Passenger to Frankfurt - Agatha Christie [83]
‘I think so. I mean, this was just a talk we had once and then, quite a long time afterwards, he told me I’d put something into his head for Project Ben something. And after that, occasionally, if I remembered, I’d ask him if he was still working on Project Ben and then sometimes he’d be very exasperated and say no, he’d come up against a snag and he was putting it all aside now because it was in–in–well, I mean the next eight words were pure jargon and I couldn’t remember them and you wouldn’t understand them if I said them to you. But in the end, I think–oh dear, oh dear, this is all about eight or nine years ago–in the end he came one day and he said, “Do you remember Project Ben?” I said, “Of course I remember it. Are you still working on it?” And he said no, he was determined to lay it all aside. I said I was sorry. Sorry if he’d given it up and he said, “Well, it’s not only that I can’t get what I was trying for. I know now that it could be got. I know where I went wrong. I know just what the snag was, I know just how to put that snag right again. I’ve got Lisa working on it with me. Yes, it could work. It’d require experimenting on certain things but it could work.” “Well,” I said to him, “what are you worrying about?” And he said, “Because I don’t know what it would really do to people.” I said something about his being afraid it would kill people or maim them for life or something. “No,” he said, “it’s not like that.” He said, it’s a–oh, of course, now I remember. He called it Project Benvo. Yes. And that’s because it had to do with benevolence.’
‘Benevolence!’ said the Admiral, highly surprised. ‘Benevolence? Do you mean charity?’
‘No, no, no. I think he meant simply that you could make people benevolent. Feel benevolent.’
‘Peace and good will towards men?’
‘Well, he didn’t put it like that.’
‘No, that’s reserved for religious leaders. They preach that to you and if you did what they preach it’d be a very happy world. But Robbie, I gather, was not preaching. He proposed to do something in his laboratory to bring about this result by purely physical means.’
‘That’s the sort of thing. And he said you can never tell when things are beneficial to people or when they’re not. They are in one way, they’re not in another. And he said things about–oh, penicillin and sulphonamides and heart transplants and things like pills for women, though we hadn’t got “The Pill” then. But you know, things that seem all right and they’re wonder-drugs or wonder-gases or wonder-something or other, and then there’s something about them that makes them go wrong as well as right, and then you wish they weren’t there and had never been thought of. Well, that’s the sort of thing that he seemed to be trying to get over to me. It was all rather difficult to understand. I said, “Do you mean you don’t like to take the risk?” and he said, “You’re quite right. I don’t like to take the risk. That’s the trouble because, you see, I don’t know in the least what the risk will be. That’s what happens to us poor devils of scientists. We take the risks and the risks are not in what we’ve discovered, it’s the risks of what the people we’ll have to tell about it will do with what we’ve discovered.” I said, “Now you’re talking about nuclear weapons again and atom bombs,” and he said, “Oh, to Hell with nuclear weapons and atomic bombs. We’ve gone far beyond that.”
‘“But if you’re going to make people nice-tempered and benevolent,” I said, “what have you got to worry about?” And he said, “You don’t understand, Matilda. You’ll never understand. My fellow scientists in all probability would not understand either. And no politicians would ever understand. And so, you see, it’s too big a risk to be taken. At any rate one would have to think for a long time.”
‘“But,” I said, “you could bring people out of it again, just like laughing gas, couldn’t you? I mean, you could make people benevolent just for a short time, and then they’d get all right again–or all wrong again–it depends which way you look at it, I should have thought.” And he said, “No.