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The World Set Free-Part11_H. G. WELLS (1866-1946)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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she pulled herself up so that she could see completely over the

intervening lumps of smashed-up masonry. Her hand touched



something wet, and after one convulsive movement she became

rigid.



It was not a whole man there; it was a piece of a man, the head

and shoulders of a man that trailed down into a ragged darkness



and a pool of shining black....

And even as she stared the mound above her swayed and crumbled,



and a rush of hot water came pouring over her. Then it seemed to

her that she was draggeddownward....



Section 3

When the rather brutish young aviator with the bullet head and



the black hair close-cropped en brosse, who was in charge of the

French special scientific corps, heard presently of this disaster



to the War Control, he was so wanting in imagination in any

sphere but his own, that he laughed. Small matter to him that



Paris was burning. His mother and father and sister lived at

Caudebec; and the only sweetheart he had ever had, and it was



poor love-making then, was a girl in Rouen. He slapped his

second-in-command on the shoulder. 'Now,' he said, 'there's



nothing on earth to stop us going to Berlin and giving them

tit-for-tat.... Strategy and reasons of state--they're over....



Come along, my boy, and we'll just show these old women what we

can do when they let us have our heads.'



He spent five minutes telephoning and then he went out into the

courtyard of the chateau in which he had been installed and



shouted for his automobile. Things would have to move quickly

because there was scarcely an hour and a half before dawn. He



looked at the sky and noted with satisfaction a heavy bank of

clouds athwart the pallid east.



He was a young man of infinite shrewdness, and his material and

aeroplanes were scattered all over the country-side, stuck away



in barns, covered with hay, hidden in woods. A hawk could not

have discovered any of them without coming within reach of a gun.



But that night he only wanted one of the machines, and it was

handy and quite prepared under a tarpaulin between two ricks not



a couple of miles away; he was going to Berlin with that and just

one other man. Two men would be enough for what he meant to



do....

He had in his hands the black complement to all those other gifts



science was urging upon unregenerate mankind, the gift of

destruction, and he was an adventurous rather than a sympathetic



type....

He was a dark young man with something negroid about his gleaming



face. He smiled like one who is favoured and anticipates great

pleasures. There was an exotic richness, a chuckling flavour,



about the voice in which he gave his orders, and he pointed his

remarks with the long finger of a hand that was hairy and



exceptionally big.

'We'll give them tit-for-tat,' he said. 'We'll give them



tit-for-tat. No time to lose, boys....'

And presently over the cloud-banks that lay above Westphalia and



Saxony the swift aeroplane, with its atomic engine as noiseless

as a dancing sunbeam and its phosphorescent gyroscopic compass,



flew like an arrow to the heart of the Central European hosts.

It did not soar very high; it skimmed a few hundred feet above



the banked darknesses of cumulus that hid the world, ready to

plunge at once into their wet obscurities should some hostile



flier range into vision. The tense young steersman divided his

attention between the guiding stars above and the level, tumbled



surfaces of the vapour strata that hid the world below. Over

great spaces those banks lay as even as a frozen lava-flow and



almost as still, and then they were rent by ragged areas of

translucency, pierced by clear chasms, so that dim patches of the



land below gleamed remotely through abysses. Once he saw quite

distinctly the plan of a big railway station outlined in lamps



and signals, and once the flames of a burning rick showing livid

through a boiling drift of smoke on the side of some great hill.



But if the world was masked it was alive with sounds. Up through

that vapour floor came the deep roar of trains, the whistles of



horns of motor-cars, a sound of rifle fire away to the south, and

as he drew near his destination the crowing of cocks....



The sky above the indistinct horizons of this cloud sea was at

first starry and then paler with a light that crept from north to






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