‘Well! I did not see this,’ Miss Sonntag said.
‘Quite all right, Miss Sonntag.’
There was nothing on the paper. He upended the envelope and carefully tapped it.
‘You don’t think there was some powder in there and I have thrown it in the bin?’ Miss Sonntag said, alarmed.
‘We can go and look in the bin.’
‘Well, I will do it! Naturally. I am just so sorry. It has not occurred to me —’
They both went and looked in the bin. They removed the envelopes, carefully tapping each inside the bin. They removed all the envelopes, but there was no powder in the bin. There was just, at the bottom, another strip of tissue paper.
At that moment Miss Sonntag remembered that the phone had gone as she opened the first envelope, and that the first envelope had been the Swedish one, which naturally had been the first to go into the bin. She began explaining this to Lazenby but he only said, ‘Quite all right, Miss Sonntag,’ and they both went back to his glassed-in room off the main lab. A few graduate students were by this time at work in the lab; it was the department of microbiology.
Lazenby inserted himself into his chair and loosened his tie. Then he looked at the two bits of paper and smelt them. ‘These are cigarette papers,’ he said. He held one up to Miss Sonntag and looked at the envelope. ‘The address is also on a cigarette paper,’ he said.
‘Well! I don’t know about this. I don’t know what I am to do,’ Miss Sonntag said faintly. She couldn’t smell anything on the paper.
‘How about getting me a cup of coffee?’ Lazenby said. ‘Also … maybe … that fellow from Scientific Services. You’ve got his number.’ He was looking sideways along one of the papers. There was nothing on it but he had an idea something was in it. There was a suggestion of indentations on the surface.
‘Of course. At once, Professor. But I wish to say,’ Miss Sonntag said formally, ‘that without this cold in my head I could not have made this mistake. It is not something —’
‘What mistake? No mistake, Dora,’ the professor said kindly, and also accurately. ‘It was acute of you to spot this. Most thorough. I admire it.’
‘So? Ah. Thank you. Yes. Coffee,’ Miss Sonntag said, and fairly hurtled through to her own room, her cheeks pink. She couldn’t remember when he had last called her Dora. Her sense of smell had miraculously returned. She smelt flowers everywhere, also her own lavender water, and through the open window glorious Oxford, and beyond it the rest of this kindliest and most gentle of lands.
Miss Sonntag and her sister Sonya, some years older, had found a haven in England from Germany just before the war, ‘sponsored’ by a friend of their father’s, a fellow-doctor. The doctor had kept them with him in Oxford throughout the war and later taken an interest in their welfare. In Germany Sonya had had medical ambitions, and Dora academic ones — neither attainable for them in that land; and not easy in England either, since their education had been dislocated for years. In the end Sonya had gone into nursing, and Dora into the university’s administration, neither of them marrying, until Professor Lazenby had whisked Dora off to his own institute. That had been fifteen years ago and she had been with him ever since. Three sugars in his coffee. She spooned them in, still glowing at recollection of the tribute to her thoroughness. Then she recollected the other thing he wanted. The man from Scientific Services.
2
The man from Scientific Services was a former student of Lazenby’s who remembered him chiefly as rather a sketchy performer at his work but a useful bluffer when experiments went wrong. He had gone down with a disappointing Third and got a job with the old Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. From Ag & Fish he had gone somewhere else, and after that Lazenby had lost touch with him. He had surfaced again, urgently soliciting help and inviting the professor to lunch, a few days before Lazenby was due at a conference in Vienna. Although having much to attend to, Lazenby could not well resist a plea from an old student; but he had been greatly surprised at the opulence of the meal laid before him. During the meal the old student invited him, as Lazenby understood it, to become a spy.
‘Oh, nothing like that, Prof! Much too strong a word.’
‘You want me to report on what people say to me in private in Vienna?’
‘Not personal things, of course not. Programmes, costly budgeting things. There’s an immense amount of duplication going on. Cannot be good for science, Prof.’
‘I find that someone is duplicating my work and tell you?’
‘Someone else might find it and tell us. Then Scientific Service would tell you.’
‘Scientific Services is a government body?’
‘A sort of government body.’
‘I see.’ He had heard of this sort of government body in America. There they called it the CIA and many American scientists did indeed assist it, as he knew, in the ways mentioned. Lazenby hoped to God it wouldn’t catch on in England. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Thank you for the meal, Philpott. I have enjoyed it.’
‘Give us a try, Prof! Let me send you some stuff in your own field.’
‘By all means. Who gave you it?’
‘Oh, people you know. All top class.’
‘Why didn’t they give it to me?’
‘Didn’t spot the significance, I expect. It needs putting together, you know. Scraps here, scraps there.’
‘Yes.’ Scraps. Smelly. ‘Well, I shall be very interested,’ he said.
‘You will be, Prof. I promise you. Most useful stuff, particularly at budget time. All our contributors say so.’
‘And will I continue to receive the useful stuff,’ Lazenby asked, ‘should I decide not to be a contributor?’
‘Good of the country, Prof.’
‘The country?’
‘Science.’ Philpott blinked. ‘Knows no boundary. Taught me that yourself. Republic of Science. The fact is — stray items, of no use to the other chap, do turn out to be of the greatest use to one. Happens very frequently. Honestly, Prof, they all do it.’
‘Who do?’
‘Foreigners. They expect one to do it. Would be highly surprised to learn you weren’t in touch with someone like us already. I assure you!’
‘Well. I will accept your assurance. And the stuff,’ Lazenby gravely told him.
And to his surprise it did turn out to be useful. Scraps, as Philpott had said, but skilfully put together. And showing indeed possible duplication of some projected work. Not much, but enough to give him pause.
With only a small feeling of guilt he had acceded to Philpott’s request. Not grossly violating any confidences. Just scraps that might prove of interest to some other chap in the republic. And these scraps, too, had come back to him, interwoven with others, in the bulletins that periodically arrived from Scientific Services. They arrived not by post but by courier, accompanied by a note suggesting an early reading, and a request that the material should not be photocopied.
On one occasion, when a bulletin had been mislaid for some weeks, unread, Miss Sonntag had been astonished to find that all the words on it had disappeared. To prevent a recurrence of the mishap she had photocopied the next bulletin. The photocopy had come out blank, and the original itself had gone blank. It was the recollection of this — and the ways of foreigners — that had brought Philpott to mind when Lazenby gazed at the cigarette papers.