east as the dawn came on. The Milky Way was visible" target="_blank" title="a.看不见的；无形的">invisible in the
blue, and the lesser stars vanished. The face of the adventurer

at the steering-wheel, darklyvisible ever and again by the oval
greenish glow of the compass face, had something of that firm

beauty which all concentrated purpose gives, and something of the
happiness of an idiot child that has at last got hold of the

matches. His companion, a less imaginative type, sat with his
legs spread wide over the long, coffin-shaped box which contained

in its compartments the three atomic bombs, the new bombs that
would continue to explode indefinitely and which no one so far

had ever seen in action. Hitherto Carolinum, their essential
substance, had been tested only in almost infinitesimal

quantities within steel chambers embedded in lead. Beyond the
thought of great destruction slumbering in the black spheres

between his legs, and a keen resolve to follow out very exactly
the instructions that had been given him, the man's mind was a

blank. His aquiline profile against the starlight expressed
nothing but a profound gloom.

The sky below grew clearer as the Central European capital was
approached.

So far they had been singularly lucky and had been challenged by
no aeroplanes at all. The frontier scouts they must have passed

in the night; probably these were mostly under the clouds; the
world was wide and they had had luck in not coming close to any

soaring sentinel. Their machine was painted a pale gray, that
lay almost invisibly over the cloud levels below. But now the

east was flushing with the near ascent of the sun, Berlin was but
a score of miles ahead, and the luck of the Frenchmen held. By

imperceptible degrees the clouds below dissolved....
Away to the north-eastward, in a cloudless pool of gathering

light and with all its nocturnal illuminations still blazing, was
Berlin. The left finger of the steersman verified roads and open

spaces below upon the mica-covered square of map that was
fastened by his wheel. There in a series of lake-like expansions

was the Havel away to the right; over by those forests must be
Spandau; there the river split about the Potsdam island; and

right ahead was Charlottenburg cleft by a great thoroughfare that
fell like an indicating beam of light straight to the imperial

headquarters. There, plain enough, was the Thiergarten; beyond
rose the imperial palace, and to the right those tall buildings,

those clustering, beflagged, bemasted roofs, must be the offices
in which the Central European staff was housed. It was all coldly

clear and colourless in the dawn.
He looked up suddenly as a humming sound grew out of nothing and

became swiftly louder. Nearly overhead a German aeroplane was
circling down from an immenseheight to challenge him. He made a

gesture with his left arm to the gloomy man behind and then
gripped his little wheel with both hands, crouched over it, and

twisted his neck to look upward. He was attentive, tightly
strung, but quite contemptuous of their ability to hurt him. No

German alive, he was assured, could outfly him, or indeed any one
of the best Frenchmen. He imagined they might strike at him as a

hawk strikes, but they were men coming down out of the bitter
cold up there, in a hungry, spiritless, morning mood; they came

slanting down like a sword swung by a lazy man, and not so
rapidly but that he was able to slip away from under them and get

between them and Berlin. They began challenging him in German
with a megaphone when they were still perhaps a mile away. The

words came to him, rolled up into a mere blob of hoarse sound.
Then, gathering alarm from his grim silence, they gave chase and

swept down, a hundred yards above him perhaps, and a couple of
hundred behind. They were beginning to understand what he was.

He ceased to watch them and concentrated himself on the city
ahead, and for a time the two aeroplanes raced....

A bullet came tearing through the air by him, as though some one
was tearing paper. A second followed. Something tapped the

machine.
It was time to act. The broad avenues, the park, the palaces

below rushed widening out nearer and nearer to them. 'Ready!'
said the steersman.

The gaunt face hardened to grimness, and with both hands the
bomb-thrower lifted the big atomic bomb from the box and steadied

it against the side. It was a black sphere two feet in diameter.
Between its handles was a little celluloid stud, and to this he

bent his head until his lips touched it. Then he had to bite in
order to let the air in upon the inducive. Sure of its

accessibility, he craned his neck over the side of the aeroplane
and judged his pace and distance. Then very quickly he bent

forward, bit the stud, and hoisted the bomb over the side.
'Round,' he whispered inaudibly.

The bomb flashed blinding scarlet in mid-air, and fell, a
descending column of blaze eddying spirally in the midst of a

whirlwind. Both the aeroplanes were tossed like shuttlecocks,
hurled high and sideways and the steersman, with gleaming eyes

and set teeth, fought in great banking curves for a balance. The
gaunt man clung tight with hand and knees; his nostrils dilated,

his teeth biting his lips. He was firmly strapped....
When he could look down again it was like looking down upon the

crater of a small volcano. In the open garden before the
Imperial castle a shuddering star of evil splendour spurted and

poured up smoke and flame towards them like an accusation. They
were too high to distinguish people clearly, or mark the bomb's

effect upon the building until suddenly the facade tottered and
crumbled before the flare as sugar dissolves in water. The man

stared for a moment, showed all his long teeth, and then
staggered into the cramped standing position his straps

permitted, hoisted out and bit another bomb, and sent it down
after its fellow.

The explosion came this time more directly underneath the
aeroplane and shot it upward edgeways. The bomb box tipped to

the point of disgorgement, and the bomb-thrower was pitched
forward upon the third bomb with his face close to its celluloid

stud. He clutched its handles, and with a sudden gust of
determination that the thing should not escape him, bit its stud.

Before he could hurl it over, the monoplane was slipping
sideways. Everything was falling sideways. Instinctively he gave

himself up to gripping, his body holding the bomb in its place.
Then that bomb had exploded also, and steersman, thrower, and

aeroplane were just flying rags and splinters of metal and drops
of moisture in the air, and a third column of fire rushed eddying

down upon the doomed buildings below....
Section 4

Never before in the history of warfare had there been a
continuing explosive; indeed, up to the middle of the twentieth

century the only explosives known were combustibles whose
explosiveness was due entirely to their instantaneousness; and

these atomic bombs which science burst upon the world that night
were strange even to the men who used them. Those used by the

Allies were lumps of pure Carolinum, painted on the outside with
unoxidised cydonator inducive enclosed hermetically in a case of

membranium. A little celluloid stud between the handles by which
the bomb was lifted was arranged so as to be easily torn off and

admit air to the inducive, which at once became active and set up
radio-activity in the outer layer of the Carolinum sphere. This

liberated fresh inducive, and so in a few minutes the whole bomb
was a blazing continualexplosion. The Central European bombs

were the same, except that they were larger and had a more
complicated arrangement for animating the inducive.

Always before in the development of warfare the shells and
rockets fired had been but momentarily explosive, they had gone

off in an instant once for all, and if there was nothing living
or valuable within reach of the concussion and the flying

fragments then they were spent and over. But Carolinum, which
belonged to the beta group of Hyslop's so-called 'suspended

degenerator' elements, once its degenerative process had been
induced, continued a furious radiation of energy and nothing