The Sleeping Partner by Winston Graham Page B

leukaemia among people who’ve been exposed to small over-tolerance doses of radiation. It’s called a late proliferative response. The whole subject’s tremendously interesting, but I certainly didn’t intend to use myself as a guinea-pig.’
    I walked up and down once. ‘You remind me of Stella,’ he said.
    â€˜What astonishes me—’
    â€˜Go on.’
    â€˜It’ll lead to argument again.’
    â€˜I’ve still time for that.’
    â€˜What I can’t understand is your being the way you are and holding the views you do.’
    â€˜I don’t see the connection. Surely nobody cuts his coat as obviously as that.’
    â€˜I don’t know. Perhaps nobody knows until it comes to the point. But you make me feel very small …’
    He had been watching me. I tried to imagine what he had looked like before he was ill.
    He said: ‘What I was trying to say the other night is this. D’you mind? …’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜In fifteen years we shan’t need coal. How old will you be then? Still under fifty? Men like you will be the new kings. That’s one reason why I’m anxious about the future.’
    â€˜You don’t trust us,’ I said. It was a pretty queer thing to say to him.
    â€˜I don’t trust you only because you yourselves have nothing to trust – or will allow yourselves nothing to trust.’
    â€˜You mean because we’re atheists or agnostics?’
    â€˜I don’t like the terms,’ he said. ‘ They mean nothing. Selfishness is the only true atheism.’
    â€˜Well, then?’
    He stopped. ‘ Sorry. When I talk too much I lose my breath. Hold hard.’
    I waited.
    He said: ‘Science, I suppose you’d say, begins with observed facts systematically classified. Right? Well, there is one fact about man that has distinguished him from his first appearance on the earth. It marks him as different from all other creatures. That is, he’s a worshipping animal. Wherever he’s existed there are the remains in some form of his worship. That’s not a pious conclusion; it’s an observed fact. And all through pre-history and recorded history, when he’s deprived himself of that he’s gone to pieces. Many people nowadays are going to pieces, or they find the first convenient prop to tie their instincts on to. It’s behind the extraordinary adulation of royalty. It’s behind the mobbing of TV stars. If you don’t give expression to an instinct, you’ve got to sublimate it or go out of your mind.’
    â€˜And as for us …’
    â€˜Well, the ordinary man has to work his own way through. I’ve no cure-all to suggest. What I’m concerned about is you people whose hands are going to hold so much power.’
    â€˜I’m concerned with that too.’
    â€˜I know. It’s where we came in. But I thought I’d try to explain my rudeness.’
    â€˜There wasn’t any rudeness. I told you.’
    He hesitated, his brows together and contradicting the upturn of his thin clever mouth. ‘As I see it, Mike – may I call you Mike?’
    â€˜Of course.’
    â€˜As I see it, Mike, science can’t emancipate man from his own nature; it can only help him – if he has a certain amount of intellectual modesty – to understand it better. In times of crisis, if a man has no reference outside himself, even his best moral judgments straggle off into enervation and expediency. If you lose your sense of wonder you lose your sense of balance. Who was it said: “Here is a great man, here is my master – to betray him is to betray myself”? I don’t think he was stating a religious fact but simply a principle of life.’
    I glanced up and saw that Stella had come into the hall.

Chapter Eleven
    M EETING HER again was deadly with him there. And his being there was now so much worse than I’d ever