The World Set Free

Section 6

One single monarch held out against the general acquiescence in the new rule, and that was that strange survival of mediaevalism, the ’Slavic Fox,’ the King of the Balkans.  He debated and delayed his submissions.  He showed an extraordinary combination of cunning and temerity in his evasion of the repeated summonses from Brissago.  He affected ill-health and a great preoccupation with his new official mistress, for his semi-barbaric court was arranged on the best romantic models.  His tactics were ably seconded by Doctor Pestovitch, his chief minister.  Failing to establish his claims to complete independence, King Ferdinand Charles annoyed the conference by a proposal to be treated as a protected state.  Finally he professed an unconvincing submission, and put a mass of obstacles in the way of the transfer of his national officials to the new government.  In these things he was enthusiastically supported by his subjects, still for the most part an illiterate peasantry, passionately if confusedly patriotic, and so far with no practical knowledge of the effect of atomic bombs.  More particularly he retained control of all the Balkan aeroplanes.

For once the extreme naivete of Leblanc seems to have been mitigated by duplicity.  He went on with the general pacification of the world as if the Balkan submission was made in absolute good faith, and he announced the disbandment of the force of aeroplanes that hitherto guarded the council at Brissago upon the approaching fifteenth of July.  But instead he doubled the number upon duty on that eventful day, and made various arrangements for their disposition.  He consulted certain experts, and when he took King Egbert into his confidence there was something in his neat and explicit foresight that brought back to that ex-monarch’s mind his half-forgotten fantasy of Leblanc as a fisherman under a green umbrella.

About five o’clock in the morning of the seventeenth of July one of the outer sentinels of the Brissago fleet, which was soaring unobtrusively over the lower end of the lake of Garda, sighted and hailed a strange aeroplane that was flying westward, and, failing to get a satisfactory reply, set its wireless apparatus talking and gave chase.  A swarm of consorts appeared very promptly over the westward mountains, and before the unknown aeroplane had sighted Como, it had a dozen eager attendants closing in upon it.  Its driver seems to have hesitated, dropped down among the mountains, and then turned southward in flight, only to find an intercepting biplane sweeping across his bows.  He then went round into the eye of the rising sun, and passed within a hundred yards of his original pursuer.

The sharpshooter therein opened fire at once, and showed an intelligent grasp of the situation by disabling the passenger first.  The man at the wheel must have heard his companion cry out behind him, but he was too intent on getting away to waste even a glance behind.  Twice after that he must have heard shots.  He let his engine go, he crouched down, and for twenty minutes he must have steered in the continual expectation of a bullet.  It never came, and when at last he glanced round, three great planes were close upon him, and his companion, thrice hit, lay dead across his bombs.  His followers manifestly did not mean either to upset or shoot him, but inexorably they drove him down, down.  At last he was curving and flying a hundred yards or less over the level fields of rice and maize.  Ahead of him and dark against the morning sunrise was a village with a very tall and slender campanile and a line of cable bearing metal standards that he could not clear.  He stopped his engine abruptly and dropped flat.  He may have hoped to get at the bombs when he came down, but his pitiless pursuers drove right over him and shot him as he fell.

Three other aeroplanes curved down and came to rest amidst grass close by the smashed machine.  Their passengers descended, and ran, holding their light rifles in their hands towards the debris and the two dead men.  The coffin-shaped box that had occupied the centre of the machine had broken, and three black objects, each with two handles like the ears of a pitcher, lay peacefully amidst the litter.

These objects were so tremendously important in the eyes of their captors that they disregarded the two dead men who lay bloody and broken amidst the wreckage as they might have disregarded dead frogs by a country pathway.

‘By God,’ cried the first.  ‘Here they are!’

‘And unbroken!’ said the second.

‘I’ve never seen the things before,’ said the first.

‘Bigger than I thought,’ said the second.

The third comer arrived.  He stared for a moment at the bombs and then turned his eyes to the dead man with a crushed chest who lay in a muddy place among the green stems under the centre of the machine.

‘One can take no risks,’ he said, with a faint suggestion of apology.

The other two now also turned to the victims.  ‘We must signal,’ said the first man.  A shadow passed between them and the sun, and they looked up to see the aeroplane that had fired the last shot.  ‘Shall we signal?’ came a megaphone hail.

‘Three bombs,’ they answered together.

‘Where do they come from?’ asked the megaphone.

The three sharpshooters looked at each other and then moved towards the dead men.  One of them had an idea.  ‘Signal that first,’ he said, ’while we look.’  They were joined by their aviators for the search, and all six men began a hunt that was necessarily brutal in its haste, for some indication of identity.  They examined the men’s pockets, their bloodstained clothes, the machine, the framework.  They turned the bodies over and flung them aside.  There was not a tattoo mark. . . .  Everything was elaborately free of any indication of its origin.

‘We can’t find out!’ they called at last.

‘Not a sign?’

‘Not a sign.’

‘I’m coming down,’ said the man overhead….