The Adventure of the Blue Room

by Sydney Fowler

Rich & Cowan
1945

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CONTENTS

1.        SOMETHING ABOUT CATTLE
2.        ADVANTAGES OF A GOOD MEMORY
3.        DIFFICULTIES OF A GREAT PLAN
4.        ULTIMATUM
5.        THE COURAGE OF SILVER LONG
6.        OPINIONS OF THE EXPERTS
7.        THE COURAGE OF SEELEY WHITCOMBE
8.        REX BULLDOZER REACHES EUROPE
9.        BULLDOZER SLEEPS ALONE
10.        RICHTER REQUIRES HELP
11.        COLONEL WAGRAM INVITES
12.        FIRST CASUALTY
13.        SEELEY MAY COME IN
14.        INTERVIEW IN A BLUE ROOM
15.        AFTER A BAFFLING NIGHT
16.        RICHTER WILL RUN NO RISKS
17.        SEELEY IS OUTSIDE THE DOOR
18.        AMELIE SHOULD NOT THINK
19.        FEAR IN BERLIN
20.        SEELEY WILL NOT ESCAPE
21.        GESTAPO WILL TAKE A HAND
22.        AMELIE COMES IN THE NIGHT
23.        ZWEIGLER THINKS DIFFERENTLY
24.        MAINLY CONCERNING A CUP OF COFFEE
25.        GESTAPO IS IN CONTROL
26.        LIVELINESS IN THE NIGHT
27.        LIVELINESS IN THE NIGHT (continued)
28.        LIVELINESS IN THE NIGHT (continued)
29.        UNEXPECTED ATTITUDE OF HERR RICHTER
30.        ANOTHER WEAPON OF WAR
31.        IS IT THE SAME MAN?
32.        ZWEIGLER HAS MUCH TO SAY
33.        ZWEIGLER BECOMES DANGEROUS
34.        THE PRESIDENT APPROVES
35.        MORE FEAR IN BERLIN
36.        ZWEIGLER BECOMES ACTIVE
37.        AMELIE IS NOT SURE
38.        ZWEIGLER PREFERS A FULL NET
39.        WE MAY GUESS, BUT WE DO NOT KNOW
40.        BUT SHOULD WE CALL IT A WAR?

CHAPTER ONE

SOMETHING ABOUT CATTLE

"GOD FORGIVE ME," Edouard Richter said to himself, as he left the white straight-windowed building in the Quai d'Orsay, where the Committee of Public Safety met, and entered his waiting car - "God forgive me, but it will be the best way in the end."

        The expression was no more than an atavism of speech, for it was a June evening of 1990, and Edouard Richter, youngest and most brilliant member of the Committee on which the security, if not the existence, of Europe depended, was not likely to have his mind encumbered by any superstition of the existence of a personal deity.

        But the clear light of science had not yet proved sufficient to overcome the weaknesses of human emotion, or the instabilities of the human will, and the decision from which he had come might well effect the serenity of the man who was primarily responsible for it though those who knew him best would not have understood the particular mental disturbance which his exclamation disclosed, for it arose from a knowledge that was still private to his own mind.

        Yet the decision to which he had listened less than half an hour before was one which might make his name famous as a world-conqueror for long ages to come. It might leave whatever should remain of a victorious Europe offering gifts at his feet. That was if it should succeed, about which he had no doubt whatever. And for itself - what was it but an affair of cattle?

        So greatly, in half a century, had the humanity of science mitigated the old ferocities of war!

        There had been - it is only fair to recognize that - an intervening episode. There had been the Great War. That is the name which is given to every widespread conflict, till the next one obliterates it from the minds of men. This - the war of 1979 - had not been barren of horror. But it had been barren of victory. It had left no post-war problems for the embarrassment of the exhausted belligerents, for those belligerents had ceased to be. When the war ended, two-thirds of Asia was a poisonous waste from which human life had disappeared completely. Ten years after, it was empty still. For the Great Powers that remained - the United States of Europe, the Commonwealth of Englishspeaking nations, and the Latin-American Union - had seen the folly of destroying themselves in a new struggle for its possession, and any suitable agreement had still been beyond the resources of the statesmanship of the world, when this new war had suddenly broken out.

        But this one was to be without the horrors of the older and more barbarous conflicts. With the warning before their eyes of the desolated Asian plains, where a hundred million human corpses had rotted, and where tigers and cobras bred among the ruins of their empty homes, the remaining Great Powers had faced the fact that scientific civilization could not endure such another war. . . .

        The idea of a League of Nations had still survived, though it had moved its locality, reconstructed its constitution, and changed its name.

        The formation of the United States of Europe having rendered Geneva a situation for its deliberations unsatisfactory to the English Commonwealth, it had been decided that Latin-America, as being somewhat weaker than the three other world-Federations (one of which had now disintegrated and disappeared), would be a more suitable location. It had been established at Quetta. There it was to be serene; above the contentions of a fretful world. It was the Council of the Clouds.

        It had faced this problem of conflict, on which the existence of its civilization - it called it the existence of humanity, which was rhetoric rather than a statement of logical consequence - depended. lt had been decided that it would be impracticable to eradicate the instinct for war, or to avert the possibility, however remote, that it would break out again. It had sought therefore to arrive at such rules of conflict as would be generally accepted, and would be likely to be honourably observed. After several years of argument and negotiation, it had formulated a method, and rules of strife to which the Three Great Federations (which the destruction of Asia had left in entire possession of the earth's surface) had affixed their solemn signatures, and which their peoples had approved and acclaimed as providing a sufficient severity of conflict, while removing the probability that a future war would be of an inevitable and universal fatality.

        It was generally recognized that the next war, as had been that which had made a desert of Asia, would be one not of steel or muscle, or of the primitive violence of high explosive, or the crude clumsiness of poison gases which the wind might turn, but of the quiet deadliness of the testtube, the secret processes of the laboratory.

        Each of the three great powers had its research workers whose discoveries were reported, in vague whisperings which their own governments may have encouraged, to be of new and very dreadful kinds. If the folly of war should yet again threaten the foundations of scientific civilization, let it be contested in orderly scientific ways. Let the complainant Group have the first right to let loose any aggressive weapon which did not directly menace the lives of its opponents, and let the scientists of the assaulted lands show their skill in neutralizing its effects. Should they succeed, so that the attack had failed to bring them to the point of submission within three months, then the challenging nation should let loose a counter-attack which should be limited only by the same rule. So in turn might each assail the other, till one should admit defeat. . . .

        If these rules were broken, then the neutrality of the third power should be cast aside, and all the weight of its own strength be put forth against the delinquent, in whatever form, for it would be loosed against those who would have outlawed themselves from the comity of civilization. . . .

        So it had been agreed among the three powers, who had resolved with equal solemnity that nothing would lead them to the folly of further warfare, even though it were restricted by such rules as these. . . . And then, sudden and fierce, the cause of conflict came, and the temper of conflict rose. . . .

        The trouble was that the English Commonwealth had warmed a sea. That, in itself, was no crime. It was near no lands but their own, being that which lay between their peopled territories and the Antarctic continent, which was also theirs. By this act they had enormously increased the supply of certain fish which had become of a high commercial value since the last whale had died. That was all to their own, and the world's, gain.

        But the United States of Europe looked at it in a different way. They complained of a change of wind. To change a wind was a breach of international law. There could be no dispute about that. The Warsaw Convention of 1959 had laid it down in words which were beyond disputation. That had followed the successful experiment by which the genius of Lebrun had brought rain-clouds to the Sahara, and presented the United States of Europe with an enormous fertile plain in Northern Africa, which was now occupied by seven million European colonists. No one had complained about that. It had had no sinister consequence on a large scale, though there had been some unforeseen disturbance to navigation, and a liner had gone down with the loss of a thousand lives.

        But the experiment had raised questions which the Convention had faced, for the future peace of the world. If to change one wind could bring rain to your own, to change another might bring drought to a neighbouring land. It had been solemnly resolved that no nation in future should change a wind without the common consent.

        But the English Federation said that they had not changed a wind. They had done nothing but warm a sea. If a change of aircurrents had followed (which they did not admit) who could blame them for that? If such a principle were allowed, where would it stop? Almost every human activity had some effect on the winds. There were the crops that draw moisture from the air. The dryness of air influenced the direction in which it moved. Must they ask their neighbours' permission before deciding what crops they would sow? It was a self-evident absurdity. They repeated that they had not changed a wind. They had no desire to do so. The air-currents had been well enough as they were. All they had done was to warm a sea.

        The United States of Europe replied that that difference had made a profound disturbance in the great winds of the world. It threatened the climate of Europe in unendurable ways. This was a natural consequence of their action, which the scientists of the Rhodesian Institute should have been able to calculate in advance. Indeed, if their first object had been to change a wind, what more natural method could they have adopted than that of warming a sea?

        The issue had not been one which could be lightly decided, nor on which unemotional logic could be expected from either side. The stake was too great. The change of wind which had been evident for one season, and might be of a constant recurrence, threatened to reduce the fertility of Europe to a precariously low level. On the other hand, the prosperity of the southern portion of the eastern hemisphere was vitally staked upon the new temperature of its antarctic waters.

        What government could ask its citizens to accept privation that another race might enjoy prosperity in larger measure? The English Federation temporized. Could not the combined scientific resources of the world find some method of dealing with the difficulty which would be satisfactory to all? It proposed a conference. The United States of Europe consulted its Committee of Public Safety. Confident in the assurances it received, it rejected the proposal, and declared

war. . . .

        By the new laws, the aggressive party had the first right of attack. It must give fourteen days' notice of the injury which it proposed to inflict upon its opponent, who could use that period for the making of peace if the threat were one which it was not prepared to endure, or which its own scientists were not prepared to resist.

        Now the Committee of Public Safety of the European Federation, which had succeeded the War Offices of the old barbarous times, had met and decided, amongst a selected number of the methods of attack which had been prepared by its members against such an emergency, to adopt that of Herr Edouard Richter in the first instance, for it seemed an exceptional improbability that any antidote to it ravages should be discovered; and, should it fail, they could still try the more terrible expedient of M. Labord. . . . For they had no dread of the intervening attack of the English Federation which they must be prepared to sustain, they having purchased, as they believed, at an enormous and yet trivial price, both the secret plans of their opponents, and the methods which would be sufficient to reduce them to nullity. . . .

        So, in due form, they arranged to notify their opponents of the date and nature of the first assault which would be delivered against them.

CHAPTER TWO

ADVANTAGES OF A GOOD MEMORY

PARIS HAD CHANGED little in the last century. The war that had commenced in 1939 and continued during the larger part of the following decade, having been fought by the crude methods of high explosive, had done much to alter the face of Europe, and to prepare its cities' for the architecture of the following period, but Paris, having escaped damage by the treason or cowardice of those who should have been the inspiration of its resistance, had been subsequently selected by the Council of the new European Federation to be preserved as an example of old-world architecture, furnishing, and social customs.

        It was a decision which French opinion had received with discord, some maintaining that it was an exceptional honour, the Council of Europe having suitably recognized the pre-eminence of its most beautiful city, so preserving an excellence which would become more evident as it would be increasingly contrasted with the utilitarian building of succeeding years; and others regarding it as a more dubious distinction, such as would emphasize for ever the craven policy which had preserved it from the destructions of siege and storm.

        Where some are doubtful and others resolved, the issue will be to those of a settled mind. Paris stood as it was: not merely excused the mania for reconstruction which entailed so much destruction of ancient, lovely, and precious things throughout the rest of the continent, but deliberately preserved in its archaic form. Its crooked streets remained unstraightened: its narrow boulevards unwidened: its hills were not blasted flat. Even the obvious convenience of a central airport was prohibited. Its distinction had become greater in contrast with the utilitarian architecture of a time which had made comfort and security its ignoble gods. It had been left deliberately without land or air protection, having been declared by a charter, to which every government of the whole world had subscribed, to be outside the sphere of any future hostilities. It may have been owing to this fact, though they had other plausible pretexts, that the European Committee of Public Safety had held this secret decisive meeting in its neutral area.

        Now Edouard Richter returned to his unobtrusive but most exclusive hotel in the Boulevard des Italiens, and prepared to make a prompt removal to the Stuttgart Laboratory which he owned and controlled, and the secrets of which made him one of the crownless kings of his day. One of the crownless kings? By the spring of the next year he meant to be more than that. He meant to do, with cold efficiency, that which the blundering Hitler had attempted fifty years before. He might become far more generally feared. He might become more universally hated. He had no occasion to care. For he knew that there would be the vital difference that every man would desire to guard the health of Edouard Richter as sedulously as his own. . . .

        Amelie was alone when he entered. She was stretched on an old-style couch, and was dressed to match the ancient atmosphere of the room. But she was one who would have been beautiful by any standards, at any time, and to whatever period she might have been dressed and groomed.

        "Settled it?" she asked lazily, without raising her eyes to his.

        "Yes. They will try my formula first. The ultimatum will go tonight."

        "Poor beasts!" she said lightly. And then: "I expect we shall be going back?"

        We'll think about dinner now."

        "I never think about dinner without being glad that I wasn't born until after 1952."

        "It must have been a good deal later than that."

        "A fair bit. . . . I expect you know."

        "Not at all. I never burden my mind with any non-essential fact. I know everything about you that is necessary to me."

        "Well, that's something!" she said lightly. There was no real intimacy between them, but there was a bond of mutual interest and dependence which may give an even stronger security than the loyalties of friendship or love. He had given her everything that she had. He promised her more, to the limit of all desires. And they both knew that she had become irreplaceably necessary to him.

        He had searched the world to find her. He was assured that she had the best memory in the world. That memory was now the depository of the results of many secret experiments, of innumerable formulæ as potent as the magic spells of the fairy tales of an older time: things far too dangerous to be committed to the hazards of paper: things which must be stored without other record in his memory and hers. Some which - though he guarded this secret well - had become too numerous and complicated for retention in his own mind, so that, should he require them, he would be entirely dependent upon her. . . .

        Her allusion to 1952 had, of course, been to the great Food Riots which, during that year, had deluged Europe with blood. The trouble had its origin in the rationing system which had been copied from the British Food Office, and had been continued long after it had been abandoned by the land of its conception.

        The British Food Office had entrenched itself strongly during the war which had given it birth. At its conclusion it had urged, with some force of reason, that rationing must be continued in a world which was hungry, and in which shipping was inadequate for all requirements.

        It had then produced elaborate formulæ for what it called 'scientifically balanced' diets for all ages, and all manners of life. It promised its disciples (who, at first, had been numerous and enthusiastic) that, as the food situation eased, the danger of monotony should be avoided by alternative diets, for any of which people of suitable categories could register on giving the three months' notice which difficulties of supply and distribution required. It called this latitude the 'theory of equivalence', and advanced it as evidence of its desire to leave individual freedom undisturbed, so far as might be compatible with the paramount necessity of maintaining national health.

        It required, and obtained, parliamentary sanction for controlling agricultural production, so that no farmer could sow turnips, no market-gardener grow a field of peas, without its licence. It argued, reasonably, that, without this authority, it could not undertake to feed the nation with the rational diet which it considered their health required.

        It was given the right to prosecute people who were so lawlessly indifferent to the requirements of their own health, as defined by the Ministry's expert advisers, that they would exchange items of their rations with people in other categories, so that both would suffer from the unsuitability of what they ate. The difficulties of preventing this pernicious form of health sabotage, especially among members of a family, were recognized to be too great for any but the most drastic penalties to suppress it, and when a young woman, being convicted of bartering the whole of her meat and bacon rations for a month for the family's chocolate, was sentenced to two years' imprisonment, the Press described it as a too lenient sentence, while finding satisfaction in the thought that she would be scientifically fed for some time to come - a reflection which raised the doubt of whether it could be properly described as a punishment at all. . . .

        The climax came when it was disclosed that the Ministry had ordered that the growth of spinach should be increased by 140,000 acres, from which it was readily deduced that the population was to br fed on larger quantities of this reputable herbage during the following year.

        Appreciation of spinach is not universal, and those who dislike it usually do so with emphasis. They proved to be an unexpectedly large, and annoyingly vocal, minority. Liberty of action in Britain had, at this time, been almost entirely eliminated, but considerable freedom of speech remained. In the height of this controversy, an enterprising journalist secured, and photographed, the menu-card which had been issued for a Food Ministry banquet, and then, amid a roar of execration, the Food Ministry went down to its belated grave. The Minister became a viscount, his staff were distributed to other ministries, and a number of wholesale firms recognized that they were likely to pay less income-tax than had become their annual habit.

        But in Europe, where food scarcity had been more acute, and distributional difficulties greater, the plague continued until 1952, by which time it had become an established organization, with vested interests which appeared too strong to be overset. And then, even more suddenly than in England, the storm had broken, and over the same worthy but unpopular vegetable.

        At that time a large proportion of the inhabitants of Europe had become so used to hearing of the imposition of brutal penalties for slight offences, particularly if they were of a political character, that it had been found impossible to maintain public order, especially in Germany, by inflicting sentences of normal leniency, so that it had become a humanitarian custom to deal with most convicts by imposing suspended sentences of gradually diminishing brutality. It had been calculated during the previous year that there were actually over three hundred thousand people in Western Europe who had been sentenced to death, and who were legally liable to be called up for judgment at any time.

        It followed that when a child of ten absolutely refused to eat her ration of spinach, it excited no indignation and little notice when she was sentenced to death, it being added that the sentence would be suspended for six months, and then indefinitely, if it should be reported by the inspecting officer that she had become docile to the orders which she received, as it was assumed that she would.

        But the unexpected happened. The increasingly apprehensive parents lied vainly in assertion that she ate the provided vegetable. The inspector made many calls. He was persuasive. He was patient. He tried threatening. But all was vain. The child, tearlessly stubborn, said, and appeared literally to mean: "I would rather die."

        So a small matter became great. A state cannot afford to be persistently defied by a child of ten. And this child, if its resistance should succeed, would have shown a way by which all the children, at least, if not the adult members of the community, might bring scientific feeding to utter wreck.

        It is useless to impose fines on a child which it cannot pay. It may have no goods which can be seized. You may imprison it, but what if that should have no effect? You cannot imprison all the children of the nation without much resulting disorder, with consequences more disastrous than the overcrowding of cinemas by parents who are having an easy time. The question became serious: should the sentence be executed? As time passed, it became imminent. Suddenly, riot flamed. The premises of a Food Office in Ghent were mobbed. There was an attempt to set them on fire. The international military force (scrupulously called police in the post-war Europe of the midcentury) fired on the mob. But while it was overawed, and the dead and wounded were being cleared from the street, and vans were being filled with arrested men, a warehouse in another part of the city was entered (it was said by some that it had been thrown open to the crowd by the treachery of its own staff), and was looted of so many tons of dates and sugar that it had become a physical impossibility for the Ministry to provide a properly balanced diet over a wide area for the following fortnight - the position being made worse by the fact that distribution had become exactly organized, and large reserves were not held.

        Within forty-eight hours, the example of Ghent had been followed in almost every city of Western Europe. The plundering of food warehouses produced such confusion that law-abiding citizens could no longer be properly fed. Even during the first week of these disorders there was a case in Berlin where slaters, doing open-air work, were issued food containing precisely the same vitamins as was supplied to decorators, whose requirements, as they were engaged upon interior work, could not be identical. Naturally, the decorators struck work and went to lie on the roof.

        For nearly three weeks the Federal Government of Europe struggled against the storm, fortified by the assurance of the food experts that the energy of the rebels must decline rapidly as the confusion of vitamins would increase within them. But, if this were so, its operation was not swift enough to be decisive. There came a time when even the troops were beyond control, declining to throw bombs at those who threw food at them. Amid a general howl of triumph the Food Ministries were swept away. The lives of some thousands of their more prominent or zealous officials were saved by sending them to an Imbeciles' Home, which was prepared for their exclusive reception. It was named Insanity House, as the whole world knew; but the kind President of Europe had given authority to the sign-painter to leave a short space between the second and third letters of the first word, so that it became an assurance to its inmates that they were the sane exceptions to a lunatic world.

        In the disorderly days that followed, the prices of food, after some extreme fluctuations, fell permanently as they had done in England under similar conditions) from the high levels at which the Food Ministry had maintained them; and the people lived or died as their muddled vitamins might allow. . . . Edouard Richter understood very easily when Amelie said that she was glad that she had been born after 1952.

        "Have much trouble?" she asked in the same drawling, detached voice as before, which maintained conversation pleasantly enough but as though she had no personal concern in the matter of which she spoke. Perhaps it was natural - a correct attitude in one who was his hired secretary, in constant companionship only because she was the depository of his mind, into which, at any moment, he might have something further to enter.

        "Not much," he replied. "Betz wanted them to try his contraction formula. Fatal enough, of course. But I told them I knew three ways in which they could settle that, and it would be odd if they couldn't discover one of the three. I told them I would stake my life that they'd find no answer to mine."

        "Yes. . . . I suppose we do."

        "Yes. . . . But they didn't mean that."

        "No. Of course not. . . . It would be awkward if we should both happen to die."

        "Awkward for the rest of the world. But that wouldn't matter to us then."

        "No. I don't see that It would."

        For a moment her dark eyes were lifted to look speculatively at the great scientist whom she was so highly privileged to serve, and to whom she rendered a service few others, if any, could. It was strange how easily most people forgot. Why should they? When you heard something, or read it, the natural thing was to remember. The difficulty - perhaps the impossibility - would have been to forget.

        But she wasn't thinking of that now, as she looked at a man who was not looking at her. Her thought was: 'Suppose he should die, and I live. What would he expect me to do then?'

        But she had the kind of wisdom that knows when silence is best. It was not an eventuality which he would be likely to care to discuss. He might even detect disloyalty in the thought. And he was one whom it would be easy to dread. Especially knowing all of him, and his plans, that had been necessarily confided to her. Perhaps he was to be dreaded all the more because he was, as she well knew, a weak man. But she looked at him, and whatever discretion she might exercise, she was not conscious of any fear. She was too absolutely necessary to him. And when had she been less than loyal at any time, either in word or act?

        Indeed, she might have asked the opposite question: What would he do if she were to die? But, again, silence was best.

        She said: "I've been thinking - - "

        "Yes. About what!" There was surprise in his voice. He did not credit her with capacity for thought. It was something which he did not require her to do. And he considered it to be a scientific certainty that, with her abnormal capacity for remembering, capacity for thought would be proportionately subnormal. And when anyone of his training and traditions applied the adjective 'scientific' to any conclusion, it became a closed issue, concerning which there was nothing more to be thought or said.

        "I've been thinking you'll have to keep quite a lot alive if there's to be much comfort left in the world."

        He answered her seriously, for it was a question which had become the constant preoccupation of his own mind: "It is the most important matter I have to decide now; and it is one which I should have been glad to have more time to consider. I hoped that war wouldn't have come for at least a couple of years yet, and by that time I should have been ready, war or not, to go ahead in my own way."

        "Yes. You don't need a war at all. It's just forcing your hand."

        So it was. Without war, at his own time, he could have brought the civilization of man to an end, or under his control, in his own way. But, now that war had come, he must be first to act, lest he should be himself the victim of some incalculable enemy action, different, but as deadly, as that he himself designed for his fellow men. . . . A waiter bowed at the door. "Madame. . . . Monsieur," he said, "dinner is served."

CHAPTER THREE

DIFFICULTIES OF A GREAT PLAN

THE MAN WHO had little doubt that he would soon be the unquestioned lord of a world reduced to his own measure, and controlled to his own ends, found that he had no power to induce sleep, which declined to come.

        He had sufficient knowledge of his own nature, and that of narcotics, to avoid drug-taking, and, as a rule, being one who worked hard, he slept well.

        But in his mind there was a coward's doubt, which he could not still. Was he great enough to bring this stupendous dream to a good end? By a good end, he meant one which would be for his own comfort and well-being, and would give him supreme power.

        When he had first discovered the virus which would sweep away all mammalian life - unless it should be inoculated with the antidote of which only he and his secretary would know - he had thought of destroying the whole human race, with the exception of a small number of women, thinking vaguely that all the riches of earth would then be his.

        But further thought had shown him the fallacy of this plan. Excepting such forms of wealth as would be already accumulated,

and of durable kinds, he saw that a single man, surrounded by all the riches of earth, would be condemned to a life of toil. After a time, even means of transit would not be maintained without much menial work, and then only in primitive or diminishing forms. Should he save a few horses? He knew little of what service they would require, but he saw easily that they would not feed or water themselves in the winter days. He had once seen a man clip a horse's coat in the spring. He had no desire to do that.

        He was not sufficiently modest, or sufficiently self-analytic, to observe that this desire for the elimination of his fellow men was evidence of subconscious recognition of his own limitations The necessity for a pattern - for an orderly form - so repugnant to Nature, is felt by all finite minds. And, however monstrous his dream, the pattern to which he would naturally work would be very small. A man may have a profound knowledge of physics, and yet be unfit either to govern or guide.

        He did not observe this, but he wished that he had had longer time to ponder, and to resolve. He felt a sense of irritation, as of one who was being unfairly rushed. He would have so little time to decide who should be kept alive, and how their security was to be arranged without their knowledge; or how, if they should be told, it should be made certain that they would not act in ways which would be disastrous to him. Self-interest - the kindred motives of hope and fear - would be sufficient to silence most. But there are some of whom you can never be quite sure.

        He hesitated, as he had done more than once before, over the idea of destroying only the English-speaking Commonwealth and the Latin-American Federation, leaving the Federation of Europe to occupy an empty world. The jealousies which had left the vast barrenness of Asia unoccupied would be swept away. Europe would be the heir of the world. But it would not be easy to arrange, nor sure in its results for himself. He might be blamed, rather than praised, for doing so great a thing without the authority of the Council of Europe. And to do it - to take the precautions which would save the inhabitants of Europe - without premature knowledge of their fate coming to the outside world, would be difficult in several ways. Even as he had planned it to be, there must be a period of danger, when desperation might strike back blindly in ways hard to foresee or avoid.

        He determined that he would commence at once to make a selection of those which it would be politic to preserve, not, at first, resolving on any total figure, but making individual selections, which he would communicate to the safe and secret depository of Amelie's memory as they would come to his own mind.

        On the relief of this resolution, he should have slept, but he had a tumult of thought which he could not still, so that he was glad when the dawn came.

        Delayed by the archaic necessity of driving by car to an airport which was ten miles from the centre of Paris, he yet caught a 'plane which landed him at Stuttgart during the morning hours and before noon he was in the laboratories in which he had done work of recognized brilliance during previous years, and in which he reigned in unquestioned supremacy.

        Here he had much to do, much to direct, so that action must hinder thought. At three in the afternoon he was on the telephone to the European Ambassador at Havana, giving him precise information as to the threatened action which he was to announce to the Premier of the English-speaking Federation before returning to Europe. It might yet be that the threat would be sufficient to secure a last-moment peace; and he was conscious that such a solution, postponing the occasion for decisive action, would have brought him a great relief.

CHAPTER FOUR

ULTIMATUM

WHEN THE GENIUS of King David united, for a brief period, the alien races of Israel and Judea, he observed the impossibility of inducing either of them to accept a capital city in the opposite territory, and so, leaving Hebron and Shechem to equal obscurity, he took Jerusalem from the Jebusites and established a royal city which ad been foreign to both nations before. The United States and the British Dominions had resolved contending jealousies in a similar, though less violent, manner, by building a new capital city upon land which was neutralized for that purpose.

        When the Commonwealth of the English-speaking Nations was formed, it became evident that the greatest difficulty would not be the English royal family, which the majority of Americans were rather keen to accept, but the selection of a city in which the Council of the Federation would deliberate, and which would have the prestige and prosperity which must belong to the centre of so vast a power.

        It was clear that Washington and London would be equally impossible. The suggestion of Capetown had a partial popularity, which was not sufficient to sustain it.

        In the end, three places were selected, none of which was upon the territory of a major member of the proposed union, and the final choice was made by a solemn lottery, safeguarded by many ingenuities against the possibility of fraud.

        By this means, Havana became the capital city of one of the Four Powers of the world, and that which was, by many standards of judgement, even after the defection of India (so fatal to its own prosperity and independence), held to be the first of the four.

        The island of Cuba, which might have hesitated as to whether it would have allied itself to the Latin American Union, to which it had affinities of race and language which warred against its economic relations with the United States, swallowed the glittering bait, and became the official centre of the English-speaking world. The Capitol of Havana, a magnificent building which had been erected at the beginning of the century during Machado's presidency, became the headquarters of the new government, until an even more imposing edifice could be built upon higher ground in a fold of the wooded hills.

        By the period with which we are now dealing, the population had become so numerous, and its prosperity so great, that the whole island was thought of throughout the world as a huge Havana, and the name of Cuba was seldom heard.

        The old Capitol was now occupied by the Interfederal Ministry, which was in charge of Lord Seeley Whitcombe, a New Zealander by birth, whose immaculate dress and somewhat Etonian manner of speech concealed the fact that he was an anxious and worried man.

        He had spoken against the sea-warming project with eloquent earnestness less than a year before, in the House of Lords, which now met in the West Indian island, and of which he was a distinguished member (the retention and reconstitution of that House had been due, oddly though, almost entirely to feeling in the American States), and he was still striving, with some temporary loss of popularity, to avert the consequences of the policy which he had been unable to change.

        It was a full hour before noon when he gave audience to the European ambassador, but he had already received the plenipotentiary of the Latin-American Union, and had a long conference with his own Premier, Mr. Silver Long.

        Mr. Long came from Oregon, where he had shown conspicuous ability as a lumberjack in his early days. But his dexterity with an axe had been far less than that with which he had felled his way through political thickets to the eminence which he now held. There was, and would be, no lordly title for him. He was fond of saying that he was a plain man; and his native land, which now contributed numerous titled members to the House of Lords, had, with a pleasant inconsistency, idolized him for this contemptuous attitude.

        Lord Whitcombe had found some welcome encouragement in Mr. Long's shrewd and sturdy optimism.

        "It doesn't much matter what you say" had been his parting remark, "so long as you make that dirty skunk understand that we don't care a hoot for anything they can do, and hell it's our turn we shall give them hell."

        He might have spoken differently to different man, but his confidence in Lord Whitcombe was not great. He thought that he lacked the backbone that the occasion required, in which he did less than justice to a man whose tenacity was no less than his, though it might be demonstrated in different ways.

        Now the 'dirty skunk' was announced, and Seeley Whitcombe rose to receive the representative of the United States of Europe.

        Herr Bocker was a small neat man, not typical in appearance of the Hanover from which he came. He could be genial in manner during hours of relaxation, but it is improbable that he ever failed in watchfulness over the words which left his mouth with such careful economy. His official manner was precise, formal, reserved.

        An invisible onlooker might have thought that neither of the two men who now confronted one another was great enough for the stupendous drama in which they had been cast for such leading parts. But is that not an observation of almost universal application? It is seldom indeed that the cross-chances of human destiny combine the great moment with the great man, who is unlikely to emerge with punctuality of time and place from the million mediocrities among whom it is most probable that he will have been obscurely born. And this improbability of emergence had been increased by the standardization of life which had been the social characteristic of a century which had abolished freedom of action, and discouraged individuality. It was a condition of life in which it had become harder to sink, and therefore harder to rise.

        With no consciousness of either absolute or relative inferiority, Herr Bocker said: "My instructions are to make what must, I regret to say, be a final enquiry as to whether your Government will secure the peace of the world by ceasing to warm the eastern currents of the Antarctic Ocean."

        "We would do much," Lord Whitcombe replied, "for the world's peace, which we have no purpose to break, but the eastern part of the Antarctic Ocean is our domestic concern, over which even the LatinAmerican Union makes no claim, and still less can the United States of Europe assert a right of control. I cannot think that your Government will convulse the world, to its own ruin, in such a cause."

        "My Government," Herr Bocker replied, "has no such intention. It is your own ruin which it would mercifully avert, if you would listen to either reason or right. But unless you will do so now, I must give you the notice which our treaty requires, for it is our intention to proceed in every way (as it may be needless to mention) in accordance with international law.

        "The treaty you mention," Lord Whitcombe - who would not have trusted either Herr Bocker or his Government with a nickel coin - replied smoothly, "requires not only that you shall give fourteen days' notice before commencing any operation of war, but that you shall disclose the nature and intended consequences of that operation, from which you shall not deviate, and which you shall in no way exceed."

        "I have a written memorandum here by which those conditions will be covered, and it is one which may incline you to the more conciliatory attitude which the position requires."

        As Herr Bocker said this, he handed over a folded paper, which Lord Whitcombe opened, and at which he glanced, while endeavouring, with a politician's long-practised ease, to control his expression to that which he considered appropriate to the event.

        He laid it down with a gesture of the hand which seemed to wave it contemptuously away. "We can easily deal with that," he said casually.

        "You will find that that will be wholly beyond your power. . . . I need not remind you that, under the terms of the treaty, you must endure the consequences of your own obduracy lor a period of three months, during which you will make no reprisal at all."

        "We shall have no occasion for haste," Lord Whitcombe replied, with the same complacency as before. "But there is a warning which I must ask you to convey to your own Government, which it will be well for them to consider before they commence that which they may find themselves unable to stay.

        "They must not rashly conclude that, if they should fail in this attack upon us (which you can assure them that they most certainly will), they will then be able to retire from a conflict which they have been sole to provoke. We may decline to consider peace until we have given them such chastisement as the world will not forget for a million years."

        "I must take exception," Herr Bocker replied, with characteristic precision, "to the implication your words convey. The provocation was yours, and we are being forced to engage in defensive war. But, beyond that, I must add that it is a war which we should not begin, even under the provocation we have received, if we were not entirely sure of what its issue will be."

        "Then," Lord Whitcombe said, with more of dignity than he would often show, "there is no more which it will be useful to say."

        "There is nothing except to urge upon you the wisdom of giving way while there is yet time; and to state that I will wait upon you at the same hour on the fourteenth day for your final reply."

        Lord Whitcombe made no further comment. He walked with the ambassador to the door, which he opened for him, without shaking hands, and in a manner which left Herr Bocker in some doubt of whether he had been shown an exceptional courtesy or kicked into the street.

        But it was a point upon which he was not greatly concerned. He was convinced that his Government would not have issued such an ultimatum had they not been confident that they had the game in their own hands. He thought it would not be long before he would be interviewing Seeley Whitcombe to find him in a less ambiguous mood. . . . It might even be that the threat which he had conveyed would be sufficient to bring submission. He dined alone with his staff, who found his spirits, his dry occasional jests, and the dinner, to be equally good.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE COURAGE OF SILVER LONG

AFTER closing the door upon the European ambassador, Lord Whitcombe proceeded at once to wait upon Mr. Long, and these two gentlemen were joined in conference almost immediately by Sir Leslie Monk, the Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries (a quaint-sounding combination of offices inherited from the traditions of British Governments), who, in his Fisheries capacity, may be held to have had a special responsibility for the trouble which had arisen, and, as Minister for Agriculture, a particular interest in the threatened reprisal.

        This threat was set out with menacing exactitude in the document which Herr Bocker had delivered, and which now lay before them.

        It said that, on the morning of the fifteenth day, unless terms of peace should have been previously concluded, a wasting sickness would be observed among the cattle of Canada, such as would end in speedy and certain death, and that the plague spreading downward from the Arctic regions, would, within six days, have reached the northern border of Mexico. (That country, being a member of the Latin-American Union, would not, of course, be affected.) It would then spread through the West Indian Islands, cross the Atlantic to extend its blight throughout central and southern Africa, and then, through Madagascar, by way of the great East Indian Islands (which had remained outside the destruction which had desolated the Asian mainland, and were populated and prosperous members of the English-speaking Commonwealth) to Australia and New Zealand, which would be reached before the end of the same month.

        Within a week of its appearance in any locality, the blight would spread to other forms of mammalian life, which would be subject, though in some cases more slowly, to equally certain destruction. Only the human race (as the treaty required), together with birds, reptiles, and insects, would remain immune.

        There was a concluding warning that the curse would not be temporary but continuous. To import fresh stock at any subsequent period would be wasted effort. It would be geographical in its operation, and permanent in its results.

        The three who were considering this sinister proposition had a common aspect, though Mr. Silver Long had not lost his pugnacity. They looked perturbed and puzzled.

        The Premier said: "It sounds cock-eyed to me. How could you set A geographical limit to such a plague? I shouldn't be surprised if they think they can catch us out with a good bluff. They think, if they threaten some impossible thing, our scientists won't be able to say that they know how to deal with it, and then we shall just give way. . . . It's as likely as not that they mean to give way themselves at the last moment, if they can't bounce us into lying flat."

        He looked at Sir Leslie Monk as he spoke, for it was a matter on which his opinion would have exceptional weight. Sir Leslie was an elderly, rotund man, whose health was not good. He had held office in succeeding governments as an expert rather than a politician. He had begun life as a veterinary surgeon. He was reputed not only for brilliance in his own profession, but as the first authority in the world on climates, soils, and manures. Now his hand on the table was trembling weakly, and he breathed heavily as he gave an inconclusive reply: I don't know what to think about that. They've got some clever men in Berlin. And there's that Stuttgart fellow - it'll be his idea, more likely than not. We ought to get Murchison's opinion before we decide anything."

        "We can't go to him direct," the Premier said. "Conroy'd have a fit. We'll have to do it through the Institute in the usual way."

        "That oughtn't to mean any real block," Seeley suggested. "They'll all be sitting up taking notice now. . . . I suppose we've got to let this loose to the Press?"

        It was a point on which the Premier's decision was already made. "I've called the Cabinet," he said, "for one-thirty, and the House meets at two. You know that. The Cabinet's got to see it first. But it's not a thing we can hold back. And if we shouldn't make it public at once, Berlin probably would."

        "You won't go into secret session?"

        "No. Just the contrary. We'll have the proceedings in the House broadcast direct. That'll make Linkwater toe the line, if anything will."

        He added, seeing the doubt in Seeley Whitcombe's eyes, which provoked him to his more truculent manner:

        "I'll start by reading this dirty screed to the House, and then everyone'll know where we are."

        He spoke with a contagious confidence, and the doubt receded from Seeley's eyes. "I dare say," he agreed, "it'll be the best way."

        It was a characteristic decision, showing the quality of audacious courage which the opponents of Silver Long had had past occasions to dread. If anything would produce the bold parliamentary front, and the unity of national spirit which he considered that the moment required, it would be the knowledge that every spoken word would be heard, not only through their own world wide Commonwealth, but in enemy and neutral lands. And it would be a procedure of additional significance because it was not the common practice to allow a direct broadcast of parliamentary debates, except on opening and other formal occasions, the rule being for reports for broadcasting to be submitted to the Speaker, and subjected to what might be no more than the formality of his approval, before they would reach the ears of the outer world. 'And,' the Premier thought, with a satisfaction which, even at that moment, brought a smile to his lips, 'it sure will make Linkwater mad.'

        His thought was interrupted by Sir Leslie's: "Well, we've got fourteen days. We've got to think out what we can do "

        "We've got fourteen days and three months," he answered sharply. "And then we've got to do something that'll make them wish they'd never been born."

        "You feel sure," Whitcombe asked, "that they'll keep the rules of the game?"

        "I'm not sure of anything. But if they don't they'll have to be darned quick at any monkey business they think they'll try. They'll have Mendoza watching them like a cat, and he won't lose a second in using every card he's got in a nasty pack. . . . And if they don't wipe us out about as soon as a clock's tick, they'll be smelling brimstone from us."

        Mendoza was the President of the Latin-American Union. As the neutral member of the three Great Powers, it had the treaty obligation to attack, without an instant's delay, and with every possible weapon, either of the belligerents who should fail to wage the conflict under the restrictive covenants to which they had all subscribed. The knowledge that the whole world was acquainted with disintegrating agencies of a potency before which the existing civilization of the human race, if not its existence, must be swept away, with the object lesson of the silent desolation of the oldest and greatest continent, the inhabitants of which had settled their internal differences in the peace of mutual destruction, might well be sufficient to restrain the rulers of the United States of Europe from a course of action which would bring instant and annihilating retribution upon itself.

        It made it particularly unlikely that it would engage in any limited violation or excess of the agreed conditions of war. If it should deviate from them at all, it must be in the hope that it could bring both its opponents and the neutral power to such swift destruction as would allow them no time for retaliation.

        It was not wonderful, in these circumstances, that the Latin-American Union wars regarding the threatened conflict with wary anxiety, or that its preparations for intervention were fully made. Yet its ambassador, when Lord Whitcombe had received him during the earlier morning, had spoken words of encouragement rather than counselled restraint to one who, he knew, had he controlled the decision, would have been disposed to a peaceful settlement of the dispute; and this attitude may have done something to harden that of Lord Whitcombe, when he had confronted Herr Bocker as representative of the British race.

        "It is not," Del Littori had said - in his pleasant, temperate manner, which would have given a sound of plausibility to extreme opinions (such as he would be unlikely to utter) - "it is not that we welcome what you have done, which may even be of some disadvantage to us, of which it is too soon to say, but we have so deep a distrust of those who now rule from Berlin that we feel that there may be some relief in having the issue determined as to what, within the limits of law, they may be able to do, and whether they may have the will to go beyond that which we have some confidence that we could counter in a way which would be their end."

        "Which," Lord Whitcombe had answered boldly, being both encouraged by Del Littori's friendly confidence, and led into unusual freedom of speech by the excitement the crisis brought, "you might not be unwilling to see?"

        The ambassador had hesitated, and then, judgment supporting inclination, had replied with the frankness which he felt that the position allowed.

        "Our relations with Europe are of normal friendliness, and we wish no ill to the inhabitants of that continent and its adjoining settlements. We desire peace - peace for all, and security for ourselves.

        "But our President has had long-standing doubts of whether such a sense of security can ever be felt while the European Federation endures, and is so largely controlled by men of Germanic blood.

        "At the conclusion of the first war of this century, the conquerors of Germany drew its claws, but allowed them to grow again, with consequences at which no one could reasonably be surprised.

        "After the second, they took precautions of a less transient nature, but they allowed the Germanic tribes to remain in their own territories, and without even the elementary precaution of settling others of different dispositions among them in numerical majority, so that succeeding generations might have been modified in type. For the time, their powers of evil were checked, but the stock and its instincts remained.

        "It is in direct consequence of that policy that, half a century later, we are confronted with this difference, that, while we have taken no side in the dispute, and while our interests are rather with them than you, we have no fear that you will do anything contrary to the pledges which you have given, or treacherously hostile to us, but we have no such confidence in them.

        "I confess that while, unless our own existence were directly at stake, we would do nothing to bring about so great a calamity, if we should see Europe an uninhabited desert, from the Urals to the North Sea, we should feel a confidence in the future of the human race which is lacking now."

        It was with this assurance of the friendly attitude, or even the potential support, of the Latin-American Federation - a relatively more powerful combination than it would have been in the earlier part of the century, owing to an enormous growth of population and development of natural resources throughout Central and South America (which had included the draining of the huge Amazonian swamps, and the discovery of mineral deposits which they had covered from the days when the Andes had been lapped by Atlantic tides) and with the knowledge that he had the support of a very resolute Premier, that Lord Whitcombe had met the European ambassador at the interview which was described in a previous chapter.

CHAPTER SIX

OPINIONS OF THE EXPERTS

IT was shortly before noon on the following day when Mr. Silver Long summoned his ministers of Agriculture and of Interfederal Affairs, to consider with them the reports of the scientific experts on whose abilities, replacing the obsolete activities of aerial, naval, or military forces, the Commonwealth must now rely, if not for its existence, at least that it should not suffer a devastating calamity at the hands of its truculent foe.

        So far, he had had the satisfaction of being able to feel that he had handled the situation well.

        He had found that his policy of parliamentary publicity had been justified by its results. He could recall with an inward chuckle the angry look and the muttered curse with which the Leader of the Opposition had heard his decision that the debate should be broadcast to a listening world, after which Mr. Linkwater had risen, and given, in his silkiest tone, assurance of his approval of this procedure, of his unequivocal support of the Government in an hour of national crisis, and of his impregnable confidence in the ability of the technical departments concerned to nullify whatever evils might be intended against the welfare of the Commonwealth.

        Mr. Long had then read the ultimatum, and had added, with the brevity which distinguished him among verboser colleagues: "Such is the threat which has been made against us. It would be obviously inappropriate at this stage for me to make any comment upon it, or to give any indication, either of the measures which we may take to resist it, or of the far deadlier counter-attack which, in due season, we shall announce to our anxious foes." He had quoted the text: "Let not him who putteth on his armour boast himself as he who taketh it off," in a manner which had made it no less a challenge to their enemies than a word of warning against over-confidence to themselves; and he had ended the short speech amidst delirious cheers by declaring: "It will be a war which the European Federation has begun, but which it will be our part to end."

        Neither the speech nor its reception could have given encouragement to Berlin, especially if (as he was disposed to hope, if not to believe) there had been the intention there of frightening the Commonwealth to submission with a threat which might be beyond possibility of execution; and its support front the House, and afterwards from the Press, had shown that the whole Commonwealth was united and resolute in his support.

        A natural result of the prompt publication of the ultimatum had been that several sacks of radiograms had already been received, proposing measures or devices to combat the threatened scourge. But these would take time to examine. They must go to the Institute of Research. He was not yet concerned with them.

        It was the reports of Professors Conroy and Murchison, which he had requested the institute to let him have before noon, which he had asked his colleagues to join him in considering. Apart from Sir Leslie, these two professors were the leading experts on mammalian infections on whom he must now rely. They had had nearly twenty-four hours in which to consider the possibility of the threat being genuine, and the means of resisting it successfully. It was of the first importance to learn what their conclusions were, and to have Sir Leslie Monk's opinions thereon.

        When the three ministers met, these reports had not arrived, and it was during the brief interval of waiting that Seeley Whitcombe said:

        "By the way, did you notice that the ultimatum didn't mention Great Britain or Ireland?"

        "Yes. Do you attach any importance to that?"

        "It seemed queer to me."

        "So it was. But it may have been no more than a recognition, unintentional or spiteful, of their geographical insignificance. Berlin may mean us to understand that they'll just take them en passant on the first day."

        "You don't think Blake could possibly have double-crossed us in any way?"

        "No. How could he? Besides, it's incredible. We know Blake. . . . It may be that they're leaving Great Britain out because it's so near to Europe, and its omission saves them from some danger, or preventive measures which would be more trouble than its inclusion would be worth while to them. Anyhow, so it is. We shall soon know. . . . Thank you, Anderson. . . . Yes, you d better stay. I may want you to take something down."

        The last words were to his private secretary, who had entered with the expected reports.

        Mr. Long opened one of them. His eyes glanced down it rapidly. He could hardly be said to have read it. He passed it over to Sir Leslie with tho remark: "Convoy's a wash-out. I hope Murchison's done better than that."

        His inspection of the second report was rather longer, but it appeared to give him no greater satisfaction. He laughed shortly: "Murchison seems to think that it will end in us and the insects getting on quite nicely together. If these are the best men we've got, we'd better put our muzzle between our paws and flap our tail on the ground. I expect that's about how it looks to you?"

        He spoke to Sir Leslie Monk, who answered reasonably: "I'd better see the report first, but I don't see how we can do much till we've got more to go on than we have now."

        "Then you're the third, if you think that. To my mind it makes the whole thing look more like a bluff than it did before."

        "I doubt whether it's that. Richter's known to have been working on cattle infections for many years. And he's a clever devil. It was he, you'll remember, who wiped out foot-and-mouth disease, like sponging a slate. That must have been seven years ago, and if he's been on the same track ever since - - ""

        "Well, we've still got six days to find out whether there are any brains on our side."

        While they spoke thus, Seeley Whitcombe was quietly reading the reports, from which he saw that there was little comfort to come. Professor Conroy said that there was no known virus, or other infective agency, which had the potency or other qualities indicated by the terms of the ultimatum and he could not profess to identify it.

        But he pointed out that, if Professor Richter had made such a discovery, its consequences could not have been the subject of extensive experiment or observation, which it would have been impossible to conceal, and he deduced that these effects must be matters of logical induction rather than demonstrated certainty, and there had been several instances during the past half-century when the danger of relying upon such inductions had been demonstrated.

        He dwelt on the obvious fact that the proposed geographical limitation of so potent a plague, and the assurance that the human race, alone among mammals, would remain unaffected, indicated confidence in an extraordinary measure of control over the mysterious agency; but he felt that there must be less than absolute reliance upon the ability of those who would put it into operation to secure these limitations, both because of the absence of adequate experimental research already mentioned, and (especially as regarding the immunity of mankind) because the comparative slowness with which animals other than cattle were to be infected indicated a virus which could gradually adapt itself to overcome variations of resistance.

        He concluded by suggesting that preparations should be made in districts where the plague was first threatened to combat it by all known means of anti-virus treatment, from the comparative results of which much might be learned; and he proposed to include some which had fallen into disuse, owing to the elimination of the diseases which they had been designed to combat. . . .

        The first paragraphs of Professor Murchison's report were very similar to those which completed that of Professor Conroy. He advocated identical measures, while appearing to have little confidence in their adequacy. He expressed a somewhat bolder doubt as to whether the threats which had been made did not go far beyond the possibilities of accomplishment. And then, having dealt with these aspects of the subject in easy brevity, he went on, at much greater length, to discuss and depreciate the adverse effects which would follow the elimination of the mammalian population of the Englishspeaking world.

        He had a persuasive style, and as he developed his arguments it might well have appeared to a receptive, non-analytical reader that the threatened destruction was of no more than minor importance, even if it might not be found to have some compensating advantages.

        Comparatively, if not absolutely, the learned professor certainly regarded it with something approaching equanimity. For suppose it had been insects which were to perish? Or even earthworms? He quoted from that ancient record of scientific experiment, Vegetable Mould (Darwin), to suggest how incalculably serious such an elimination might be.

        He showed that a general destruction of insects must result in profound natural disturbances, such as might leave the earth (or such parts of it as should experience the plague) unfit for the sustaining of human life. There would be few forms of vegetable or arboreal life which would continue to propagate. Only plants which were independent of insect intervention would continue. Many - almost all - forms of bird life would disappear for lack of essential foods. There would be further consequences, sinister in their implications, and bewildering in their complexity. The elimination of malaria, and a few other insect-borne diseases, would be a comparative triviality. He concluded that the destruction of insect life would be a calamity which only that of bacteria could exceed.

        Even the destruction of birds might have proved to be a much greater disaster, for many forms of insect life would be left thereby to such unchecked increases as must lead to a variety of desolations and plagues, the full horrors of which imagination might fail to forecast.

        But the disappearance of mammals threatened no such disasters, except for their insect parasites. It might involve nothing adverse to the prosperity, and little to the convenience of men. There would be loss of meat, and - which was more serious - milk. But large quantities of meat might be imported, and a larger and perhaps healthier population may be supported on a granivorous, or graminivorous, than upon a carnivorous diet.

        It was also to be observed that some domestic mammals, such as dogs and cats, are parasitic upon mankind, and the community would be relieved of the burden of their support. . . .

        Seeley laid down the reports. He said:

        "Well, if Murchison's right, we ought to give Richter a vote of thanks."

        Silver Long said sharply: "Murchison's just an ass. If he'd got a stable like mine - - "

        Sir Leslie Monk, who was himself fond of racing, though his income did not enable him to emulate the Premier's ownership ventures, said sympathetically: "You might get Fire-eater, and one or two others, sent into Mexico, as a precaution, during the week."

        "Nonsense. What effect do you think it would have if I set such an example as that?"

        "I am afraid," Seeley interposed, "the question is of no practical importance. I heard, just as I was leaving my office, that the Mexican borders have been closed to all transits of livestock, following a protest from Europe. They say that about half a million of live-stock of various kinds had gone over before the barriers were put down."

        "Then, if they can't be moved into the Latin lands, that leaves nowhere but European territory, and they're not likely to go in that direction."

        "On the contrary, I have reports that the movements from Central into European American territories have been going on all across the continent for the last twenty-four hours, with prices falling all the time, till they're scarcely worth taking now."

        "So they summed up what the Institute can do at about the right figure," Silver Long commented grimly. "Well, if it isn't a bluff, we've just got to face it out."

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE COURAGE OF SEELEY WHITCOMBE

"BORISWOOD'S OPINION IS that we might cease to trade with them entirely without violation of the treaty conditions, so long as it should result entirely from private inaction, without Government influence; but if we were to pass adverse legislation of any kind, or even to advise that orders should be diverted to the L.A.F., it might be a breach of our undertaking which would be a technical justification for total war."

        Silver Long looked up from the Attorney-General's report as he said this, and Seeley Whitcombe answered: "That's about how it looked to me. But it leaves it a hell of a headache, all the same. Should we have to keep putting the empty cargo-liners into the air?"

        "I expect we should. Unless they were stopped by consent. We mustn't forget that diplomatic relations will go on as before."

        "It seems a nightmare to me. There are a hundred things about which we shan't know where we are. I'm not sure that it wouldn't be better to have total war from the first. We should know what to expect, and it would be over a lot quicker."

        "Boriswood seems to be of much the same opinion. He thinks that's how it's bound to end; and the way we're placed they'll be the first to begin."

        "It's lucky that the L.A.F.'s friendly to us. That'll make them go slow, if anything will."

        "Yes. But it may only mean that they'll attack both at once if they think they've got anything sufficiently infernal to lay us out."

        "We can't do more than avoid anything that might give them an excuse, and keep wide awake, so that if they do start anything unexpected we shan't be many seconds later than they."

        "Yes," the Premier answered, in the tone of a man whose thoughts are on other things. "I wish we could find some way to scotch it before it starts."

        "You're not thinking of knuckling under?"

        "No. If we should do that, we should have the same trouble over something else, before long. I don't say they haven't got a case against us, of a sort, though I think they're wrong. . . . But there's something deeper than that. Look at the trouble they made over the Asian question! As though we ought to agree that it's to be taken over by Europe alone, just because the lands join, and we have a dividing ocean! There's no give and take about them. There's no goodwill. That's the trouble. There's no goodwill. They'd see the rest of the world dead tomorrow if they could manage it without risk to themselves. I believe that the time's sure to come when it will have to be us or them. And I'm not sure that it's far off now." He added, in the same preoccupied tone as before: "I only wish I could see a way of stopping it now."

        His eyes fell again upon the report he had received from the Attorney-General, which dealt with a score of dubious juridical questions which had been raised by various Government departments affecting the relations which would exist between the belligerent federations if a state of war should exist in a week's time. They were bewildered by lack of precedents, and the anomalies which must be occasioned by a condition of limited war.

        "You can't stop them, unless you give way."

        "No? How about letting them know in advance - know for certain that we can nullify what they'll be trying to do?"

        "Well, of course, if you could do that - - "

        "I was talking to Brewster yesterday evening. I can't blame him. He's done wonders. If it had been any of Betz's devices, he says he knows them, and the answers, by heart. He got a copy of Betz's private diary complete for several weeks, two months ago, and the things it contains just show you what fiends they are. . . . But Richter's a different matter. He says he goes about everywhere with a woman secretary, and he repeats everything confidential to her, and trusts it to her memory, to be written down somewhere, he supposes at the end of the day. She must have a wonderful memory if they keep to that plan, and avoid any previous notes. But, if there be such a record, or if he keep a private diary, it can't be found.

        "He says that when Richter cured the foot-and-mouth disease he was so secretive that even the men in his own laboratories didn't know how it was done. No one dealt with the thing completely, and there were some things he wouldn't let out of his own hands. Even about that it was understood that there were no written records. Richter is reported to have said that if they didn't like his methods he could easily start the disease again, and they could handle it their own way."

        "All this may let Brewster out, but it doesn't seem very helpful to us."

        "I guess it isn't. But you can't do much about putting a thing right till you know what the trouble is. . . . What I was thinking was, mightn't it be worth while to slip over there and see what I could find out for myself?"

        Seeley looked his astonishment. "If you were to do that," he said, "everyone'd think we were throwing our hand in. . . . And, anyway, what could you expect to find out? You'd be watched everywhere, day and night."

        "I didn't mean to go openly."

        "I don't mean to be rude; but it sounds a crazy idea to me."

        "Of course it does. And that's just what makes it so good. . . . Just think, Seeley. Brewster's watched. So's everyone who goes within half a mile of him, more likely than not. He doesn't know but what his 'phone's tapped. No one can. He told me that he's got one spy in Berlin who he found out was taking money from Betz; and the man admitted it, but said he wasn't selling him anything worth knowing. So he paid him extra to go on being paid by Betz, and to fool him; and he isn't sure that Betz isn't paying Rodd - that's the beauty's name - extra to double-cross us over again. There's such a slough of cross-bribery that no one knows whom to trust, or even whom to distrust, which is a lot worse.

        "But one thing's sure. Brewster couldn't start any man off to Berlin or Stuttgart tomorrow - or Paris, for that matter - and be sure that he wouldn't be known and watched, however secret and round-about the procedure might be. The chances are all on the other side. . . . But if I were to start off on my own, with no one knowing but you, and you were to put it about that I should be so much engaged in investigating methods of fighting this coming plague that I couldn't see anyone, or attend to anything else - I'd give you and Simms authorities to deputize for me - I might have beginner's luck, and blue the whole show."

        "I don't see how you'd do anything. I don't see how you'd go about it at all."

        "Well, there might be ways. I might get Richter himself in a quiet spot, and put the fear of God into him - or the fear of death. He's not the sort of man who'd believe in anything but himself, but he'd value life, as we all do. . . . And one thing's certain - no one'll be watching me to see that I don't go over to Europe to spy there. The idea'd never enter into their heads. And that's where I shall get a clear start."

        Seeley Whitcombe saw that the proposal, however fantastic it might sound, was seriously meant, and could not be put aside by a word of protest. He answered: "I doubt whether it would be as simple as that. But say it would Say you could get there without being watched or anyone guessing. How much further on would you be? Men go to Europe every day without the police taking much interest in them. They don't merely know nothing about them. They know enough to be sure that they are harmless men, occupied on their own business affairs. But even if one of them should suddenly get wild enough to make up his mind that he'd try to find out what this secret is, would he have the remotest chance of success? If he should find that he could get within a hundred yards of Richter or his secretary without rousing suspicion, let alone getting solitary interviews with them, I'd say he'd be a most lucky man."

        "That's sense, Seeley. That's what I expected to hear you say. It's long odds. And I'm not kidding myself that it's less than that. But think what a stake it's for!"

        Seeley saw that. For the first time the idea lost its grotesqueness, and became reasonable. So small a chance - but for so much! And with the vision came the idea. It was scarcely a thought. A feeling rather. An abstract recognition of fact. He was hardly aware of being personally concerned as he said: "That's true enough. But you're not the one. I don't want to be rude - I said that before - but it's a thing I could do far better than you, and I shouldn't be missed in the same way.

        It was Silver Long's turn to look surprised. He had not regarded his own proposal as of heroic quality. But he had been accustomed to take risks, to gamble with Fate, from his childhood days. It was that readiness which had brought him to the high position he held: that quality which had fitted him to meet the prevent crisis with a bold, almost jaunty, front. But he had thought Lord Whitcombe to be of another order. Had he been obliged to give truthful evidence, he might have said that he did not regard him as a man of much courage, and even argued that this opinion was supported by Seeley's attitude to the dispute they were facing now. But you never know!

        "I wouldn't think of your doing that," he answered. "It's my idea, and, besides, the whole trouble is of my making rather than yours."

        "I don't think you ought to let that weigh with you at all. The sole question is which would be the better man. You'd be missed here more than I should. And you'd be more liable to be recognized there. I don't suppose you've ever disguised yourself in your life."

        Silver Long recognized that he had heard an argument which he could not meet. Among Lord Whitcombe's versatile abilities, that of amateur acting was not least. though it had only been shown on occasions of private festivities since his college days. Silver Long had regarded it with some unspoken contempt, as an undignified, even unmanly occupation. But he saw that it might now be of essential use. He gave way, with a reluctance which first told him that inclination, as well as judgment, had urged his resolution. He had wanted to go!

        The conversation which followed was too lengthy to be recorded here. Plans were made to prevent suspicion of Seeley's absence being aroused. Many ideas were discussed, and theories exchanged as to how an unprecedented position might develop.

        At present the two great World-powers were at peace. The English-speaking Commonwealth was simply under fourteen days' notice of coming war. There was no irregularity in travelling from one country to the other, and such movements as were taking place were not only of those who had been in their neighbour's land going back to their own. Many were taking advantage of the interval before war should commence to visit the territories of their future enemy for commercial or private reasons. The air-liners were packed with traffic.

        Even after war should commence, it was not clear that such intercourse might not continue, grotesque though it might appear to be. Here, as in a hundred different ways, there was absence of precedent, and it is only when this support to fallible human thought fails that men will realize how essential it is.

        Up to a century ago the habit of war had been general through the world, but its horrors and hardships had been mitigated by many slowly-established conventions, in the nature and extent of which, since the Middle Ages, there had been a gradual, sinister, little-noticed change.

        During the first millennium of the Christian era the ferocities of war had been slightly but progressively mitigated, so far as they were exercised in inter-Christian conflict. The influence of the Church had even, at one time, become sufficient to enforce short periods during which all swords must be sheathed - 'Truces of God' - even though conflicts might be at their most critical points.

        The development of professional armies had increased this tendency. Men who were paid moderately did not expect to risk their lives every few days. Horses were liable to get knocked about in a battle. A mounted man-at-arms who hired himself for a period to a captain of condottieri would want to know what risks his horse would be likely to run, and to have his agreement clear as to who should pay for it, if it should get killed. The captain's reputation for caution and moderation of methods would affect the price at which such hirings could be made, and therefore his own profits. If the result of a threatened battle should appear dubious, there would be a common disposition to avoid it in favour of more manoeuvres, and so save expense and waste of life on both sides. If there were plain advantage on either side, both captains would probably see the matter in the same light, and make reasonable agreement on the basis of fact, without putting to bloody test what, as professional soldiers, was evident to their own eyes. It was not a matter of courage but common sense.

        There had been great European wars in which armies at no great distances apart had threatened and feinted for whole years without either commander thinking that actual fighting were worth its cost.

        But then - slightly, gradually, but on a tide which did not turn - first, the conventions of Christian chivalry had declined, and its restrictions had been ignored, and then the conservative customs of professional warfare had fallen into discredit until there had come a logical conclusion in the horrors and havoc of total war. . . . And now they were trying to go back to humaner methods. But it is always hard to return from a downward way. And they had chosen to make the attempt on a strange road, where there was an absence of guiding signs, and they must go forward in darkness and doubt.

        "Well," Seeley said at last, "we might go on talking for ever, and get no further. We can ask each other a hundred questions, and the answer's the same to each - that we don't know. It's too much like a kitten chasing a tail it can never catch. And I've got a good deal to do." He rang up his dentist.

        Next morning, he moved his offices into the Premier's official residence, after a public announcement had been made that he would be too fully occupied upon the business of his department during the next week to appear in public. His secretary remained available on the telephone; and, if he did not consult his chief before replying to important enquiries, he appeared to do so.

        The man who left the Premier's residence, and entered a waiting car in the dusk of the next evening, was curiously like the Minister of Interfederal Affairs. At a first casual glance anyone might almost have thought it were he. But a second look would have shown the absurdity of the idea. He had more prominent teeth. His hair was darker and parted differently. He was well enough dressed, but not with Lord Whitcombe's extreme precision. There were other differences which a close observer would see. If a thought of Lord Whitcombe should rise at the first glance, a second would correct the error.

        The man was probably aware of the resemblance, and tried to ape one who was so much greater than he. But the attempt failed, perhaps because he was - well, hardly a gentleman. And, of course, his teeth would always give him away.

CHAPTER EIGHT

REX BULLDOZER REACHES EUROPE

REX Bulldozer didn't behave quite like a gentleman. He talked rather too loudly, letting everyone know of his profession - he was a schoolmaster - and of the purpose of his journey to Europe, which was to bring back two ex-pupils who had been studying there.       

        He made himself uselessly objectionable in opposition to the general desire to change the radio programme. A talk had come on which dealt with the possible consequences, and feasibility, of covering certain parts of the oceans with permanent coatings of oil. The general feeling was that it was impolite, at such a time, and in so mixed a company, to have their minds directed to any question of changing seas. They had preferred, and had, an instructional programme which was intended, by a process of reiterated reason, to eliminate the atavistic instinct for floral growths or decorations.

        It appeared that there was no colour and no scent known to the flora of the whole earth which could not be produced in wholesale quantities, and more economically, from coal-tar.

        Being overruled on this point, Mr. Bulldozer incurred the rebuke of the head-steward by having the bad manners to hum very loudly the refrain of a silly sentimental song which had been popular twenty years before:

"For Percy lived a life of crime,

And so was hanged in lilac-time."

The indication might be obscure, but his fellow-travellers, who all held intelligence certificates (or they would not have been there), felt that, in however obscurely indirect a manner, he was being disrespectful to the instructional broadcast, if not to coal-tar itself, which was a god on whom they had learnt to lean. . . . If Rex Bulldozer had any resemblance to the Minister of Interfederal Affairs, it was a matter on which Lord Winchcombe deserved any sympathy which might be going about. . . .

        The liner glided down smoothly, obeying the attraction of magnetic rails; the sides of the passenger-cabins opened, appearing for a moment to be a rose-red butterfly's half-lifted wings, and then sank outward to form soft-carpeted, gently-sloping platforms of descent; and Rex Bulldozer, bustling obtrusively, stepped down to the soil of France

        He appeared to be casual in his approach to the line of attendants, to one of which he must give instructions concerning the destination of his baggage; but it was actually the first critical test of his fitness for the mission on which he came.

        There were four of these men, each of whom had been minutely described to him, who were trusted agents of his own government, and whom it would be well to avoid. There were others whose secret allegiances, if any, were unknown or suspect. There was one, a man of military figure and bearing, with a lean, hard face, who was known to be at the head of the Paris espionage service, so far as it related to airport traffic. Mr. Bulldozer must not appear to seek this man, but if it could casually and naturally happen that he should come to his charge, it was how he would prefer it to be.

        Fortune favoured him at this point to a degree which might seem ominous of coming good to a sanguine mind. But that might be an founded hope, for morning sunshine is no guarantee of a rainless day.

        He recognized the man as he approached a line that was beginning to bustle and break; and as Herr Bikker's hard keen eyes swept the descending travellers they met his own, so that their contact became natural thing.

        Herr Bikker took the baggage-ticket with the unmeaning obsequiousness of routine. His practised eye read, at one glance, the name and description of the owner which were endorsed upon it. His secret office did not alter the fact that he was the servant of those who tipped, in a world where, amid many changes, that custom had continued to flourish. His espionage value would, indeed, have been much reduced had he been less the typical steward than he had successfully studied to become.

        "To what address," he asked, "will you wish them sent? . . . And for yourself? . . . Or you have a conveyance here?"

        No. I have not been here - I have not been to Europe - before. You will tell me where I should put up. It will be for one night only. I must go on to Stuttgart tomorrow."

        "If monsieur will tell me the expense - the grade - - "

        Mr. Bulldozer became explicit and confidential. He wanted the most expensive place he could get. The gentleman for whom he was acting was paying him an agreed fee, with expenses extra. He meant those expenses to be a substantial sum.

        Herr Bikker was quick to understand the position. It was doubtless how he would have acted himself. He said he would have recommended - - But now, perhaps - - Mais non! he knew exactly. There was a little place in the Rue des Italiens, of the most exclusive, and its comforts were of incomparable quality. It was most expensive, but if there were no obstacle in that - - "

        Mr. Bulldozer said that he had no doubt that that was the place for him.

        Herr Bikker put him into a car. He spoke a few low-voiced words to the driver. He said that the baggage should follow so promptly that it would arrive almost as soon as its owner. He accepted a most liberal tip, which he would more than double by his commission on the hotel bill, it being as dear and exclusive a place as he had said, and one which would have been unlikely to admit that it had accommodation for the loud-voiced American, had he not been sent, by Bikker, which would be a guarantee of the discretion of what they did.

        He might, of course, have been directed there to be kept under observation, though, for that purpose, it would have been a most unlikely selection, but the fact was that Rex Bulldozer had won the trick, though he was still very far from winning the game. Herr Bikker, for all his shrewdness, had taken him for the transparent ass he affected to be, and as one from whom a profit might well be made without detriment to his more important activities; and such profits, large or small, were not neglected as their occasions came.

        Curiously supported in his mood by the buoyancy of the character which he had chosen to act, Seeley drove through a green suburban Paris which had changed far less in the last half-century than would normally have been the case had it been an equal part of a less-changing world.

        He had seen it more than once before, his denial to Bikker having been no more than a diplomatic lie, but the sense of its attractive quaintness had not diminished. Only, when the car turned at last into the narrower streets, he had a feeling of claustrophobia difficult to subdue. The Rue des Italiens was so narrow that he felt an instinctive impulse to stretch out his hands to either side to push back the encroaching walls, though its shortness somewhat diminished the sensation of being held in a closing trap.

        He thought: 'How much our architecture has changed, in how short a time!' And then: 'Has the change been good?'

        His mind went back to the solid oak-beamed English building of the sixteenth century. Men had been sure of themselves then: sure of their faith: sure of a lasting world. But it had been followed by the colder, prouder, less human architecture of the later Stuarts, and the succeeding Georgian era, whose loftier ceilings had seemed to be farther from the warmth of earth without being nearer the light of Heaven. And after that there had been the Victorian degeneration, during which beauty, dignity, and solidity had alike declined, until, as the twentieth century had opened, it would have been hard to show that his own country had had any style of architecture at all. Its coat of arms might have been a plank of unseasoned pine, as that of the Elizabethan period might have been one of well-seasoned oak. . . . But now all that was gone, bad and good alike, except in this quaint backwater of forgotten things; and no one could say that the new architecture was without character or durability. Its concrete walls, high and smooth and white, were made to endure. They were of substance so hard that the explosives of the Second World War would have left them standing unmoved in contemptuous strength: their surfaces were such that they would have been left unmarked by the futile fumes. Certainly it was not an architecture without character. But was that character one which it was easy to love?

        Very firmly it stood. But those who built it were less secure. . . .

        The change had been as great in the country as in the town, both in kind and degree; and it had not been in continental Europe alone. It had been in England: in the whole world. He remembered (though he had been young at the time) the fierce, futile English agitation there had been against the legislation which had obliged farmers to destroy their hedges within three years, or incur forfeitures or crippling fines. Yet it had been plain sense. A wire fence will take no nourishment from the ground. A windscreen, if it be needed, may be better made of metal sheets, which may be erected, shifted, or removed, as is impossible with a living hedge.

        As he would fly to Stuttgart tomorrow he would look down on land that the tractor could plough, mile after mile, without turn or halt: land where no tree or herb had been allowed to survive unless for a certain use: land where there would be aviaries every half-mile for the regulation number of birds of the approved species to feed on such insect pests as other methods had not eliminated - birds which would themselves be eliminated as soon as they could be replaced by more efficient agencies. He would see gigantic works, not yet completed, which were removing hills and straightening rivers, and generally bringing reason and order into the confusion which is the best which can be expected from blind, wasteful, unintelligent evolutionary forces.

        Seeley had an absurd doubt as to whether the Earth's Creator (he was inclined to indulge the possibility, or even probability, of conscious design, having been impressed by the implications of the fundamental law that thought precedes action, construction follows purpose and plan) would be entirely pleased by these human efforts to improve upon the methods which He so plainly preferred There was something comic in created beings showing their Maker how the work could have been more admirably done. Perhaps He would learn from them in time, and arrange the stars in a more orderly pattern. . . . Yet their experimental changes might be part of His own design. Might it not all be an entertainment, millennium-long, at which the Gods sat watching what the creatures They had projected would try to do? . . .

        Thought is swift, yet it is not surprising that while Seeley Whitcombe had allowed his mind to wander in this erratic manner he had been deposited at his destination, and was recalled to his environment by the fact that he was at the reception desk, and was not behaving quite as Rex Bulldozer would be likely to do.

        It was a danger he must be alert to avoid.

CHAPTER NINE

BULLDOZER SLEEPS ALONE

REX BULLDOZER WAS a talkative man. He made no secret of the errand on which he came. He had to find two ex-pupils, who were wandering about and had been last heard of at Stuttgart. He could not say that they had been staying there. But it was from that city that their last radiogram had been despatched. They might have been just passing through. Why did he not seek them through the usual publicity channels? Because he had been explicitly directed not to do so. It was, he believed, something to do with their mother's health. She did not know that they were abroad. Anyhow, it was nothing to him. Their father was an erratic man. It was enough that the instructions were clear, and the money good.

        There was a flavour of improbability in the tale which made it additionally plausible. It was not such as anyone would be likely to invent. Nor was it probable that anyone coming to Europe for an illicit purpose would make himself as conspicuous as Mr. Bulldozer certainly did. Nor, most clearly, was he such as others would entrust with a mission of secrecy, or where discretion would be required. As a boys' tutor he might be well enough. It was a matter of opinion. Beyond that - -

        Talking through a dinner which he chose to eat at the public table (such was the general preference at that period, it being considered a sign of dullness, or an affectation, to eat in a private room, though some, such as Herr Richter, would maintain the exclusive habit), it was natural that others, though less boisterously, talked to him; and he was alert to hear conversations he did not share.

        He learned some things of interest, including the surprising fact that Edouard Richter had stayed there a few days before. It was a fact that had an important sound, though it was difficult to see what its importance could be.

        The other guests were of different sorts an races, both women and men, but they all belonged to the clearly-defined plutocracy of the time. A plutocracy which was no less real because it had no technical possession of real estate, or control of individual capital. Most of those who shared the luxurious living upon which Mr. Bulldozer had so inharmoniously intruded were free of Federal taxation, and had incomes, government-allotted, which they were not only permitted, but required, to spend, under penalty of forfeiture, the notes in which it was paid to them becoming valueless if they were not returned, through collecting bankers, to the Federal Treasury before the close of the year.

        Mr. Bulldozer's fellow-guests were entirely European. They spoke of the prospect of war and its probable course without appearing to be restrained by his presence. The prevailing opinion was that the English-speaking Commonwealth would give way. There was great confidence in Edouard Richter. A man to fear. And the English-speaking Commonwealth was not normally of a warlike temper. As to the Latin-American Union, its unfriendliness would not be forgotten, but there was little doubt that it would have the discretion to stand aside.

        As to the social and economic consequences of limited war there was lively curiosity but little evidence of concern. The first aggression was to be theirs, and would be for their foes to endure. They did not appear to look beyond that. Nor did they appear to be apprehensive of the coming of total war. They may have appreciated the character of the Englishspeaking Commonwealth well enough to know that they had no such danger to fear. If it should be commenced, it would be by them. . . .

        Rex Bulldozer went up to the quiet of a room where he could relax, it being certain that he would be subjected to no human interference, unless at his own summons.

        The room was large by the standards of the time in which it was built, though it seemed quaintly small and ill-proportioned to him. Quainter far were the number of the things which it contained, for the aim of its arrangers had been to retain, as entirely as possible, the old atmosphere and the old contents, while adding, as unobtrusively as their nature would allow, such appliances as civilization requires.

        Rex Bulldozer could be forgotten at last, and Seeley Whitcombe could take what might be his last night of secure rest, and think of something which was in his mind, but was too vague to be called a plan.

        He could not forget Rex entirely, as he sat thinking for a time before resorting to darkness and seeking sleep, because the dressing-gown which Rex had brought; and he must now wear, was of a pattern which Seeley could not approve; and his thoughts of Seeley were marred by a contemptuous reference to himself which he had heard at dinner.

        He was not ignorant of the fact that Silly Whitcombe was a variation of his name which came easily to the minds, and doubtless too frequently to the lips of men, but he had not supposed that it would be in familiar use by those who spoke in a foreign tongue. And their allusions to himself had been otherwise lacking, (as was natural enough) in appreciation or respect. . . .

        There was the discreet, musical Pip-Pip-Pip which told him that attention was asked, and he pressed the button which he knew would be under the arm of his chair.

        A voice, suitably toned to solicitude for his comfort, enquired whether he desired companionship for the night. If that were so, there would be a choice of blondes and brunettes, besides a redhead of a vivacity few could match.

        Should he wish it, pictures of the competitors, with an economy or absence of attire which Dr. Dalton, of a previous generation, would have entirely approved, would be shown upon the television screen which was the centre of the pattern of tho opposite wall.

        Historical veracity compels the record that Seeley - or was it Rex? - was hesitant in his reply. Questions of inclination and expediency were alike involved. But one thing was clear. Any of these candidates for his companionship would tend to keep him awake; and he needed a good night's sleep before leaving for Stuttgart, which he had planned to do at an early hour. He said: No. He would prefer not to be further disturbed.

        But after that he had doubts. Had he replied as Bulldozer would be likely to do? Might he not have selected a companion who would have told him things possibly about Edouard Richter - which it would have been useful to know? Might he not, at least, have permitted the gallery of accessible beauty to be paraded before him?

        He did not fail to observe that there would be a particular rudeness about asking to see them, and then saying that none of them would be required. But was not that just a kind of thing that Rex would be likely to do?

        The reply was so evident that he rang to say that he would like t see the procession upon the screen. He was told, in a voice of carefully modulated politeness, that, should he do this, and then decline a selection, a substantial charge must be made; to which Rex replied, in a hearty voice: "Oh, damn that! I don't mind the expense," and felt that he had run true to form.

        He could not complain that he received grudging value for whatever he might be destined to pay. The moving, speaking pictures explained themselves, one by one, with great frankness, and there was no lack of a similar candour in the captions which set out their qualities, and sometimes their defects, so that there should be no danger of dissatisfaction resulting from inappropriate choice.

        Finally, lest memory should be confused, the whole gallery of complaisant pulchritude was comprehensively shown at a single view. A dozen pairs of eyes were turned seductively in his direction. Soft voices from smiling lips wooed his choice, with some attractive variations of accent, in. the Anglo-American tongue.

        As the lights brightened, and the screen became blank again, Rex rang up the management.

        "Tell those dames," he said, "they're a fine lot. But you haven't got quite the baby for me."

        Would he like any further refreshment before retiring? Yes - a glass of grapejuice; and two peaches - peeled. The delusion that the peach is an exceptionally fine fruit still endured in a changing world.

        The automatic waiter brought up the desired refreshment, and Seeley Whitcombe found forgetfulness in a silk-soft bed.

CHAPTER TEN

RICHTER REQUIRES HELP

THE STUTTGART OF 1990 was no larger in population than had been the bomb-battered city of forty years earlier. It would be a misleading statement to say that it was larger itself. It was not larger, but different.

        Being one of the five licensed Cities of Research within the European Federation, it had a static population of 60,000 workpeople, whose families were allowed to reside within a five-mile radius, though they were barred from access to the huge square-walled werke a city within a city - from which so great a variety of chemicals, synthetic foods, drugs, dyes, cosmetics, and manures were loaded into the trucks that were being backed continually into its marshalling yards, or run up the light electric railway on to the airport platforms, to be distributed to a grateful world.

        By that airport, the Palace Square, with its surrounding buildings and parks, had been overwhelmed many years before, in which respect Stuttgart had only experienced a destruction which had fallen upon the ancient glories of a hundred cities of the Old World, and the less venerable excellencies of those of the New; the mania which had sacrificed uncalculated material wealth during the earlier part of the century, and a million lives, to the pleasure of whirling that and those which remained, having developed in the anticipated directions, and almost to the anticipated degree.

        On to the passenger platform of this airport Rex Bulldozer was discharged in the usual manner, under a bright sun, and a sky of cloud-flecked blue (for sun and rain and cloud still continued, with but little interference from the lords of physical science, though it was not intended that this neglect should continue), at the same time that Edouard Richter, with the constant Amelie at his side, sat in the steel-walled garden of his own residence Baron Gluck, the European Minister of Education.

        They sat in the midst of a wide lawn, an open space at this period being the only possible security against not merely the overhearing, but the permanent recording of what was said, and even that security being far from absolute, particularly unless those who engaged in the conversation submitted to a preliminary examination of a thorough character. But it was the best condition possible for privacy, at a time when most privacies had taken the way that liberties went before.

        The lawn was smooth and green, being almost entirely independent of the changes the seasons bring. It was heated from beneath, from which direction its soil was also injected with potent foods, and, for other reasons, it was not soil in which the boldest wireworm would choose to live. Part of this lawn was now covered by movable ceiling, which would protect those who used it from rain or sun, as occasion came. The wind must be boisterous indeed which would overreach the barrier of the high, straight steelsheet walls to disturb those who should be sitting below.

        Baron Gluck had sat there for two hours, sipping his favourite beverage, saying little, and hearing much. At times his pudgy fingers had moved uneasily round his neck, as though the rolls of reddish skin lay uneasily round his silken collar. But these movements had ceased, and now there came a gleam of anticipation in the small pig's-eyes as he listened to the proposals that the great scientist made.

        Herr Richter had selected him as confidant and colleague in the realization of a dream which he could not resolve to leave, and which yet confronted him with problems of appalling magnitude, because the Baron's reputation was for a genius of organization which, rather than any preeminence of erudition, had brought him to where he was.

        It was that executive quality which now led him to think: 'It is our own fault that we let them live, to make sleek-fed slaves of their fellow men, who have bartered liberty and all noble things for the mess of pottage which is all that science can ever give, and which it can be so potent to take away.' He did not think in these words, for nobility of any kind would be unlikely to enter his mind, but he saw facts. He thought again: 'They of the Middle Ages were wiser than we. They would have made a bonfire to cleanse the world.'

        So reason told him, but he was not concerned for the world's welfare: he considered himself, and, subordinately, a daughter, unattractive to others, but whom he loved as much as men of his kind are able to do. He saw that Richter might have some plan to eliminate him as soon as his usefulness should be done, but he did not think that there was a great danger of that.

        Otherwise, his only peril was disclosed by his host's frank declaration that he did not intend that any man's life should continue for a season beyond his own.

        "I propose," he had said, "that we shall keep as many alive at this time as will conduce to our own comfort, and enable us to use the earth in the best way for ourselves, and that they shall be such as are of an ignorance that will render them harmless to us. It is your help I ask, for decision and selection of how many and who these survivors shall be. You will see that it is a matter of great complexity, and must be decided in a haste which I had not meant, owing to the outbreak of this cursed war. But I cannot risk what may happen if I allow it to take a precedent course. Mendoza has powers which he might be tempted to use, such as would be fatal to all - even to me. I might still have time to give brimstone to him, but there would be little comfort in that, for I should know that I might have been quicker to make an end. He is a man not to be lightly esteemed, as I have reason to know. Neither are Conroy or Murchison without some knowledge, such as it is useful to have, but they would have scruples to hold them back. They are still slaves of the superstitions that shackle action, though they may allow thought.

        "But we will act at once, which will put such dangers aside. We will make the earth an orange for us to suck. . . . I will tell you this. I do not know how I can continue to live beyond the natural duration of man, though I may find that even that can be done, when I can think of it with a free mind. If I should solve that problem, it may be well for others as well as me.

        "For I have never intended that the human race shall continue beyond the length of my own life. What could be the purpose in that? I had always meant, and for several years it has been most surely arranged, that, when I die, an infection shall take the world which none will avoid or cure. So it will be at the end. But you must not look as though that may be bad tidings for you, for I am the younger man, and all my organs are good."

        Baron Gluck had seen that. It was a most uncomfortable knowledge to have, but it held no immediate menace and, if its threat could be permanently averted, it was a matter of which to think at another time.

        And then, as though this thought were known or suspected by him, Richter went on: "I will tell you this also. I have an invention approaching the stage at which it can be put to practical use, by which I shall be able to secure the degree of safety for myself and those whom I am able to call my friends which comfort requires. It is a method of reading the thoughts of men."

        "Do you mean under all circumstances?" the baron asked. "Without the consent - or perhaps the knowledge - of those who will be liable to that exploration?"

        "It is a question," Richter answered, with an aspect of frankness, "to which it is not yet possible to give a final reply. It has been known for many years that every thought makes a physical registration upon the brain. That being so, and in the light of what has been done for the transference of sound from air to ether, and again from ether to air, it has been evident that it could only be a matter of time before the conditions of successful telepathy would be understood.

        "But I need not tell you that there is often a wide gulf between the discovery of a fact or process in physical science and its practical application. I have known for several months of a method by which a thought may be registered on a mind other than that with which it originates, by which I mean that there will be precisely the same registration - the same physical change - in both brains, but the utilization of this knowledge remains a matter very difficult to contrive. There is, among other things, an obstacle of contending or simultaneous thoughts, very curious in its consequences, and beyond brief explanation: and there is a further question of whether the identical registration will be identical in interpretation, which only extended experiment can finally resolve. And even then the means of putting the discovery to practical use must, in several respects, be a matter of further research."

        "If it could be fully controlled it would give its possessors a great power."

        "Yes. It would render many forms of deception difficult, if not impossible. As I have said already, I did not wish that this crisis should come upon us before I had this discovery, among others, in practical use. It would have enabled elimination to be made with a discrimination which we cannot apply. . . . It is a matter which I have mentioned to you because its full development - if it should still be of importance in a subdued world - might require the use of a larger number of men (or children, to speak with exactness, for they would be preferable in an important respect), who might not be available afterwards for other uses, and a sufficient number should therefore be preserved, with whatever attendants they may require.

        "I should add that I have already made a list of such of my own family and attendants, including those at the laboratories and other activities of this city, as will be likely to be profitable to keep, so that you need not concern yourself about them. And you should know that your own and your daughter's names were among the first to be there."

        "That will relieve me," the baron answered, "of what would have been the most difficult part of a matter which is still of extreme perplexity and must be resolved at extreme speed. It would be a safeguard against omission or duplication if you would let me have a copy of that list, for - need I say? - my most private use."

        "It is what I should be glad to do, but it is an impossible thing; for it is not a matter of written record but is contrived in another way".

        The Baron made no answer to this. It confirmed the opinion, generally held, that Herr Richter had a secret method of recording, though it left him to guess what it might be. He saw that he was being treated with exceptional confidence, or the information would not have been given to him, even in this cryptic manner; but he did not fail to remember that he was in the power of the man with the harassed look and the restless eyes, and that an excessive curiosity might draw upon him a deferred sentence of death, which he would have no means to avoid.

        He would have liked to take Herr Richter's rather scrawny throat in his two hands and press his thumbs into it on either side until a limp body could be safely dropped to the ground. But he remembered the warning that Richter had given that he did not intend that the human race should outlast himself. It might be an empty boast. But it might not. Herr Richter's record made it quite probably true. He said:

        "I will go back to Berlin at once. If you have a complete plan in a week's time it will be soon enough?"

        "I should have preferred it earlier than that. It might be one that I should not entirely approve. For important modifications, the remaining time would not be long."

        "But you will appreciate that it will require thought, and there may be enquiries to ascertain the names of the most suitable selections to make, among specialists of particular kinds. At present, I have no clear decision of mind, even as to whether it will be scores or millions who must survive. And you will agree that it must all be very secretly done. If I promise - - "

        "I would have you promise nothing that you do not perform. The stake is too high for any thought of failure to be allowed. It is to have the world at our feet!"

        "Yes. . . . And to save it from a prolonged and, perhaps, most worrying war!"

        The baron smiled sardonically as he said this, but there was no response on the face of his host. Herr Richter knew that men jested, though he was unable to understand why. He passed such remarks as though they had not reached his ears, as they scarcely did.

        When the Baron had left, Herr Richter summoned the head of the Stuttgart police, who took his orders from him.

        "Colonel," he said, "I want a subject for experiments which have become urgent. A child would, in some ways, be best; but it would not be suitable for subsequent return, which might occasion enquiry, such as I prefer to avoid."

        "It would occasion remark."

        "So it would, though it might not he much. There must be children whom their parents would spare with no great regret. . . . But if you can find a stranger in the town who could be invited here with a plausible word, and whose disappearance would concern no one at a near place, or a near time, it would be a service I should esteem."

        Colonel Wagram said that this should be done.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

COLONEL WAGRAM INVITES

REX BULLDOZER, HAVING enquired for the best accommodation in Stuttgart, was directed to the Hotel Central, which was on the south side of the town, and so placed, in a fold of the wooded hills, that it experienced little of the fumes from the werke, which, although so treated that they would probably have been unnoticed by an earlier generation, were considered intolerable by the plutocracy of this period.

        He was the better satisfied with this choice because the hotel was at no great distance from the high-walled residence of the King of Stuttgart (as Herr Richter was in fact, if not precisely in name), and it would be appropriate to a plan which was now taking shape in his mind - a plan which was of considerable subtlety in its intended development of the blustering clumsiness of his assumed character, but one to which it is needless to give detailed record, as it was not destined to be put to any practical test, unpredictable chance, at this stage, taking the game into its capricious control.

        For Rex Bulldozer, having secured the most expensive suite in the hotel not already in occupation, had scarcely settled himself therein when he was both annoyed and alarmed by the information that Colonel Wagram desired to see him.

        The name meant nothing to him, the colonel's status not having penetrated to the Interfederal office at Havana, but he was not aware of anyone who was likely to have business with him, unless it should be of a hostile sort.

        He answered the polite announcing voice which gave him this information with the query: "Did the gentleman say what his business is?" and received the reply, more polite of tone than substance: "He will doubtless explain that himself