The New Men Read Online Free PDF Page A

Martin, though he was discreet, knew enough to horrify the Minister; as for Luke, he knew as much as anyone had heard.
    For anyone used to Bevill’s precautions, this was startling to listen to. In terms of sense, it should not have been such a surprise. Word was going round among nuclear physicists, and Luke, young as he was, was one of the best of them. He had already been consulted on a scientific point; he could guess the rest.
    I had to accept it. There was also an advantage in speaking in front of Martin; it might be the most natural way to draw him in.
    At that moment, he was listening to Luke with a tucked-in, sarcastic smile, as though he were half-admiring Luke’s gifts, half-amused by him as a man.
    ‘Well,’ I said to Luke, ‘as you know so much, you probably know what I’ve been told to ask.’
    ‘I hadn’t heard anything,’ he replied, ‘but they must be after me.’
    ‘Would you be ready to go?’
    Luke did not answer, but said: ‘Who else have they got?’
    For the first time that afternoon, I was able to tell him something. The Superintendent, Drawbell, the engineering heads –
    ‘Good God alive,’ Luke interrupted, ‘Lewis, who are these uncles ?’
    A list of names of refugees – and then I mentioned Arthur Mounteney.
    ‘I’m glad they’ve got hold of one scientist, anyway,’ said Luke. ‘He did some nice work once. He’s just about finished, of course.’
    ‘Do you feel like going in?’ I asked.
    Luke would not reply.
    ‘Why don’t they get hold of Martin?’ he said. ‘He’s wasted where he is.’
    ‘They’re not likely to ask for me,’ said Martin.
    ‘Your name keeps cropping up,’ I said to Luke.
    Usually, when I had seen men offered jobs, they had decided within three minutes, even though they concealed it from themselves, even though they managed to prolong the pleasure of deciding. Just for once, it was not so.
    ‘It’s all very well,’ said Luke. ‘I just don’t know where I can be most use.’ He was not used to hesitating; he did not like it; he tried to explain himself. If he stayed where he was, he could promise us a ‘bit of hardware’ in eighteen months. Whereas, if he joined this ‘new party’ there was no guarantee that anything would happen for years.
    There was nothing exaggerated in Luke’s tone just then. I was used to the rowdiness with which he judged his colleagues, especially his seniors; it was the same with most of the rising scientists; they had none of the convention of politeness that bureaucrats like Sir Hector Rose were trained to, and often Rose and his friends disliked them accordingly. Listening to Luke that afternoon, no one would have thought, for instance, that the poor old derelict Mounteney was in fact a Nobel prizewinner aged about forty. But on his own value Luke was neither boastful nor modest. He was a good scientist; good scientists counted in the war, and he was not going to see himself wasted. He had lost that tincture of the absurd which had made Martin smile. He spoke without nonsense, with the directness of a man who knows what he can and cannot do.
    ‘I wish some of you wise old men would settle it for me,’ he said to me.
    I shook my head. I had put Bevill’s request, but that was as far as I felt justified in going. For what my judgement of the war was worth, I thought on balance that Luke should stay where he was.
    He could not make up his mind. As the three of us walked across the Park towards my flat in Dolphin Square, he fell first into a spell of abstraction and then broke out suddenly into a kind of argument with himself, telling us of a new device in what we then called RDF and were later to call Radar. The evening was bright. A cool wind blew from the east, bringing the rubble dust to our nostrils, although it was some days since the last raid. Under our feet the grass was dust – greyed and dry. I was worried about the war that evening; I could see no end to it; it was a comfort to be with those two,