 Section 1. The World Set Free by H. G. Wells. Section 1. Preface. The World Set Free was written in 1913 and published early in 1914, and it is the latest of a series of three fantasias of possibility, stories which all turn on the possible developments in the future of some contemporary force or group of forces. The World Set Free was written under the immediate shadow of the Great War. Every intelligent person in the world felt that disaster was impending and knew no way of averting it, but few of us realized in the earlier half of 1914 how near the crash was to us. The reader will be amused to find that here it is put off until the year 1956. He may naturally want to know the reason for what will seem a now quite extraordinary delay. As a prophet, the author must confess he has always been inclined to be a rather slow prophet. The war airplane in the world of reality, for example, beat the forecast in anticipations by about 20 years or so. I suppose a desire not to shock the skeptical reader's sense of use and want, and perhaps a less credible disposition to hedge, have something to do with this dating forward of one's main events, but in the particular case of the World Set Free there was, I think, another motive in holding the Great War back. And that was to allow the chemist to get well forward with his discovery of the release of atomic energy, 1956, or for that matter, 2056, maybe none too late for that crowning revolution in human potentialities. And apart from this procrastination of over 40 years, the guess at the opening phase of the war was fairly lucky. The forecast of an alliance of the central empires, the opening campaign through the Netherlands, and the despatch of the British expeditionary force were all justified before the book had been published six months. And the opening section of Chapter II remains now, after the reality has happened, a fairly adequate diagnosis of the essentials of the matter. One happy hit, in Chapter II, Section II, on which the writer may congratulate himself, is the forecast that under modern conditions it would be quite impossible for any great general to emerge to supremacy and concentrate the enthusiasm of the armies of either side. There could be no Alexander's or Napoleon's. And we soon heard the scientific corpse muttering, these old fools, exactly as it is here foretold. These, however, are small details, and the misses in the story far outnumber the hits. It is the main thesis, which is still of interest now, the thesis that, because of the development of scientific knowledge, separate sovereign states and separate sovereign empires are no longer possible in the world. And that, to attempt to keep on with the old system, is to heap disaster upon disaster for mankind, and perhaps to destroy our race altogether. The remaining interest of this book now is the sustained validity of this thesis, and the discussion of the possible ending of war on the earth. I have supposed a sort of epidemic of sanity to break out among the rulers of states and the leaders of mankind. I have represented the native common sense of the French mind and of the English mind. For manifestly, King Egbert is meant to be God's Englishman, leading mankind towards a bold and resolute effort of salvage and reconstruction, instead of which, as the schoolbook footnotes say, compare today's newspaper. Instead of a frank and honorable gathering of leading men, Englishmen meeting German and Frenchmen Russian, brothers in their offenses and in their disaster, upon the hills of Brissago, beheld in Geneva, at the other end of Switzerland, a poor little league of allied nations, excluding the United States, Russia, and most of the subject peoples of the world, meeting obscurely amidst a worldwide disregard to make important gestures at the leading problems of the debacle. Either the disaster has not been vast enough yet, or it has not been swift enough to inflict the necessary moral shock and achieve the necessary moral revulsion. Just as the world of 1913 was used to an increasing prosperity and thought that increase would go on forever, so now it would seem the world is growing accustomed to a steady glide towards social disintegration, and thinks that too can go on continually, and never come to a final bump. So soon do use and want establish themselves, and the most flaming and thunderous of lessons pale into disregard. The question whether a Leblanc is still possible, the question whether it is still possible to bring about an outbreak of creative sanity in mankind, to avert this steady glide to destruction, is not one of the most urgent in the world. It is clear that the writer is temperamentally disposed to hope that there is such a possibility, but he has to confess that he sees few signs of any such breath of understanding and steadfastness of will as an effectual effort to turn the rush of human affairs' demands. The inertia of dead ideas and old institutions carries on us towards the rapids, only in one direction is there any plain recognition of the idea of human common well as something overriding any national patriotic consideration, and that is in the working class movement throughout the world. And labor internationalism is closely bound up with conceptions of a profound social revolution. If world peace is to be attained through labor internationalism, it will have to be attained at the price of the completest social and economic reconstruction, and by passing through a phase of revolution that will certainly be violent, that may be very bloody, which may be prolonged through a long period, and may in the end fail to achieve anything but social destruction. Nevertheless, the fact remains that it is in the labor class, and the labor class alone, that any conception of a world rule and a world peace has so far appeared. The dream of the world set free, a dream of highly educated and highly favored leading and ruling men, voluntarily setting themselves to the task of reshaping the world, has thus far remained a dream. H. G. Wells, Easton Gleeb, Dunmau, 1921 Prelude, The Sun's Snarers Section 1 The history of mankind is the history of attainment of external power. Man is the tool using fire-making animal. From the outset of his terrestrial career, we find him supplementing the natural strength and bodily weapons of a beast, by the heat of burning, and the rough implement of stone. So he passed beyond the ape. From that he expands. Presently he added to himself the power of the horse and the ox. He borrowed the carrying strength of water, and the driving force of the wind. He quickened his fire by blowing, and his simple tools, pointed first with copper, and then with iron, increased and varied, and became more elaborate and efficient. He sheltered his heat in houses, and made his way easier by paths and roads. He complicated his social relationships, and increased his efficiency by the division of labor. He began to store up knowledge. Contrivance followed contrivance, each making it possible for a man to do more. Always down the lengthening record, save for a setback ever and again, he is doing more. A quarter of a million years ago, the utmost man was a savage, being scarcely articulate, sheltering in holes in the rocks, armed with a rough hue and flint or a fire-pointed stick, naked, living in small family groups, killed by some younger man so soon as his first virile activity declined. Over most of the great wilderness of earth, you would have sought him in vain. Only in a few temperate and subtropical river valleys would you have found the squatting lairs of his little herds, a male, a few females, a child or so. He knew no future then, no kind of life except the life he led. He fled the cave bare over the rocks, full of iron ore, and the promise of sword and spear. He froze to death upon a ledge of coal. He drank water muddy with the clay, that would one day make cups of porcelain. He chewed the ear of wild weed. He had plucked and gazed with a dim speculation in the eyes at the birds, that soared beyond his reach. Or suddenly he became aware of the scent of another male, and rose up roaring, his roars the formless precursors of moral admonitions. For he was a great individualist, that original. He suffered none other than himself. So through the long generations, this heavy precursor, this ancestor of all of us, fought and bred and perished, changing almost imperceptibly. Yet he changed. That keen chisel of necessity would sharpen the tiger's claw age by age, and find down the clumsy orchipus to the swift grace of the horse. Was that work upon him? Is that work upon him still? The clumsier and more stupidly fierce among him were killed soonest and oftenest. The finer hand, the quicker eye, the bigger brain, the better balanced body prevailed, age by age. The implements were a little better made, the man a little more delicately adjusted to his possibilities. He became more social, his herd grew larger, no longer did each man kill or drive out his growing sons. A system of taboos made them tolerable to him, and they revered him alive and soon even after he was dead, and were his allies against the beasts and the rest of mankind. But they were forbidden to touch the women of the tribe. They had to go out and capture women for themselves, and each son fled from his stepmother and hid from her lest the anger of the old man should be roused. All the world over, even to this day, these ancient, inevitable taboos can be traced. And now instead of caves came huts and hovels, and the fire was better tended, and there were wrappings in garments. And so aided, the creature spread into colder climates, carrying food with him, storing food, until sometimes the neglected grass seed sprouted again and gave a first hint of agriculture. And already there were the beginnings of leisure and thought. Man began to think. There were times when he was fed, when his lusts and his fears were all appeased, when the sun shone upon the squatting place and dim stirrings of speculation lit his eyes. He scratched upon a bone, and found resemblance, and pursued it, and began pictorial art, molded the soft, warm clay of the riverbank between his fingers, and found a pleasure in its patternings and repetitions, shaped it into the form of vessels, and found that it would hold water. He watched the streaming river, and wondered from what bountiful breast this incessant water came. He blinked at the sun, and dreamt that perhaps he might snare it and spear it, as it went down to its resting place amidst the distant hills. Then he was roused to convey to his brother that once indeed he had done so, at least that someone had done so, he mixed that perhaps, with another dream, almost as daring, that one day a mammoth had been beset, and therewith began fiction, pointing away to achievement, and the august prophetic procession of tales. For scores and hundreds of centuries, for myriads of generations that life of our fathers went on. From the beginning to the ripening of that phase of human life, from the first clumsy eolith of rudely chipped flint, to the first implements of polished stone, was two or three thousand centuries, ten or fifteen thousand generations. So slowly, by human standards, did humanity gather itself together out of the dim intimations of the beast, and that first glimmering of speculation, that first story of achievement, that storyteller bright-eyed and flushed under his matted hair, gesticulating to his gaping, incredulous listener, gripping his wrist to keep him attentive, was the most marvelous beginning this world has ever seen. It doomed the mammoths, and it began the setting of that snare that shall catch the sun. Section two. That dream was but a moment in a man's life, whose proper business it seemed was to get food and kill his fellows, and beget after the manner of all that belongs to the fellowship of the beasts. About him, hidden from him by the thinnest of veils, were the untouched sources of power, whose magnitude we scarcely do more than suspect even today, power that could make his every conceivable dream come real. But the feet of the race were in the way of it, though he died blindly unknowing. At last, in the generous levels of warm river valleys, where food is abundant, and life very easy, the emerging human overcoming his earlier jealousies, becoming, as necessity persecuted him less urgently, more social and tolerant and amenable, achieved a larger community. There began a division of labor, certain of the older men specialized in knowledge and direction, a strong man took the fatherly leadership in war, and priest and king began to develop their roles in the opening drama of man's history. The priest's solicitude was seed time and harvest and fertility, and the king ruled peace and war. In a hundred river valleys about the warm, temperate zone of the earth, there were already towns and temples, a score of thousand years ago. They flourished unrecorded, ignoring the past and unsuspicious of the future, for as yet writing had still to begin. Very slowly did man increase his demand upon the illimitable wealth of power that offered itself on every hand to him. He tamed certain animals, he developed his primordial haphazard agriculture into a ritual. He added first one metal to his resources, and then another, until he had copper and tin and iron and lead, and gold and silver to supplement his stone. He hewed and carved wood, made pottery, paddled down his river until he came to the sea, discovered the wheel, and made the first roads. But his chief activity for a hundred centuries and more was a subjugation of himself and others to larger and larger societies. The history of man is not simply the conquest of external power. It is first the conquest of those distrusts and fiercenesses, that self-concentration and intensity of animalism that tie his hands from taking his inheritance. The ape in us still resents association. From the dawn of the age of polished stone to the achievement of the peace of the world, man's dealings were chiefly with himself and his fellow man, trading, bargaining, lawmaking, propitiating, enslaving, conquering, exterminating, and every little increment in power. He turned at once and always turns to the purposes of this confused, elaborate struggle to socialize. To incorporate and comprehend his fellow men into a community of purpose became the last and greatest of his instincts. Already before the last polished phase of the stone age was over, he had become a political animal. He made astonishingly far-reaching discoveries within himself, first of counting and then of writing and making records, and with that his town communities began to stretch out to dominion. In the valleys of the Nile, the Euphrates, and the Great Chinese Rivers, the first empires and the first written laws had their beginnings. Men specialized for fighting and rule as soldiers and knights. Later, as ships grew seed-worthy, the Mediterranean which had been a barrier became a highway, and at last out of a tangle of pirate polities came the great struggle of Carthage and Rome. The history of Europe is the history of the victory and breaking up of the Roman Empire. Every ascended monarch in Europe, up to the last, aped Caesar and called himself Kaiser or Tsar or Imperator or Kassir e Hind. Measured by the duration of human life, it is a vast space of time between that first dynasty in Egypt and the coming of the airplane. But by the scale that looks back to the makers of the Eoliths, it is all of it a story of yesterday. Now during this period of 200 centuries or more, this period of the warring states, while men's minds were chiefly preoccupied by politics and mutual aggression, their progress in the acquirement of external power was slow, rapid in comparison with the progress of the old stone age, but slow in comparison with this new age of systematic discovery in which we live. They did not very greatly alter the weapons and tactics of warfare, the methods of agriculture, seamanship, their knowledge of the habitable globe, or the devices and utensils of domestic life between the days of the early Egyptians and the days when Christopher Columbus was a child. Of course, there were inventions and changes, but there were also retroaggressions. Things were found out and then forgotten again. It was on the whole a progress, but it contained no steps. The peasant life was the same. There were already priests and lawyers and towns craftsmen and territorial lords and rulers, doctors, wise women, soldiers and sailors in Egypt and China and Assyria and southeastern Europe at the beginning of that period. And they were doing much the same things and living much the same life as they were in Europe in AD 1500. The English excavators of the year AD 1900 could delve into the remains of Babylon and Egypt and dissenter legal documents, domestic accounts and family correspondence that they could read with the completest sympathy. There were great religious and moral changes throughout the period. Empires and republics replaced one another. Italy tried a vast experiment in slavery, and indeed slavery was tried again and again and failed and failed, and was still to be tested again and rejected again in the new world. Christianity and Mohammedanism swept away a thousand more specialized cults. But essentially these were progressive adaptations of mankind to material conditions that must have seemed fixed forever. The idea of revolutionary changes in the material conditions of life would have been entirely strange to human thought through all that time. Yet the dreamer, the storyteller, was there still, waiting for his opportunity amidst the busy preoccupations, the comings and goings, the wars and processions, the castle building and cathedral building, the arts and loves, the small diplomacy and incurable feuds, the crusades and trading journeys of the Middle Ages. He no longer speculated with the untrammeled freedom of the stone age savage. Authoritative explanations of everything barred his path, but he speculated with a better brain, sat idle and gazed at circling stars in the sky and mused upon the coin and crystal in his hand. Whenever there was a certain leisure for thought throughout these times, then men were to be found dissatisfied with the appearances of things, dissatisfied with the assurances of orthodox belief, uneasy with a sense of unread symbols in the world about them, questioning the finality of scholastic wisdom. Through all the ages of history, there were men to whom this whisper had come of hidden things about them. They could no longer lead ordinary lives nor content themselves with the common things of this world once they had heard this voice. And mostly, they believed not only that all this world as it were a painted curtain before things unguessed at, but that these secrets were power. Hitherto, power had come to men by chance, but now there were these seekers seeking, seeking among rare and curious and perplexing objects, sometimes finding some odd, utilizable thing, sometimes deceiving themselves with fancy discovery, sometimes pretending to find. The world of every day laughed at these eccentric beings, or found them annoying and ill-treated them, or was seized with fear and made saints and sorcerers and warlocks of them, or with covetousness and entertain them hopefully. But for the greater part, heeded them not at all, yet they were of the blood of him who had first dreamt of attacking the mammoth. Every one of them was of his blood and descent, and the thing they sought, all unwittingly, was a snare that will someday catch the sun. Section 3 Such a man was that Leonardo da Vinci, who went about the court of Sforza in Milan in a state of dignified abstraction. His commonplace books are full of prophetic subtlety and ingenious anticipations of the methods of the early aviators. Durer was his parallel, and Roger Bacon, whom the Franciscans silenced, of his kindred. Such a man again, in an earlier city, was hero of Alexandria, who knew of the power of steam 1900 years before it was first brought into use. An earlier still was Archimedes of Syracuse, and still earlier the legendary Daedalus of Snossos. All up and down, the record of history, wherever there was a little leisure from war and brutality, the seekers appeared, and half the alchemists were of their tribe. When Roger Bacon blew up his first batch of gunpowder, one might have supposed that men would have gone at once to the explosive engine, but they could see nothing of the sort. They were not yet beginning to think of seeing things. Their metallurgy was all too poor to make such engines, even had they thought of them. For a time they could not make instruments sound enough to stand this new force, even for so rough a purpose as hurling a missile. Their first guns had barrels of cupred timber, and the world waited for more than 500 years before the explosive engine came. Even when the seekers found, it was at first a long journey before the world could use their findings for any but the roughest, most obvious purposes. If man in general was not still as absolutely blind to the unconquered energies about him as his Paleolithic precursor, he was at least purrblind. Section 4 The laden energy of coal and the power of steam waited long on the verge of discovery before they began to influence human lives. There were no doubt many such devices as heroes' toys devised and forgotten time after time in courts and palaces, but it needed that coal should be mined and burning with plenty of iron at hand before it dawned upon men that here was something more than a curiosity. And it is to be remarked that the first recorded suggestion for the use of steam was in war. There is an Elizabethan pamphlet in which it is proposed to fire shot out of corked iron bottles full of heated water. The mining of coal for fuel, the smelting of iron upon a larger scale than men had ever done before, the steam pumping engine, the steam engine, and the steamboat. Followed one another in an order that had a kind of logical necessity. It is a most interesting and instructive chapter in the history of the human intelligence, the history of steam from its beginning as a fact in human consciousness to the perfection of the great turbine engines that preceded the utilization of intramolecular power. Nearly every human being must have seen steam, seen it incuriously for many thousands of years. The women in particular were always heating water, boiling it, seeing it boil away, seeing the lids of vessels dance with its fury. Millions of people at different times must have watched steam pitching rocks out of volcanoes like cricket balls and blowing pumice into foam. And yet you may search the whole human record through. Letters, books, inscriptions, pictures. For any glimmer of a realization that here was force, here was strength to borrow and use. Then suddenly man woke up to it, the railways spread like a network over the globe. The ever enlarging iron steamships began their staggering fight against wind and wave. Steam was the first comer in the new powers. It was the beginning of the age of energy that was to close the long history of the warring states. But for a long time men did not realize the importance of this novelty. They would not recognize. They were not able to recognize that anything fundamental had happened to their immemorial necessities. They called the steam engine the iron horse and pretended that they had made the most partial of substitutions. Steam machinery and factory production were visibly revolutionizing the conditions of industrial production. Population was streaming steadily in from the countryside and concentrating in hitherto unthought of masses about a few city centers. Food was coming to them over enormous distances. Upon a scale that made the one soul precedent, the corn ships of Imperial Rome, a petty incident, and a huge migration of peoples between Europe and Western Asia and America was in progress. And nobody seems to have realized that something new had come into human life. A strange swirl different altogether from any previous circling and mutation. A swirl like the swirl when at last the lock gates begin to open after a long phase of accumulating water and eddying inactivity. The sober Englishmen at the close of the 19th century could sit at his breakfast table, decide between tea from Ceylon or coffee from Brazil, devour an egg from France with some Danish ham, or eat a new Zealand chop, wind up his breakfast with a West Indian banana, glance at the latest telegrams from all the world, scrutinize the prices current of his geographically distributed investments in South Africa, Japan, and Egypt, and tell the two children he had begotten, in the place of his father's aid, that he thought the world changed very little. They must play cricket, keep their hair cut, go to the old school he had gone to, shirk the lessons he had shirked, learn a few scraps of Horus and Virgil and Homer for the confusion of cadds, and all would be well with them. ELECTRICITY Though it was perhaps the earlier of the two to be studied, invaded the common life of men a few decades after the exploitation of steam. To electricity also, in spite of its provocative nearness all about him, mankind had been utterly blind for incalculable ages. Could anything be more emphatic than the appeal of electricity for attention? It thundered at man's ears, it signaled to him in blinding flashes. Occasionally it killed him, and he could not see it as a thing that concerned him enough to merit study. It came into the house with the cat on any dry day, and crackled insinuatingly whenever he stroked her fur. It rotted his medals when he put them together. There is no single record that anyone questioned why the cat's fur crackles, or why hair is so unruly to brush on a frosty day before the 16th century. For endless years man seems to have done this very successful best not to think about it at all, until this new spirit of a seeker turned itself to these things. How often things must have been seen and dismissed as unimportant before the speculative eye and the movement of vision came. It was Gilbert, Queen Elizabeth's court physician, who first puzzled his brains with rubbed amber and bits of glass and silk and shellac, and so began the quickening of the human mind to the existence of this universal presence. And even then, the science of electricity remained a mere little group of curious facts for nearly 200 years, connected perhaps with magnetism, a mere guess that, perhaps with the lightning, frog's legs must have hung by copper hooks from iron railings and twitched upon countless occasions before Galvani saw them. Except for the lighting conductor, it was 250 years after Gilbert, before electricity stepped out of the cabinet of scientific curiosities into the life of the common man. Then suddenly, in the half century between 1880 and 1930, it ousted the steam engine and took over traction. It ousted every other form of household heating, abolished distance with the perfected wireless telephone and the telephotograph. Section 6 And there was an extraordinary mental resistance to discovery and invention for at least 100 years after the scientific revolution had begun. Each new thing made its way into practice against a skepticism that amounted at times to hostility. One writer upon these subjects gives a funny little domestic conversation that happened. He says, in the year 1898, within 10 years, that is to say, of the time when the first aviators were fairly on the wing. He tells us how he sat at his desk in his study and conversed with his little boy. His little boy was in profound trouble. He felt he had to speak very seriously to his father and, as he was a kindly little boy, he did not want to do it too harshly. This is what happened. I wished, Daddy, he said, coming to his point, that you wouldn't write all this stuff about flying. The chaps rot me. Yes, said his father. An old broomy, the head I mean. He rots me. Everybody rots me. But there's going to be flying quite soon. The little boy was too well-bred to say what he thought of that. Anyhow, he said, I wish you wouldn't write about it. You'll fly lots of times before you die, the father assured him. The little boy looked unhappy. The father hesitated. Then he opened the drawer and took out a blurred and underdeveloped photograph. Come and look at this, he said. The little boy came round to him. The photograph showed a stream and a meadow beyond and some trees and in the air a black pencil-like object with flat wings on either side of it. It was the first record of the first apparatus heavier than air that ever maintained itself in the air by a mechanical force. Across the margin was written, Here we go up, up, up from SP Langley, Smithsonian Institution, Washington. The father watched the effect of this reassuring document upon his son. Well, he said, That, said the schoolboy after reflection, is only a model. Model today, man tomorrow. The boy seemed divided in his allegiance. Then he decided for what he believed quite firmly to be omniscience. But old Broomie, he said, He told all the boys in his class only yesterday. No man will ever fly. No one, he says, who has ever shot grouse or pheasants on the wing would ever believe anything of the sword. Yet that boy lived to fly across the Atlantic and edit his father's reminiscences. Section 7 At the close of the 19th century as a multitude of passages in the literature of that time witnesses, it was thought that the fact that man had at last had successful and profitable dealings with the steam that scalded him and the electricity that flashed and banged about the sky at him was an amazing and perhaps a culminating exercise of his intelligence and his intellectual courage. The air of Nunk Demitis sounds insane of these writings. The great things are discovered, wrote Gerald Brown in his summary of the 19th century. For us there remains little but the working out of detail. The spirit of the seeker was still rare in the world. Education was unskilled, unstimulating, scholarly, but little valued. And few people even then could have realized that science was still but the flimsiest of trial sketches and discoveries scarcely beginning. No one seems to have been afraid of science and its possibilities. Yet now, when there had been but a score or so of seekers, there were many thousands, and for one needle of speculation that had been probing the curtain of appearances in 1800, there were now hundreds. And already chemistry, which had been content with her atoms and molecules for the better part of a century, was preparing herself for that vast next stride that was to revolutionize the whole life of man from top to bottom. One realizes how crude was the science of that time, when one considers the case of the composition of air. This was determined by that strange genius and recluse, that man of mystery, that disemboweled intelligence, Henry Cavendish, towards the end of the 18th century. So far as he was concerned, the work was admirably done. He separated all the known ingredients of the air with precision altogether remarkable. He even put it upon record that he had some doubt about the purity of the nitrogen. For more than a hundred years his determination was repeated by chemists all the world over. His apparatus was treasured in London. He became, as they used to say, classic and always at every one of the innumerable repetitions of his experiment, that sly element argon was hiding among the nitrogen. And with the little helium and traces of other substances. And indeed all the hints that might have led to the new departures of the 20th century chemistry. And every time it slipped unobserved through the professional fingers that repeated his procedure. Is it any wonder then, with this margin of inaccuracy, that up to the very dawn of the 20th century scientific discovery was still rather a procession of happy accidents than an orderly conquest of nature? Yet the spirit of seeking was spreading steadily through the world. Even the schoolmaster could not check it. For the mere handful who grew up to feel wonder and curiosity about the secrets of nature in the 19th century, there were now, at the beginning of the 20th, myriads escaping from the limitations of intellectual routine and the habitual life in Europe, in America, north and south, in Japan, in China, and all about the world. It was in 1910 that the parents of young Holston, who was to be called by a whole generation of scientific men, the greatest of European chemists, were staying in a villa near Santo Domenico, between Fiesole and Florence. He was only then 15, but he was already distinguished as a mathematician and possessed by a savage appetite to understand. He had been particularly attracted by the mystery of phosphorescence and its apparent unrelatedness to every other source of light. He was to tell afterwards, in his reminiscences, how he watched the fireflies drifting and glowing among the dark trees in the garden of the villa under the warm blue night sky of Italy, how he caught and kept them in cages, dissected them, first studying the general anatomy of insects very elaborately, and how he begun to experiment with the effect of various gases and varying temperatures upon their light. Then the chance present of a little scientific toy invented by Sir William Crookes, a toy called the spin tharoscope, on which radium particles impinge upon sulfide of zinc and make it luminous, induced him to associate the two sets of phenomena. It was a happy association for his inquiries. It was a rare and fortunate thing, too, that any one with the mathematical gift should have been taken by these curiosities. Section 8 And while the boy Holston was mooning over his fireflies at Fiesole, a certain professor of physics named Rufus was giving a course of afternoon lectures upon radium and radioactivity in Edinburgh. They were lectures that had attracted a very considerable amount of attention. He gave them in a small lecture theatre that had become more and more congested as his course proceeded. At his concluding discussion, it was crowded right up to the ceiling at the back, and there people were standing, standing without any sense of fatigue. So fascinating did they find his suggestions. One youngster in particular, a chuckle-headed scrub-haired lad from the Highlands, sat hugging his knee with great sand-red hands and drinking in every word, eyes aglow, cheeks flushed, and ears burning. And so, said the professor, we see that this radium, which seemed at first a fantastic exception, a mad inversion of all that was most established and fundamental in the constitution of matter, is really at one with the rest of the elements. It does noticeably and forcibly what probably all the other elements are doing with an imperceptible slowness. It is like the single voice, crying aloud that it trays the silent breathing multitude in the darkness. Radium is an element that is breaking up and flying to pieces. But perhaps all elements are doing that at less perceptible rates. Uranium certainly is. Thorium, the stuff of this incandescent gas-mental, certainly is. Actinium. I feel that we are but beginning the list. And we know now that the atom, that once we thought hard and impenetrable and indivisible and final and lifeless, is really a reservoir of immense energy. That is the most wonderful thing about all this work. A little while ago, we thought of the atoms as we thought of bricks, as solid building material, as substantial matter, as unit masses of lifeless stuff, and behold, these bricks are boxes, treasure boxes, boxes full of the intensest force. This little bottle contains about a pint of uranium oxide. That is to say, about 14 ounces of the element uranium. It is worth about a pound. And in this bottle, ladies and gentlemen, in the atoms in this bottle, there's slumbers, at least as much energy as we could get by burning 160 tons of coal. If at a word in one instant, I could suddenly release that energy here and now, it would blow us and everything about us to fragments. If I could turn it into the machinery that lights this city, it could keep Edinburgh brightly lit for a week. But at present, no man knows. No man has an inkling of how this little lump of stuff can be made to hasten the release of its store. It does release it as a burn trickles. Slowly the uranium changes into radium. The radium changes into a gas called the radium emanation. And that again to what we call radium A. And so the process goes on, giving out energy at every stage until at last we reach the last stage of all, which is, so far as we can tell at present, lead. But we cannot hasten it. I take ye man, whispered the chuckle-headed lad, with his red hands tightening like a vice upon his knee. I take ye man, go on, oh, go on. The professor went on after a little pause. Why is the change gradual? he asked. Why does only a minute fraction of the radium disintegrate at any particular second? Why does it dole itself out so slowly and so exactly? Why does not all the uranium change to radium and all the radium change to the next lowest thing it wants? Why this decay by driblets? Why not a decay en masse? Suppose presently we find it is possible to quicken that decay. The chuckle-headed lad nodded rapidly. The wonderful, inevitable idea was coming. He drew his knee up towards his chin and swayed in his seat with excitement. Why not? he echoed. Why not? The professor lifted his forefinger. Given that knowledge, he said. Mark what we should be able to do. We should not only be able to use this uranium and thorium. Not only should we have a source of power so potent that a man might carry in his hand the energy to light a city for a year, fight a fleet of battleships, or drive one of our giant liners across the Atlantic. But we should also have a clue that would enable us at last to quicken the process of disintegration in all the other elements where decay is still so slow as to escape our finest measurements. Every scrap of solid matter in the world would become an available reservoir of concentrated force. Do you realize, ladies and gentlemen, what these things would mean for us? The scrubhead nodded. Oh, go on, go on. It would mean a change in human conditions that I can only compare to the discovery of fire, that first discovery that lifted man above the brute. We stand today towards radioactivity as our ancestor stood towards fire before he had learned to make it. He knew it then only as a strange thing utterly beyond his control, a flare on the crest of the volcano, a red destruction that poured through the forest. So it is that we know radioactivity today. This, this is the dawn of a new day in human living at the climax of that civilization which had its beginning in the hammered flint and the fire stick of the savage, just when it is becoming apparent that our ever-increasing needs cannot be borne indefinitely by our present sources of energy. We discover suddenly the possibility of an entirely new civilization, the energy we need for our very existence and with which nature supplies us, still so grudgingly, is in reality locked up in inconceivable quantities all about us. We cannot pick that lock at present, but he paused, his voice sank so that everybody strained a little to hear him. We will. He put up that lean finger again, his solitary gesture. And then, he said, then that perpetual struggle for existence, that perpetual struggle to live on the bare surplus of nature's energies will cease to be the lot of man. Man will step from the pinnacle of this civilization to the beginning of the next. I have no eloquence, ladies and gentlemen, to express the vision of man's material destiny that opens out before me. I see the desert continents transform, the poles no longer wildernesses of ice, the whole world once more Eden. I see the power of man reach out among the stars. He stopped abruptly with a catching of the breath that many an actor or orator might have envied. The lecture was over. The audience hung silent for a few seconds, sighed, became audible, stirred, flittered, prepared for dispersal. More light was turned on and what had been a dim mass of figures became a bright confusion of movement. Some of the people signaled to friends. Some crowded down towards the platform to examine the lecturer's apparatus and make notes of his diagram. But the chuckle-headed lad with the scrub hair wanted no such detailed frittering away of the thoughts that had such inspired him. He wanted to be alone with them. He elbowed his way out almost fiercely. He made himself as angular and bony as a cow, fearing lest someone should speak to him. Lest someone should invade his glowing sphere of enthusiasm. He went through the streets with a wrapped face, like a saint who sees visions. He had arms disproportionately long and ridiculous big feet. He must get alone, get somewhere high out of all this crowding of commonness of everyday life. He made his way to the top of Arthur's seat and there he sat for a long time in the golden evening sunshine still except that ever and again he whispered to himself some precious phrase that had stuck in his mind. If, he whispered, if only we could pick that block. The sun was sinking over the distant hills. Already it was shorn of its beams. A globe of ruddy gold hanging over the great banks of cloud that would presently engulf it. Ugh! said the youngster. Ugh! He seemed to wake up at last out of his entrancement and the red sun was there before his eyes. He stared at it, at first without intelligence and then with a gathering recognition. Into his mind came a strange echo of that ancestral fancy, that fancy of a stone age savage dead and scattered bones among the drift two hundred thousand years ago. Ye old thing, he said, and his eyes were shining and he made a kind of grabbing gesture with his hand. Ye old red thing will have ye yet. End of Prelude. Chapter I. The New Source of Energy. Section I. The problem which was already being mooted by such scientific men as Ramsey, Rutherford, and Soddy, in the very beginning of the twentieth century, the problem of inducing radioactivity in the heavier elements and so tapping the internal energy of atoms, was solved by a wonderful combination of induction, intuition, and luck by Holston so soon as the year 1933. From the first detection of radioactivity to its first subjugation to human purpose measured little more than a quarter of a century. For twenty years after that, indeed, minor difficulties prevented any striking practical application of his success, but the essential thing was done. This new boundary in the march of human progress was crossed in that year. He set up atomic disintegration in a minute particle of bismuth. It exploded with great violence into a heavy gas of extreme radioactivity which disintegrated in its turn in the course of seven days, and it was only after another year's work that he was able to show practically that the last result of this rapid release of energy was gold. But the thing was done. He lost of a blistered chest and an injured finger, and from the moment when the invisible speck of bismuth flashed into riving and rending energy, Holston knew that he had opened away for mankind, however narrow and dark it might still be, to worlds of limitless power. He recorded as much in the strange diary biography he left the world, a diary that was up to that particular moment, a mass of speculations and calculations, and which suddenly became, for a space, an amazingly minute and human record of sensations and emotions that all humanity might understand. He gives, in broken phrases and often single words, it is true, but nonetheless vividly for that, a record of the 24 hours following the demonstration of the correctness of his intricate tracery of computations and guesses. I thought I should not sleep, he writes. The words omitted are supplied in brackets, an account of, pain in the hand and chest, and the wonder of what I had done, slept like a child. He felt strange and disconcerted the next morning. He had nothing to do. He was living alone in apartments in Bloomsbury, and he decided to go up to Hampstead Heath, which he had known when he was a little boy as a breezy playground. He went up by the underground tube that was then the recognized means of travel from one part of London to another, and walked up Heath Street from the tube station to the open Heath. He found it a gully of planks and scaffoldings between the hoardings of housewreckers. The spirit of the times had seized upon that narrow, steep, and winding thoroughfare, and was in the act of making it commodious and interesting, according to the remarkable ideals of neo-Georgian aestheticism. Such is the illogical quality of humanity that Holston, fresh from work that was like a pitard under the seat of current civilization, saw these changes with regret. He had come up Heath Street, perhaps a thousand times, had known the windows of all the little shops, spent hours in the varnished cinematograph there, and marveled at the high-flung early Georgian houses upon the westward bank of that old gully of a thoroughfare. He felt strange with all these familiar things gone. He escaped at last with a feeling of relief from this choked alley of trenches and holes and cranes, and emerged upon the old familiar scene about the white-stone pond. That, at least, was very much as it used to be. There were still the fine old red-brick houses to left and right of him. The reservoir had been improved by a portico of marble. The white-fronted inn with the clustering flowers above its portico still stood out at the angle of the ways. And the blue view to Harrow Hill and Harrow Spire of view of hills and trees and shining waters and wind-driven cloud shadows was like the opening of a great window to the ascending Londoner. All that was very reassuring. There was the same strolling crowd, the same perpetual miracle of motors dodging through it harmlessly, escaping headlong into the country from the sabbatical stuffiness behind and below them. There was a band still, a women's suffrage meeting, for the suffrage women had won their way back to the tolerance, a trifle derisive of the populace again. Socialist orators, politicians, a band, the same wild uproar of dogs, frantic with the gladness of their one-blessed weekly release from the backyard and the chain, and away along the road to the Spaniards strolled a vast multitude, saying, as ever, that the view of London was exceptionally clear that day. Young Holston's face was white. He walked with that uneasy affection of ease that marks an overstrained nervous system and an under-exercise body. He hesitated at the white-stone pond whether to go to the left of it or the right, and again at the fork of the roads. He kept shifting his stick in his hand, you know, and then he would get in the way of people on the footpath or be jostled by them because of the uncertainty of his movements. He felt, he confesses, inadequate to ordinary existence. He seemed to himself to be something inhuman and mischievous. All the people about him looked fairly prosperous, fairly happy, fairly well adapted to the lives they had to lead. He had worked in a Sunday of best clothes and mild promenading, and he had launched something that would disorganize the entire fabric that held their contentments and ambitions and satisfactions together. Felt like an imbecile who was presented a box full of loaded revolvers to a crash, he notes. He met a man named Lawson, an old school fellow, who in history now knows only that he was red-faced and had a terrier. He and Holston walked together and Holston was sufficiently pale and jumpy for Lawson to tell him he overworked and needed a holiday. They sat down at a little table outside the county council house of Golders Hill Park and set one of the waiters to the bowl and bush for a couple of bottles of beer, no doubt at Lawson's suggestion. The beer warmed Holston's rather dehumanized system. He began to tell Lawson as clearly as he could to what his great discovery amounted. Lawson feigned attention, but indeed he had neither the knowledge nor the imagination to understand. In the end, before many years are out, this must eventually change war, transit, lighting, building, and every sort of manufacture, even agriculture, every material human concern. Then Holston stopped short. Lawson had leapt to his feet. Damn that dog! cried Lawson. Look at it now! Hi! Here! Phew! Phew! Phew! Come here, Bobs! Come here! The young scientific man with his bandaged hand sat at the green table, too tired to convey the wonder of the thing he had sought so long. His friend whistled and bawled for his dog, and the Sunday people drifted about them through the spring sunshine. For a moment or so, Holston stared at Lawson in astonishment, for he had been too intent upon what he had been saying to realize how little Lawson had attended. Then he remarked, Well! and smiled faintly, and finished the tankard of beer before him. He sat down again. One must look after one's dog, he said, with a note of apology. What was it you were telling me? Section 2 In the evening, Holston went out again. He walked to St. Paul's Cathedral, and stood for a time near the door listening to the evening service. The candles upon the altar reminded him in some odd way of the fireflies at Fiazale. Then he walked back through the evening lights to Westminster. He was oppressed. He was indeed scared by a sense of the immense consequences of his discovery. He had a vague idea that night that he ought not to publish his results, that they were premature, that some secret association of wise men should take care of his work and hand it on from generation to generation until the world was ripe for its practical application. He felt that nobody and all the thousands of people he passed had really awakened to the fact of change. They trusted the world for what it was, not to alter too rapidly, to respect their trusts, their assurances, their habits, their little accustomed traffic and hard-won positions. He went into those little gardens beneath the overhanging, brightly lit masses of the Savoy Hotel and the Hotel Cecil. He sat down on a seat and became aware of the talk of the two people next to him. It was a talk of a young couple evidently on the eve of marriage. The man was congratulating himself on having regular employment at last. They liked me, he said, and I liked the job. If I work up in a dozen years or so, I ought to be getting something pretty comfortable. That's the plain sense of it, Hedy. There ain't no reason whatsoever why we shouldn't get along very decently. Very decently indeed. The desire for little successes amidst conditions securely fixed. So it struck upon Holston's mind. He added in his diary, I had a sense of all this globe is that. By that phrase he meant a kind of clairvoyant vision of this populated world as a whole, of all its cities and towns and villages, its high roads and the inns beside them, its gardens and farms and upland pastures, its boatmen and sailors, its ships coming along the great circles of the ocean, its timetables and appointments and payments and dues, as if it were one unified and progressive spectacle. Sometimes such visions came to him, his mind accustomed to great generalizations and yet acutely sensitive to detail, saw things far more comprehensively than the minds of most of his contemporaries. Usually the teaming sphere moved on to its predestined ends and circled with a stately swiftness on its path about the sun. Usually it was all a living progress that altered under his regard, but now fatigue a little deadened him to that incessancy of life. It seemed now just an eternal circling. He lapsed to the commoner persuasion of the great fixities and recurrences of the human routine. The remoter past of wandering savagery, the inevitable changes of tomorrow were veiled and he saw only day and night, seed time and harvest, loving and begetting, births and deaths, walks in the summer sunlight and tails by the winter fireside, the ancient sequence of hope and axe and age perennially renewed, eddying on forever and ever, save that now the impious hand of research was raised to overthrow this drowsy, gently humming, habitual, sunlit spinning top of man's existence. For a time he forgot wars and crimes and hates and persecution, famine and pestilence, the cruelties of beasts, weariness and the bitter wind, failure and insufficiency and retrocession. He saw all mankind in terms of the humble Sunday couple upon the seat beside him, who schemed their inglorious outlook and improbable contentments. I had a sense of all this globe as that. His intelligence struggled against this mood and struggled for a time in vain. He reassured himself against the invasion of this disconcerting idea that he was something strange and inhuman, a loose wanderer from the flock returning with evil gifts from his sustained unnatural excursions amidst the darkness and phosphorescences beneath the fair surfaces of life. Man had not been always thus. The instincts and desires of little home, the little plot, was not all his nature. Also he was an adventurer, an experimenter, an unresting curiosity, an insatiable desire. For a few thousand generations, indeed, he had tilled the earth and followed the seasons, saying his prayers, grinding his corn and trampling the October wine-press. Yet not for so long, but that, he was still full of restless stirrings. If there have been home and routine in the field, thought Holston, there have also been wonder and the sea. He turned his head and looked up over the back of the seat at the great hotels above him, full of softly shaded lights and the glow and color and stir of feasting. Might his gift to mankind mean simply more of that? He got up and walked out of the garden, surveying a passing tram car laden with warm light against the deep blues of evening, stripping and trailing long skirts of shining reflection. He crossed the embankment and stood for a time, watching the dark river and turning ever and again to the lit buildings and bridges. His mind began to scheme conceivable replacements of all those clustering arrangements. It has begun, he writes in the diary in which these things are recorded. It is not for me to reach out to consequences I cannot foresee. I am a part, not a whole. I am a little instrument in the armory of change. If I were to burn all these papers before a score of years had passed, some other man would be doing this. Section 3 Holston, before he died, was destined to see atomic energy dominating every other source of power. But for some years yet a vast network of difficulties in detail and application kept the new discovery from any effective invasion of ordinary life. The path from the laboratory to the workshop is sometimes a tortuous one. Electromagnetic radiations were known and demonstrated for 20 years before Marconi made them practically available and in the same way, it was 20 years before induced radioactivity could be brought to practical utilization. The thing, of course, was discussed very much. More perhaps at the time of its discovery than during the interval of technical adaptation, but with very little realization of the huge economic revolution that impended. What chiefly impressed the journalists of 1933 was a production of gold from Bismuth and the realization albeit upon unprofitable lines of the alchemist's dreams. There was a considerable amount of discussion and expectation in that more intelligent section of the educated public of the various civilized countries which followed scientific development. But for the most part the world went about its business as the inhabitants of those Swiss villages which live under the perpetual threat of overhanging rocks and mountains go about their business. Just as though the possible was impossible, as though the inevitable was postponed forever because it was delayed. It was in 1953 that the first Holston-Roberts engine brought induced radioactivity into the sphere of industrial production, and its first general use was to replace the steam engine in electrical generating stations. Hard upon the appearance of this came the DOS Tata engine, the invention of two among brilliant galaxy of Bengali inventors, the modernization of Indian thought was producing at this time, which was used chiefly for automobiles, aeroplanes, waterplanes, and such like, mobile purposes. The American Kemp engine, differing widely in principle but equally practicable, and the Krupp Erlonger came hard upon the heels of this, and by the autumn of 1954 a gigantic replacement of industrial methods and machinery was in progress all about the habitable globe. Small wonder was this, when the cost even of these earliest and clumsiest of atomic engines is compared with that of the power they superseded. Allowing for the lubrication of the DOS Tata engine once it was started cost a penny to run 37 miles, and added only nine and a quarter pounds to the weight of the carriage it drove. It made the heavy alcohol driven automobile of the time ridiculous in appearance as well as preposterously costly. For many years the price of coal, and every form of liquid fuel, had been clambering to levels that made even the revival of the draft horse seem a practicable possibility. And now with the abrupt relaxation of this stringency the change in appearance of the traffic upon the world's roads was instantaneous. In three years the frightful armored monsters that had hooded and smoked and thundered about the world for four awful decades were swept away to the dealers in old metal, and the highways thronged with light and clean and shimmering shapes of silvered steel. At the same time a new impetus was given to aviation by the relatively enormous power for weight of the atomic engine. It was the last possible to add red mains ingenious helicopter ascent and descent engine to the vertical propeller that had hitherto been the sole driving force of the aeroplane without over-weighting the machine, and men found themselves possessed of an instrument of flight that could hover or ascend or descend vertically and gently as well as rush wildly through the air. The last dread of flying vanished. As the journalists of the time phrased it, this was the epoch of the leap into the air. The new atomic aeroplane became indeed a mania. Every one of means was frantic to possess a thing so controllable, so secure and so free from dust and danger of the road. And in France alone, in the year 1943, 30,000 of these new aeroplanes were manufactured and licensed and soared hummingly softly into the sky. And with an equal speed, atomic engines of various types invaded industrialism, the railways paid enormous premiums for priority in the delivery of atomic traction engines. Atomic smelting was embarked upon so eagerly as to lead to a number of disastrous explosions due to inexperience handling of the new power. And the revolutionary cheapening of both materials and electricity made the entire reconstruction of domestic buildings a matter merely dependent upon a reorganization of the methods of the builder and the house furniture. Viewed from the side of the new power and from the point of view of those who financed and manufactured the new engines and material it required, the age of the leap into the air was one of astonishing prosperity. Patent holding companies were presently paying dividends of five or six hundred percent and enormous fortunes were made in fantastic wages earned by all who were concerned in the new development. This prosperity was not a little enhanced by the fact that in both the Das Tata and Holston Roberts engines, one of the recoverable waste products was gold. The former disintegrated dust of Bismuth