The World Set Free

Section 3

When the rather brutish young aviator with the bullet head and the black hair close-cropped en brosse, who was in charge of the French special scientific corps, heard presently of this disaster to the War Control, he was so wanting in imagination in any sphere but his own, that he laughed.  Small matter to him that Paris was burning.  His mother and father and sister lived at Caudebec; and the only sweetheart he had ever had, and it was poor love-making then, was a girl in Rouen.  He slapped his second-in-command on the shoulder.  ‘Now,’ he said, ’there’s nothing on earth to stop us going to Berlin and giving them tit-for-tat….  Strategy and reasons of state—­they’re over….  Come along, my boy, and we’ll just show these old women what we can do when they let us have our heads.’

He spent five minutes telephoning and then he went out into the courtyard of the chateau in which he had been installed and shouted for his automobile.  Things would have to move quickly because there was scarcely an hour and a half before dawn.  He looked at the sky and noted with satisfaction a heavy bank of clouds athwart the pallid east.

He was a young man of infinite shrewdness, and his material and aeroplanes were scattered all over the country-side, stuck away in barns, covered with hay, hidden in woods.  A hawk could not have discovered any of them without coming within reach of a gun.  But that night he only wanted one of the machines, and it was handy and quite prepared under a tarpaulin between two ricks not a couple of miles away; he was going to Berlin with that and just one other man.  Two men would be enough for what he meant to do….

He had in his hands the black complement to all those other gifts science was urging upon unregenerate mankind, the gift of destruction, and he was an adventurous rather than a sympathetic type….

He was a dark young man with something negroid about his gleaming face.  He smiled like one who is favoured and anticipates great pleasures.  There was an exotic richness, a chuckling flavour, about the voice in which he gave his orders, and he pointed his remarks with the long finger of a hand that was hairy and exceptionally big.

‘We’ll give them tit-for-tat,’ he said.  ’We’ll give them tit-for-tat.  No time to lose, boys….’

And presently over the cloud-banks that lay above Westphalia and Saxony the swift aeroplane, with its atomic engine as noiseless as a dancing sunbeam and its phosphorescent gyroscopic compass, flew like an arrow to the heart of the Central European hosts.

It did not soar very high; it skimmed a few hundred feet above the banked darknesses of cumulus that hid the world, ready to plunge at once into their wet obscurities should some hostile flier range into vision.  The tense young steersman divided his attention between the guiding stars above and the level, tumbled surfaces of the vapour strata that hid the world below.  Over great spaces those banks lay as even as a frozen lava-flow and almost as still, and then they were rent by ragged areas of translucency, pierced by clear chasms, so that dim patches of the land below gleamed remotely through abysses.  Once he saw quite distinctly the plan of a big railway station outlined in lamps and signals, and once the flames of a burning rick showing livid through a boiling drift of smoke on the side of some great hill.  But if the world was masked it was alive with sounds.  Up through that vapour floor came the deep roar of trains, the whistles of horns of motor-cars, a sound of rifle fire away to the south, and as he drew near his destination the crowing of cocks….

The sky above the indistinct horizons of this cloud sea was at first starry and then paler with a light that crept from north to east as the dawn came on.  The Milky Way was invisible in the blue, and the lesser stars vanished.  The face of the adventurer at the steering-wheel, darkly visible ever and again by the oval greenish glow of the compass face, had something of that firm beauty which all concentrated purpose gives, and something of the happiness of an idiot child that has at last got hold of the matches.  His companion, a less imaginative type, sat with his legs spread wide over the long, coffin-shaped box which contained in its compartments the three atomic bombs, the new bombs that would continue to explode indefinitely and which no one so far had ever seen in action.  Hitherto Carolinum, their essential substance, had been tested only in almost infinitesimal quantities within steel chambers embedded in lead.  Beyond the thought of great destruction slumbering in the black spheres between his legs, and a keen resolve to follow out very exactly the instructions that had been given him, the man’s mind was a blank.  His aquiline profile against the starlight expressed nothing but a profound gloom.

The sky below grew clearer as the Central European capital was approached.

So far they had been singularly lucky and had been challenged by no aeroplanes at all.  The frontier scouts they must have passed in the night; probably these were mostly under the clouds; the world was wide and they had had luck in not coming close to any soaring sentinel.  Their machine was painted a pale gray, that lay almost invisibly over the cloud levels below.  But now the east was flushing with the near ascent of the sun, Berlin was but a score of miles ahead, and the luck of the Frenchmen held.  By imperceptible degrees the clouds below dissolved….

Away to the north-eastward, in a cloudless pool of gathering light and with all its nocturnal illuminations still blazing, was Berlin.  The left finger of the steersman verified roads and open spaces below upon the mica-covered square of map that was fastened by his wheel.  There in a series of lake-like expansions was the Havel away to the right; over by those forests must be Spandau; there the river split about the Potsdam island; and right ahead was Charlottenburg cleft by a great thoroughfare that fell like an indicating beam of light straight to the imperial 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….