Free The New Men by C. P. Snow Page B

carefully and looked into it from above.
    ‘It’s funny about those chaps,’ he reflected. ‘I used to think scientists were supermen. But they’re not supermen, are they? Some of them are brilliant, I grant you that. But between you and me, Eliot, a good many of them are like garage hands. Those are the chaps who are going to blow us all up.’
    I said, for I was not speaking like a subordinate, that a good many of them had more imagination than his colleagues.
    Bevill agreed, with cheerful indifference.
    ‘Our fellows can’t make much difference to the world, and those chaps can. Do you think it will be a better world, when they’ve finished with it?
    I thought it might. Not for him, probably not for me and my kind: but for ninety per cent of the human race. ‘I don’t trust them,’ said Thomas Bevil. Then he said: ‘By the by, I like the look of your brother, Eliot.’
    It was partly his good manners, having caught himself in a sweeping statement. But he said it as though he meant it.
    ‘He put the cat among the pigeons, you know, that afternoon down there. It’s just as well he did, or Master Drawbell mightn’t have seen the red light in time, and if they’d all gone on crabbing Luke I couldn’t have saved the situation.’
    He began laughing, his curious, internal, happy laugh, as though he were smothering a dirty joke.
    ‘Those Drawbells! Between them they’d do anything to get a K, wouldn’t they?’
    He meant a knighthood. He was constantly amused at the manoeuvres men engaged in to win titles, and no one understood them better.
    ‘Never mind, Eliot,’ he said. ‘We saved the situation, and now it’s up to those chaps not to let us down.’
    It was his own uniquely flat expression of delight: but his face was rosy, he did not look like a man of seventy-three, he was revelling in his victory, the hot room, the mildly drunken night.
    ‘If this country gets a superbomb,’ he said cheerfully, ‘no one will remember me.’
    He swung his legs under his chair.
    ‘It’s funny about the bomb,’ he said. ‘If we manage to get it, what do we do with it then?’
    This was not the first time that I heard the question: once or twice recently people at Barford had raised it. It was too far away for the scientists to speculate much, even the controversialists like Mounteney, but several of them agreed that we should simply notify the enemy that we possessed the bomb, and give some evidence: that would be enough to end the war. I repeated this view to Bevill.
    ‘I wonder,’ he said.
    ‘I wonder,’ he repeated. ‘Has there ever been a weapon that someone did not want to let off?’
    I said, though the issue seemed remote, that this was different in kind. We had both seen the current estimate, that one fission bomb would kill three hundred thousand people at a go.
    ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Bevill. ‘Think of what we’re trying to do with bombing. We’re trying to kill men, women, and children. It’s worse than anything Genghis Khan ever did.’
    He said it without relish, without blame, with neutrality.
    Soon the room grew warmer, the port went round again, as men came in from a late night meeting. A couple of them were ministers, and Bevill looked towards them with a politician’s insatiable hope. Had they any news for him? He could not help hoping. He was old, he had made such reputation as he could, if he stayed in office he would not add a syllable to it; he knew how irretrievably he was out of favour, and he did not expect to last three months; yet still, on that happy night, he wondered if he might not hear of a reprieve, if he might not hear that he was being kept on, perhaps in an obscurer post.
    I saw that his flicker of hope did not last long. From their manner he knew they had nothing to tell him. It did not weigh him down, he was pleased with himself that night. And they brought other news: the invasion fleet was safely out of Gibraltar, and all looked well for the North African