shoulder, 'imagine Leonard not telling us about those two when we were all discussing whether Best was mad or not. Any fellow who dresses women up in that rig-out must be off his trolley. Anyway, you'd think it worth a mention. But Leonard didn't, even though he told me later he had noticed them when he went up to the place for lunch the other day. I pressed him and got him to admit it did strike him at the time as a bit unusual.'
'I'm afraid he's rather uninstructed in some ways.'
'Now then, you let him be. He's one of the best, is Brian Leonard. He's got first-class stuff in him. The only trouble is, he doesn't seem to get much luck. And that reminds me, my old Max. In the next couple of days you've got the chance of being a real good pal to our Brian. He's going to need one.'
'How much do you know about the psychology of the Chinese?' asked Ross- Donaldson.
Leonard hesitated. He was still in a state of unrelieved gloom and foreboding at the ever-present thought of the way he had allowed Deering to steal secrets from under his nose. Bewilderment had been added when he arrived in response to Ross-Donaldson's unexpected summons to find that the latter had had his outer office cleared and an armed guard placed on its door. Leonard's breakfast of eggs bonne femme felt as if it had not quite completed its journey to his stomach.
'Only what I learned in the basic training they give us,' he said finally. 'I've never done a course on it or anything.'
'No. Well, at the risk of covering familiar ground, let me just place the relevant point, which is that they suffer from an unusually wide schemata-data divergence. In practical terms, and as regards their attitudes to the West, this means that their ideology teaches them to despise us and think us stupid, while empirically they're forced into continual ad hoc respect for our efficiency and cunning. Consequently, any project aimed at deceiving them must contain elements of apparent stupidity and elements of apparent cunning in highly critical proportions delicately balanced. Let's just examine those sets of elements in turn as they appear in the project you and I have been concerned with over the past weeks.
'First, the elements of apparent stupidity. At the outset, ostensibly in sole charge of Security arrangements for a uniquely secret Operation, we find you, an inexperienced officer working without assistants. When, later, assistants must obviously be furnished to watch Dr. Best, they're men of tested and proven incompetence. The Chinese agent, Deering, finds no difficulty whatever in becoming your servant, in which position he has at least putative access to your secret files. Your training for this project, by stressing the importance of supposed subtlety and encouraging you to keep those files in the most exposed place possible, ensured that that putative access had the best chance of becoming actual. To a Chinese mind, of course, and to lots of others as well, that supposed subtlety would appear as real stupidity. It was hardly expected that you yourself would train Deering in a highly unsophisticated method of getting at your files, but after some discussion it was agreed that this worked out substantially on the credit side. Finally, there was the almost unbelievable stroke of good fortune whereby you began to concentrate your efforts on Dr. Best, a dangerous man, certainly, but one totally unconnected with the business in hand.
'So far, so incorrigibly, predictably, imperialistically stupid. Now as to… You look tired, Leonard. Would you care for a cup of tea?'
Leonard thought of asking for sherry instead, then just nodded.
'Milk and sugar?'
'Milk. No sugar.'
Left alone, Leonard sat there without moving, hardly thinking. Until Ross-Donaldson came back, he spent his time wanting to be with Lucy.
'What department do you belong to?' he asked without much curiosity.
'Its name would mean nothing to you. It was set in being for this project alone and will shortly be disbanded. I'd like to fill in the other side of the picture now if I may. I hope I'm not boring you.'
'No.'
'Right. We've covered satisfactorily the elements of apparent stupidity. Now as to the elements of apparent cunning. The prime concern here was lavishness, the unstinting expenditure of time, energy and money on the pretense that this unit was created as a training establishment and briefing center for the use in war of tactical atomic weapons of a reasonably mature sort in unprece-dentedly far-forward areas. Here, incidentally, we achieved a rather elegant bonus. It'll do the Chinese High Command quite a durable bit of good to believe, or at the lowest to wonder whether, the British Army can dispose of nuclear hand-guns at infantry-section level. In fact, of course, the so-called NHW-17, or rather its ammunition, is far too expensive and troublesome to produce for its warlike employment to be practicable.
'I was referring to lavishness in the expenditure of time, energy and money. Of these, money was probably the most important as, in the Eastern mind, a guarantee of genuineness. You perhaps recall from your training a famous World War I case in which Turkish Intelligence, having had certain fake Allied battle plans put in their way, became convinced of their authenticity largely on the grounds that a considerable sum in current notes had fallen into their hands under the same cover. The cost of the physical Security arrangements here was immense by Chinese standards, from the building of Hut D4 to the installing of closed-circuit television. So much outlay on a cover, on a deception, plus our apparent willingness to sacrifice, if need be, the secrecy of the NHW-17, must convince them that what lay behind the cover was genuine. The depth of our cunning was underwritten by the costliness of our deception.'
Here the tea arrived, brought in by a corporal whom Leonard remembered as having done far more than his fair share of swearing on the day of Exercise Nabob. The man glanced at him several times with an incipient grin that told of vicarious triumph. Nobody outside could have known just what Leonard was going through, but anybody with more than a week's service would have known that he was going through something.
'Right,' said Ross-Donaldson when the door of the outer office had shut. 'All this means, in the simplest terms, that when the Chinese get the word from Deering that they stand to lose a million men in the third week of their invasion of the Indian sub-continent, and two and a half million in the fourth week, they're going to take him seriously. The peculiar horror of the weapon behind the cover, the weapon we were supposedly going to use on them as soon as they were over the Himalayas in substantial numbers, was an additional guarantee of authenticity: Western inhumanity, imperialist savagery and so forth. In fact, the horror was designed purely to horrify. Operation Apollo was impracticable from the start. Millions of non-combatants would have died in the sub- continent alone. But that was yet another guarantee of authenticity: capitalist indifference to Asian
