Life with the Physicists

LIVE WITH LIGHTNING (404 pp.) --Mitchell Wilson-- Little, Brown ($3).

"Who's talking about nuclear energy today? . . . What got the headlines? Tell me. Was it power? No. Bombs . . . And you [physicists] can storm and shout about atomic energy at the top of your voices -- the world just won't hear you."

That is the main thing that bothers the hero of ex-Physicist Mitchell Wilson's long-winded novel (a Literary Guild se lection for October). The hero's other worry: that private interests are hypnotizing the U.S. public with the A-bomb while they quietly muscle in on Washington to seize control of atomic energy. Hardy readers who plow through all of Lightning's small type will learn what he does about it and, incidentally, what life can be like for an atomic physicist these days. There seems to be frustration aplenty.

Hero Erik Gorin quits his instructorship at a Midwestern college in disgust at university politics. He takes a better paying job with a machine-tool company, where he buries his ethics and tries to wiggle into a managerial position. But Erik's big pitch is a big flop; his employer outmaneuvers him. So he signs up with the Government as a research physicist, helps split the atom and make the bomb possible. In postwar Washington (and still panting after the big money 5, he is about to team up with malefactors of great wealth who want to kidnap atomic energy for private profit. But a Congressman's rabble-rousing speech sickens him, sends him back to unhampered research behind university walls.

The reader may feel that Erik's decision comes too late to win him a halo. On every occasion except the last, he invariably chucks science for dollars when the chips are down; in a sense, he has even deserted in the face of the enemy. The deeper objection is not that Erik is such an unstable compound, but that living with lightning makes such a dull life.

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