radio-activity as our ancestor stood towards fire before he had
learnt to make it. He knew it then only as a strange thing
utterly beyond his control, a flare on the crest of the volcano,
a red destruction that poured through the forest. So it is that
we know radio-activity to-day. This-this is the dawn of a new
day in human living. At the climax of that civilisation which
had its beginning in the hammered flint and the fire-stick of the
savage, just when it is becoming apparent that our
ever-increasing needs cannot be borne indefinitely by our present
sources of energy, we discover suddenly the possibility of an
entirely new civilisation. The energy we need for our very
existence, and with which Nature supplies us still so grudgingly,
is in reality locked up in inconceivable quantities all about us.
We cannot pick that lock at present, but--'
He paused. His voice sank so that everybody strained a little to
hear him.
'--we will.'
He put up that lean finger again, his solitary gesture.
'And then,' he said…
'Then that perpetual struggle for existence, that perpetual
struggle to live on the bare surplus of Nature's energies will
cease to be the lot of Man. Man will step from the pinnacle of
this civilisation to the beginning of the next. I have no
eloquence, ladies and gentlemen, to express the vision of man's
material destiny that opens out before me. I see the desert
continents transformed, the poles no longer wildernesses of ice,
the whole world once more Eden. I see the power of man reach out
among the stars…'
He stopped abruptly with a catching of the breath that many an
actor or orator might have envied.
The lecture was over, the audience hung silent for a few seconds,
sighed, became audible, stirred, fluttered, prepared for
dispersal. More light was turned on and what had been a dim mass
of figures became a bright confusion of movement. Some of the
people signalled to friends, some crowded down towards the
platform to examine the lecturer's apparatus and make notes of
his diagrams. But the chuckle-headed lad with the scrub hair
wanted no such detailed frittering away of the thoughts that had
inspired him. He wanted to be alone with them; he elbowed his way
out almost fiercely, he made himself as angular and bony as a
cow, fearing lest some one should speak to him, lest some one
should invade his glowing sphere of enthusiasm.
He went through the streets with a rapt face, like a saint who
sees visions. He had arms disproportionately long, and
ridiculous big feet.
He must get alone, get somewhere high out of all this crowding of
commonness, of everyday life.
He made his way to the top of Arthur's Seat, and there he sat for
a long time in the golden evening sunshine, still, except that
ever and again he whispered to himself some precious phrase that
had stuck in his mind.
'If,' he whispered, 'if only we could pick that lock…'
The sun was sinking over the distant hills. Already it was shorn
of its beams, a globe of ruddy gold, hanging over the great banks
of cloud that would presently engulf it.
'Eh!' said the youngster. 'Eh!'
He seemed to wake up at last out of his entrancement, and the red
sun was there before his eyes. He stared at it, at first without
intelligence, and then with a gathering recognition. Into his
mind came a strange echo of that ancestral fancy, that fancy of a
Stone Age savage, dead and scattered bones among the drift two
hundred thousand years ago.
'Ye auld thing,' he said-and his eyes were shining, and he made
a kind of grabbing gesture with his hand; 'ye auld red thing…
We'll have ye YET.'
CHAPTER THE FIRST
THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY
Section I
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
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