This was no snobbish attempt at
class-distinction: matters of Team policy were often discussed at the
big round table, and the more confidential details of their work. People
who have only their knowledge and their ideas to sell are wary about
bandying either loosely, and the six men and three women who faced each
other across the twelve-foot diameter of the teakwood table had no other
stock-in-trade.
They were nine people of nine different nationalities, or they were nine
people of the common extra-nationality of science. That Duncan MacLeod,
their leader, had grown up in the Transvaal and his wife had been born
in the Swedish university town of Upsala was typical not only of their
own group but of the hundreds of independent research-teams that had
sprung up after the Second World War. The scientist-adventurer may have
been born of the relentless struggle for scientific armament supremacy
among nations and the competition for improved techniques among
industrial corporations during the late 1950s and early '60s, but he had
been begotten when two masses of uranium came together at the top of a
steel tower in New Mexico in 1945.
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