by H. G. Wells
choked alley of trenches and holes and cranes, and emerged upon
the old familiar scene about the White Stone Pond. That, at
least, was very much as it used to be.
There were still the fine old red-brick houses to left and right
of him; the reservoir had been improved by a portico of marble,
the white-fronted inn with the clustering flowers above its
portico still stood out at the angle of the ways, and the blue
view to Harrow Hill and Harrow spire, a view of hills and trees
and shining waters and wind-driven cloud shadows, was like the
opening of a great window to the ascending Londoner. All that
was very reassuring. There was the same strolling crowd, the same
perpetual miracle of motors dodging through it harmlessly,
escaping headlong into the country from the Sabbatical stuffiness
behind and below them. There was a band still, a women's suffrage
meeting-for the suffrage women had won their way back to the
tolerance, a trifle derisive, of the populace again-socialist
orators, politicians, a band, and the same wild uproar of dogs,
frantic with the gladness of their one blessed weekly release
from the back yard and the chain. And away along the road to the
Spaniards strolled a vast multitude, saying, as ever, that the
view of London was exceptionally clear that day.
Young Holsten's face was white. He walked with that uneasy
affectation of ease that marks an overstrained nervous system and
an under-exercised body. He hesitated at the White Stone Pond
whether to go to the left of it or the right, and again at the
fork of the roads. He kept shifting his stick in his hand, and
every now and then he would get in the way of people on the
footpath or be jostled by them because of the uncertainty of his
movements. He felt, he confesses, 'inadequate to ordinary
existence.' He seemed to himself to be something inhuman and
mischievous. All the people about him looked fairly prosperous,
fairly happy, fairly well adapted to the lives they had to
lead-a week of work and a Sunday of best clothes and mild
promenading-and he had launched something that would disorganise
the entire fabric that held their contentments and ambitions and
satisfactions together. 'Felt like an imbecile who has presented
a box full of loaded revolvers to a Creche,' he notes.
He met a man named Lawson, an old school-fellow, of whom history
now knows only that he was red-faced and had a terrier. He and
Holsten walked together and Holsten was sufficiently pale and
jumpy for Lawson to tell him he overworked and needed a holiday.
They sat down at a little table outside the County Council house
of Golders Hill Park and sent one of the waiters to the Bull and
Bush for a couple of bottles of beer, no doubt at Lawson's
suggestion. The beer warmed Holsten's rather dehumanised system.
He began to tell Lawson as clearly as he could to what his great
discovery amounted. Lawson feigned attention, but indeed he had
neither the knowledge nor the imagination to understand. 'In the
end, before many years are out, this must eventually change war,
transit, lighting, building, and every sort of manufacture, even
agriculture, every material human concern--'
Then Holsten stopped short. Lawson had leapt to his feet. 'Damn
that dog!' cried Lawson. 'Look at it now. Hi! Here!
Phewoo-phewoo phewoo! Come HERE, Bobs! Come HERE!'
The young scientific man, with his bandaged hand, sat at the
green table, too tired to convey the wonder of the thing he had
sought so long, his friend whistled and bawled for his dog, and
the Sunday people drifted about them through the spring sunshine.
For a moment or so Holsten stared at Lawson in astonishment, for
he had been too intent upon what he had been saying to realise
how little Lawson had attended.
Then he remarked, 'WELL!' and smiled faintly, and-finished the
tankard of beer before him.
Lawson sat down again. 'One must look after one's dog,' he said,
with a note of apology. 'What was it you were telling me?'
Section 2
In the evening Holsten went out again. He walked to Saint Paul's
Cathedral, and stood for a time near the door listening to the
evening service. The candles upon the altar reminded him in some
odd way of the fireflies at Fiesole. Then he walked back through
the evening lights to Westminster. He was oppressed, he was
indeed scared, by his sense of the immense consequences of his
discovery. He had a vague idea that night that he ought not to
publish his results, that they were premature, that some secret
association of wise men should take care of his work and hand it
on from generation to generation until the world was riper for
its practical application. He felt that nobody in all the
thousands of people he passed had reallyawakened to the fact of
change, they trusted the world for what it was, not to alter too
rapidly, to respect their trusts, their assurances, their habits,
their little accustomed traffics and hard-won positions.
He went into those little gardens beneath the over-hanging,
brightly-lit masses of the Savoy Hotel and the Hotel Cecil. He
sat down on a seat and became aware of the talk of the two people
next to him. It was the talk of a young couple evidently on the
eve of marriage. The man was congratulating himself on having
regular employment at last; 'they like me,' he said, 'and I like
the job. If I work up-in'r dozen years or so I ought to be
gettin' somethin' pretty comfortable. That's the plain sense of
it, Hetty. There ain't no reason whatsoever why we shouldn't get
along very decently-very decently indeed.'
The desire for little successes amidst conditions securely fixed!
So it struck upon Holsten's mind. He added in his diary, 'I had
a sense of all this globe as that…'
By that phrase he meant a kind of clairvoyant vision of this
populated world as a whole, of all its cities and towns and
villages, its high roads and the inns beside them, its gardens
and farms and upland pastures, its boatmen and sailors, its ships
coming along the great circles of the ocean, its time-tables and
appointments and payments and dues as it were one unified and
progressive spectacle. Sometimes such visions came to him; his
mind, accustomed to great generalisations and yet acutely
sensitive to detail, saw things far more comprehensively than the
minds of most of his contemporaries. Usually the teeming sphere
moved on to its predestined ends and circled with a stately
swiftness on its path about the sun. Usually it was all a living
progress that altered under his regard. But now fatigue a little
deadened him to that incessancy of life, it seemed now just an
eternal circling. He lapsed to the commoner persuasion of the
great fixities and recurrencies of the human routine. The remoter
past of wandering savagery, the inevitable changes of to-morrow
were veiled, and he saw only day and night, seed-time and
harvest, loving and begetting, birth
s and deaths, walks in the
summer sunlight and tales by the winter fireside, the ancient
sequence of hope and acts and age perennially renewed, eddying on
for ever and ever, save that now the impious hand of research was
raised to overthrow this drowsy, gently humming, habitual, sunlit
spinning-top of man's existence…
For a time he forgot wars and crimes and hates and persecutions,
famine and pestilence, the cruelties of beasts, weariness and the
bitter wind, failure and insufficiency and retrocession. He saw
all mankind in terms of the humble Sunday couple upon the seat
beside him, who schemed their inglorious outlook and improbable
contentments. 'I had a sense of all this globe as that.'
His intelligence struggled against this mood and struggled for a
time in vain. He reassured himself against the invasion of this
disconcerting idea that he was something strange and inhuman, a
loose wanderer from the flock returning with evil gifts from his
sustained unnatural excursions amidst the darknesses and
phosphorescences beneath the fair surfaces of life. Man had not
been always thus; the instincts and desires of the little home,
the little plot, was not all his nature; also he was an
adventurer, an experimenter, an unresting curiosity, an
insatiable desire. For a few thousand generations indeed he had
tilled the earth and followed the seasons, saying his prayers,
grinding his corn and trampling the October winepress, yet not
for so long but that he was still full of restless stirrings.
'If there have been home and routine and the field,' thought
Holsten, 'there have also been wonder and the sea.'
He turned his head and looked up over the back of the seat at the
great hotels above him, full of softly shaded lights and the glow
and colour and stir of feasting. Might his gift to mankind mean
simply more of that?…
He got up and walked out of the garden, surveyed a passing
tram-car, laden with warm light, against the deep blues of
evening, dripping and trailing long skirts of shining reflection;
he crossed the Embankment and stood for a time watching the dark
river and turning ever and again to the lit buildings and
bridges. His mind began to scheme conceivable replacements of all
those clustering arrangements…
'It has begun,' he writes in the diary in which these things are
recorded. 'It is not for me to reach out to consequences I cannot
foresee. Iam a part, not a whole; Iam a little instrument in
the armoury of Change. If I were to burn all these papers,
before a score of years had passed, some other man would be doing
this…
Section 3
Holsten, before he died, was destined to see atomic energy
dominating every other source of power, but for some years yet a
vast network of difficulties in detail and application kept the
new discovery from any effective invasion of ordinary life. The
path from the laboratory to the workshop is sometimes a tortuous
one; electro-magnetic radiations were known and demonstrated for
twenty years before Marconi made them practically available, and
in the same way it was twenty years before induced radio-activity
could be brought to practical utilisation. The thing, of course,
was discussed very much, more perhaps at the time of its
discovery than during the interval of technical adaptation, but
with very little realisation of the huge economic revolution that
impended. What chiefly impressed the journalists of 1933 was the
production of gold from bismuth and the realisation albeit upon
unprofitable lines of the alchemist's dreams; there was a
considerable amount of discussion and expectation in that more
intelligent section of the educated publics of the various
civilised countries which followed scientific development; but
for the most part the world went about its business-as the
inhabitants of those Swiss villages which live under the
perpetual threat of overhanging rocks and mountains go about
their business-just as though the possible was impossible, as
though the inevitable was postponed for ever because it was
delayed.
It was in 1953 that the first Holsten-Roberts engine brought
induced radio-activity into the sphere of industrial production,
and its first general use was to replace the steam-engine in
electrical generating stations. Hard upon the appearance of this
came the Dass-Tata engine-the invention of two among the
brilliant galaxy of Bengali inventors the modernisation of Indian
thought was producing at this time-which was used chiefly for
automobiles, aeroplanes, waterplanes, and such-like, mobile
purposes. The American Kemp engine, differing widely in principle
but equally practicable, and the Krupp-Erlanger came hard upon
the heels of this, and by the autumn of 1954 a gigantic
replacement of industrial methods and machinery was in progress
all about the habitable globe. Small wonder was this when the
cost, even of these earliest and clumsiest of atomic engines, is
compared with that of the power they superseded. Allowing for
lubrication the Dass-Tata engine, once it was started cost a
penny to run thirty-seven miles, and added only nine and quarter
pounds to the weight of the carriage it drove. It made the heavy
alcohol-driven automobile of the time ridiculous in appearance as
well as preposterously costly. For many years the price of coal
and every form of liquid fuel had been clambering to levels that
made even the revival of the draft horse seem a practicable
possibility, and now with the abrupt relaxation of this
stringency, the change in appearance of the traffic upon the
world's roads was instantaneous. In three years the frightful
armoured monsters that had hooted and smoked and thundered about
the world for four awful decades were swept away to the dealers
in old metal, and the highways thronged with light and clean and
shimmering shapes of silvered steel. At the same time a new
impetus was given to aviation by the relatively enormous power
for weight of the atomic engine, it was at last possible to add
Redmayne's ingenious helicopter ascent and descent engine to the
vertical propeller that had hitherto been the sole driving force
of the aeroplane without overweighting the machine, and men found
themselves possessed of an instrument of flight that could hover
or ascend or descend vertically and gently as well as rush wildly
through the air. The last dread of flying vanished. As the
journalists of the time phrased it, this was the epoch of the
Leap into the Air. The new atomic aeroplane became indeed a
mania; every one of means was frantic to possess a thing so
controllable, so secure and so free from the dust and danger of
the road, and in France alone in the year 1943 thirty thousand of
these new aeroplanes were manufactured and licensed, and soared
humming softly into the sky.
And with an equal speed atomic engines of various types invaded
industriali
sm. The railways paid enormous premiums for priority
in the delivery of atomic traction engines, atomic smelting was
embarked upon so eagerly as to lead to a number of disastrous
explosions due to inexperienced handling of the new power, and
the revolutionary cheapening of both materials and electricity
made the entire reconstruction of domestic buildings a matter
merely dependent upon a reorganisation of the methods of the
builder and the house-furnisher. Viewed from the side of the new
power and from the point of view of those who financed and
manufactured the new engines and material it required the age of
the Leap into the Air was one of astonishing prosperity.
Patent-holding companies were presently paying dividends of five
or six hundred per cent. and enormous fortunes were made and
fantastic wages earned by all who were concerned in the new
developments. This prosperity was not a little enhanced by the
fact that in both the Dass-Tata and Holsten-Roberts engines one
of the recoverable waste products was gold-the former
disintegrated dust of bismuth and the latter dust of lead-and
that this new supply of gold led quite naturally to a rise in
prices throughout the world.
This spectacle of feverish enterprise was productivity, this
crowding flight of happy and fortunate rich people-every great
city was as if a crawling ant-hill had suddenly taken wing-was
the bright side of the opening phase of the new epoch in human
history. Beneath that brightness was a gathering darkness, a
deepening dismay. If there was a vast development of production
there was also a huge destruction of values. These glaring
factories working night and day, these glittering new vehicles
swinging noiselessly along the roads, these flights of
dragon-flies that swooped and soared and circled in the air, were
indeed no more than the brightnesses of lamps and fires that
gleam out when the world sinks towards twilight and the night.
Between these high lights accumulated disaster, social
catastrophe. The coal mines were manifestly doomed to closure at
no very distant date, the vast amount of capital invested in oil
was becoming unsaleable, millions of coal miners, steel workers
upon the old lines, vast swarms of unskilled or under-skilled
labourers in innumerable occupations, were being flung out of
employment by the superior efficiency of the new machinery, the