The World Set Free

Section 1

The problem which was already being mooted by such scientific men as Ramsay, Rutherford, and Soddy, in the very beginning of the twentieth century, the problem of inducing radio-activity in the heavier elements and so tapping the internal energy of atoms, was solved by a wonderful combination of induction, intuition, and luck by Holsten so soon as the year 1933.  From the first detection of radio-activity to its first subjugation to human purpose measured little more than a quarter of a century.  For twenty years after that, indeed, minor difficulties prevented any striking practical application of his success, but the essential thing was done, this new boundary in the march of human progress was crossed, in that year.  He set up atomic disintegration in a minute particle of bismuth; it exploded with great violence into a heavy gas of extreme radio-activity, which disintegrated in its turn in the course of seven days, and it was only after another year’s work that he was able to show practically that the last result of this rapid release of energy was gold.  But the thing was done—­at the cost of a blistered chest and an injured finger, and from the moment when the invisible speck of bismuth flashed into riving and rending energy, Holsten knew that he had opened a way for mankind, however narrow and dark it might still be, to worlds of limitless power.  He recorded as much in the strange diary biography he left the world, a diary that was up to that particular moment a mass of speculations and calculations, and which suddenly became for a space an amazingly minute and human record of sensations and emotions that all humanity might understand.

He gives, in broken phrases and often single words, it is true, but none the less vividly for that, a record of the twenty-four hours following the demonstration of the correctness of his intricate tracery of computations and guesses.  ‘I thought I should not sleep,’ he writes—­the words he omitted are supplied in brackets—­(on account of) ’pain in (the) hand and chest and (the) wonder of what I had done….  Slept like a child.’

He felt strange and disconcerted the next morning; he had nothing to do, he was living alone in apartments in Bloomsbury, and he decided to go up to Hampstead Heath, which he had known when he was a little boy as a breezy playground.  He went up by the underground tube that was then the recognised means of travel from one part of London to another, and walked up Heath Street from the tube station to the open heath.  He found it a gully of planks and scaffoldings between the hoardings of house-wreckers.  The spirit of the times had seized upon that narrow, steep, and winding thoroughfare, and was in the act of making it commodious and interesting, according to the remarkable ideals of Neo-Georgian aestheticism.  Such is the illogical quality of humanity that Holsten, fresh from work that was like a petard under the seat of current civilisation, saw these changes with regret.  He had come up Heath Street perhaps a thousand times, had known the windows of all the little shops, spent hours in the vanished cinematograph theatre, and marvelled at the high-flung early Georgian houses upon the westward bank of that old gully of a thoroughfare; he felt strange with all these familiar things gone.  He escaped at last with a feeling of relief from this 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?’