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    The World Set Free

    Page 4
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      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, a 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, and the same wild uproar of dogs,

      frantic with the gladness of their one blessed weekly release

      from the back yard 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 Holsten's face was white. He walked with that uneasy

      affectation of ease that marks an overstrained nervous system and

      an under-exercised 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, and

      every now 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-a week of work and a Sunday of best clothes and mild

      promenading-and he had launched something that would disorganise

      the entire fabric that held their contentments and ambitions and

      satisfactions together. 'Felt like an imbecile who has presented

      a box full of loaded revolvers to a Creche,' he notes.

      He met a man named Lawson, an old school-fellow, of whom history

      now knows only that he was red-faced and had a terrier. He and

      Holsten walked together and Holsten 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 sent one of the waiters to the Bull and

      Bush for a couple of bottles of beer, no doubt at Lawson's

      suggestion. The beer warmed Holsten's rather dehumanised 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 Holsten stopped short. Lawson had leapt to his feet. 'Damn

      that dog!' cried Lawson. 'Look at it now. Hi! Here!

      Phewoo-phewoo phewoo! 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 Holsten stared at Lawson in astonishment, for

      he had been too intent upon what he had been saying to realise

      how little Lawson had attended.

      Then he remarked, 'WELL!' and smiled faintly, and-finished the

      tankard of beer before him.

      Lawson 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 Holsten went out again. He walked to Saint 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 Fiesole. Then he walked back through

      the evening lights to Westminster. He was oppressed, he was

      indeed scared, by his 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 riper for

      its practical application. He felt that nobody in all the

      thousands of people he passed had reallyawakened 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 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 himself on 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 desire for little successes amidst conditions securely 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, saw things far more comprehensively than the

      minds of 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 saw only day and night, seed-time and

      harvest, loving and begetting, birth
    s 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 hates and persecutions,

      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 darknesses and

      phosphorescences beneath the fair surfaces of life. Man had not

      been always thus; the instincts and desires of 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 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. Iam a part, not a whole; Iam a 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 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; electro-magnetic radiations were known and 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

      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-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

      cost, even of these earliest and clumsiest of atomic engines, is

      compared with that of the power they superseded. Allowing for

      lubrication the Dass-Tata engine, once it was started cost a

      penny to run thirty-seven miles, and added only nine and 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

      armoured monsters that had hooted 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 at last possible to add

      Redmayne's ingenious helicopter ascent and descent engine to the

      vertical propeller that had hitherto been the sole driving force

      of the aeroplane without overweighting 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 the dust and danger of

      the road, and in France alone in the year 1943 thirty thousand of

      these new aeroplanes were manufactured and licensed, and soared

      humming softly into the sky.

      And with an equal speed atomic engines of various types invaded

      industriali
    sm. 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 inexperienced 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 reorganisation of the methods of the

      builder and the house-furnisher. 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 per cent. and enormous fortunes were made and

      fantastic wages earned by all who were concerned in the new

      developments. This prosperity was not a little enhanced by the

      fact that in both the Dass-Tata and Holsten-Roberts engines one

      of the recoverable waste products was gold-the former

      disintegrated dust of bismuth and the latter dust of lead-and

      that this new supply of gold led quite naturally to a rise in

      prices throughout the world.

      This spectacle of feverish enterprise was productivity, this

      crowding flight of happy and fortunate rich people-every great

      city was as if a crawling ant-hill had suddenly taken wing-was

      the bright side of the opening phase of the new epoch in human

      history. Beneath that brightness was a gathering darkness, a

      deepening dismay. If there was a vast development of production

      there was also a huge destruction of values. These glaring

      factories working night and day, these glittering new vehicles

      swinging noiselessly along the roads, these flights of

      dragon-flies that swooped and soared and circled in the air, were

      indeed no more than the brightnesses of lamps and fires that

      gleam out when the world sinks towards twilight and the night.

      Between these high lights accumulated disaster, social

      catastrophe. The coal mines were manifestly doomed to closure at

      no very distant date, the vast amount of capital invested in oil

      was becoming unsaleable, millions of coal miners, steel workers

      upon the old lines, vast swarms of unskilled or under-skilled

      labourers in innumerable occupations, were being flung out of

      employment by the superior efficiency of the new machinery, the

     


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