In an extraordinary and dramatic way, Sir Charles Snow showed himself every inch the novelist last night. For the British civil servant, scientist, and writer opened the first of his three Godkin lectures on "Science and Government" with what was almost a novelist's account of the intertwining careers of two English scientists in volved in a historic quarrel.

The purpose of this historic "parable," Snow told his Sanders Theatre audience, was to illustrate a bizarre feature of modern life: that in advanced industrial societies, such as England, the United States and Russia, a handful of men make secret decisions which determine "in the crudest sense whether we live or die."

Typical of such decisions were the choice in England and the United States to start work on the atom bomb, and the choices in the U.S. and Russia about intercontinental missiles. Snow's "parable," however, concerned the secret decision made in 1935 in England to develop radar.

Here Snow adopted the role of storyteller and began to describe the two characters in his cast: Sir Henry Tizard, "the best scientific mind in our time that has ever applied itself to war," and F. A. Lindemenn, Lord Cherwell, who was Winston Ohurchill's "grey eminence" in scientific matters during the thirties and into the war.

Snow characterized Tizard as "a patriot in the way of an English naval officer," an amiable, brilliant man "with the face of an intelligent and sensitive frog." "About Lindemann," however, "hung an atmosphere of indefinable malaise." He had, Snow said, the inflated passions of a character in Balsao's novels.

Both men met in Germany as science students and were friends there. Both were to meet again as enemies.

In the course of distinguished careers, both men prepared themselves for the roles they were to play in their quarrel over radar. After their participation in Word War I each followed "a characteristic path" in slipping out of pure science and into politics, Snow said.

Tizard went into the civil service, in 1934 was made head of the committee to propose measures for England's defense and thus became engaged in the "closed politics" of the scientific bureaucracy. On the other hand, Lindemann used his social connections and friendship with Winston Churchill to enter the "open politics" of Society and Parliament. He became an ally and adviser to Churchill during the period when he was the anti-government spokesman in the Commons.

The historic clash between the two men occurred in '35, when Churchill and Lindemann were allowed to examine Tizard's secret and desperate decision to start a crash program for the development of radar, Snow said. "Within half an hour," Lindemann and turned on his friend, declared that the high priority given radar was an act "equivalent to treason," and bitterly attacked the crash program.

At this suspenseful point, Sir Charles stopped. One faculty member in the audience characterized the atmosphere as he left: "do you think the butler did it?"