Saving the Queen

by William F. Buckley

  “Is that true?” Queen Caroline turned to Blackford, who knew that a great deal would depend on his answer.

  “No, ma’am, it is not true. But there is no reason for Viscount Kirk to believe it to be anything other than the truth, inasmuch as I never communicated with him from that day until this afternoon, and I do not doubt that, as head boy, he communicated frequently with Dr. Chase, and is a faithful carrier of school legend, as head boys tend to be.”

  It was an adroit blend, greatly admired by the Queen, of a consistent refusal to validate a historical distortion, a reduction of that distortion to the puerile level of schoolboy lore unfit for the exercise of adult curiosity, and a superbly consummated gesture of condescension toward Viscount Kirk, head boy emeritus. Kirk recognized his disadvantage and instantly retreated when the Queen, abruptly changing the subject, asked Blackford whether his work in England included any effort to compare English and American approaches to atomic research. Blackford knew that as providence had it, he was being tested in the same few minutes on the two subjects he needed, most acutely, to acquit himself well on.

  “Well, your Majesty … I did work as an assistant, while at Yale, to a consultant in atomic physics for the War Department—”

  “Who was that?” Peregrine asked, his voice returned now to the informal drawl, reintegrating himself in the general conviviality.

  “His name is Rene Wallack—a colleague of Enrico Fermi when they were at the University of Chicago. He was very active during the entire Manhattan Project part of the nuclear operation. After Hiroshima he pulled formally out of the program, but Edward Teller thinks so highly of him he kept going after him. I was in Wallack’s office twice when Teller came in and had long discussions with him about the theoretical problems involved in producing a hydrogen bomb. A lot of the conversation was over my head, but”—Blackford paused, lowered his eyes slightly, and twirled his glass of wine—“not all of it. Teller is the most convincing evangelist I ever met, and by the time he had left, I wanted to go out and volunteer my services in trying to develop a hydrogen bomb.”

  “Why didn’t you?” the Queen asked.

  “Because I could tell from their last conversation—that was in May—that by the time I could learn enough to be useful, they’d probably have the problem cracked. Teller actually gave Wallack a day—a target for an actual test. And then he said, ‘But vid your help, Rene, dot would be in de summer, not de vinter, uff negst year.’” The company laughed.

  “Teller is a very systematic man, Wallack told me, who has reduced the problems involved into a set of categories, and he apparently knows that Wallack’s background qualifies him to crack one, maybe two of these, and he spent a day talking him into the proposition that insight into those two impasses would illuminate the entire problem. Wallack finally succumbed, and agreed to devote full time to the work at the end of the spring semester. So I guess he’s been working on it ever since. In fact, he wrote me a couple of months ago and asked if I would go back and carry out some experiments for him. I had already accepted the foundation job here in London, but I knew the kind of thing he wanted—No more, thank you,” he said to the wine steward—“so I persuaded a friend of mine from MIT to go see the old gentleman. They hit it off, and my friend is now hired, and for my pains,” said Blackford with feigned air of opera bouffe secretiveness, as if he were privy to the plays to be used in the fall’s offensive by the Yale football team, “I get detailed reports about the professor’s progress. I have to confess I’ve developed a curiosity about the hydrogen bomb, but I suppose, ma’am, not even your archives at Windsor will give me any insight into that problem!”

  “I don’t know,” said the Queen cheerily. “After the next war, when we shall all have exchanged hydrogen bombs, I should think these archives would be tremendously useful, since whoever is left over will be reduced to defending himself by the use of things like moats and machicolations and bows and arrows.… Oh dear,” the Queen said, rising, thus bringing all in the room to their feet, “why do we need to have things like hydrogen bombs?”

  “Because we have things like Communists,” said Viscount Kirk. Blackford thought that exchange could have been written for Lunt and Fontaine, and even wondered, wildly, whether it had been. He wondered whether Kirk’s anti-communism was of the dilettante’s variety he knew so well from back home. Still, he might ask Singer Callaway to run a routine check on him, if he hadn’t done so already.

  Queen Caroline walked into a drawing room Blackford could only describe as sort of Jack-and-the-Beanstalk Dresden. There coffee was served, and brandy and champagne. Quite unself-consciously, the Queen having drunk her coffee, approached the piano and went through a creditable version of the first two movements of Bach’s C minor partita. There was polite applause when she was done, and of course rapt silence while she played.

  “It’s a funny thing,” she said, turning slightly, and sipping from the champagne that the butler, from habit, had placed on a silver coaster to the right of the music stand. “I played that more competently than I do now when I was a girl of thirteen, but in those days my audiences listened less acutely and applauded less heartily. It is extraordinary how my anointment as Queen has improved the quality of my audiences.” There was scattered laughter, as ever, after the Queen drew attention to the enveloping sycophancy.

  “I have only a single encore tonight, after which, if you will forgive me, I shall retire, since I simply cannot put off The Caine Mutiny. I myself think that Mr. Queeg was bonkers, but I have great sympathy for people who are both bonkers and in a post of authority. Heaven only knows how this kingdom would have fared if there had been a mutiny every time someone had discovered an unstable monarch. Eh, Sir Alfred? Possible theme for your next volume? I shall play the E major prelude from Bach’s ‘Well-tempered Clavier.’ I would also play you the fugue, even though that would bore you, except that I cannot: It is too difficult.” She played the quiet, serene prelude with a feeling that belied her derisory approach to her own playing, and the applause was genuine.

  She stood, as did the assembly. “Please, do not move.” She said this not as a pleasantry but as a command. All stood exactly where they were as, gracefully bowing her head, and reaching up to receive in her right hand the poodle lifted from the couch by a butler, she smiled, turned around, and, followed by a footman, left through the back door.

  The Duchess followed her niece presently, and, only a few minutes later, the Alex-Hillers left and the Schulers, leaving only the house guests. It was Peregrine who suggested to Blackford that they move back to the study and have a nightcap. Peregrine, who asked Blackford please so to refer to him, made no further reference to Greyburn. But he was unabashedly interested in the Cold War. The Soviet Union, Perry insisted to Blackford, is much more advanced technologically than we think it is, and besides, there are scientists all over the world, he insisted, including not a few in America, who are passing along secrets as quickly as they are developed. And the concentration of that old fanatic Stalin is such that—Perry gave it as his opinion, after spending several years on a study of the military history of the last war—“there is no doubt in my mind that the Americans are on to the final problems involved in developing a hydrogen bomb. I know this, because I’ve talked to a lot of American scientists and I’ve put two and two together. But I can’t guess when they will go ahead and detonate a bomb. Probably before the year is out.”

  “That would sound about right,” said Black nonchalantly. “But the working model they have got is a huge cumbersome thing, which you would need one of those guppies to transport. On the other hand, that may be true only of the prototype, and once they go into manufacturing, they will probably come up with something sleeker. I hope to heaven they can devise something that will fit in the B-36.”

  Peregrine wondered whether NATO would have full authority over the new weapon. “As you know, there are some people in your Congress who believe that new rules should be drafted to cover the H-bomb alone;
others think the older rules governing the A-bomb suffice. My feeling is that we have got to have total mobility. Stalin is in a crunch, and I should think it terribly unsafe to take any chances with him. My friends tell me some rather bad news, which is that the hydrogen bomb is a hell of a lot easier to build than the atom bomb. That it is, like the other, a, construct, really; but that the construct has a certain simple purity to it, which, once you get through the problem of refining the uranium in just the right way, makes the rest of it downhill.”

  Black knew suddenly that the training taken so painstakingly from Rufus was now glaringly relevant. “It is true,” he said, “the construct is easy to handle. But it requires a terribly sophisticated computer technology to move toward production. And, too, we have the kind of massive technological reserves the Russians just don’t have. Mr. Wallack says that unless the Russians succeed in stealing the entire American model (he is, as you would expect, very sarcastic about what Fuchs got away with, and it is true that our people warned that Fuchs was making odd noises in the last couple of years), he can’t imagine the Soviet Union duplicating ours in less than two years. And to do that, they would have to have a pretty exact copy of our plans—particularly, our electronic computer system.”

  “Are our chaps working on that, or is that purely American?”

  “Purely American, but they have asked one of your labs—Soames—to check out one important part of it, and they’re supposed to begin doing that this week, under the supervision of Laszlo Mulner. What do you bet if he succeeds he will be Sir Laszlo Mulner?” Blackford smiled impishly.

  Peregrine changed the subject, and asked Blackford about his own experiences during the war. Blackford told him he had come to the European theater as a fighter pilot, had had three engagements “in which I was pretty lucky” but then was grounded, hospitalized with hepatitis.

  “Nothing of course on the scale of what you saw.” Blackford was happy to pay Peregrine the compliment of familiarity with his record as an air ace. “But it might interest you that this afternoon I flew the new Sabre. My father is a salesman for the company and he is over here trying to peddle it in Europe. As you probably know, Sabre is in cutthroat competition with Hawker’s new Hunter.”

  “Yes,” Peregrine said. “Because of my accident, I went a long time without flying, but a couple of years ago, I began feeling out the jets—God, they are lovely, aren’t they! No rough stuff. But the doctors only last week told me to go do anything I liked. I like to fly—I’ve given up competitive jumping—so I notified my unit I am available for test flying, which I like. Specifically, I told them I’d like to try out the new Hunter, and I received by return mail an invitation to go up in it.”

  “It would be fun,” said Blackford excitedly, “to exchange roles. By the way”—he spoke with spontaneity—“if you would like to fly our plane, I think I can arrange it without any problem. Father is in fact in physical charge of the three models we have down here at Northolt.”

  “I say,” Peregrine’s voice was equally excited. “Could you really arrange that? I wish I could promise you, in return, that I could arrange for you to take up one of our Hunters, but I have no father with Hunters at his disposal. If you would like to slaughter a thousand pheasants, I have a most useful father. But he has not yet noticed fighter airplanes. Though”—Peregrine paused, as if over a merchandise counter—“I suppose I could persuade him to buy one.…”

  Blackford laughed. “Obviously I’d like to do it. But I didn’t mean to suggest you would be obliged to reciprocate. Give me your address and telephone, and after I check with my father, I’ll be in touch with you. Within the week.”

  He pocketed Peregrine’s card and instinctively gave him one of his own. They finished their whiskey, Peregrine said he would have to be off early, wished Blackford luck with his research, and they walked out together, Peregrine giving Blackford useful instructions on how to retrace his steps to Chester Tower.

  Blackford entered his room and felt an unexpected chill; a sense of intensifying risk; of foreboding. The Queen, her wit and beauty apart, was a total enigma. Her detailed interest in the bomb was unfeigned but also, Blackford thought, lacking in any aspect of disingenuous-ness; She simply wanted to know what there was to know that a layman could understand about the hydrogen bomb, and, especially, anything a layman was not permitted to know.

  Why?

  And how many people did she treat with the familiarity she showed toward Kirk? Black had read in his industrious research—which included the collected works of Crawfie, Caroline’s predecessor’s nurse—that Caroline and Peregrine were second cousins, and although she was older, he had taken on the job of teaching her the finer points of horsemanship. So perhaps that intimacy was unique. Or were there others whom she befriended thus openly and intimately? What” would happen tomorrow? Would he thenceforth eat his meals with the keepers? Served in his room? At what point would someone discreetly inquire how was he coming along with his research, or, perhaps even less discreetly, announce that unfortunately the rooms he was occupying were booked for another guest beginning—when? Friday? Saturday?

  At first the Queen’s spontaneous receptiveness he had interpreted as a stroke of very good fortune—as if, preparing a laborious expedition to the North Pole, he had suddenly been dropped there by helicopter. But, under the precipitate circumstances, he was not quite sure—sitting on top of the pole—quite what to do. If he had become a casual (as distinct from an intimate) member of the court circle, he might have observed Queen Caroline, to be sure from a distance, but over a protracted period, arriving at cautious conclusions about her inclinations, her conversational habits; identifying, perhaps, that awesomely important lead that Rufus and indeed the head of NATO were so desperate to identify. True, his social company might continue to amuse the Queen, and he might quickly, luckily, discover what he was looking for. Perhaps even if his visit to Windsor terminated tomorrow, in another week, or another month, there would be another invitation, and slowly he would cull his observations. But, he thought, he must not needlessly risk any approach to his mission so casually. He had been led to believe that the passage of secrets from the Queen to the Soviet Union needed to be stopped very quickly, and the only alternative to the identification of the intermediary being a wholly implausible interruption in the flow of information from American and British scientists, he would be better to push aggressively any opportunities he might come upon in the next few days, or even hours. He felt he could profitably strike up an acquaintance with Master-son, who, though he was off to a laconic start that afternoon, might, tomorrow, open up, in protective deference to the guest’s American innocence. Also there was the keeper. He wondered if there was a publicly available guest book which he could quickly skim to see how many names appeared regularly as guests of the Queen at Windsor.

  He lay back in bed, opening the curtains and looking out in the moonlight past the garden over those irenic fields that had bred, according to the famous adage, the flower of British youth. He felt suddenly a return of that rage he had never excreted, rekindled tonight by the smug coarseness of Kirk’s reference to Greyburn. So he had been head boy. He remembered him, of course, though he had forgotten his name. He was, to Oakes the third-former, a remote and glamorous athletic and administrative figure, who had never given him, by any word or deed, any indication that he was himself aware of Blackford Oakes. He made a note to himself: He must write to Anthony Trust and ask what impression Trust had of Kirk, who as head boy would have presided over the prefects’ meetings. He had always sensed that Dr. Chase would have planted the legend of the Cowardly American running home to his mother rather than endure what every British schoolboy endures as a matter of course, and Anthony had never told him whether, in the few days that Anthony remained at Greyburn before himself shipping out for America, he had made any effort, or met with any success, in modifying the legend Dr. Chase would have worked so hard to propagate. He wondered whether his stepfather’s letter to D
r. Chase had been given any surreptitious currency. He wondered at Chase’s endurance as headmaster—whom was he beating? Were there any other fresh Americans to whom he could say, after the torture session, “Courtesy of Great Britain, sir”?. It was less than the obsession it used to be, but Blackford knew that someday he would need to expunge it from his emotional system, though he could not guess how, or even let his mind run over hypothetical means of taking condign, if asymmetrical, revenge. Perhaps he had no alternative than one of these days, after completing his present mission, driving his MG down to Greyburn, climbing up those stone steps, walking past Leary-deary’s nose, or his successor’s, into the inner sanctum, and beating the shit out of the august Dr. Chase.… Odd, that after several years of letting that fantasy subside, it revived now in his mind. He knew why. It was Kirk, and what Kirk had said at the dinner table. Black always expected to come up, somewhere, upon it, but he imagined it would be late at night, at a drunken evening at a gentlemen’s club. It had happened at a sedate, intimate dinner in the presence of the Queen of England. Black’s emotional resentment was bright again, like the fire in the living room, which he had lit on coming in, and at which he was now staring.

  In another wing of the castle, Peregrine Kirk lay, also looking out the window and wondering whether communism, really, wouldn’t have come easier to people in general if he had come up with an extra-scientific provenance to smooth the pilgrim’s way: perhaps in the bowdlerized editions.…

  He reminisced, thinking now with some excitement about his long recovery. It wasn’t very far from Wembley to St. George’s Hospital, but he very nearly did not survive the journey, and it was a week before he grew conscious of his small bedroom, and the constant presence of a nurse, ascetic in appearance and manner, who when she was not massaging him or superintending his leg and arm exercises or bathing his broken body with lotions, sat patiently in the corner of the room, reading. It was several weeks before he had fought his listlessness sufficiently to inquire what it was that engrossed her so. She replied that she was reading, at that moment, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. He laughed, which hurt; and then wondered whether he had hurt her, but she was evidently used to it. She never brought up the subject, but did not shrink from it, and in another week she was reading Lenin aloud to him.