H. Wells - The World Set Free

began to suspect that all was not well with them.

It was terribly lonelyin this chaotic strangeness, and perhaps

this man-if it was a man, for it was difficult to see-might for

all his stillness be merely insensible. He might have been

stunned…

The leaping glare beyond sent a ray into his corner and for a

moment every little detail was distinct. It was Marshal Dubois.

He was lying against a huge slab of the war map. To it there

stuck and from it there dangled little wooden objects, the

symbols of infantry and cavalry and guns, as they were disposed

upon the frontier. He did not seem to be aware of this at his

back, he had an effectof inattention, not indifferent attention,

but as if he were thinking…

She could not seethe eyes beneath his shaggy brows, but it was

evident he frowned. He frowned slightly, he had an air of not

wanting to be disturbed. His face still bore that expression of

assured confidence, that conviction that if things were left to

him France might obey in security…

She did not cry out to him again, but she crept a little nearer.

A strange surmise made her eyes dilate. With a painfulwrench

she pulled herselfup so that she could seecompletely over the

intervening lumps of smashed-up masonry. Her hand touched

something wet, and after one convulsive movement she became

rigid.

It was not a whole man there; it was a piece of a man, the head

and shoulders of a man that trailed down into a ragged darkness

and a pool of shining black…

And even as she stared the mound above her swayed and crumbled,

and a rush of hot water came pouring over her. Then it seemed to

her that she was dragged downward…

Section 3

When the rather brutish young aviator with the bullet head and

the black hair close-cropped en brosse, who was in charge of the

French special scientific corps, heardpresently of this disaster

to the War Control, he was so wanting in imagination in any

sphere but his own, that he laughed. Small matter to him that

Paris was burning. His mother and father and sister lived at

Caudebec; and the only sweetheart he had ever had, and it was

poor love-making then, was a girl in Rouen. He slapped his

second-in-command on the shoulder. 'Now,' he said, 'there's

nothing on earth to stop us going to Berlin and giving them

tit-for-tat… Strategy and reasons of state-they're over…

Come along, my boy, and we'll just show these old women what we

can do when they let us have our heads.'

He spent five minutes telephoning and then he went out into the

courtyard of the chateau in which he had been installed and

shouted for his automobile. Things would have to move quickly

because there was scarcely an hour and a half before dawn. He

looked at the sky and noted with satisfactiona heavy bank of

clouds athwart the pallid east.

He was a young man of infinite shrewdness, and his material and

aeroplanes were scattered all over the country-side, stuck away

in barns, covered with hay, hidden in woods. A hawk could not

have discovered any of them without coming within reach of a gun.

But that night he only wanted one of the machines, and it was

handy and quite prepared under a tarpaulin between two ricks not

a couple of miles away; he was going to Berlin with that and just

one other man. Two men would be enough for what he meant to

do…

He had in his hands the black complement to all those other gifts

science was urging upon unregenerate mankind, the gift of

destruction, and he was an adventurous rather than a sympathetic

type…

He was a dark young man with something negroid about his gleaming

face. He smiled like one who is favoured and anticipates great

pleasures. There was an exotic richness, a chuckling flavour,

about the voice in which he gave his orders, and he pointed his

remarks with the long finger of a hand that was hairy and

exceptionally big.

'We'll give them tit-for-tat,' he said. 'We'll give them

tit-for-tat. No time to lose, boys…'

And presently over the cloud-banks that lay above Westphalia and

Saxony the swift aeroplane, with its atomic engine as noiseless

as a dancing sunbeam and its phosphorescent gyroscopic compass,

flew like an arrow to the heart of the Central European hosts.

It did not soar very high; it skimmed a few hundred feet above

the banked darknesses of cumulus that hid the world, ready to

plunge at once into their wet obscurities should some hostile

flier range into vision. The tense young steersman divided his

attention between the guiding stars above and the level, tumbled

surfaces of the vapour strata that hid the world below. Over

great spaces those banks lay as even as a frozen lava-flow and

almost as still, and then they were rent by ragged areas of

translucency, pierced by clear chasms, so that dim patches of the

land below gleamed remotely through abysses. Once he sawquite

distinctly the plan of a big railway station outlined in lamps

and signals, and once the flames of a burning rick showing livid

through a boiling drift of smoke on the side of some great hill.

But if the world was masked it was alive with sounds. Up through

that vapour floor came the deep roar of trains, the whistles of

horns of motor-cars, a sound of rifle fire away to the south, and

as he drew near his destination the crowing of cocks…

The sky above the indistinct horizons of this cloud sea was at

first starry and then paler with a light that crept from north to

east as the dawn came on. The Milky Way was invisible in the

blue, and the lesser stars vanished. The face of the adventurer

at the steering-wheel, darkly visible ever and again by the oval

greenish glow of the compass face, had something of that firm

beauty which all concentrated purpose gives, and something of the

happinessof an idiot child that has at last got hold of the

matches. His companion, a less imaginative type, sat with his

legs spread wide over the long, coffin-shaped box which contained

in its compartments the three atomic bombs, the new bombs that

would continueto explode indefinitely and which no one so far

had ever seenin action. Hitherto Carolinum, their essential

substance, had been tested only in almost infinitesimal

quantities within steel chambers embedded in lead. Beyond the

thoughtof great destruction slumbering in the black spheres

between his legs, and a keen resolve to follow out very exactly

the instructions that had been given him, the man's mindwas a

blank. His aquiline profile against the starlight expressed

nothing but a profound gloom.

The sky below grewclearer as the Central European capital was

approached.

So far they had been singularly lucky and had been challenged by

no aeroplanes at all. The frontier scouts they must have passed

in the night; probably these were mostly under the clouds; the

world was wide and they had had luck in not coming close to any

soaring sentinel. Their machine was painted a pale gray, that

lay almost invisibly over the cloud levels below. But now the

east was flushing with the near ascent of the sun, Berlin was but

a score of miles ahead, and the luck of the Frenchmen held. By

imperceptible degrees the clouds below dissolved…

Away to the north-eastward, in a cloudless pool of gathering

light and with all its nocturnal illuminations still blazing, was

Berlin. The left finger of the steersman verified roads and open