difficulty, to ring. Presently they warmed a little to the work,
and we realised what was going on. They were ringing a peal. We
listened with an unbelieving astonishment and looking into each
other's yellow faces.
' "They mean it," said my colleague.
' "But what can they do now?" I asked. "Everything is broken
down…" '
And on that sentence, with an unexpected artistry, Barnet
abruptly ends his story.
Section 6
From the first the new government handled affairs with a certain
greatness of spirit. Indeed, it was inevitable that they should
act greatly. From the first they had to see the round globe as
one problem; it was impossible any longer to deal with it piece
by piece. They had to secure it universally from any fresh
outbreak of atomic destruction, and they had to ensure a
permanent and universal pacification. On this capacity to grasp
and wield the whole round globe their existence depended. There
was no scope for any further performance.
So soon as the seizure of the existing supplies of atomic
ammunition and the apparatus for synthesising Carolinum was
assured, the disbanding or social utilisation of the various
masses of troops still under arms had to be arranged, the
salvation of the year's harvests, and the feeding, housing, and
employment of the drifting millions of homeless people. In
Canada, in South America, and Asiatic Russia there were vast
accumulations of provision that was immovable only because of the
breakdown of the monetary and credit systems. These had to be
brought into the famine districts very speedily if entire
depopulation was to be avoided, and their transportation and the
revival of communications generally absorbed a certain proportion
of the soldiery and more able unemployed. The task of housing
assumed gigantic dimensions, and from building camps the housing
committee of the council speedily passed to constructions of a
more permanent type. They found far less friction than might have
been expected in turning the loose population on their hands to
these things. People were extraordinarily tamed by that year of
suffering and death; they were disillusioned of their traditions,
bereft of once obstinate prejudices; they felt foreign in a
strange world, and ready to follow any confident leadership. The
orders of the new government came with the best of all
credentials, rations. The people everywhere were as easy to
control, one of the old labour experts who had survived until the
new time witnesses, 'as gangs of emigrant workers in a new land.'
And now it was that the social possibilities of the atomic energy
began to appear. The new machinery that had come into existence
before the last wars increased and multiplied, and the council
found itself not only with millions of hands at its disposal but
with power and apparatus that made its first conceptions of the
work it had to do seem pitifully timid. The camps that were
planned in iron and deal were built in stone and brass; the roads
that were to have been mere iron tracks became spacious ways that
insisted upon architecture; the cultivations of foodstuffs that
were to have supplied emergency rations, were presently, with
synthesisers, fertilisers, actinic light, and scientific
direction, in excess of every human need.
The government had begun with the idea of temporarily
reconstituting the social and economic system that had prevailed
before the first coming of the atomic engine, because it was to
this system that the ideas and habits of the great mass of the
world's dispossessed population was adapted. Subsequent
rearrangement it had hoped to leave to its successors-whoever
they might be. But this, it became more and more manifest, was
absolutely impossible. As well might the council have proposed a
revival of slavery. The capitalist system had already been
smashed beyond repair by the onset of limitless gold and energy;
it fell to pieces at the first endeavour to stand it up again.
Already before the war half of the industrial class had been out
of work, the attempt to put them back into wages employment on
the old lines was futile from the outset-the absolute shattering
of the currency system alone would have been sufficient to
prevent that, and it was necessary therefore to take over the
housing, feeding, and clothing of this worldwide multitude
without exacting any return in labour whatever. In a little while
the mere absence of occupation for so great a multitude of people
everywhere became an evident social danger, and the government
was obliged to resort to such devices as simple decorative work
in wood and stone, the manufacture of hand-woven textiles,
fruit-growing, flower-growing, and landscape gardening on a grand
scale to keep the less adaptable out of mischief, and of paying
wages to the younger adults for attendance at schools that would
equip them to use the new atomic machinery… So quite
insensibly the council drifted into a complete reorganisation of
urban and industrial life, and indeed of the entire social
system.
Ideas that are unhampered by political intrigue or financial
considerations have a sweeping way with them, and before a year
was out the records of the council show clearly that it was
rising to its enormous opportunity, and partly through its own
direct control and partly through a series of specific
committees, it was planning a new common social order for the
entire population of the earth. 'There can be no real social
stability or any general human happiness while large areas of the
world and large classes of people are in a phase of civilisation
different from the prevailing mass. It is impossible now to have
great blocks of population misunderstanding the generally
accepted social purpose or at an economic disadvantage to the
rest.' So the council expressed its conception of the problem it
had to solve. The peasant, the field-worker, and all barbaric
cultivators were at an 'economic disadvantage' to the more mobile