keep everything in watertight compartments. In the interests of security, they said, but more likely in the interests of inefficiency, I think. Well, I didn’t like it as you can imagine. It isn’t my way of going about a problem. So I started agitating for a transfer, a transfer to this show over here. I had an idea that things would be done a lot better here. And I see they are,” he added, as he took up another piece of toast.
“Besides I suddenly got a longing for a sight of green grass. When that comes on you it isn’t to be denied.”
“This is all very well, Geoff, but it doesn’t explain how you prised yourself loose from this formidable organization.”
“Pure luck,” answered Marlowe. “The people over in Washington got the idea that maybe you people weren’t telling everything you knew. And as I’d let it be known that I’d welcome a transfer, I was sent over here as a spy. That’s where the treachery comes in.”
“You mean you’re supposed to report on anything we may be concealing?”
“That’s exactly the situation. And now that you know why I’m here, am I to be allowed to stay or are you going to throw me out?”
“It’s the rule here that everyone who comes into Nortonstowe stays. We don’t let anyone out.”
“Then it’ll be all right if Mary comes along? She’s been doing some shopping in London. But she’ll be right along some time tomorrow.”
“That’ll be fine. This is a big place. We’ve got plenty of room.We shall be glad to have Mrs Marlowe here. Frankly, there’s an awful lot of work to be done, and far too few people to do it.”
“And maybe occasionally I might send a crumb of information to Washington, just to keep them happy?”
“You can tell ’em anything you like. I find the more I tell the politicians the more depressed they get. So it’s our policy to tell ’em everything. There’s no secrecy at all here. You can send anything you wish on the direct radio link to Washington. We got it working about a week ago.”
“In that case maybe you’d give me an outline of what’s been happening at this end. Personally, I’m very little wiser than on the day we talked out in the Mohave Desert. I have done a bit, but it isn’t optical work we need just now. By the fall we could get something. But this is a business for the radio boys, as I think we agreed.”
“We did. And I stirred up John Marlborough as soon as I got back to Cambridge in January. It took some persuasion to start him on the job, because I didn’t tell him the real reason to begin with — although he knows now of course. Well, we got out a temperature for the Cloud. It’s a little above two hundred degrees, two hundred degrees absolute of course.”
“That’s pretty good. About what we’d hoped for. A bit cold, but possible.”
“It’s really better than it sounds. Because, as the Cloud approaches the Sun, internal motions must develop inside it. My first calculations showed that the resulting rise of temperature might be somewhere between fifty and a hundred per cent, making in total a temperature somewhere around freezing point. So it looked as if we might be in for a frosty spell and nothing more.”
“Couldn’t be better.”
“That’s what I thought at the time. But I’m not really an expert in gas dynamics, so I wrote off to Alexandrov.”
“My God, you were taking a chance in writing to Moscow.”
“I don’t think so. The problem could be put in a purely academic form. And there’s nobody better suited to tackle it than Alexandrov. In any case it led to us getting him here. He regards this as the best concentration camp in the world.”
“I see there’s still a lot that I don’t know. Go on.”
“At this time, still in January, I was feeling pretty clever. So I decided to take the political authorities for a really rough trip. I perceived that two things the politicians must have at all costs — scientific information and secrecy. I determined to give both to them, on my own conditions — the conditions you see around you here at Nortonstowe.”
“I see, a pleasant place to live in, no military to badger you, no secrecy. And how was the team recruited?”
“Simply by indiscretions in the right quarters, like the letter to Alexandrov. What could be more natural than that everyone should be brought here who might have learned anything from me? I did play one dirty trick, and it still lies on my conscience. Sooner or later you will meet a charming girl who plays the piano extremely well. You will meet an artist, an historian, other musicians. It seemed to me that incarceration at Nortonstowe for over a year would be quite intolerable if there were only scientists here. So I arranged the appropriate indiscretions. Don’t breathe a word of this, Geoff. In the circumstances I think perhaps I was justified. But it’s better they shouldn’t know that I was deliberately responsible for their being sent here. What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over.”
“And what about that cave you were talking about when we were in the Mohave? I suppose you’ve got that all lined up too.”
“Of course. You probably haven’t seen it, but over there — just below that hillock — we’ve got a vast quantity of earth-moving machinery at work.”
“Who looks after it?”
“The chaps that live down on the new housing estate.”
“And who runs the house here, cooks the food, and so on?”
“The women from the new estate, and the girls do the secretarial work.”
“What happens to them when things get tough?”
“They come into the shelter, of course. It means that the shelter has to be far bigger than I originally intended. That’s why we’ve started work on it so early.”
“Well, Chris, it seems to me as if you’ve arranged a pretty smooth trip for yourself. But I don’t see where the politicians are getting their rough ride. After all they’ve got us boxed in here, and by what you told me a while ago they’re getting all the information you can give ’em. So things look pretty smooth for them too.”
“Let me put it to you as I saw it in January and February. In February I planned to take over the control of world affairs.”
Marlowe laughed.
“Oh, I know it sounds ridiculously melodramatic. But I’m being serious. And I’m not suffering from megalomania either. At least I don’t think I am. It was only to be for a month or two, after which I would retire gracefully back to scientific work. I’m not the stuff dictators are made of. I’m only really comfortable as an underdog. But this was a heaven-sent opportunity for the underdog to take a great big bite out of those who were hoofing him around.”
“Living in this mansion you certainly look pretty much the underdog,” said Marlowe, settling down to his pipe and still laughing.
“All this had to be fought for. Otherwise we’d have had the same sort of set-up that you objected to. Let me talk a bit of philosophy and sociology. Has it ever occurred to you, Geoff, that in spite of all the changes wrought by science — by our control over inanimate energy, that is to say — we will preserve the same old social order of precedence? Politicians at the top, then the military, and the real brains at the bottom. There’s no difference between this set-up and that of Ancient Rome, or of the first civilizations in Mesopotamia for that matter. We’re living in a society that contains a monstrous contradiction, modern in its technology but archaic in its social organization. For years the politicians have been squawking about the need for more trained scientists, more engineers, and so forth. What they don’t seem to realize is that there are only a limited number of fools.”
“Fools?”
“Yes, people like you and me, Geoff. We’re the fools. We do the thinking for an archaic crowd of nitwits and allow ourselves to be pushed around by ’em into the bargain.”
“Scientists of the world unite! Is that the idea?”
“Not exactly. It isn’t just a case of scientists versus the rest. The matter goes deeper. It’s a clash between two totally different modes of thinking. Society today is based in its technology on thinking in terms of numbers. In its social organization, on the other hand, it is based on thinking in terms of words. It’s here that the real clash lies, between the literary mind and the mathematical mind. You ought to meet the Home Secretary. You’d see straight away what I mean.”
“And you had an idea for altering all this?”
