Scientist Fiction

THE STRUGGLES OF ALBERT WOODS (287 pp.) -- William Cooper -- Doubleday ($3.50).

"Forward, Woods!" cried Albert Woods to his diary in the high spirits of youth. "Let your light shine!" Poor Albert--fate had equipped him with a million-watt ambition, but his soul was wired for common house-current. Or, as British Author William Cooper states it in this entertaining novel about The Struggles of Albert Woods: "Can you be a great man if you have a touch of the little man? That was Albert Woods's life problem."

Nonetheless, against all odds, and even against common sense, Albert forged ahead, shoving with both hands and sometimes with his cheek to get his small bulb out where it could shine. As Cooper observes, "The immortal gift of Albert Woods was his capacity for answering [the question of how to be great] with a glorious hotheaded 'Somehow!' " In short, Author Cooper, himself a physicist hiding under a pseudonym, sets off a merry little stink bomb in the sacred precincts of High Science, as if to show that the laboratory atmosphere is not always filled with the ozone of pure disinterestedness.

One End of a Molecule. At 23, Albert did a brilliant paper on something called "non-typical Wurmer-Klaus reactions" and was invited to join a chemistry-research department at Oxford. There he went to work for F. R. Dibdin, a revered character who wandered around in a cloud of pipesmoke and portentous cliches, occasionally avoiding difficult questions by sidling off to the lavatory. Scientist Albert told his diary: "Dr. Dibdin ... is a wonderfully inspired leader ... He will give Woods the discipline he needs."

Nobody could ever quite do that. At a meeting of the chemistry faculty, Albert lost his head. When somebody questioned a point in a paper he was reading, he called the man "daft," and went on blustering long after he was proved wrong. The fellowship he was seeking went to another man. Albert blamed the setback on treachery, and concluded that Dibdin didn't "know one end of a molecule from the other.''

Knighthood That Failed. The sense of estrangement from Dibdin did not last long. Dibdin's daughter Margaret had beauty, Dibdin had money, and, perhaps best of all, Mrs. Dibdin had aristocratic blood. On his honeymoon Albert was converted, after "some excesses of which he was proud," from a great amorist to a great husband. "Woods." he told himself, "is at the height of his powers"; and rushed back to his laboratory to become a great scientist, too.

In the next 15 years he never quite did that, but he became a great committeeman. In time, his perseverance was rewarded with a Rolls-Royce, a fellowship in the Royal Society, even a membership in the Athenaeum. And once, when Albert was deserted at a critical moment by a gifted pupil on whom he largely depended for his theoretical ideas, he actually solved an impossible problem in the synthesis of a nerve gas. It was Albert's greatest triumph--marred only by the misfortune (from Albert's standpoint) that neither side used nerve gas in World War II.

Nevertheless, Albert stood to get a knighthood out of it--if only he had been able to control that atavistic tendency to be just plain human. At a party one day he confronted a particularly loud and repulsive woman who was making drunken claims that Hitler was right about the

Jews. "You stupid --!" cried Albert, in

a fury. "Leave this house immediately!" Too late, Albert discovered that she was the wife of a cabinet minister.

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