Critical Mass Part 8

THE ENGINEER.

When writers collaborate, it often happens that one of them takes off in a direction which the other fellow simply can't or won't follow. So sometimes quite long chunks of real, printable copy get thrown away, and tempers fray. This almost never happened when Cyril and I worked together. Our first drafts, of course, needed a lot of revision and polis.h.i.+ng, and they got them, but structurally they almost always survived unchanged into print. But there was one exception. In Gladiator-at-Law we were intrigued with the idea of a "political engineer" (in the same sense that Eisen-hower was a "political general"), but it went nowhere in the novel, and we took it out. A few months later it occurred to us that the scene we had cut was practically a short story in itself, so we put it through the typewriter again and it came out this way.

IT WAS VERY SIMPLE. Some combination of low temperature and high pressure had forced something from the seepage at the ocean bottom into combination with something in the water around them.

And the impregnable armor around Subatlantic Oil's drilling chamber had discovered a weakness.

On the television screen it looked more serious than it was-so Muhlenhoff told himself, staring at it grimly. You get down more than a mile, and you're bound to have little technical problems. That's why deep-sea oil wells were still there.

Still, it did look kind of serious. The water driving in the pitted faults had the pressure of eighteen hundred meters behind it, and where it struck it did not splash-it battered and destroyed. As Muhlenhoff watched, a bulkhead collapsed in an explosion of spray; the remote camera caught a tiny driblet of the scattering brine, and the picture in the screen fluttered and shrank, and came back with a wavering sidewise pulse.

Muhlenhoff flicked off the screen and marched into the room where the Engineering Board was waiting in att.i.tudes of flabby panic.

As he swept his hand through his snow-white crew cut and called the board to order, a dispatch was handed to him-a preliminary report from a quickly-dispatched company trouble-shooter team. He read it to the board, stone-faced.

A veteran heat-transfer man, the first to recover, growled: "Some vibration thing-and seepage from the oil pool. Sloppy drilling!" He sneered. "Big deal! So a couple hundred meters of shaft have to be plugged and pumped. So six or eight compartments go pop. Since when did we start to believe the cack Research and Development hands out? Armor's armor. Sure it pops -when something makes it pop. If Atlantic oil was easy to get at, it wouldn't be here waiting for us now. Put a gang on the job. Find out what happened, make sure it doesn't happen again. Big deal!"

Muhlenhoff smiled his attractive smile. "Breck," he said, "thank G.o.d you've got guts. Perhaps we were hi a bit of a panic. Gentlemen, I hope we'll all take heart from Mr. Breck's level-headed-what did you say, Breck?"

Breck didn't look up. He was pawing through the dispatch Muhlenhoff had dropped to the table. "Nine-inch plate," he read aloud, white-faced. "And time of installation, not quite seven weeks ago. If this goes on in a straight line-" he grabbed for a pocket slide-rule -"we have, uh-" he swallowed-"less time than the probable error," he finished.

"Breck!" Muhlenhoff yelled. "Where are you going?"

The veteran heat-transfer man said grimly as he sped through the door: "To find a submarine."

The rest of the Engineering Board was suddenly pulling chairs toward the trouble-shooting team's'dispatch. Muhlenhoff slammed a fist on the table.

"Stop it," he said evenly. "The next man who leaves the meeting will have his contract canceled. Is that clear, gentlemen? Good. We will now proceed to get organized."

He had them; they were listening. He said forcefully: "I want a task force consisting of a petrochemist, a vibrations man, a hydrostatics man and a structural engineer. Co-opt mathematicians and computermen as needed. I will have all machines capable of handling Fourier series and up cleared for your use. The work of the task force will be divided into two phases. For Phase One, members will keep their staffs as small as possible. The objective of Phase One is to find the cause of the leaks and predict whether similar leaks are likely elsewhere in the project. On receiving a first approximation from the force I will proceed to set up Phase Two, to deal with countermeasures."

He paused. "Gentlemen," he said, "we must not lose our nerves. We must not panic. Possibly the most serious technical crisis in Atlantic's history lies before us. Your most important job is to maintain-at all times-a cheerful, courageous att.i.tude. We cannot, repeat cannot, afford to have the sub-technical staff of the project panicked for lack of a good example from us." He drilled each of them in turn with a long glare. "And," he finished, "if I hear of anyone suddenly discovering emergency business ash.o.r.e, the man who does it better get fitted for a sludgemonkey's suit, because that's what he'll be tomorrow. Clear?"

Each of the executives a.s.sumed some version of a cheerful, courageous att.i.tude. They looked ghastly, even to themselves.

Muhlenhoff stalked into his private pffice, the nerve-center of the whole bulkheaded works.

In MuhlenhofFs private office, you would never know you were 1,800 meters below the surface of the sea. It looked like any oilman's bra.s.s-hat office anywhere, complete to the beautiful blonde outside the door (but white-faced and trembling), the potted palm (though the ends of its fronds vibrated gently), and the typical section chief bursting in in the typical flap. "Sir," he whined, frenzied, "Section Six has pinholed! The corrosion-"

"Handle it!" barked Muhlenhoff, and slammed the door. Section Six be d.a.m.ned! What did it matter if a few of the old bulkheads pinholed and rilled? The central chambers were safe, until they could lick whatever it was that was corroding. The point was, you had to stay with it and get out the oil; because if you didn't prove your lease, PetroMex would. Mexican oil wanted those reserves mighty badly.

Muhlenhoff knew how to handle an emergency. Back away from it. Get a fresh slant. Above all, don't panic.

He slapped a b.u.t.ton that guaranteed no interruption and irritably, seeking distraction, picked up his latest copy of the New New Review-for he was, among other things, an intellectual as tune allowed.

Under the magazine was the latest of several confidential communications from the home office. Muhlenhoff growled and tossed the magazine aside. He reread what Priestley had had to say: "I know you understand the importance of beating our Spic friends to the Atlantic deep reserves, so I won't give you a hard time about it. I'll just pa.s.s it on the way Lundstrom gave it to me: 'Tell Muhlenhoff he'll come back on the Board or on a board, and no alibis or excuses.' Get it? Well-"

h.e.l.l. Muhlenhoff threw the sheet down and tried to think about the d.a.m.ned corrosion-leakage situation.

But he didn't try for long. There was, he realized, no point at all in him thinking about the problem. For one thing, he no longer had the equipment.

Muhlenhoff realized, wonderingly, that he hadn't opened a table of integrals for ten years; he doubted that he could find his way around the pages, well enough to run down a tricky form. He had come up pretty fast through the huge technical staff of Atlantic. First he had been a geologist in the procurement section, one of those boots-and-leather-jacket guys who spent his days in rough, tough blasting and drilling and his nights in rarefied scientific air, correlating and integrating the findings of the day. Next he had been a Chief Geologist, chairborne director of youngsters, now and then tackling a muddled report with Theory of Least Squares and Gibbs Phase Rule that magically separated dross from limpid fact ... or, he admitted wryly, at least turning the muddled reports over to mathemati-, cians who specialized in those disciplines.

Next he had been a Raw Materials Committee member who knew that drilling and figuring weren't the almighty things he had supposed them when he was a kid, who began to see the Big Picture of off-sh.o.r.e leases and depreciation allowances; of power and fusible rocks and steel for the machines, butane for the drills, plastics for the pipelines, metals for the circuits, the computers, the doors, windows, walls, tools, utilities. A committeeman who began to see that a friendly beer poured for the right resources-commission man was really more important than Least Squares or Phase Rule, because a resources commissioner who didn't get along with you might get along, for instance, with somebody from Coastwide, and allot to Coastwide the next available block of leases-thus working grievous harm to Atlantic and the billions it served. A committeeman who began to see that the Big Picture meant government and science leaning chummily against each other, government setting science new and challenging tasks like the billion-barrel procurement program, science backing government with all its tremendous prestige. You consume my waste hydrocarbons, Muhlenhoff thought comfortably, and I'll consume yours.

Thus mined, smelted and milled, Muhlenhoff was tempered for higher things. For the first, the technical directorate of an entire Atlantic Sub-Sea Petroleum Corporation district, and all wells, fields, pipelines, stills, storage fields, transport, fabrication and maintenance appertaining thereto. Honors piled upon honors. And then- He, glanced around him at the comfortable office. The top. Nothing to be added but voting stock and Board members.h.i.+p-and those within his grasp, if only he weathered this last crisis. And then the rarefied height he occupied alone.

And, by G.o.d, he thought, I do a d.a.m.n good job of it! Pleasurably he reviewed his conduct at the meeting; he had already forgotten his panic. Those shaking fools would have brought the roof down on us, he thought savagely. A few gallons of water in an unimportant shaft, and they're set to message the home office, run for the surface, abandon the whole project. . The Big Picture! They didn't see it, and they never would. He might, he admitted, not be able to chase an integral form through a table, but by G.o.d he could give the orders to those who would. The thing was organized now; the project was rolling; the task force had its job mapped out; and somehow, although he would not do a jot of the brain-wearing, eyestraining, actual work, it would be his job, because he had initiated it. He thought of the flat, dark square miles of calcareous ooze outside, under which lay the biggest proved untapped petroleum reserve in the world. Sector Fortyone, it was called on the hydrographic charts.

Perhaps, some day, the charts would say: Muhlenhoff Basin.

Well, why not?

The emergency intercom was flickering its red call light pusillanimously. Muhlenhoff calmly lifted the handset off its cradle and ignored the tinny bleat. When you gave an order, you had to leave the men alone to carry it out.

He relaxed in his chair and picked up a book from the desk. He was, among other things, a student of Old American History, as time permitted.

Fifteen minutes now, he promised himself, with the heroic past. And then back to work refreshed!

Muhlenhoff plunged into the book. He had schooled himself to concentration; he hardly noticed when the pleading noise from the intercom finally gave up trying to attract his attention. The book was a_ study of that Mexican War in which the United States had been so astonis.h.i.+ngly deprived of Texas, Oklahoma and points west under the infamous Peace of Galveston. The story was well told; Muhlenhoff was lost in its story from the first page.

Good thumbnail sketch of Presidente Lopez, artistically contrasted with the United States' Whitmore. More-in-sorrow-than-in-anger off-the-cuff psychoa.n.a.lysis of the crackpot Texan, Byerly, derisively known to Mexicans as "El Cacafuego." Byerly's raid at the head of his screwball irredentists, their prompt annihilation by the Mexican Third Armored Regiment, Byerly's impeccably legal trial and execution at Tehuantepec. Stiff diplomatic note from the United States. Bland answer: Please mind your business, Senores, and we will mind ours. Stiffer diplomatic note. We said please, Senores, and can we not let it go at that? Very stiff diplomatic note; and Latin temper flares at last: Mexico severs relations.

Bad to worse. Worse to worst.

Ma.s.sacre of Mexican nationals at San Antonio. Bland refusal of the United States federal government to interfere in "local police problem" of punis.h.i.+ng the guilty. Mexican Third Armored* raids San Antone, arrests the murderers (feted for weeks, their faces in the papers, their proud boasts of butchery retold everywhere), and hangs them before recrossing the border. United States declares war. United States loses war-outmaneuvered, outgeneraled, out-logisticated, outgunned, outmanned. And outfought. Said the author: "The colossal blow this cold military fact delivered to the United States collective ego is inconceivable to us today. Only a study of contemporary comment can make it real to the historian: The choked hysteria of the newspapers, the raging tides of suicides, Whit-more's impeachment and trial, the forced resignations of the entire General Staff-all these serve only to sketch in the national mood.

"Clearly something had happened to the military power which, within less than five decades previous, had annihilated the war machines of the Cominforrn and the Third Reich.

"We have the words of the contemporary military a.n.a.lyst, Osgood Ferguson, to explain it: "The rise of the so-called 'political general' means a decline in the efficiency of the army. Other things being equal, an undistracted professional beats an officer who is half soldier and half politician. A general who makes it his sole job to win a war will infallibly defeat an opponent who, by choice or constraint, must offend no voters of enemy ancestry, destroy no cultural or religious shrines highly regarded by the press, show leniency when leniency is fas.h.i.+onable at home, display condign firmness when voters demand it (though it cause hi& zone of communications to blaze up into a fury of guerrilla clashes), choose his invasion routes to please a state department apprehensive of potential future ententes.

"It is unfortunate that most of Ferguson's doc.u.mentation was lost when his home was burned during the unsettled years after the war. But we knowjhat what Mexico's Presidente Lopez said to his staff was: 'My generals, win me this war.' And this entire volume does not have enough s.p.a.ce to record what the United States generals were told by the White House, the Congress as a whole, the Committees on Military affairs, the Special Committees on Conduct of the War, the State Department, the Commerce Department, the Interior Department, the Director of the Budget, the War Manpower Commission, the Republican National Committee, the Democratic National Committee, the Steel lobby, the Oil lobby, the Labor lobby, the political journals, the daily newspapers, the broadcasters, the ministry, the Granges, the Chambers of Commerce. However, we do know-unhappily-that the United States generals obeyed their orders. This sorry fact was inscribed indelibly on the record at the Peace of Galveston."

Muhlenhoff yawned and closed the book. An amusing theory, he thought, ,but thin. Political generals? Nonsense.

He was glad to see that his subordinates had given up their attempt to pa.s.s responsibility for the immediate problem to his shoulders; the intercom had been silent for many minutes now. It only showed, he thought comfortably, that they had absorbed his leading better than they knew.

He glanced regretfully at the door that had sheltered him, for this precious refres.h.i.+ng interlude, from the shocks of the project outside. Well, the interlude was over; now to see about this leakage thing. Muhlenhoff made a note, in his tidy card-catalog mind, to have Maintenance on the carpet. The door was bulging out of true. Incredible sloppiness! And some d.a.m.ned fool had shut the locks in the ventilating system. The air was becoming stuffy.

Aggressive and confident, the political engineer pressed the release that opened the door to the greatest shock of all.

NIGHTMARE WITH ZEPPELINS.

Elsewhere I have mentioned Cyril's incomplete Civil War novel, The Crater. The opening chapters introduced his viewpoint character, an English journalist. I liked the character; I liked the background material; and I used them verbatim in this short story.

THE ZEPPELIN dirigible balloons bombed London again last night and I got little sleep what with the fire brigades clanging down the street and the antiaircraft guns banging away. Bad news in the morning post. A plain card from Emmie to let me know that Sam's gone, fast and without much pain. She didn't say, but I suppose it was the flu, which makes him at least the fifth of the old lib-lab boys taken off this winter. And why not? We're in our seventies and eighties. It's high time.

Shaw said as much the other day when I met him on the steps of the Museum reading room, he striding in, I doddering out. In that brutal, flippant way of his, he was rather funny about how old Harry Lewes was standing in the way of youngsters like himself, but I can't bring myself to put his remarks down; they would be a little too painful to contemplate.

Well, he's quite recovered from that business with his foot that gave us all such a fright. Barring the 'flu, he may live to my age, and about 1939 bright youngsters now unborn will be watching him like hawks for the smallest sign of rigidity, of eccentricity, and saying complacently: "Grand old boy, G.B.S. Such a pity he's going the least bit soft upstairs." And I shall by then be watching from Olympus, and chuckling.

Enough of him. He has the most extraordinary way of getting into everybody's conversation, though it is true that my own conversation does wander, these bad days. I did not think that the second decade of the twentieth century would be like this, though, as I have excellent reason to be, I am glad it is not worse.

I am really quite unhappy and uncomfortable as I sit here at the old desk. Though all the world knows I don't hold with personal service for the young and healthy, I am no longer a member of either of those cla.s.ses. I do miss the ministrations of Bagley, who at this moment is probably lying in a frozen trench and even more uncomfortable than I. I can't seem to build as warm a fire as he used to. The coals won't go right. Luckily, I know what to do when I am unhappy and uncomfortable: work.

Anyway, Wells is back from France. He has been talking, he says, to some people at the Cavendish Laboratory, wherever that is. He told me we must make a "radium bomb." I wanted to ask: "Must we, Wells? Must we, really?"

He says the great virtue of a radium bomb is that it explodes and keeps on exploding-for hours, days, weeks. The italics are Wells's-one could hear them in his rather high-pitched voice-and he is welcome to them.

I once saw an explosion which would have interested Wells and, although it did not keep on exploding, it was as much of an explosion as I ever care to see.

I thought of telling him so. But, if he believed me, there would be a hue and a cry-I wonder, was I ever once as consecrated as he?-and if he did not, he might all the same use it for the subject of one of his "scientific" romances. After I am gone, of course, but surely that event cannot be long delayed, and in any case that would spoil it. And I want the work. I do not think I have another book remaining-forty-one fat volumes will have to do-but this can hardly be a book. A short essay; it must be short if it is not to become an autobiography and, though I have resisted few temptations in my life, I mean to fight that one off to the end. That was another jeer of Shaw's. Well, he scored off me, for I confess that some such thought had stirred in my mind.

My lifelong struggle with voice and pen against social injustice had barely begun in 1864, and yet I had played a part in three major work stoppages, published perhaps a dozen pamphlets and was the editor and princ.i.p.al contributor of the still-remembered Labour's Voice. I write with what must look like immodesty only to explain how it was that I came to the attention of Miss Carlotta c.o.x. I was working with the furious energy of a very young man who has discovered his vocation, and no doubt Miss c.o.x mistook my daemon-now long gone, alas!-for me.

Miss c.o.x was a member of that considerable group of ruling-cla.s.s Englishmen and women who devote time, thought and money to improving the lot of the workingman. Everybody knows of good Josiah Wedgewood, Mr. William Morris, Miss Nightingale; they were the great ones. Perhaps I alone today remember Miss c.o.x, but there were hundreds like her and pray G.o.d there will always be.

She was then a spinster in her sixties and had spent most of her life giving away her fortune. She had gone once in her youth to the cotton mills whence that fortune had come, and knew after her first horrified look what her course must be. She instructed her man of business to sell all her shares in that Inferno of sweated labour and for the next forty years, as she always put it, attempted to make rest.i.tution.

She summoned me, in short, to her then-celebrated stationer's shop and, between waiting on purchasers of nibs and foolscap, told me her plan. I was to go to Africa.

Across the Atlantic, America was at war within herself. The rebellious South was holding on, not with any hope of subduing the North, but in the expectation of support from England.

England herself was divided. Though England had abolished slavery on her own soil almost a century earlier, still the detestable practise had Its apologists, and there were those who held the rude blacks incapable of a.s.suming the dignities of freedom. I was to seek out the Dahomeys and the Congolese on their own grounds and give the lie to those who thought them less than men.

"Tell England," said Miss c.o.x, "that the so-called primitive Negroes possessed great empires when our fathers lived in wattle huts. Tell England that the black lawgivers of Solomon's tune are true representatives of their people, and that the monstrous caricature of the plantation black is a venal creation of an ign.o.ble cla.s.s!"

She spoke like that, but she also handed me a cheque for two hundred and fifty pounds to defray my expenses of travel and to subsidize a wide distribution of the numbers of Labour's Voice which would contain my correspondence.

Despite her sometimes grotesque manner, Miss c.o.x's project was not an unwise one. Whatever enlightenment could be bought at a price of two hundred and fifty pounds was a blow at human slavery. Nor, being barely twenty, was I much distressed by the thought of a voyage to strange lands.

In no time at all, I had turned the direction of Labour's Voice over to my tested friends and contributors Mr. Samuel Blackett and Miss Emma Chatto (they married a month later) and in a week I was aboard a French "composite s.h.i.+p," iron of frame and wooden of skin, bound for a port on the Dark Continent, the home of mystery and enchantment.

So we thought of it in those days and so, in almost as great degree, do we think of it today, though I venture to suppose that, once this great war is over, those same creations of Count Zeppelin which bombed me last night may dispel some of the mystery, exorcise the enchantment and bring light into the darkness-. May it be so, though I trust that whatever discoveries these aeronauts of tomorrow may bring will not repeat the discovery Herr Faesch made known to me in 1864.

The squalor of ocean travel in those days is no part of my story. It existed and I endured it for what seemed like an eternity, but at last I bade farewell to Le Flamant and all her roaches, rats and stench. Nor does it become this memoir to discuss the tragic failure of the mission Miss c.o.x had given me.

(Those few who remember my Peoples of the Earth will perhaps also remember the account given in the chapter I ent.i.tled "Africa Journeyings." Those, still fewer, whose perception revealed to them an unaccountable gap between the putrid sore throat with which I was afflicted at the headwaters of the Congo and my leave taking on the Gold Coast will find herewith the chronicle of the missing days).

It is enough to say that I found no empires in 1864. If they had existed, and I believe they had, they were vanished with Sheba's Queen. I did, however, find Herr Faesch. Or he found me.

How shall I describe Herr Faesch for you? I shan't, Shaw notwithstanding, permit myself so hackneyed a term as "hardy Swiss"; I am not so far removed from the youthful spring of creation as that. Yet Swiss he was, and surely hardy as well, for he discovered me (or his natives did) a thousand miles from a community of Europeans, deserted by my own bearers, nearer to death than ever I have been since. He told me that I tried thrice to kill him, in my delirium; but he nursed me well and I lived. As you see.

He was a scientific man, a student of Nature's ways, and a healer, though one cure was beyond him. For, sick though I was, he was more ravaged by destructive illness than I. I woke in a firelit hut with a rank poultice at my throat and a naked savage daubing at my brow, and I was terrified; no, not of the native, but of the awful cadaverous face, ghost-white, that frowned down at me from the shadows.

That was my first sight of Herr Faesch.

When, a day later, I came able to sit up and to talk, I found him a gentle and brave man, whose English was every bit as good as my own, whose knowledge surpa.s.sed that of any human I met before or since. But the mark of death was on him. In that equatorial jungle, his complexion was alabaster. Ruling the reckless black warriors who served him, his strength yet was less than a child's. In those steaming afternoons when I hardly dared stir from my cot for fear of stroke, he wore gloves and a woollen scarf at his neck.

We had, in all, three days together. As I regained my health, his health dwindled.

He introduced himself to me as a native of Geneva, that colorful city on the finest lake of the Alps. He listened courteously while I told him of my own errand and did me, and the absent Miss c.o.x, the courtesy of admiring the spirit which prompted it- though he was not sanguine of my prospects of finding the empires.

He said nothing of what had brought him to this remote wilderness, but I thought I knew. Surely gold. Perhaps diamonds or some other gem, but I thought not; gold was much more plausible.

I had picked up enough of the native dialect to catch perhaps one word in twenty of what he said to his natives and they to him-enough, at any rate, to know that when he left me in their charge for some hours, that first day, he was going to a hole hi the ground. It could only be a mine, and what, I asked myself, would a European trouble to mine in the heart of unexplored Africa but gold?

I was wrong, of course. It was not gold at all.

Wells says that they are doing astonis.h.i.+ng things at the Cavendish Laboratory, but I do think that Herr Faesch might have astonished even Wells. Certainly he astonished me. On the second day of my convalescence, I found myself strong enough to be up and walking about.

Say that I was prying. Perhaps I was. It was oppressively hot-I dared not venture outside-and yet I was too restless to lie abed waiting for Herr Faesch's return. I found myself examining the objects on his-camp table and there were, indeed, nuggets. But the nuggets were not gold. They were a silvery metal, blackened and discolored, but surely without gold's yellow hue; they were rather small, like irregular lark's eggs, and yet they were queerly heavy. Perhaps there was a score of them, aggregatng about a pound or two.

I rattled them thoughtfully in my hand, and then observed that across the tent, in a laboratory jar with a gla.s.s stopper, there were perhaps a dozen more-yes, and in yet another place in that tent, in a pottery dish, another clutch of the things. I thought to bring them close together so that I might compare them. I fetched the jar and set it on the table; I went after the pellets in the pottery dish.

Herr Faesch's voice, shaking with emotion, halted me. "Mr. Lewes!" he whispered harshly. "Stop, sir!"

I turned, and there was the man, his eyes wide with horror, standing at the flap of the tent. I made my apologies, but he waved them aside.

"No, no," he croaked, "I know - you meant no harm. But I tell you, Mr. Lewes, you were very near to death a moment ago."

I glanced at the pellets. "From these, Herr Faesch?"

"Yes, Mr. Lewes. From those." He tottered into the tent and retrieved the pottery dish from my hands. Back to its corner it went; then the jar, back across the tent again. "They must not come together. No, sir," he said, nodding thoughtfully, though I had said nothing with which he might have been agreeing, "they must not come together."

He sat down. "Mr. Lewes," he whispered, "have you ever heard of uranium?" I had not. "Or of pitchblende? No? Well," he said earnestly, "I a.s.sure you that you will. These ingots, Mr. Lewes, are uranium, but not the standard metal of commerce. No, sir. They are a rare variant form, indistinguishable by the most delicate of chemical tests from the ordinary metal, but possessed of characteristics which 'are-I shall merely say 'wonderful,' Mr. Lewes, for I dare not use the term which comes first to mind."

"Remarkable," said I, feeling that some such response was wanted.

He agreed. "Remarkable indeed, my dear Mr. Lewes! You really cannot imagine how remarkable. Suppose I should tell you that the mere act of placing those few nuggets you discovered in close juxtaposition to each other would liberate an immense amount of energy. Suppose I should tell you that if a certain critical quant.i.ty of this metal should be joined together, an explosion would result. Eh, Mr. Lewes? What of that?"

I could only say again, "Remarkable, Herr Faesch." I knew nothing else to say. I was not yet one-and-twenty, I had had no interest in making chemists' stinks, and much of what he said was Greek to me- or was science to me, which was worse, for I should have understood the Greek tolerably well. Also a certain apprehension lingered in my mind. That terrible white face, those fired eyes, his agitated speech-I could not be blamed, I think. I believed he might be mad. And though I listened, I heard not, as he went ^on to tell me of what his discovery might mean.

The next morning he thrust a sheaf of ma.n.u.script at me. "Read, Mr. Lewes!" he commanded me and went off to his mine; but something went wrong. I drowsed through a few pages and made nothing of them except that he thought in some way his nuggets had affected his health. There was a radiant glow hi the mine, and the natives believed that glow meant sickness and hi time death, and Herr Faesch had come to agree with the natives. A pity, I thought absently, turning in for a nap.

A monstrous smas.h.i.+ng sound awakened me. No one was about. I ran out, thrusting aside the tent flap and there, over a hill, through the interstices of the trees, I saw a huge and angry cloud./! don't know how to describe it; I have never since seen its like, and pray G.o.d the world never shall again until the end of time.