## CHAPTER THE SECOND. THE LAST WAR

### Section 4

Never before in the history of warfare had there been a continuing explosive; indeed, up to the middle of thetwentieth century the only explosives known were combustibles whose explosiveness was due entirely to theirinstantaneousness; and these atomic bombs which science burst upon the world that night were strange even to themen who used them. Those used by the Allies were lumps of pure Carolinum, painted on the outside withunoxidised cydonator inducive enclosed hermetically in a case of membranium. A little celluloid stud between thehandles by which the bomb was lifted was arranged so as to be easily torn off and admit air to the inducive, whichat once became active and set up radio−activity in the outer layer of the Carolinum sphere. This liberated freshinducive, and so in a few minutes the whole bomb was a blazing continual explosion. The Central Europeanbombs were the same, except that they were larger and had a more complicated arrangement for animating theinducive.
### The World Set Free

### The World Set Free
32


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 theconcussion and the flying fragments then they were spent and over. But Carolinum, which belonged to the betagroup of Hyslop's so−called 'suspended degenerator' elements, once its degenerative process had been induced,continued a furious radiation of energy and nothing could arrest it. Of all Hyslop's artificial elements, Carolinumwas the most heavily stored with energy and the most dangerous to make and handle. To this day it remains themost potent degenerator known. What the earlier twentieth−century chemists called its half period was seventeendays; that is to say, it poured out half of the huge store of energy in its great molecules in the space of seventeendays, the next seventeen days' emission was a half of that first period's outpouring, and so on. As with allradio−active substances this Carolinum, though every seventeen days its power is halved, though constantly itdiminishes towards the imperceptible, is never entirely exhausted, and to this day the battle−fields and bombfields 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 thesurface of the Carolinum began to degenerate. This degeneration passed only slowly into the substance of thebomb. 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, theyreached the ground still mainly solid, and, melting soil and rock in their progress, bored into the earth. There, asmore and more of the Carolinum became active, the bomb spread itself out into a monstrous cavern of fieryenergy 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 remainedspinning furiously and maintaining an eruption that lasted for years or months or weeks according to the size ofthe bomb employed and the chances of its dispersal. Once launched, the bomb was absolutely unapproachable anduncontrollable until its forces were nearly exhausted, and from the crater that burst open above it, puffs of heavyincandescent vapour and fragments of viciously punitive rock and mud, saturated with Carolinum, and each acentre 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' towar....