H. Wells - The World Set Free

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 wisemen should take care of his work and hand it

on from generation to generation until the world was riper for

its practical application. He feltthat nobody in all the

thousands of people he passed had really awakenedto 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 traffics and hard-won positions.

He went into those little gardens beneath the over-hanging,

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 the talk of a young couple evidently on the

eve of marriage. The man was congratulating himselfon having

regular employment at last; 'they like me,' he said, 'and I like

the job. If I work up-in'r dozen years or so I ought to be

gettin' somethin' pretty comfortable. That's the plain sense of

it, Hetty. There ain't no reason whatsoever why we shouldn't get

along very decently-very decently indeed.'

The desirefor little successes amidst conditionssecurely fixed!

So it struck upon Holsten's mind. He added in his diary, 'I had

a sense of all this globe as 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 time-tables and

appointments and payments and dues as it were one unified and

progressive spectacle. Sometimes such visions came to him; his

mind, accustomed to great generalisations and yet acutely

sensitive to detail, sawthings far more comprehensively than the

mindsof most of his contemporaries. Usually the teeming 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 recurrencies of the human routine. The remoter

past of wandering savagery, the inevitable changes of to-morrow

were veiled, and he sawonly day and night, seed-time and

harvest, loving and begetting, births and deaths, walks in the

summer sunlight and tales by the winter fireside, the ancient

sequence of hope and acts and age perennially renewed, eddying on

for ever 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 hatesand persecutions,

famine and pestilence, the cruelties of beasts, weariness and the

bitterwind, 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 himselfagainst 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 darknesses and

phosphorescences beneath the fair surfaces of life. Man had not

been always thus; the instincts and desiresof the 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 winepress, yet not

for so long but that he was still full of restless stirrings.

'If there have been home and routine and the field,' thought

Holsten, '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 colour and stir of feasting. Might his gift to mankind mean

simply more of that?…

He got up and walked out of the garden, surveyed a passing

tram-car, laden with warm light, against the deep blues of

evening, dripping 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 mindbegan 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 ama part, not a whole; I ama little instrument in

the armoury 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

Holsten, before he died, was destined to seeatomic 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 effectiveinvasion of ordinary life. The

path from the laboratory to the workshop is sometimes a tortuous

one; electro-magnetic radiations were knownand demonstrated for

twenty years before Marconi made them practically available, and

in the same way it was twenty years before induced radio-activity

could be brought to practical utilisation. 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 realisation of the huge economic revolution that

impended. What chiefly impressed the journalists of 1933 was the

production of gold from bismuth and the realisation 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 publics of the various

civilised 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 for ever because it was

delayed.

It was in 1953 that the first Holsten-Roberts engine brought

induced radio-activity 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 Dass-Tata engine-the invention of two among the

brilliant galaxy of Bengali inventors the modernisation of Indian

thoughtwas 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-Erlanger 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