§ 4
Never before in the history of warfare had there been a continuing
explosive; indeed, up to the middle of the twentieth century the only
explosives known were combustibles whose explosiveness was
due entirely to their instantaneousness; and these atomic bombs which
science burst upon the world that night were strange even to the men who
used them. Those used by the Allies were lumps of pure Carolinum,
painted on the outside with unoxidised cydonator inducive enclosed
hermetically in a case of membranium. A little celluloid stud between
the handles by which the bomb was lifted was arranged so as to be easily
torn off and admit air to the inducive, which at once became active and
set up radio-activity in the outer layer of the Carolinum sphere. This
liberated fresh inducive, and so in a few minutes the whole bomb was a
blazing continual explosion. The Central European bombs were the same,
except that they were larger and had a more complicated arrangement for
animating the inducive.
Always before in the development of warfare the shells and
rockets fired had been but momentarily explosive, they had gone off in
an instant once for all, and if there was nothing living or valuable
within reach of the concussion and the flying fragments then they were
spent and over. But Carolinum, which belonged to the β group of
Hyslop's so-called `suspended degenerator' elements, once its
degenerative process had been induced, continued a furious radiation of
energy and nothing could arrest it. Of all Hyslop's artificial elements,
Carolinum was the most heavily stored with energy and the most dangerous
to make and handle. To this day it remains the most potent degenerator
known. What the earlier twentieth-century chemists called its half
period was seventeen days; that is to say, it poured out half of the
huge store of energy in its great molecules in the space of seventeen
days, the next seventeen days' emission was a half of that first
period's outpouring, and so on. As with all radio-active substances this
Carolinum, though every seventeen days its power is halved, though
constantly it diminishes towards the imperceptible, is never entirely
exhausted, and to this day the battle-fields and bomb fields of that
frantic time in human history are sprinkled with radiant matter, and so
centres of inconvenient rays.
What happened when the celluloid stud was opened was that the
inducive oxidised and became active. Then the surface of the Carolinum
began to degenerate. This degeneration passed only slowly into the
substance of the bomb. A moment or so after its explosion began it was
still mainly an inert sphere exploding superficially, a big, inanimate
nucleus wrapped in flame and thunder. Those that were thrown from
aeroplanes fell in this state, they reached the ground still mainly
solid, and, melting soil and rock in their progress, bored into the
earth. There, as more and more of the Carolinum became active, the bomb
spread itself out into a monstrous cavern of fiery energy at the base of
what became very speedily a miniature active volcano. The Carolinum,
unable to disperse, freely drove into and mixed up with a boiling
confusion of molten soil and superheated
steam, and so remained spinning furiously and maintaining an eruption
that lasted for years or months or weeks according to the size of the
bomb employed and the chances of its dispersal. Once launched, the bomb
was absolutely unapproachable and uncontrollable until its forces were
nearly exhausted, and from the crater that burst open above it, puffs of
heavy incandescent vapour and fragments of viciously punitive rock and
mud, saturated with Carolinum, and each a centre of scorching and
blistering energy, were flung high and far.
Such was the crowning triumph of military science, the ultimate
explosive that was to give the `decisive touch' to war. . . .
