The Great Wash

by Gerald Kersh

  “Microscopic quantities, you understand. An atomic bomb of any magnitude is not possible unless a certain considerable weight, or ‘critical mass’ of these fissionable isotopes, is brought together—in which case you have something like the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, and up to the present we have been able to demonstrate no means of making such a bomb without employing certain exceedingly rare metals which, in themselves, are extremely difficult to purify.

  “Now, here is what Brevis has discovered—that it is possible—indeed, comparatively easy—to make an atomic bomb out of Silicon, or more properly Si28. What is Silicon? It is the essential element found everywhere in sand, clay, the very mud off your boots! Brevis shows here how one may take Si28 and, by increasing the density of its nucleus in a Cyclotron or an atomic pile, thus produce Si32—which must be at least as terrible for its purpose as Plutonium. This is what Brevis terms the ‘megatope’ of Silicon.

  “And there you have the import of these papers: in a word, a heavy industrial plant with access to a sand dune or a clay pit may manufacture atomic bombs as easily as television sets. And, furthermore, Kurt Brevis clearly demonstrates that the critical mass, or war-head, of the Megatopic Silicon Bomb need weigh no more than 3.2 kilograms; about the weight of a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica. . . . There, gentlemen.”

  “Which means,” said George Oaks, “that one might easily turn out atom bombs at least two thousand times more deadly than the Hiroshima bomb.”

  “Quite that,” said Ohm Robertson.

  “And any totalitarian dictator could make them?” I asked. “Or any megalomaniac industrialist?”

  “Of course,” said Ohm Robertson, with another shrug and moué of complete indifference.

  “Anyone who could harness atomic power would without question become master of all the world. But as affairs stand at present, and are likely to stand for very many years to come, it is quite out of the question that any government in the world could permit atomic energy to be used extra-governmentally.”

  “Which means to say that Kadmeel’s aims are extra-governmental,” said George Oaks.

  “Distinctly so. . . . Still, according to what I am told, there are few ordinary humdrum citizens who do not break the law whenever they think they can do so without being detected. For example, who would not leap at an opportunity safely to defraud the Collectors of His Majesty’s Inland Revenue, or cheat the Customs and Excise? . . .”

  Ohm Robertson smiled faintly. “Law . . . I have so little time, and so little need, to fuddle my head with what is legal and what is illegal. And I do not like lawyers, whose primary function, when all’s said and done, is to make a practical truth of that which isn’t supposed to be, and vice versa. Yours is a remarkably sound intelligence, Oaks, in a scatter-brained way, and I’m sure you won’t think me too wickedly amoral when I say that your Decalogue to me is a thing of the moment, and that my primary conscious obedience is to Laws that are eternal.”

  “Now you’re talking like a Sciocrat, Ohm,” said George Oaks, with a laugh.

  “Am I? Perhaps I am. I don’t know. Another thing you asked me about was the matter of those little maps.”

  “Yes! I guessed, vaguely, what you were going to say about the Brevis notes, Ohm, but tell me in what way they’re connected with those unknown islands.”

  “Oh, really, it’s perfectly simple, my dear Oaks. These are maps of places you must have travelled over a score of times. Surely, you must have been having a little game with me? See here——” He got up lazily and shuffled over the thick green carpet to the desk. There was a Chinese pot filled with carefully sharpened pencils. He selected one, and spread out Kurt Brevis’s maps, saying: “It can’t matter a bit if I mark these things, you know. They are mere tracings, quite valueless. Without some indication of the complementary land masses as they exist at present they are, I admit, momentarily confusing. You see, they are the outlines of sea-coasts that exist, at present, only in theory. See?”

  He began to draw. “By the God!” cried George Oaks, striking himself on the forehead. “Idiot that I am!” For, with three swiftly-thrown lines in the waters of the first map, Ohm Robertson had pulled the contours of a familiar continent out of the sea. The Woman, the Clown, and the Shark, linked together, became North America. On the second map, the Woman, the Parrot, and the Diver became one with the continent of Europe, and the poor little crumbs in the north, now we saw, were the British Isles. Two scornfully scrawled lines on the third map, and the Gnawed Jaw and the Antler became South America.

  “In a word,” said Ohm Robertson, “you were puzzled by some simple sketches of the higher points of Europe, and of North and South America. I do not profess to be a geographer, but I rather fancy that if you take maps of these continents and rub out all the land up to three or four hundred feet above sea level, you’ll have left something like Brevis’s drawings.”

  He returned to his chair, and George Oaks stood thunderstruck, I think, with shame. There was something so comical in his hangdog attitude as he went for the big blue “poison” bottle, that I laughed aloud, and Ohm Robertson smiled quite broadly. Back in his chair with an inch of golden brandy in his beaker, George Oaks said. “After that, whatever anybody says about me, he’s right. I am a fool.”

  And I had to say: “He was so busy looking for the Waters Under the Earth, Professor Robertson, he simply couldn’t stop to look at the sea.”

  Ohm Robertson said, soothingly: “There, Mr. Kemp, there, you mustn’t laugh at Oaks. His ‘unknown islands’ have no existence as such, at present, it is true. But it is very likely that they will exist in something like those shapes, in due course. Assume a rise in the sea level of about four hundred feet throughout the world, and, the land being flooded to that depth, the islands automatically stand much as Brevis drew them.”

  “Will exist in due course?” I asked.

  “More than likely, yes. You may have read in the popular journals that sea levels generally are steadily rising at the rate of something like ten or eleven inches a year, on account of the melting of the polar ice-caps, since the earth’s climate is gradually growing warmer. If this continues—and there is no reason why it should not continue—why, then, it follows that within five hundred years from now the great land masses enclosed by the outlines I have just drawn must then be under water. Do not be downcast, Oaks, you can look forward to your ‘unknown islands’. And who knows but you may live to see them?”

  “What d’you mean by that, Ohm?” said George Oaks, alert again.

  “I do not mean, of course, that you may live five hundred years; only that it may not be necessary for you to live five hundred years in order to see these islands.”

  “You mean that this process of the rising of the waters might be hurried?”

  “Why, yes.”

  “Naturally, or artificially, hurried?” asked George Oaks.

  “It would have to be artificially hurried, Oaks, if you were to live to see it,” said Ohm Robertson.

  “By melting the polar ice-caps?”

  “Of course. How else could you increase the volume of the seas?”

  “Then the connection between Brevis’s findings on the Silicon megatope and the maps he drew must be this—Kadmeel proposes to use Megatopic Silicon Bombs to melt the polar ice!” said George Oaks.

  “It would seem so,” said Ohm Robertson. “I don’t know what was in Brevis’s mind—apart from his figures, of course. But the conjunction of those figures with the drawings might indicate that Brevis was seriously considering the application of the Megatopic Silicon Bomb to some very substantial reduction of the polar ice and a consequent alteration of sea levels. Very likely, yes, Oaks.”

  “Do you know,” said George Oaks, with a short laugh, “I had in mind a certain idea that Kadmeel’s Sciocrats were going to make some serious attempt to
take the world by assault, somehow, with atom bombs. That’d be crazy enough. But what you imply, Ohm, doesn’t make sense!”

  “What is Sense?” Ohm Robertson murmured.

  “This, for example, is sense, old friend—that the most terrific atomic bombardment imaginable upon the polar ice caps couldn’t conceivably melt more than a few cubic miles of the Eternal Ice!” cried George Oaks.

  “Wait a bit,” said Ohm Robertson, putting finger-tips to finger-tips and pressing together the heels of his hands so that he seemed to be making a kind of cage to protect something invisible. “One thing at a time. Who suggested a superficial bombardment of the polar ice-caps? Not I. And I am quite sure that Brevis could never have had any such thought in mind. As you say, it is indicated that the melting of the earth’s ice-caps and the subsequent rising of the waters may be expedited by the use of bombs. But does this necessarily imply that your bombs must be dropped directly upon your frozen seas? Think carefully, now, Oaks. Think, now! I must refer you to your own work. In 1943 you wrote for your newspaper an emotional but well-informed ‘story’ of the bombing of the Ruhr Dams——”

  “—Gibbo, Wing-Commander Gibson, V.C. . . . And the world shall end ere I forget,” said George Oaks, under his breath.

  “—Quite, quite. No doubt you remember, then. Your Wing-Commander, on that occasion, earned the Victoria Cross, and the adulation of the whole world, by cleverly and courageously placing a certain number of ordinary high-explosive bombs at certain points, so that a valley was flooded. The virtue of Wing-Commander Gibson’s operation lay in the fact that he caused to occur in a matter of days an inundation infinitely more terrible than a million Gibsons armed with buckets could have poured out in five hundred years. Now, speaking in terms of the melting of the polar ice-caps—in other words, the flooding of the lowlands of the world; it is the same thing—assume that your polar ice-cap is kept in its place, that is to say, held solid, by a kind of Ruhr dam, the breaking of which will let loose upon it a steady flood of hot water.”

  “Yes?”

  “Assume that in this case your Ruhr dam is a great barrier of living rock under the sea, and that your Wing-Commander is Commander of a submarine, armed with an unlimited supply of atomic bombs and exact information as to where they may most effectively be placed!”

  George Oaks’s corded hands were spliced rather than clasped together, and his voice was very quiet and evenly measured as he said: “I get what you’re driving at, now. Go on, Ohm.”

  Ohm Robertson, parting his finger-tips and scrutinising his palms with something of the air of a fortune-teller, went on: “Why, then, it must be evident to you that these submarine dams which are to be pin-pointed with atomic bombs must be in the rocky barriers which extend under the sea between Newfoundland and England in the Atlantic, and under the Bering Straits in the Pacific. This same rocky barrier, upon which the Atlantic cable is laid, is the barrier that diverts the warm waters of the Gulf Stream from the Arctic Circle. Smash this barrier, and countless billions of tons of comparatively hot water must rush north to the polar ice, which must inevitably melt, releasing in its turn an uncontrollable deluge smashing southward. Break down the barriers under the Bering Straits, and under the Atlantic, and you may force to come to pass in six months a cataclysm that in the course of nature would take five hundred years to mature.”

  “But that would be pointless——” I began.

  “—To what end?” asked George Oaks, simultaneously. “That would mean the annihilation of the civilised world!”

  “Of course it would,” said Ohm Robertson, parting his hands and putting them down flat on the arms of his chair. “As you may see by the maps, most of the centres of civilisation (civilisations are born and thrive in valleys and on low-lying coasts, remember) would be drowned. Terrible tidal waves would rush inland, of course, from every point of the compass, together with typhoons, cyclones, and hurricanes of hitherto unimagined fury. The great mass of humanity would be as helpless as the Siberian mammoths and rhinoceroses were when the sudden frost of the First Ice Age froze them in their tracks. There would be, of course, a wild rush of people to the highlands and the mountains. There could be no time for a shifting of centres of government, or of industry—most certainly, no time for an uprooting and transplantation of farmers. In practically no time at all, primitive conditions would obtain. Man and beast, fighting tooth and nail for a hands breadth of purchase on the uplands, would be motivated only by the instinct to survive. It would be dog eat dog, until the rage of the elements subsided—which might take a few years; at the end of which time the sun would shine through a dripping mist upon a fresh, a scantily-populated world. And who would be the masters of this world?”

  George Oaks said: “Obviously, those who’d planned the cataclysm, and, therefore, taken precautions against it. Those who had stored food and weapons—those who had established themselves in the high places of the earth. For example, Kadmeel!”

  “For example,” said Ohm Robertson, shrugging.

  And at this, somehow, I felt as you might feel if, coming home after a brief absence, a cobweb brushed your face: one touch of the Unexpected, and a homely shadow becomes a lurking beast, and the light-switch is half a world away. . . . Something wrong has found its way in through some crack in the old place, and this wrong thing is lying in wait for you, filling the dark—you can feel the cold night curling about your ears as the Thing smiles, and you know that if you turn back to the outer door, cold and sticky filaments will fall across your eyes and turn you around and around until you are wound over and over and spun into a black cocoon . . . One loose thread makes horror in the house before the lights go on. . . . Do not ask me why I felt so cold just then. I only know that, suddenly, I was afraid, because something had touched me out of turn.

  Perhaps George Oaks felt as I did, because his hand closed like tongs on my wrist as he said: “You take it coolly, Ohm.”

  Ohm Robertson said: “And why should I not?”

  My nerves were strung high. I expected some little note of deprecation, at least; not another shrug, not another pursing of lips and elevation of eyebrows over the bridge of the nose while the tails of those eyebrows lingered lower down to tickle the tired wrinkles. George Oaks was right—Ohm Robertson was not of the world of common men, any more than a child is of this world of pity and passion. “Why should he not!” I would have tried to make him see the reason why not, only I was struck dumb by a sense of awful inadequacy—paralysed by the impotent rage of a man who knows that right is right and wrong is wrong but holds his tongue for fear that he may be asked why and wherefore.

  So I shrugged my shoulders, too, and then I felt George Oaks’s fingers pressing out an old familiar signal, dot-dot-dot-dash, dot-dot-dot-dash . . . the old V sign for Victory, while he said: “Now, Albert, now do you begin to see why I didn’t dare talk before for fear of being earmarked crazy?”

  “Oh, but you never were crazy, Oaks,” said Ohm Robertson. “Emotional, I grant you. Never crazy. In your way, Oaks, a man of the highest perspicacity, a thoroughly honest man, one in many thousands.”

  “Well, Ohm,” said George Oaks, “for example, I think I see now why it was necessary for Kadmeel to murder Austin Crabbe. He also tried to draw some maps, as I told Albert, here, last night. Austin Crabbe’s maps—the little I remember of the shapes of them—were somehow similar to and at the same time absolutely unlike Kurt Brevis’s maps. (Oh, Designer Infinite!) Seeing those scribbles of Austin Crabbe’s in my mind’s eye now, I recognise them as something like the areas that you blocked in! Ohm—Albert—whereas Kurt Brevis mapped out the highlands that were to be left above water, Austin Crabbe tried to draw the lowlands that were to be flooded under. I can put the shapes together in my head and, by the God, they fit!”

  “Good,” said Ohm Robertson, nodding . . . and I had a vision of him, dryly kind and pityingly patient, cou
nting the bubbles in the foam at the mouth of some bright young scholar at his university thirty-odd years ago. “Good, Oaks. Proceed . . .”

  Now when he said Proceed in that tone of voice, I felt, again, a curious hollowness in the breast, because George Oaks, in his more arrogant moments, spoke just like that; and it occurred to me suddenly that this man was Oaks’s master. “Go on, Oaks.”

  Stumbling over his words like a schoolboy, and looking at me as a schoolboy looks at his neighbour for moral support while he talks at his teacher in class, George Oaks said: “And Austin Crabbe’s figures, I mean, the lists of figures he compiled and wrote down—among his papers that were stolen, that is to say, bought under false pretences by the man who represented himself as Gaylord Taylor from the London Evening Post—those figures applied to transactions and stock manipulations by Kadmeel and his associates. I remember some of the headings: Rocky Mountains, Appalachians, Apennines, Andes! Norway, Africa, India, China! All high places of the world, eh, Ohm?”

  Ohm Robertson took out his watch, opened it, consulted it, listened to it, closed it, wound it, listened to it again, and put it back in his pocket before saying: “The greater part of these places would, indeed, stand above water in the event of such a cataclysm as we have been considering. Go on, Oaks. What are your conclusions?”