“We shall first feed up our war weapons with that new power and dictate our terms to Paris and London…” interrupted Eitel, standing in the center of the room, with glittering eyes, threatening with his fists some region in space.

II

FLINDER turned on the current and shut the door of the laboratory behind him. A flood of light illumined the familiar picture, at once arresting one’s attention with the serenity and peacefulness of a working atmosphere. Wires in rigid lines stretched all over the walls; porcelain insulators, like ivory fingers, protruded here and there and between them; on the — tables and shelves sparkled glass utensils; brass parts of the apparatus glittered in yellow reflections; a marble switch board with its appliances and colored lamps, added a cold, yet solemn appearance to the spacious room.

Upon a large marble-top table, at the rear wall, stood a mechanical appliance, from which the work was to start. Flinder stopped before it with a feeling of inward satisfaction and throbbing expectation. Everything he saw before him was the reflection and incarnation of his thoughts. Each lever, each screw, each contact of the wires — everything to the minutest detail — up of atoms, by means of bombarding them with grains of helium, that are discharged by radioactive matter, he added the action of the electromagnetic field of high tension. This enhanced the speed of flight and the power of explosion of the miniature charges. And to-day he intended to test the influence of some admixtures upon activated nitrogen, admixtures that are dissolved in the tube with gas and represent minutest molecules.

He examined carefully the scheme of arrangement of the appliances and focused the microscope over the fluorescene stage over which the explosions were to register the path of the fragments of the atoms, and turned on the switch. A deep, heavy buzz of the transformer filled the room, as if a giant drone from out the wilderness of the night, beat his wings and whizzed upon the window-sill, shaking the concrete walls with his blows.

The professor turned off the light and looked into the microscope. There was the usual scene: like falling stars on a calm August night, flashes of racing atoms glimmered in the dark field, left and right, in the direction of the current; paths of light intersected the field of sight, crossing in places, indicating colliding, extinguishing and flashing up again, and strange seemed the silence in which this fiery rain was pouring down. Then, turning a small stop-cock, Flinder admitted into the tube of the apparatus a tiny cloud of dust, which was to serve as a stimulator and augmenter of the process. And at once the picture in the dark field changed. Into the pattern of fiery lines, broke in a volley of rays, scattering themselves in all directions like explosions of miniature charges. These' were no longer integral; the atoms were being scattered into tens and hundreds of fragments by the force of the bombardment. Microscopic worlds were being destroyed, silently rumbled the catastrophies, one after another splashing flashes of rays followed one another.