The Mouse That Roared

by Leonard Wibberley

  “Do you ever feed the birds, Mr. President?” Dr. Kokintz asked. “A few crumbs and they are quite gay.” He reached for the pocket in which he kept his sandwich.

  The President smiled. “We can feed the birds later,” he replied. “I have brought these gentlemen--you know, of course, the Secretary of Defence and Senator Griffin--so that they can hear about the project. You told me last night it was finished and successful. I want them to know the details. It is hardly necessary to say that nothing that is said here will be repeated.”

  “Ah, yes. The project,” said Dr. Kokintz, releasing his sandwich reluctantly. “Yes. It is done. It is done. That last machine for calculating the navy loaned me, was a great help. With the others it would have taken two years. As it was, it took only a month. Of course, I was a year setting up the problems for the machine to solve. And I had to work in the hope that a machine capable of solving them would be invented. But that is all water under the bridge. Here it is.”

  With some difficulty he pulled his pipe--a massive Oompaul --out of his right-hand pocket and then extricated his copious tobacco pouch. He put the pipe in his mouth and proceeded to open the pouch so that they thought for a second he was going to smoke. But instead he inserted a finger and thumb in the pouch and brought out a dull metal cylinder, not much bigger than a bobbin. He threw it on the desk, and it rolled, with little bits of tobacco clinging to it, towards the President. The latter picked it up, weighed it in his hand, and then put it down again, one eyebrow cocked in interrogation.

  “Enough,” said Kokintz, “to incinerate an area of two million square miles. Perhaps more. You know how we scientists are. We cannot be sure without trying.”

  The other two looked at the little cylinder with mixed curiosity and awe.

  The Secretary of Defence spoke first. He put his three fingers to his lower lip, looking as nervous as a schoolboy asking a question before the whole class, and said, “What is it?”

  “Quadium,” said Kokintz. “A form of hydrogen which has not existed in the universe in billions of years. It is quite impossible to say how long. When I say that it is a form of hydrogen, you must realize that I speak for the layman.” He smiled an apologetic little smile. “It is, let us say, as closely related to the hydrogen one finds in water as man is to the ape. I will not trouble you with the details of the atomic structure. It is extremely involved. The mass difference of the nucleus is the greatest yet achieved.”

  “Mass difference?” queried the Secretary of Defence.

  “That is an indication of the force which binds the nucleus together,” said Senator Griffin, with a touch of superiority. “It is a measure of the power which will be released when the nucleus is split. Right, Doctor?”

  “Yes,” replied Kokintz. “But if we get into the details, you will be either confused or get a wrong impression. With the bomb known as the atom bomb--the plutonium bomb to be more exact--only about one tenth of one per cent of the plutonium employed is converted into energy. With the quadium bomb it will be possible to convert ten per cent of the quadium into energy. And the energy released is far more powerful, unit for unit, than that released with the plutonium bomb.

  “To continue, this form of hydrogen, which, as I said, existed on this earth billions of years ago, is believed to have been the substance which made the earth a flaming planet with a temperature equivalent to perhaps a thousand times that of the surface of the sun. When this quadium had been completely exhausted, converted into denser nuclei, the earth still continued to flame for millions of years until it eventually cooled down, and life was formed on it.

  “It was the quadium, we believe, which first set the fire. There is no quadium on the sun. That has all burned up eons ago. In fact, there is no quadium anywhere that we know of in the whole of space, other than that which is on the desk before you.”

  “You mean nowhere?” asked Senator Griffin. “Nowhere but there,” said Dr. Kokintz, pointing to the tiny cylinder.

  The clock struck the half-hour and the noise of it frightened the blue jays, who fled across the lawn.

  “What will it do?” the President asked, at length.

  Kokintz picked up the container, held it a few inches from his thick glasses, and put it down again with every evidence of loathing.

  “It will do whatever may be the will of man in the way of destruction. It will make of the atomic bomb something comparatively as harmless as a child’s toy pistol. It will give to the nation which possesses it in the form of a bomb the ability to destroy a complete continent. It will, in short, make of war a strictly one-shot affair. Indeed, there is now no foreseeable limit to the power of the explosive we can manufacture from quadium, other than the amount of quadium available. We could, in theory, blow the whole of the North American continent off the face of the earth. Perhaps South America, too.”

  Again there was a silence interrupted only by the plodding, purposeful ticking of the clock. The President looked at it and said, “How long, in point of time, do you think we may be ahead of the others in the discovery of quadium?”

  Kokintz shrugged. “Maybe five years. Maybe only two. Somewhere between there, I would say, depending upon the amount of information which has been leaked to them. I am not myself convinced that the others have even an atomic bomb, although they may have achieved an atomic explosion. However, for safety’s sake, it would be best to assume that they have a workable atomic bomb. That is the first step to a quadium bomb.

  “You know, of course, that there is a limit to the amount of power which can be released with an atomic bomb. The limit is set by the mass of fission material which is used. Only a certain amount will work. More than that, and the bomb will not explode. It is generally agreed that the most powerful atomic bomb that can be built would be the equivalent of 150,000 tons of high explosive, such as T.N.T.”

  He stopped, took off his thick glasses, put them in one of the numerous pockets of his coat and screwed up his eyelids as if his eyes were hurting him. He seemed like a man who was standing in more light than a human being should be called upon to endure. It was as if he were being shrivelled by it. He hunched his shoulders and let his hands dangle before him as if they were lifeless. Then he continued.

  “A deuterium bomb,” he said, “which is the bomb talked of in the newspapers as the hydrogen bomb, or hell bomb, can be made to produce an explosion fifty times as great as that of the most powerful atom bomb. That is to say the equivalent of 7,500,000 tons of T.N.T. Of that we are quite sure. The explosion could be even greater.

  “Then there is the tritium bomb, for which the Press has not yet invented a name. Conservatively a tritium “bomb would release a force equivalent to the spontaneous detonation of more than 22,000,000 tons of T.N.T. It might be a far greater force than that. I am inclined to believe it would. I am talking now, of course, in terms of the use of the same quantity of deuterium and tritium in the bombs.”

  “Tritium bomb?” asked the Secretary of Defence.

  “Also a form of hydrogen,” Kokintz explained. “Like quadium, it does not occur in nature, but existed on the earth during its incandescent period. Lord Rutherford, the British physicist, produced the first samples in 1935. But they were regarded as a mere chemical curiosity--as indeed was deuterium when it was first produced under the name of heavy water. A future for deuterium, not as a bomb, but as an important agent in making dyes fast, was predicted. Of course, in those days, we were concerned with poison gases and flame throwers, rather than new types of explosives.

  “The quadium bomb provides the ultimate weapon. One containing the same amount of quadium as there is in liquid form in that cylinder would have the explosive force equivalent to 100,000,000 tons of T.N.T. But that is a mere figure. A bomb capable of destroying a continent as big as the United States can be produced as readily as one which would destroy merely New York, Washington, Boston and Philadelphia.”

  All the time he had been talking, Dr. Kokintz had remained in the curious hunched, shri
velled stance of a man caught in a blinding searchlight. He relaxed now, quite suddenly, fished his glasses out of his pocket, put them on and smiled at the other three, as if his ordeal was over.

  “You believe it might take the others as long as from two to five years to produce a usable amount of quadium?” asked the President, grimly.

  “I believe so,” said Kokintx. “It is first of all necessary to arrive at the exact structure of the nucleus. The calculations are involved in the extreme--I, of course had the help of the navy calculator. Then there is the designing of the aparatus and the establishing of controls. There is a great deal of radioactivity as the process develops. Two years, I believe, would be a safe estimate. Of course, we must remember that the other side has carried out extensive research into atomic nuclei using cosmic rays instead of cyclotrons. The cosmic ray is far more powerful as an atom-splitting agent than any cyclotrons we have invented. But the splitting process is much slower because of a number of factors. They may have stumbled upon the structure of the quadium atom--whch is the first step towards the creation of the element--but I am inclined to doubt it.”

  “How long after they find how to produce quadium to the development of a quadium bomb?”

  “That I cannot say at all. It depends on too many unknown factors. Theoretically the bomb is quite simple to make. The quadium will not explode until subjected to a temperature of fifty million degrees centigrade. Our atomic bombs achieve that temperature for a hundred billionth of a second, which is sufficient to ignite the quadium. It should not be too hard to make a quadium bomb, placing the quadium in the centre of an atomic bomb. If it is not too hard for us, it should not be too hard for them either. But the atomic bomb, as I said, is the first step. It represents the essential fuse.”

  The President got up, walked to the window and looked out. “Tell me,” he said, with his back to them, “are there any other likely after effects of the explosion, apart from the appalling destruction caused by the fire and light. Any radiation or other things of that nature?”

  “Several rather interesting ones,” replied Kokintz, slowly. “The neutrons released will, without a doubt, attack the nitrogen in the air, splitting the atomic nuclei and producing a substance known as carbon fourteen. The precise characteristics of carbon fourteen are not understood. But the indications are that it is extremely toxic. There is a strong suggestion that it produces sterility, not only in mammals, but also in the soil itself. If that is so, the soil over which this substance drifts and settles would become quite barren. There is also the probability that carbon fourteen may be a factor in the production of monsters, both in the animal kingdom to which, of course, man belongs, and in the vegetable kingdom as well. Carbon fourteen is a remarkably stable substance. It does not readily disintegrate. Once produced by a quadium-bomb explosion, it would drift about the earth for several centuries, destroying all that it touched.

  “The after effects of the bomb, then, would be much more appalling than the explosion itself?” the President asked.

  “Far worse. With a bomb containing the amount of quadium you have before you, the intense heat created would produce enormous windstorms, sweeping at hurricane force over whole continents and oceans. These windstorms would be sufficient to produce tidal waves and unprecedented damage over the greater part of the world. No one, of course, could live in the path of such a windstorm. They would be torn apart. Then again, much of the heat of these bombs is concentrated downwards to the earth. Volcanic eruptions and earthquakes might follow. It would be like heating a glass globe at one spot. The glass must be expected either to melt, or, if not melt, crack. I do not exaggerate when I say that the effect would be all that could be expected, if the sun were to be placed in contact with the earth’s surface for the space of, say, a hundred billionth of a second.”

  “Nothing could survive,” Senator Griffin said, more to himself than to the others.

  Dr. Kokintz looked sadly at the President. “It has been most interesting work,” he said, “though there have been times when I felt the same compassion for you that Mephistopheles had for Faust. When one is engaged alone, as I have been, in a project of this nature, the very mental isolation from one’s fellows; the impossibility of imparting one vestige of knowledge to them; the increasing and inevitable sense of a godlike power over the mass of humanity, threatens to change the character one builds from childhood.” He smiled a little wryly.

  “I felt at times,” he continued, “that you and all mankind had sold your souls to me for the secret represented by that,” and he pointed to the cylinder of quadium. “Even now I am not convinced that all our souls are not forfeit, or at least in jeopardy, as a result of this work. That is what I mean when I talk of Mephistopheles and Faust.

  “But, Mr. President, I do not want to be Mephistopheles any more. I want to be a human being again. And as a human being, I want to ask you: do not make this bomb. Do not let it be us, we, the Americans, to whom the Old World has looked for so long, who kill off one quarter or one third of the people on this earth and leave the rest and their children for generations after, to face a fate which we ourselves cannot foretell with any certainty.”

  It was not the President who replied, but the Secretary of Defence. He spoke in a clipped, metallic voice, quite different from his normal, hesitant tone.

  “It is not our choice,” he said. “The time is running short. Two to five years you estimate. Perhaps less than that. We have got nowhere with attempts at control, even of the atom bomb. Whoever has the quadium bomb first, has the best chance of survival. This bomb promises world mastery, though of a monstrous kind. The others want mastery, and they prefer a monstrous sort. It is either we who are the masters, or they, and the world, I believe, would prefer it to be us.

  “It is not a role we choose, but one which is forced upon us. And every hour counts. They would never agree not to use such a weapon.”

  “There is no other way? No hope of agreement? No compromise?” Kokintz asked.

  “None,” said the secretary.

  The President picked up the cylinder of quadium and gave it to the scientist, who put it reluctantly in his tobacco pouch.

  “Dr. Kokintz,” the President said, “I understand that though you have lived the greater part of your life in America, you were not born in the United States. Do you mind my asking what was your native land?”

  “You have probably never heard of it,” Kokintz replied, a little surprised. “Indeed, I can scarcely remember it myself. It is a place in the northern foothills of the Alps. A little independent duchy called Grand Fenwick.”

  CHAPTER VI

  The newspapers of May 6 that year blazoned the story that sometime in the near future, on a day and at an hour which was to be kept secret even from the President, a full-scale air raid alarm would be enforced for the whole east coast of the United States. This was not to be a mere howling of sirens clearing traffic and people off the streets for ten minutes, and then an all clear with no one particularly disturbed and half the population unaware that anything untoward had taken place.

  In view of the development of weapons against which no complete defence has yet been devised (the official announcement from the Department of Defence read) it is necessary to bring home to each and every member of the public the need for attending to his individual preservation.

  The duration of the alert will be for twenty-four hours or even longer. During that time no one is to leave whatever place he or she may be in, other than to go to an air-raid shelter. Those in their homes, far from any official shelter, must stay there. Air-raid wardens, with the support of the military establishment, have instructions to see that nobody leaves his or her residence, even to search for children who may be out playing or at school, once the alarm has been sounded. It will not be permitted to leave homes or office buildings to obtain food. Restaurants, groceries, and dairies, in common with other businesses, will be closed down. Extra food should be laid in in advance.

 
Children in school or out playing will be taken to shelters and cared for by the Civil Defence Organization, as will adults in the open at the time of the alert.

  Do not use the telephone. Jamming of lines in case of a real attack might well cause the loss of hundreds of lives through essential calls not being able to get through.

  Do not turn on water faucets. A heavy demand on mains during actual attack could result in firemen being unable to deal with serious fires. Gas must be turned off. Electric current may remain connected so that the public can listen to developments on the radio.

  Cars and buses on the streets at the time of the alert are to be abandoned, and the passengers are to go immediately to the nearest air-raid shelter. Subway trains are to take their passengers to the nearest station and disembark them there. The passengers will remain in the station where emergency feeding arrangements have already been established for them.

  Ships in east coast harbours, capable of doing so, will proceed immediately to sea. Personnel aboard other ships will evacuate their vessels and go to air-raid shelters.

  During the attack, key groups of defence workers, wearing special coverings designed to give them protection from lethal radiation, will undertake special missions. They will visit a number of key buildings in the course of these duties. They are on no account to be impeded or interfered with in any way.

  Then followed a long list of things which people might do to provide for the alert, and at the end the admonition: “This is an exercise in preparing for the preservation of yourself, your community, and your nation. It is essential that you do your part.”

  The warning of the coming alert was broadcast, courtesy of numerous automobile dealers, soap, soup, canned meat, furniture, and other manufacturers, every fifteen minutes twenty-four hours a day for a week. The same warning was given, at the same intervals and courtesy of much the same sponsors, over television. The Broadway regulars chuckled over the quip of a night club comedian that, “This disaster comes to you courtesy of the Cosmopolitan Life Insurance Company.” As the days passed, and the warnings continued through every medium of communication--the Press, the radio, television, the cinema, from the pulpit, and in a host of pronouncements from everyone with the slightest claim to public attention, a mild hysteria began to develop and manifest itself in a series of curious reactions.