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The World Set Free-Part12_H. G. WELLS (1866-1946)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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could arrest it. Of all Hyslop's artificial elements, Carolinum

was the most heavily stored with energy and the most dangerous to



make and handle. To this day it remains the most potent

degenerator known. What the earlier twentieth-century chemists



called its half period was seventeen days; that is to say, it

poured out half of the huge store of energy in its great



molecules in the space of seventeen days, the next seventeen

days' emission was a half of that first period's outpouring, and



so on. As with all radio-active substances this Carolinum,

though every seventeen days its power is halved, though



constantly it diminishes towards the imperceptible, is never

entirely exhausted, and to this day the battle-fields and bomb



fields of that frantic time in human history are sprinkled with

radiant matter, and so centres of inconvenient rays.



What happened when the celluloid stud was opened was that the

inducive oxidised and became active. Then the surface of the



Carolinum began to degenerate. This degeneration passed only

slowly into the substance of the bomb. A moment or so after its



explosion began it was still mainly an inert sphere exploding

superficially, a big, inanimate nucleus wrapped in flame and



thunder. Those that were thrown from aeroplanes fell in this

state, they reached the ground still mainly solid, and, melting



soil and rock in their progress, bored into the earth. There, as

more and more of the Carolinum became active, the bomb spread



itself out into a monstrouscavern of fiery energy at the base of

what became very speedily a miniature active volcano. The



Carolinum, unable to disperse, freely drove into and mixed up

with a boiling confusion of molten soil and superheated steam,



and so remained spinningfuriously and maintaining an eruption

that lasted for years or months or weeks according to the size of



the bomb employed and the chances of its dispersal. Once

launched, the bomb was absolutely unapproachable and



uncontrollable until its forces were nearly exhausted, and from

the crater that burst open above it, puffs of heavy incandescent



vapour and fragments of viciously punitive rock and mud,

saturated with Carolinum, and each a centre of scorching and



blistering energy, were flung high and far.

Such was the crowning triumph of military science, the ultimate



explosive that was to give the 'decisive touch' to war....

Section 5



A recent historicalwriter has described the world of that time

as one that 'believed in established words and was invincibly



blind to the obvious in things.' Certainly it seems now that

nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier



twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming

impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not



see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands. Yet

the broad facts must have glared upon any intelligent mind. All



through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the amount of

energy that men were able to command was continually increasing.



Applied to warfare that meant that the power to inflict a blow,

the power to destroy, was continually increasing. There was no



increase whatever in the ability to escape. Every sort of

passive defence, armour, fortifications, and so forth, was being



outmastered by this tremendous increase on the destructive side.

Destruction was becoming so facile that any little body of



malcontents could use it; it was revolutionising the problems of

police and internal rule. Before the last war began it was a



matter of common knowledge that a man could carry about in a

handbag an amount of latentenergy sufficient to wreck half a



city. These facts were before the minds of everybody; the

children in the streets knew them. And yet the world still, as



the Americans used to phrase it, 'fooled around' with the

paraphernalia and pretensions of war.



It is only by realising this profound, this fantasticdivorce




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