The New Men Read Online Free PDF Page B

clear my head. So, as an excuse, I went off by myself to call on Luke.
    It meant a walk through a country lane leading from the mansion, which had been turned into the administrative headquarters, to the airfield. The hedges were brittle and dark with the coming winter, the only touch of brightness was the green of the ivy flowers. At the top of the rise the mist was shredding a way, and suddenly, on the plateau, the huts, hangars, half-built brick ranges, stood out in the light of the cold and silvery sun.
    Inside Luke’s hangar, the vista was desolate. A quarter of the roof was open to the sky, and a piece of canvas was hanging down like a velarium. The only construction in sight was a cube of concrete, about six feet high, with a small door in it standing slightly ajar, through which a beam of light escaped. The afternoon had turned cold, and in the half-light, lit only by that beam on the wet floor and a naked bulb on the side of the hangar, the chill struck like the breath of a cave. No place looked less like an engine room of the scientific future; it might have been the relic of a civilization far gone in decay.
    There was not a person in sight. In a moment, as though he had heard me, Luke came out of the cube door, muttering to someone within. He was wearing a windjacket, which made him seem more than ever square, like an Eskimo, like a Polar explorer. He beat his arms across his chest and blew on his fingers.
    ‘Hello, Lewis,’ he said. ‘It’s bloody cold, and this blasted experiment won’t go, and I want to run away and cry.’
    I was interrupting him, he was fretting to get back to work; a voice from inside the cube asked about the next move. For minutes together, Luke gave orders for a new start the following day. ‘What shall we do tonight?’ came the voice.
    Luke considered. For once he did not find the words. At last he said: ‘ We’ll just go home .’
    I walked back with him, for he and his wife had invited some of my old acquaintances to meet me at their house that evening. He was so dejected that I did not like to press him, and yet I had to confirm what everyone was telling me – that he was getting nowhere. Even so, my own question sounded flat in the bitter air.
    ‘How is it going, Walter?’
    Luke swore. ‘How do you think it’s going?’
    ‘Is it going to come out?’
    ‘Does it look like it?’ he replied.
    I told him that I should be talking next morning to Drawbell, that nothing I could say would signify much, but it all helped to form opinion.
    ‘You didn’t do much good bringing me here, did you?’
    Then he corrected himself, though his tone was still dejected. ‘That’s not fair,’ he said.
    I asked more about his method (which aimed at plutonium, not the isotope).
    ‘I’m not promising anything,’ said Luke.
    ‘Will it work in time?’
    ‘I can’t see the way tonight,’ he said, with another curse.
    ‘Shall you?
    He said, half depressed, half boastful: ‘What do you think I’m here for?’
    But that was his only burst of arrogance, and in the party at his house he sat preoccupied. So did Martin, for a different reason: for Irene had arranged to meet him there, and, when everyone else had arrived, still did not come.
    Each time the door opened Martin looked round, only to see the Mounteneys enter, then the Puchweins. And yet, though he was saying little and Luke brooded as he went round filling glasses from a jug of beer, the evening was a cosy one. Out of doors, the countryside was freezing. It was a winter night, the fields stretching in frosted silence. Outside was the war, but within our voices and the light of the fire. It was a night on which one felt lapped in safeness to the fingertips.
    Ideas, hopes, floated in the domestic air. For the first time at Barford, I heard an argument about something other than the project. After science, in those wartime nights, men like Puchwein and Mounteney had a second favourite subject. They argued as naturally as most of