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overwhelmingly altered my perceptions of modern society. My view that evening from a hospital window took on a strangely objective detachment. A massive unstoppable charade played out on the street below; civilization walked blindfold towards a precipice and the yawning chasm of planetary collapse. The certitude of the peril we faced struck me with the power of a revelation.
    Momentous decisions are straight from the gut. From that moment the direction of my life would be changed totally. My head ached, my heart pounded. I was being driven, unmercifully driven by the calling of some other place, the challenge of finding some another way to achieve a purpose for existing. Geneva no more sounded melodramatic. But to where, to what? That didn’t matter. Sick or not I’d break out of here.
    The nurse helped me from the window. I sank back on the bed, panting from the effort. Good god, my arms were thin, I held up the left one and studied an ugly red weal on my wrist? Of course, the briefcase, yes, where was it now and its politically damning contents?
    Confused thoughts were clearing. I found it possible to recall my appointment with the swivel eyed Goldberg and the soft handshake of a scientist putting a front on politician designs. Sitting beside the PM., a man of gushing bonhomie brimming with altruism, his nuclear intentions held with a messianic certainty.
    More particularly, I recalled the unspoken pressure to gag my research paper hid a certain menace. Would I be followed? My research results could impact adversely on the whole nuclear industry, the weapons’ industry and definitely the wider field of international treaties. The problem of the safe long term storage of lethal material lay at the crux of all these issues.
    I knew the Non-Proliferation Treatise was in limbo, had failed to halt the spread of nuclear weapons. Any agreement based on ‘we have weapons, and won’t give them up, you haven’t and are not allowed them, was bound to fail. The fact of America not signing the Treaty amounted to defying any ban. Some countries were even withdrawing from current arrangements and weapon testing was suspected.
    Worse still, turning a blind eye on Israel’s secret nuclear bombs by a main player in negotiations, the U.S.A., had made diplomacy a fraught business. Other nations clambering to develop civilian nuclear plants with potential for producing the fissile material required in bomb making would become a dire threat. Back in 1995 the U.N. had proposed a treaty which aimed to outlaw the making of weapons grade material. Nothing came of it, mainly due to America’s refusal to accept the required inspection.
    Depression always followed a high. I knew at first hand the dangers of radiation and I’d picture the mushroom cloud which obliterated Hiroshima. Suddenly the flash would strike, back on the tube train, I’d smell cordite, see the blood, hear the tortured screams, the hideous screaming. Arms flailing, an unstoppable groaning would seize me, until gradually the scene faded and I’d look into beckoning blue eyes and feel a surge of relief.

    I’d turned the key of my two bed-roomed Geneva flat on the morning of the tube train attack and flown into London. Colleagues at the research establishment had wished me success. A single chap, none left to worry about me nor expect any contact until my return. None at all, not even the shreds of a broken love affair, two years past and a regret rather than the anguish of separation.
    Long days at the research establishment, do they mean more to you than me? She’d said this again as we walked that night along the shores of Lake Geneva. How could I explain I’d embarked on a quest that burnt in my mind by day, lit fresh insights on wakening. I was climbing, slipping, climbing again, striving to grasp The Holy Grail of science, the unravelling of particle behaviour at the birth of the universe, perhaps even the mystery of dark matter.
    How often I’d tried to explain.