headquarters. There, plain enough, was the Thiergarten; beyond

rose the imperial palace, and to the right those tall buildings,

those clustering, beflagged, bemasted roofs, must be the offices

in which the Central European staff was housed. It was all coldly

clear and colourless in the dawn.

He looked up suddenly as a humming sound grew out of nothing and

became swiftly louder. Nearly overhead a German aeroplane was

circling down from an immense height to challenge him. He made a

gesture with his left arm to the gloomy man behind and then

gripped his little wheel with both hands, crouched over it, and

twisted his neck to look upward. He was attentive, tightly

strung, but quite contemptuous of their ability to hurt him. No

German alive, he was assured, could outfly him, or indeed any one

of the best Frenchmen. He imagined they might strike at him as a

hawk strikes, but they were men coming down out of the bitter

cold up there, in a hungry, spiritless, morning mood; they came

slanting down like a sword swung by a lazy man, and not so

rapidly but that he was able to slip away from under them and get

between them and Berlin. They began challenging him in German

with a megaphone when they were still perhaps a mile away. The

words came to him, rolled up into a mere blob of hoarse sound.

Then, gathering alarm from his grim silence, they gave chase and

swept down, a hundred yards above him perhaps, and a couple of

hundred behind. They were beginning to understand what he was.

He ceased to watch them and concentrated himself on the city

ahead, and for a time the two aeroplanes raced…

A bullet came tearing through the air by him, as though some one

was tearing paper. A second followed. Something tapped the

machine.

It was time to act. The broad avenues, the park, the palaces

below rushed widening out nearer and nearer to them. 'Ready!'

said the steersman.

The gaunt face hardened to grimness, and with both hands the

bomb-thrower lifted the big atomic bomb from the box and steadied

it against the side. It was a black sphere two feet in diameter.

Between its handles was a little celluloid stud, and to this he

bent his head until his lips touched it. Then he had to bite in

order to let the air in upon the inducive. Sure of its

accessibility, he craned his neck over the side of the aeroplane

and judged his pace and distance. Then very quickly he bent

forward, bit the stud, and hoisted the bomb over the side.

'Round,' he whispered inaudibly.

The bomb flashed blinding scarlet in mid-air, and fell, a

descending column of blaze eddying spirally in the midst of a

whirlwind. Both the aeroplanes were tossed like shuttlecocks,

hurled high and sideways and the steersman, with gleaming eyes

and set teeth, fought in great banking curves for a balance. The

gaunt man clung tight with hand and knees; his nostrils dilated,

his teeth biting his lips. He was firmly strapped…

When he could look down again it was like looking down upon the

crater of a small volcano. In the open garden before the

Imperial castle a shuddering star of evil splendour spurted and

poured up smoke and flame towards them like an accusation. They

were too high to distinguish people clearly, or mark the bomb's

effect upon the building until suddenly the facade tottered and

crumbled before the flare as sugar dissolves in water. The man

stared for a moment, showed all his long teeth, and then

staggered into the cramped standing position his straps

permitted, hoisted out and bit another bomb, and sent it down

after its fellow.

The explosion came this time more directly underneath the

aeroplane and shot it upward edgeways. The bomb box tipped to

the point of disgorgement, and the bomb-thrower was pitched

forward upon the third bomb with his face close to its celluloid

stud. He clutched its handles, and with a sudden gust of

determination that the thing should not escape him, bit its stud.

Before he could hurl it over, the monoplane was slipping

sideways. Everything was falling sideways. Instinctively he gave

himself up to gripping, his body holding the bomb in its place.

Then that bomb had exploded also, and steersman, thrower, and

aeroplane were just flying rags and splinters of metal and drops

of moisture in the air, and a third column of fire rushed eddying

down upon the doomed buildings below…

Section 4

Never before in the history of warfare had there been a

continuing explosive; indeed, up to the middle of the twentieth

century the only explosives known were combustibles whose

explosiveness was due entirely to their instantaneousness; and

these atomic bombs which science burst upon the world that night

were strange even to the men who used them. Those used by the

Allies were lumps of pure Carolinum, painted on the outside with

unoxidised cydonator inducive enclosed hermetically in a case of

membranium. A little celluloid stud between the handles by which

the bomb was lifted was arranged so as to be easily torn off and

admit air to the inducive, which at once became active and set up

radio-activity in the outer layer of the Carolinum sphere. This

liberated fresh inducive, and so in a few minutes the whole bomb

was a blazing continual explosion. The Central European bombs

were the same, except that they were larger and had a more

complicated arrangement for animating the inducive.

Always before in the development of warfare the shells and

rockets fired had been but momentarily explosive, they had gone

off in an instant once for all, and if there was nothing living

or valuable within reach of the concussion and the flying

fragments then they were spent and over. But Carolinum, which

belonged to the beta group of Hyslop's so-called 'suspended

degenerator' elements, once its degenerative process had been

induced, continued a furious radiation of energy and nothing

could arrest it. Of all Hyslop's artificial elements, Carolinum

was the most heavily stored with energy and the most dangerous to

make and handle. To this day it remains the most potent

degenerator known. What the earlier twentieth-century chemists

called its half period was seventeen days; that is to say, it

poured out half of the huge store of energy in its great

molecules in the space of seventeen days, the next seventeen

days' emission was a half of that first period's outpouring, and

so on. As with all radio-active substances this Carolinum,

though every seventeen days its power is halved, though