H. Wells - The World Set Free

The king broke into a cold perspiration. Then Pestovitch

answered: 'Only a poor farmer loading hay,' he said, and picked

up a huge hay fork and went forward softly.

'You load your hay at a very bad time and in a very bad light,'

said the man at the door, peering in. 'Have you no electric

light here?'

Then suddenly he turned on an electric torch, and as he did so

Pestovitch sprang forward. 'Get out of my barn!' he cried, and

drove the fork full at the intruder's chest. He had a vague idea

that so he might stab the man to silence. But the man shouted

loudly as the prongs pierced him and drove him backward, and

instantly there was a sound of feet running across the yard.

'Bombs,' cried the man upon the ground, struggling with the

prongs in his hand, and as Pestovitch staggered forward into view

with the force of his own thrust, he was shot through the body by

one of the two new-comers.

The man on the ground was badly hurt but plucky. 'Bombs,' he

repeated, and struggled up into a kneeling position and held his

electric torch full upon the face of the king. 'Shoot them,' he

cried, coughing and spitting blood, so that the halo of light

round the king's head danced about.

For a moment in that shivering circle of light the two men saw

the king kneeling up in the cart and Peter on the barn floor

beside him. The old fox looked at them sideways-snared, a

white-faced evil thing. And then, as with a faltering suicidal

heroism, he leant forward over the bomb before him, they fired

together and shot him through the head.

The upper part of his face seemed to vanish.

'Shoot them,' cried the man who had been stabbed. 'Shoot them

all!'

And then his light went out, and he rolled over with a groan at

the feet of his comrades.

But each carried a light of his own, and in another moment

everything in the barn was visible again. They shot Peter even

as he held up his hands in sign of surrender.

Kurt and Abel at the head of the ladder hesitated for a moment,

and then plunged backward into the pit. 'If we don't kill them,'

said one of the sharpshooters, 'they'll blow us to rags. They've

gone down that hatchway. Come!…

'Here they are. Hands up! I say. Hold your light while I

shoot…'

Section 8

It was still quite dark when his valet and Firmin came together

and told the ex-king Egbert that the business was settled.

He started up into a sitting position on the side of his bed.

'Did he go out?' asked the ex-king.

'He is dead,' said Firmin. 'He was shot.'

The ex-king reflected. 'That's about the best thing that could

have happened,' he said. 'Where are the bombs? In that

farm-house on the opposite hill-side! Why! the place is in sight!

Let us go. I'll dress. Is there any one in the place, Firmin, to

get us a cup of coffee?'

Through the hungry twilight of the dawn the ex-king's automobile

carried him to the farm-house where the last rebel king was lying

among his bombs. The rim of the sky flashed, the east grew

bright, and the sun was just rising over the hills when King

Egbert reached the farm-yard. There he found the hay lorries

drawn out from the barn with the dreadful bombs still packed upon

them. A couple of score of aviators held the yard, and outside a

few peasants stood in a little group and stared, ignorant as yet

of what had happened. Against the stone wall of the farm-yard

five bodies were lying neatly side by side, and Pestovitch had an

expression of surprise on his face and the king was chiefly

identifiable by his long white hands and his blonde moustache.

The wounded aeronaut had been carried down to the inn. And after

the ex-king had given directions in what manner the bombs were to

be taken to the new special laboratories above Zurich, where they

could be unpacked in an atmosphere of chlorine, he turned to

these five still shapes.

Their five pairs of feet stuck out with a curious stiff

unanimity…

'What else was there to do?' he said in answer to some internal

protest.

'I wonder, Firmin, if there are any more of them?'

'Bombs, sir?' asked Firmin.

'No, such kings…

'The pitiful folly of it!' said the ex-king, following his

thoughts. 'Firmin,' as an ex-professor of International Politics,

I thinkit falls to you to bury them. There?… No, don't put

them near the well. People will have to drink from that well.

Bury them over there, some way off in the field.'

Section 1

The task that lay before the Assembly of Brissago, viewed as we

may view it now from the clarifying standpoint of things

accomplished, was in its broad issues a simple one. Essentially

it was to place social organisation upon the new footing that the

swift, accelerated advance of human knowledgehad rendered

necessary. The council was gathered together with the haste of a

salvage expedition, and it was confronted with wreckage; but the

wreckage was irreparable wreckage, and the only possibilities of

the case were either the relapse of mankind to the agricultural

barbarism from which it had emerged so painfullyor the

acceptanceof achieved science as the basis of a new social

order. The old tendencies of human nature, suspicion, jealousy,

particularism, and belligerency, were incompatible with the

monstrous destructive power of the new appliances the inhuman

logic of science had produced. The equilibrium could be restored

only by civilisation destroying itself down to a level at which

modern apparatus could no longer be produced, or by human nature

adapting itself in its institutions to the new conditions. It was

for the latter alternative that the assembly existed.

Sooner or later this choice would have confronted mankind. The

sudden development of atomic science did but precipitate and

render rapid and dramatic a clash between the new and the

customary that had been gathering since ever the first flint was

chipped or the first fire built together. From the day when man

contrived himselfa tool and suffered another male to draw near

him, he ceasedto be altogether a thing of instinct and

untroubled convictions. From that day forth a widening breach can

be traced between his egotistical passions and the social need.

Slowly he adapted himselfto the life of the homestead, and his

passionate impulses widened out to the demands of the clan and

the tribe. But widen though his impulses might, the latent hunter

and wanderer and wonderer in his imagination outstripped their

development. He was never quite subdued to the soil nor quite

tamed to the home. Everywhere it needed teaching and the priest

to keep him within the bounds of the plough-life and the

beast-tending. Slowly a vast system of traditional imperatives

superposed itself upon his instincts, imperatives that were

admirably fitted to make him that cultivator, that cattle-mincer,

who was for twice ten thousand years the normal man.

And, unpremeditated, undesired, out of the accumulations of his

tilling came civilisation. Civilisation was the agricultural

surplus. It appeared as trade and tracks and roads, it pushed

boats out upon the rivers and presently invaded the seas, and

within its primitive courts, within temples grownrich and

leisurely and amidst the gathering medley of the seaport towns

rose speculation and philosophy and science, and the beginning of