The World Set Free Read online

  resolution of a fiercely frightened sheep to plunge. And now that

  its weapons were exploding in its hands, Europe was only too

  eager to drop them, and abandon this fancied refuge of violence.

  For a time the whole world had been shocked into frankness;

  nearly all the clever people who had hitherto sustained the

  ancient belligerent separations had now been brought to realise

  the need for simplicity of attitude and openness of mind; and in

  this atmosphere of moral renascence, there was little attempt to

  get negotiable advantages out of resistance to the new order.

  Human beings are foolish enough no doubt, but few have stopped to

  haggle in a fire-escape. The council had its way with them. The

  band of 'patriots' who seized the laboratories and arsenal just

  outside Osaka and tried to rouse Japan to revolt against

  inclusion in the Republic of Mankind, found they had

  miscalculated the national pride and met the swift vengeance of

  their own countrymen. That fight in the arsenal was a vivid

  incident in this closing chapter of the history of war. To the

  last the 'patriots' were undecided whether, in the event of a

  defeat, they would explode their supply of atomic bombs or not.

  They were fighting with swords outside the iridium doors, and the

  moderates of their number were at bay and on the verge of

  destruction, only ten, indeed, remained unwounded, when the

  republicans burst in to the rescue…

  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 join
ed 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…

  Section 7

  The Slavic fox stood upon a metal balcony in his picturesque Art

  Nouveau palace that gave upon the precipice that overhung his

  bright little capital, and beside him stood Pestovitch, grizzled

  and cunning, and now full of an ill-suppressed excitement. Behind

  them the window opened into a large room, richly decorated in

  aluminium and crimson enamel, across which the king, as he

  glanced ever and again over his shoulder with a gesture of

  inquiry, could see through the two open doors of a little azure

  walled antechamber the wireless operator in the turret working at

  his incessant transcription. Two pompously uniformed messengers

  waited listlessly in this apartment. The room was furnished with

  a stately dignity, and had in the middle of it a big green

  baize-covered table with the massive white metal inkpots and

  antiquated sandboxes natural to a new but romantic monarchy. It

  was the king's council chamber and about it now, in attitudes of

  suspended intrigue, stood the half-dozen ministers who

  constituted his cabinet. They had been summoned for twelve

  o'clock, but still at half-past twelve the king loitered in the

  balcony and seemed to be waiting for some news that did not come.

  The king and his minister had talked at first in whispers; they

  had fallen silent, for they found little now to express except a

  vague anxiety. Away there on the mountain side were the white

  metal roofs of the long farm buildings beneath which the bomb

  factory and the bombs were hidden. (The chemist who had made all

  these for the king had died suddenly after the declaration of

  Brissago.) Nobody knew of that store of mischief now but the king

  and his adviser and three heavily faithful attendants; the

  aviators who waited now in the midday blaze with their

  bomb-carrying machines and their passenger bomb-throwers in the

  exercising grounds of the motor-cyclist barracks below were still

  in ignorance of the position of the ammunition they were

  presently to take up. It was time they started if the scheme was

  to work as Pestovitch had planned it. It was a magnificent plan.

  It aimed at no less than the Empire of the World. The government

  of idealists and professors away there at Brissago was to be

  blown to fragments, and then east, west, north, and south those

  aeroplanes would go swarming over a world that had disarmed

  itself, to proclaim Ferdinand Charles, the new Caesar, the

  Master, Lord of the Earth. It was a magnificent plan. But the

  tension of this waiting for news of the success of the first blow

  was-considerable.

  The Slavic fox was of a pallid fairness, he had a remarkably long

  nose, a thick, short moustache, and small blue eyes that were a

  little too near together to be pleasant. It was his habit to

  worry his moustache with short, nervous tugs whenever his

  restless mind troubled him, and now this motion was becoming so

  incessant that it irked Pestovitch beyond the limits of

  endurance.

  'I will go,' said the minister, 'and see what the trouble is with

  the wireless. They give us nothing, good or bad.'

  Left to himself, the king could worry his moustache without

  stint; he leant his elbows forward on the balcony and gave both

  of his long white hands to the work, so that he looked like a

  pale dog gnawing a bone. Suppose they caught his men, what

  should he do? Suppose they caught his men?

  The clocks in the light gold-capped belfries of the town below

  presently intimated the half-hour after midday.

  Of course, he and Pestovitch had thought it out. Even if they

  had caught those men, they were pledged to secrecy… Probably

  they would be killed in the catching… One could deny anyhow,

  deny and deny.

  And then he became aware of half a dozen little shining specks

  very high in the blue… Pestovitch came out to him presently.

  'The government messages, sire, have all dropped into cipher,' he

  said. 'I have set a man--'

  'LOOK!' interrupted the king, and pointed upward with a long,

  lean finger.

  Pestovitch followed that indication and then glanced for one

  questioning moment at the white face before him.

  'We have to face it out, sire,' he said.

  For some moments they watched the steep spirals of the descending

  messengers, and then they began a hasty consultation…

  They decided that to be holding a council upon the details of an

  ultimate surrender to Brissago was as innocent-looking a thing as

  the king could well be doing, and so, when at last the ex-king

  Egbert, whom the council had sent as its envoy, arrived upon the

  scene, he discovered the king almost theatrically posed at the

  head of his councillors in the midst of his court. The door upon

  the wireless operators was shut.

  The ex-king from Brissago came like a draught through the

  curtains and attendants that gave a wide margin to King

  Ferdinand's state, and the familiar confidence of his manner

  belied a certain hardness in his eye. Firmin trotted behind him,

  and no one else was with him. And as Ferdinand Charles rose to

  greet him, there came into the heart of the Balkan king again

  that same chilly feeling that he had felt upon the balcony-and

  it passed at the careless gestures of his guest. For surely any

  one might outwit this foolish talker who, for a mere idea and at

  the command of a little French rationalist in spectacles, had

  thrown away the most ancient crown in all the world.

  One must deny, deny…

  And then slowly and quite tiresomely he realised that there was

  nothing to deny. His visitor, with an amiable ease, went on

  talking about everything in debate between himself and Brissago

  except--.

  Could it be that they had been delayed? Could it be that they

  had had to drop for repairs and were still uncaptured? Could it

  be that even now while this fool babbled, they were over there

  among the mountains heaving their deadly charge over the side of

  the aeroplane?

  Strange hopes began to lift the tail of the Slavic fox again.

  What was the man saying? One must talk to him anyhow until one

  knew. At any moment the little brass door behind him might open

  with the news of Brissago blown to atoms. Then it would be a

  delightful relief to the present tension to arrest this chatterer

  forthwith. He might be killed perhaps. What?

  The king was repeating his observation. 'They have a ridiculous

  fancy that your confidence is based on the po
ssession of atomic

  bombs.'

  King Ferdinand Charles pulled himself together. He protested.

  'Oh, quite so,' said the ex-king, 'quite so.'

  'What grounds?' The ex-king permitted himself a gesture and the

  ghost of a chuckle-why the devil should he chuckle? 'Practically

  none,' he said. 'But of course with these things one has to be

  so careful.'

  And then again for an instant something-like the faintest shadow

  of derision-gleamed out of the envoy's eyes and recalled that

  chilly feeling to King Ferdinand's spine.

  Some kindred depression had come to Pestovitch, who had been

  watching the drawn intensity of Firmin's face. He came to the

  help of his master, who, he feared, might protest too much.

  'A search!' cried the king. 'An embargo on our aeroplanes.'

  'Only a temporary expedient,' said the ex-king Egbert, 'while the

  search is going on.'

  The king appealed to his council.

  'The people will never permit it, sire,' said a bustling little

  man in a gorgeous uniform.

  'You'll have to make 'em,' said the ex-king, genially addressing

  all the councillors.

  King Ferdinand glanced at the closed brass door through which no

  news would come.

  'When would you want to have this search?'

  The ex-king was radiant. 'We couldn't possibly do it until the

  day after to-morrow,' he said.

  'Just the capital?'

  'Where else?' asked the ex-king, still more cheerfully.

  'For my own part,' said the ex-king confidentially, 'I think the

  whole business ridiculous. Who would be such a fool as to hide

  atomic bombs? Nobody. Certain hanging if he's caught-certain,

  and almost certain blowing up if he isn't. But nowadays I have to

  take orders like the rest of the world. And here Iam.'

  The king thought he had never met such detestable geniality. He

  glanced at Pestovitch, who nodded almost imperceptibly. It was

  well, anyhow, to have a fool to deal with. They might have sent a

  diplomatist. 'Of course,' said the king, 'I recognise the

  overpowering force-and a kind of logic-in these orders from

  Brissago.'

  'I knew you would,' said the ex-king, with an air of relief, 'and

  so let us arrange--'

  They arranged with a certain informality. No Balkan aeroplane

  was to adventure into the air until the search was concluded, and

  meanwhile the fleets of the world government would soar and