I suppose they thought they had to have one representative of the Army along; possibly I got the invitation because I was once reported as saying that not all politicians were stupid and corrupt. I went on to say that in my view those that were not stupid were corrupt and vice versa, but that part was left out. Anyway, there I stood, on a bright spring morning, an island of brass entirely surrounded by civilians. It was easy to tell the politicians from the scientists. It was a scientists’ occasion; the politicians, for once, looked abashed.
Professor Norwood, who had a reputation that even I could be expected to have heard of, called us to order.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “and”—he smiled towards me—“General Sands, before we go next door I think it may be as well to say a few words. You all have some idea of the importance of our meeting here, and some of my colleagues, of course, know more about the actual work than I do, but there will be others”—another friendly smile for the general—“who are still in the dark as to what has been going on. That is natural enough, because it has been kept very secret. And it has been kept very secret because it represents the greatest weapon this—or any other country—has ever had.”
That depressed me, of course. There is a belief that soldiers enjoy hearing about new weapons, but it is a belief strictly confined to civilians. No new weapon has ever been anything but a nuisance to the men who have to administer the army, however necessary it was.
“Our present research,” Professor Norwood went on, “was suggested in rather an odd way. An exhibition of sketches of the inventions of Leonardo da Vinci started it all. Looking round them, I could not help being struck by the quality of anticipation in da Vinci’s work. This was something over and above what one expects to find in the work of an inventor. The ordinary inventor rests on the firm base of what has gone before; his work is a development—a new twist on an old theory. But the da Vinci sketches show something quite different. Examine his projected submarine, his auto-gyro, his screw-cutting lathe… they are a wild jump from anything known in his time.
“The conventional explanation, of course, is that he was a great genius. But it so happened that the day before I saw this exhibition I had been reading again Dunne’s book, An Experiment with Time, and as a result of this a different explanation occurred to me. You will know that Dunne’s book is an account of how he and a group of other experimenters established, mainly through dreams, a kind of fore-knowledge of what was to happen. If his work is accepted, time becomes a far more uncertain factor than is commonly believed. The future is not necessarily a closed book.”
I had been looking round surreptitiously while he was talking. We were in two groups: those in the know, and the rest. The former were practically at the nail-biting stage. It was something big, all right.
“More recently than Dunne’s, there has been the work of Doctor Soal, who established the fact of precognition in a series of patient experiments. But I mention these things only in passing. They are important because to me, quite suddenly, they linked up with da Vinci. What if the clue to da Vinci’s technical genius was simply this—prevision? What if da Vinci was doing no more than eavesdrop on the ordinary workshop chatter of the twentieth century?”
Professor Norwood looked at me again. “You see the implication,” he said. I could remember talking in just that tone to very young lieutenants at Staff College. “If a da Vinci could get hold of inventions that still lay four hundred years in the future, it might be possible to do the same thing today. And we would not make the mistake da Vinci’s contemporaries did, of ignoring the prophecies when we had got them.
“Nowadays, of course, we are more interested in weapons than in any other branch of technology.”