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part of the world. No one, of course, could live in the path of such a windstorm. They would be torn apart. Then again, much of the heat of these bombs is concentrated downwards to the earth. Volcanic eruptions and earthquakes might follow. It would be like heating a glass globe at one spot. The glass must be expected either to melt, or, if not melt, crack. I do not exaggerate when I say that the effect would be all that could be expected, if the sun were to be placed in contact with the earth’s surface for the space of, say, a hundred billionth of a second.”
    “Nothing could survive,” Senator Griffin said, more to himself than to the others.
    Dr. Kokintz looked sadly at the President. “It has been most interesting work,” he said, “though there have been times when I felt the same compassion for you that Mephistopheles had for Faust. When one is engaged alone, as I have been, in a project of this nature, the very mental isolation from one’s fellows; the impossibility of imparting one vestige of knowledge to them; the increasing and inevitable sense of a godlike power over the mass of humanity, threatens to change the character one builds from childhood.” He smiled a little wryly.
    “I felt at times,” he continued, “that you and all mankind had sold your souls to me for the secret represented by that,” and he pointed to the cylinder of quadium. “Even now I am not convinced that all our souls are not forfeit, or at least in jeopardy, as a result of this work. That is what I mean when I talk of Mephistopheles and Faust.
    “But, Mr. President, I do not want to be Mephistopheles any more. I want to be a human being again. And as a human being, I want to ask you: do not make this bomb. Do not let it be us, we, the Americans, to whom the Old World has looked for so long, who kill off one quarter or one third of the people on this earth and leave the rest and their children for generations after, to face a fate which we ourselves cannot foretell with any certainty.”
    It was not the President who replied, but the Secretary of Defence. He spoke in a clipped, metallic voice, quite different from his normal, hesitant tone.
    “It is not our choice,” he said. “The time is running short. Two to five years you estimate. Perhaps less than that. We have got nowhere with attempts at control, even of the atom bomb. Whoever has the quadium bomb first, has the best chance of survival. This bomb promises world mastery, though of a monstrous kind. The others want mastery, and they prefer a monstrous sort. It is either we who are the masters, or they, and the world, I believe, would prefer it to be us.
    “It is not a role we choose, but one which is forced upon us. And every hour counts. They would never agree not to use such a weapon.”
    “There is no other way? No hope of agreement? No compromise?” Kokintz asked.
    “None,” said the secretary.
    The President picked up the cylinder of quadium and gave it to the scientist, who put it reluctantly in his tobacco pouch.
    “Dr. Kokintz,” the President said, “I understand that though you have lived the greater part of your life in America, you were not born in the United States. Do you mind my asking what was your native land?”
    “You have probably never heard of it,” Kokintz replied, a little surprised. “Indeed, I can scarcely remember it myself. It is a place in the northern foothills of the Alps. A little independent duchy called Grand Fenwick.”
     
     

CHAPTER VI
     
    The newspapers of May 6 that year blazoned the story that sometime in the near future, on a day and at an hour which was to be kept secret even from the President, a full-scale air raid alarm would be enforced for the whole east coast of the United States. This was not to be a mere howling of sirens clearing traffic and people off the streets for ten minutes, and then an all clear with no one particularly disturbed and half the population unaware that anything untoward had taken