Chelyuskin had been burnt to death when his dacha, to which he had retired for a short period of relaxation, had caught fire. There was a post-mortem examination and an enquiry. The rumour got around that Chelyuskin had been smoking in bed when in his cups and that vodka added to the flames had not helped him much. That was a story everybody could believe. A month later Chelyuskin slipped over the Iranian border. Three days later he was in Teheran and the following day he was put down at RAF Northolt by courtesy of Transport Command.
He was given an enthusiastic welcome by a select group who turned out to welcome this genius who was then at the ripe age of twenty-eight.
There would be a lot of mileage left in him. The powers-that-be were somewhat baffled by Chelyuskin's comparative youth. They tended to forget that creative abstract thought, especially in mathematics, is a young man's game, and that Einstein had published his Special Theory of Relativity when only nineteen. Even the politicians among them forgot that Pitt was Prime Minister at twenty-four. They were even more baffled and irritated by Chelyuskin's attitude. He soon made it clear that he was a Russian patriot and no traitor, and that he had no intention of disclosing secrets, atomic or otherwise. He said he had left Russia because he did not want to work on atomics, and that to communicate his knowledge would be to negate the action he had taken.
Conversations on atomic theory were barred. The irritation grew and pressure was applied, but authority found that it could neither bend nor break this man. The more pressure was applied the more stubborn he became, until finally he refused to discuss any of his work. Even the ultimate threat did not move him. When told that he could be disclosed to the Russians even at that late stage he merely shrugged and indicated that it was the privilege of the British to do so if they wished, but he thought it would be unworthy of them. Authority changed its tack. Someone asked him what he wanted to do. Did he want a laboratory put at his disposal, for instance? By now Chelyuskin was wary of the British and their motives. I suppose, in a way, he had been naive to expect any other treatment, but naivety in a genius is comparatively normal. He found himself surrounded, not by scientists whom he understood, but by calculating men, the power brokers of Whitehall. Mutual incomprehensibility was total. He rejected the offer of a laboratory curtly. He saw quite clearly that he was in danger of exchanging one intellectual prison for another. When they asked him again what it was he wanted, he said something interesting, 'I want to live as an ordinary citizen,' he said. 'I want to sink and lose myself in the sea of Western capitalism.' Authority shrugged its shoulders and gave up. Who could understand these funny foreigners, anyway? A dog-in-the-manger attitude was adopted; if we couldn't get at the man's brain then the Russians didn't have it, either, and that was good enough. He could always be watched and, who knows, he might even declare a dividend in the future. So Chelyuskin got exactly what he asked for. A REME soldier called George Ashton had been killed in a traffic accident in Germany. He was twenty-seven and had been brought up in a foundling home. Unmarried and with neither kith nor kin to mourn him, he was the perfect answer. Chelyuskin was flown to Germany, put in the uniform of a private in the British Army, and brought back to England by train and sea, accompanied discreetly at all times. He went through a demobilization centre where he was given a cheap suit, a small amount of back pay and a handshake from a sombre unrecruiting sergeant. He was also given an honorarium of?2000. He asked for, and was given, something else before he was cast adrift. Because of the necessity for scientific study he had learned English in his youth and read it fluently. But he never had occasion to speak it, which might have been an advantage when he was put through a six months' total immersion course in conversational English, because he had no bad habits to unlearn. He came out of it with a cultured generalized Home Counties accent, and set out to sink or swim in the capitalist world. ?2000 may not seem much now, but it was quite a sizeable piece of change back in 1947. Even so, George Ashton knew he must conserve his resources; he put most of it in a bank deposit account, and lived very simply while he explored this strange new world. He was no longer an honoured man, an Academician with a car and a dacha at his disposal, and he had to find a way of earning a living. Any position requiring written qualifications was barred to him because he did not have the papers. It was a preposterous situation. He took a job as a bookkeeper in the stores department of a small engineering firm in Luton. This was in the days before computers when bookkeeping was done by hand as in the days of Dickens, and a good bookkeeper could add a triple column of pounds, shillings and pence in one practised sweep of the eye. But there weren't many of those around and Ashton found himself welcome because, unlike the popular myth, he was an egghead who could add and always got his change right. He found the job ridiculously easy if monotonous, and it left him time to think. He struck up an acquaintanceship with the foreman of the toolroom, a man called John Franklin who was about 50 years of age. They got on very well together and formed the habit of having a drink together in the local pub after work. Presently Ashton was invited chez Franklin for Sunday dinner where he met Franklin's wife, Jane, and his daughter, Mary. Mary Franklin was 25 then, and as yet unmarried because her fiance had been shot down over Dortmund in the final days of the war. All this time Ashton was being watched. If he was aware of it he gave no sign. Other people were watched, too, and the Franklin family came in for a thorough rummaging on the grounds that those interested in Ashton were per se interesting in themselves. Nothing was discovered except the truth; that Jack Franklin was a damned good artisan with his brains in his fingertips, Jane Franklin was a comfortable, maternal woman, and Mary Franklin had suffered a tragedy in her life. Six months after they met, Ashton and Franklin left the engineering firm to strike out on their own. Ashton put up?1500 and his brains while Franklin contributed?500 and his capable hands. The idea was to set up a small plastics moulding shop; Franklin to make the moulds and the relatively simple machines needed, and Ashton to do the designing and to run the business. The small firm wobbled along for a while without overmuch success until Ashton, becoming dissatisfied with the moulding powders he was getting from a big chemical company, devised a concoction of his own, patented it, and started another company to make it. After that they never looked back. Ashton married Mary Franklin and I dare say a member of some department or other was unobtrusively present at the wedding. A year later she gave him a daughter whom they christened Penelope, and two years later another girl whom they called Gillian.
Mary Ashton died a couple of years later in 1953, from childbirth complications. The baby died, too. All his life Ashton kept a low profile. He joined no clubs or trade associations; he steered clear of politics, national or local, although he voted regularly, and generally divided his life between his work and his home. This gave him time to look after his two small girls with the help of a nanny whom he brought into the small suburban house in Slough, where he then lived. From the record he was devoted to them. About 1953 he must have opened his old notebooks and started to think again. As Chelyuskin he had never published any of his work on catalysts and I suppose he thought it was safe to enter the field. A catalyst is a substance which speeds up the chemical reactions between other substances, sometimes by many thousands of times. They are used extensively in chemical processing, particularly in the oil industry. Ashton put his old work to good use. He devised a whole series of new catalysts tailored to specialized uses. Some he manufactured and sold himself, others he allowed to be made under licence. All were patented and the money began to roll in. It seemed as though this odd fish was swimming quite well in the capitalist sea. In 1960 he bought his present house and, after fifteen months of extensive internal remodelling, he moved in with his family. After that nothing much seemed to happen except that he saw the portent of North Sea oil, opened another factory in 1970, took out a lot more patents and became steadily richer. He also extended his interest to those natural catalysts, the enzymes, and presumably the sketchy theory presented in the early notebook became filled out. After 1962 the record became particularly flat and perfunctory, and I knew why. Authority had lost interest in him and he would exist only in a tickler file to remind someone to give an annual check. It was only when I set the bells jingling by my inadvertent enquiry that someone had woken up. And that was the life of George Ashton, once Aleksandr Dmitrovitch Chelyuskin-my future father-in-law.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN What I have set down about Ashton-Chelyuskin is a mere condensation of what was in the computer together with a couple of added minor assumptions used as links to make a sustained narrative. Had I been able to use the printer it would have churned out enough typescript to make a book the size of a family bible. To set down in print the details of a man's life needs a lot of paper.
Yet I think I have presented the relevant facts. When I finished I had a headache. To stare at a cathode ray screen for two and a half hours is not good for the eyes, and I had been smoking heavily so that the little room was very stuffy. It was with relief that I emerged into Ogilvie's office. He was sitting at his desk reading a book. He looked up and smiled. 'You look as though you need a drink.' 'It would go down very well,' I agreed. He got up and opened a cabinet from which he took a bottle of whisky and two glasses; then he produced a jug of iced water from a small built-in refrigerator. The perquisites of office. 'What do you think?' 'I think Ashton is one hell of a man. I'm proud to have known him.' 'Anything else?' 'There's one fact that's so damned obvious it may be overlooked.' 'I doubt it,' said Ogilvie, and handed me a glass. 'A lot of good men have checked that file.' I diluted the whisky and sat down. 'Do you have all of Ashton in there?'
'All that we know is there.' 'Exactly. Now, I've gone through Ashton's work in some detail and it's all in the field
