ve no evidence so far, but that may not mean much,’ said the ever-cautious Colin. ‘The truth is, we don’t know what happened.’
‘Has Stevens sent any other letters like this?’ Boys-Allen asked. ‘How wide is he casting his net?’
‘No others have come to hand.’ Colin Maitland said. ‘But that’s not to say he hasn’t written to his contacts.’
‘He’s bound to have written other letters,’ Gardner said. ‘My guess is there could be twenty more like this in circulation, possibly forty. Some of them will have gone to America. Stevens is a powerful figure in the scientific community here and on the other side of the Atlantic. He’s one of the Government’s main advisers on nuclear issues, knows all the leading players, particularly the Americans. They respect him for the work he did before the war.’
‘He mentions forming some kind of association,’ Maitland said. ‘There could already be a groundswell of hostile opinion among our own scientific community which we haven’t yet noticed, and this proposal could fly within days. There would be serious repercussions,’ he warned, ‘if this country’s senior nuclear scientists created an effective lobby in defiance of government policy.’
‘He’ll need more than the voices of a few scientists to pose any threat to policy,’ Guy Benton said. ‘This kind of opposition is usually very amateur, all emotion and no sense.’
If Benton’s rejection of the amateur was intended to reassure us, it didn’t. Stevens was a man of standing whose opinions held considerable weight. Whatever he said would get listened to.
‘I accept he’s not in the Nils Bohr league,’ Colin Maitland said. ‘But he’s not far behind. He’ll be listened to.’
‘What do we know about Hall?’ Arthur Gurney asked. ‘He’s a new one on me.’
‘Explosives expert.’ Maitland consulted his notes. ‘Very highly thought of Did a lot of experimental work during the war. Worked with Barnes Wallis for a time. He’s one of the men Willy Glover’s trying to lure on to his nuclear programme. I am told that without Hall, making the bomb’s going to be a damn sight more difficult.’
‘Is he likely to be convinced by Stevens’s argument?’
‘I don’t know enough about him to answer that,’ Maitland said, sounding less than sure.
‘Has Hall ever expressed any views similar to Stevens?’
‘Not that we know of,’ Colin said. ‘That doesn’t mean he hasn’t, it means we don’t know if he has.’
‘So it’s possible?’
‘It’s possible, yes.’
‘There’s a lot of moral uncertainty within the scientific community at present,’ Arthur Gurney said. ‘We’ve picked that up from a number of sources. They’ve seen the photographs and the films of the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and it’s scared them half to death. Those images of molten corpses are very powerful, certainly enough to make any reasonable person think twice about taking part in a project to build a weapon of such indiscriminate destruction. There are real grounds for thinking that Stevens’s appeal may succeed. He could be pushing on doors that are already open to him.’
‘What if a significant group of scientists were to agree with Stevens?’ Guy Benton asked. ‘What would happen then?’
‘No scientists, no bomb,’ Colin Maitland said bluntly.
‘And if we have no bomb?’
‘How can we play in the big boys’ playground if we don’t have the toys they have?’
There was silence while we contemplated life on the margins of international politics. It didn’t appeal. I sensed a brief but unspoken yearning for the simple choices of past glories. How much simpler our lives had been when we had an empire: we knew our place in the world, and no one had exploded a nuclear device. Stevens’s letter seemed to illustrate all the complications and dangers of the difficult, new post-war world.
*
A week later a newspaper article appeared in the press in Stevens’s regular column. It was clear he was unable to keep his secret to himself – or that he
had been instructed not to do so.
News comes of citizens within the Soviet Union, scientists like myself, who are prepared to oppose their political masters over the moral issue of the building of nuclear weapons without safeguards for their use.
These men and women have taken the courageous and unprecedented step of refusing to continue work on the nuclear programme until their government accedes to their demands. They are using their knowledge, their skills and their consciences to counterbalance the enormous weight of the all-powerful Soviet political machine. They are risking their lives for their beliefs.
We must applaud these brave men and women as heroes and lend them our strongest support. We must add our voices to theirs until our chorus, the sentiments of ordinary people the world over, drowns out all other voices, particularly the strident thump of ideological anthems. We must set ourselves the task of rebuilding a world from which we have banished all weapons of mass destruction. If we can do this, and we must, we will have taken the first important step in liberating the world of war itself.
Later that same day the cutting appeared on Rupert’s desk. There was the familiar red scrawl. Even upside down the instructions were clear.
Rupert, this must stop. Do something. W.G.
The battle lines were being drawn.
13
DANNY
We left on the second night.
One of the Finns who had accompanied us from Helsinki reported that a Russian patrol had been seen a few miles away, heading in our direction. Mika said it was no longer safe for us to stay and Hammerson agreed. It meant a change of plan about where Krasov was to be picked up but the contingency was in place.
‘It ought to work,’ Hammerson said to me. ‘But you never know, do you?’ It was the first time he’d shown less than full confidence in the enterprise.
There were six of us in the party: Krasov, Hammerson, myself, Mika and his two minders. Over our clothes we wore white suits, like those used by soldiers in the Winter War. Mika issued us with guns. Hammerson saw my surprise and said: ‘Better safe than sorry. But I don’t expect to use it.’
Making Enemies Page 20