He paused.
“Well?” George encouraged him.
Pang Li said, unexpectedly: “Do you know anything about meteorites, George?”
“Not much.”
“Well, there are three kinds, and that kind known as side-rites are alloys of iron and nickel. When a meteorite hits, it hits remarkably hard. When a big one fell in Siberia in 1908 it knocked the trees flat over an area half as big as your Yorkshire. That's a pretty good concussion. They also liberate some heat. A gram of dynamite lets off 1,000 calories, but a good large meteorite lets off 450,000 calories for every gram of its weight. So you see the kind of thing one might possibly collect by raking round the heavens with an intensely powerful magnetic beam.”
George blinked.
“Might,” he said. “Might! Why I should say it's millions to one against your happening to touch one.”
Pang Li shook his head.
“On the contrary, it would be much more remarkable if you did not pick up several thousands. But it is also true that most of them would be burned away long before they could reach the ground.”
“So what?” inquired George. “It doesn't seem to help much.”
“True. The same thought occurred to the venerable Wu Chin-tan. He had to consider, therefore, where the best meteors were to be found, for it was his contention that if there were a really considerable magnetic disturbance many meteorites which would normally swing clear of the Earth might be brought down, and possibly there would be some large ones among them.”
“Now there is a famous swarm of meteor-ites known as the Leonids which gives one of the most brilliant and densest showers of ‘shooting stars’. They are probably the remains of a disintegrated comet, and their path intersects with that of the Earth every thirty-three years. They came in 1932 and they were due to come again on the nights of November the 13th, 14th and 15th, 1965. It was on this meteor swarm that Wu Chin-tan put his hopes. And we worked to create the biggest magnetic disturbance ever known, at the time when Earth should be in the densest part of the swarm.”
“Frankly, the results surprised us. Even Wu Chin-tan himself did not expect a celestial bombardment on such a scale. The poor old man is rather worried now for fear of what he has let loose. It is, of course, utterly impossible to compute the amount of meteorites which fell on and around Japan that night, but large and small together there must have been many millions. And the impact of some seems to have started volcanic activity. How much of the damage is really due to the resulting earthquakes and eruptions we can't yet tell. It is there that luck was with us, for we had not foreseen that part of the catastrophe.”
George was silent for a time.
Pictures rose before him.
Beautiful countrysides, where happy and industrious people made use of every foot of ground, living on in their own cultural tradition, still almost untouched by the century of frenzied Westernization in the cities. They had had nothing to do with this war, it was the imported machinery and the big business houses which demanded markets.
This was the year 1965 for the West and for the cities of Japan, but in the country places they kept to the old ways, for them it was the year 2625 of their own culture. He saw Japan in the spring, smothered in cherry-blossom: he saw it now, blasted and blackened, towns and villages flattened out by concussion, cities burning unchecked.
“It is the people who have suffered more than the leaders,” he said.
“In war,” said Pang Li, “it is always the people who suffer — never the leaders. And Japan's leaders have been no more than monkeys, imitating you Western barbarians. In the old days when the Japanese fought they fought for life or honour; now they fight for cash-registers and businessmen. In analysis, it is you who have destroyed Japan, not we. You have been doing it for a hundred years.”
But George scarcely followed him, his mind was still on the final disaster.
“It must have been like a biblical judgement. They called down fire from heaven upon themselves,” he said.
“Others will do the same,” Pang Li said. “But not China. Did I not tell you that the stars in their courses fight for China?”