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 immense height 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