8.6 KiB
CHAPTER THE FOURTH. THE NEW PHASE
Section 3
The world on which the council looked did indeed present a task quite sufficiently immense and altogether toourgent for any wanton indulgence in internal dissension. It may be interesting to sketch in a few phrases thecondition of mankind at the close of the period of warring states, in the year of crisis that followed the release ofatomic power. It was a world extraordinarily limited when one measures it by later standards, and it was now in astate of the direst confusion and distress. It must be remembered that at this time men had still to spread into enormous areas of the land surface of theglobe. There were vast mountain wildernesses, forest wildernesses, sandy deserts, and frozen lands. Men stillclung closely to water and arable soil in temperate or sub−tropical climates, they lived abundantly only in rivervalleys, and all their great cities had grown upon large navigable rivers or close to ports upon the sea. Over greatareas even of this suitable land flies and mosquitoes, armed with infection, had so far defeated human invasion,and under their protection the virgin forests remained untouched. Indeed, the whole world even in its mostcrowded districts was filthy with flies and swarming with needless insect life to an extent which is now almostincredible. A population map of the world in 1950 would have followed seashore and river course so closely in its
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darker shading as to give an impression that homo sapiens was an amphibious animal. His roads and railways layalso along the lower contours, only here and there to pierce some mountain barrier or reach some holiday resortdid they clamber above 3000 feet. And across the ocean his traffic passed in definite lines; there were hundreds ofthousands of square miles of ocean no ship ever traversed except by mischance. Into the mysteries of the solid globe under his feet he had not yet pierced for five miles, and it was still not fortyyears since, with a tragic pertinacity, he had clambered to the poles of the earth. The limitless mineral wealth ofthe Arctic and Antarctic circles was still buried beneath vast accumulations of immemorial ice, and the secretriches of the inner zones of the crust were untapped and indeed unsuspected. The higher mountain regions wereknown only to a sprinkling of guide−led climbers and the frequenters of a few gaunt hotels, and the vast rainlessbelts of land that lay across the continental masses, from Gobi to Sahara and along the backbone of America, withtheir perfect air, their daily baths of blazing sunshine, their nights of cool serenity and glowing stars, and theirreservoirs of deep−lying water, were as yet only desolations of fear and death to the common imagination. And now under the shock of the atomic bombs, the great masses of population which had gathered into theenormous dingy town centres of that period were dispossessed and scattered disastrously over the surroundingrural areas. It was as if some brutal force, grown impatient at last at man's blindness, had with the deliberateintention of a rearrangement of population upon more wholesome lines, shaken the world. The great industrialregions and the large cities that had escaped the bombs were, because of their complete economic collapse, inalmost as tragic plight as those that blazed, and the country−side was disordered by a multitude of wandering andlawless strangers. In some parts of the world famine raged, and in many regions there was plague.... The plains ofnorth India, which had become more and more dependent for the general welfare on the railways and that greatsystem of irrigation canals which the malignant section of the patriots had destroyed, were in a state of peculiardistress, whole villages lay dead together, no man heeding, and the very tigers and panthers that preyed upon theemaciated survivors crawled back infected into the jungle to perish. Large areas of China were a prey to brigandbands.... It is a remarkable thing that no complete contemporary account of the explosion of the atomic bombs survives.There are, of course, innumerable allusions and partial records, and it is from these that subsequent ages mustpiece together the image of these devastations. The phenomena, it must be remembered, changed greatly from day to day, and even from hour to hour, as theexploding bomb shifted its position, threw off fragments or came into contact with water or a fresh texture of soil.Barnet, who came within forty miles of Paris early in October, is concerned chiefly with his account of the socialconfusion of the country−side and the problems of his command, but he speaks of heaped cloud masses of steam.'All along the sky to the south−west' and of a red glare beneath these at night. Parts of Paris were still burning, andnumbers of people were camped in the fields even at this distance watching over treasured heaps of salvaged loot.He speaks too of the distant rumbling of the explosion−−'like trains going over iron bridges.' Other descriptions agree with this; they all speak of the 'continuous reverberations,' or of the 'thudding andhammering,' or some such phrase; and they all testify to a huge pall of steam, from which rain would fall suddenlyin torrents and amidst which lightning played. Drawing nearer to Paris an observer would have found the salvagecamps increasing in number and blocking up the villages, and large numbers of people, often starving and ailing,camping under improvised tents because there was no place for them to go. The sky became more and moredensely overcast until at last it blotted out the light of day and left nothing but a dull red glare 'extraordinarilydepressing to the spirit.' In this dull glare, great numbers of people were still living, clinging to their houses and inmany cases subsisting in a state of partial famine upon the produce in their gardens and the stores in the shops ofthe provision dealers. Coming in still closer, the investigator would have reached the police cordon, which was trying to check thedesperate enterprise of those who would return to their homes or rescue their more valuable possessions within
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the 'zone of imminent danger.' That zone was rather arbitrarily defined. If our spectator could have got permission to enter it, he would haveentered also a zone of uproar, a zone of perpetual thunderings, lit by a strange purplish−red light, and quiveringand swaying with the incessant explosion of the radio−active substance. Whole blocks of buildings were alightand burning fiercely, the trembling, ragged flames looking pale and ghastly and attenuated in comparison with thefull−bodied crimson glare beyond. The shells of other edifices already burnt rose, pierced by rows of windowsockets against the red−lit mist. Every step farther would have been as dangerous as a descent within the crater of an active volcano. Thesespinning, boiling bomb centres would shift or break unexpectedly into new regions, great fragments of earth ordrain or masonry suddenly caught by a jet of disruptive force might come flying by the explorer's head, or theground yawn a fiery grave beneath his feet. Few who adventured into these areas of destruction and survivedattempted any repetition of their experiences. There are stories of puffs of luminous, radio−active vapour driftingsometimes scores of miles from the bomb centre and killing and scorching all they overtook. And the firstconflagrations from the Paris centre spread westward half−way to the sea. Moreover, the air in this infernal inner circle of red−lit ruins had a peculiar dryness and a blistering quality, sothat it set up a soreness of the skin and lungs that was very difficult to heal.... Such was the last state of Paris, and such on a larger scale was the condition of affairs in Chicago, and the samefate had overtaken Berlin, Moscow, Tokio, the eastern half of London, Toulon, Kiel, and two hundred andeighteen other centres of population or armament. Each was a flaming centre of radiant destruction that only timecould quench, that indeed in many instances time has still to quench. To this day, though indeed with a constantlydiminishing uproar and vigour, these explosions continue. In the map of nearly every country of the world threeor four or more red circles, a score of miles in diameter, mark the position of the dying atomic bombs and thedeath areas that men have been forced to abandon around them. Within these areas perished museums, cathedrals,palaces, libraries, galleries of masterpieces, and a vast accumulation of human achievement, whose charredremains lie buried, a legacy of curious material that only future generations may hope to examine....