“Now the foundation-stone of protoplasm is the element nitrogen. The plants draw on the store of nitrogenous compounds in the soil in order to build up their tissues; and then we eat the plants and thus transfer this material to our own organisms. What happens next? Do we return the nitrogen to the soil? Not we. We throw it into the sea in the form of sewage. So you see the net outcome of the process is that we are gradually using up the stores of nitrogen compounds in the soil, with the result that the plants have less and less nitrogen to live on.”
“Well, but surely four-fifths of the atmosphere is nitrogen? That seems to me a big enough reserve to be drawn on.”
“So it would be, if the plants could tap it directly, but they can’t do that except in the case of some exceptional ones. Most plants simply cannot utilise nitrogen until it has been combined with some other element. They can’t touch it in the uncombined state, as it is in the atmosphere; so that as far as the nitrogen in the air goes, it is useless to plants. They can’t thrive on pure nitrogen, any more than you can feed yourself on a mixture of charcoal, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen; though these elements are all that you need in the way of diet to keep life going.
“No, Flint, we are actually depleting the soil of these nitrogen compounds at a very rapid rate indeed. Why, even in the first decade of the twentieth century South America was exporting no less than 15,000,000 tons of nitrogen compounds which she dug out of the natural deposits in the nitre beds of Chile and Peru; and all that vast quantity was being used as artificial manure to replace the nitrogenous loss in the soil of the agricultural parts of the world. The loss is so great that it even pays to run chemical processes for making nitrogenous materials from the nitrogen of the air—the fixation of nitrogen, they call it.
“Well, that is surely enough to show you how much hangs upon this nitrogen question. If we go on as we are doing, there will eventually be a nitrogen famine; the soil will cease to yield crops; and we shall go short of food. It’s no vision I am giving you; the thing has already happened in a modified form in America. There they used up the soil by continual drafts on it, wheat crops year after year in the same places. The result was that the land ceased to be productive; and we had the rush of American farmers into Canada in the early days of the century to utilise the virgin soil across the border instead of their own exhausted fields.”
“I suppose you know all about it,” I said, “but where do these come in?”
I pointed to the pinkish disks of the cultures.
“These are what are called denitrifying bacteria. Although the plants can’t act upon pure nitrogen and convert it into compounds which they can feed upon, some bacteria have the knack. The nitrifying bacteria can link up nitrogen with other elements so as to produce nitrogenous material which the plants can then utilise. So that if we grow these nitrifying bacteria in the soil, we help the plants to get more food. The denitrifying bacteria, on the other hand—these ones here—act in just the opposite way. Wherever they find nitrogenous compounds, they break them down and liberate the nitrogen from them, so that it goes back into the air and is lost to us again.
“So you see that outside our bodies we have bacteria working for or against us. The nitrifying bacteria are helping to pile up further supplies of nitrogen compounds upon which the plants can draw and whereon, indirectly, we ourselves can be supported. The denitrifying bacteria, on the other hand, are continually nibbling at the basic store of our food; decomposing the nitrogen compounds and freeing the nitrogen from them in the form of the pure gas which is useless to us from the point of view of food.”
“You mean that a large increase in the numbers of the one set would put us in clover, whereas multiplication of the other lot would mean a shortness of supplies?”
“Exactly. And we have no idea of the forces which govern the reproduction of these creatures. It’s quite within the bounds of possibility that some slight change in the external conditions might reinforce one set and decimate the other; and such a change would have almost unpredictable influences on our food problem.”
At this moment the thunder-clouds, which had grown heavier as time passed, evidently reached their full tension. A tremendous flash shot across the sky; and on its heel, so close as to be almost simultaneous, there came a shattering peal of thunder. We looked out; but I had been so dazzled by the brilliance of the flash that I could see little. The air was very still; no rain had yet fallen; and my skin tingled with the electrical tension of the atmosphere. Wotherspoon felt it also, he told me. It was evident that we were in the vicinity of some very powerful disturbance.
“Awfully hot to-night, isn’t it?” I said. “Suppose we have some more air? It’s stifling in here.”
Wotherspoon pushed the broad leaves of the French windows apart; but no breeze came to cool us; though in the silence after the thunder-clap I heard the rustle of leaves from the trees below us. We stood, one at either end of the bench with the cultures on it, trying to draw cooler air into our lungs; and all the while I felt as though a multitude of tiny electric sparks were running to and fro upon the surface of my body.
Suddenly, over St. Katherine’s House, a sphere of light appeared in the air. It was not like lightning, brilliantly though it shone. It seemed to hover for a few seconds above the roof, almost motionless. Then it began slowly to advance, in a wavering flight, approaching us and sinking by degrees in the sky as it came. To me, it appeared to be about a foot in diameter; but Wotherspoon afterwards estimated it at rather less. In any case, it was of no great size; and its rate of approach was not more than five miles an hour.
For some seconds I watched it coming. It had a peculiar vacillating motion, rather like that which one sees in the flight of certain kinds of summer flies. Now it would hover almost motionless, then suddenly it would dart forward for twenty yards or so, only to resume its oscillation about a fixed point.
But to tell the truth, I watched it in such a state of fascination that I doubt if any coherent thoughts passed through my mind; so that my impressions may have been inaccurate. All that I remember clearly is a state of extreme tension. I never feel quite comfortable during a thunder-storm; and the novelty of the phenomenon increased this discomfort, for I did not know what turn it might take next.
Slowly the luminous sphere crossed the edge of the Park, dipping suddenly as though the iron railings had attracted it; and now it was almost opposite our window. For a moment its impetus seemed to carry it onwards, slantingly along the terrace; then, with a dart it swung from its course and entered the window at which we stood.
From its behaviour at the Park rail, I am inclined to think that it was drawn from its line of flight by the attracting power of the metal balustrade which protected the little balcony outside the window; and that its velocity carried it past the iron, so that it came to rest within the room, just over the table between us.
Instinctively, both Wotherspoon and I recoiled from this flaming apparition, shrinking back as far as possible from it on either side. Beyond this movement we seemed unable to go, for neither of us stepped out of the window recess. Between us, the ball of fire hung almost motionless; but before my eyes were dazzled I saw that it was spinning with tremendous velocity on a horizontal axis; and it seemed to me that its substance was a multitude of tiny sparks whirling in orbits about its centre. Its light was like that from a spirit-lamp charged with common salt; for over it I caught a glimpse of Wotherspoon’s flinching face, all shadowed and green. As I watched the fire-ball, shading my eyes with my hands, I saw that it was slowly settling, just as a soap-bubble sinks in the air. Lower it descended and lower, still spinning furiously on its axis. Then, after what seemed an interminable period of suspense, it collided with the table.
There came a dull explosion which jerked me from my feet and drove me back against a chair. I saw Wotherspoon collapse and then everything vanished in the darkness which followed the concussion.
It must have been half a minute before I was able to recover fro
m shock and pull myself together. When I got to my feet again, I found Wotherspoon half-standing, half-leaning against the door, one panel of which had been blown out. The room was strewn with wreckage: broken glass, scattered papers, and shattered furniture. The electric lamps had been smashed by the force of the explosion.
Wotherspoon and I recovered almost simultaneously; and on comparing notes—which was difficult at first owing to our being temporarily deaf—we found that neither of us had suffered any serious injury. A few slight cuts with flying glass were apparently the worst of the damage which we had sustained. There was a sharp tang in the air of the room which made us cough for some time until it cleared away; but whatever the gas may have been, it left no permanent effects on us.
When we had procured lights and pulled ourselves together sufficiently to make a fuller examination of the room, we began to appreciate the extent of the damage and to congratulate ourselves still more upon the escape which we had had. The whole place was littered with fragments of furniture. The incubators had been shattered; and their contents, smashed into countless fragments, lay all over the floor. But it was on the bench at the window that the full force of the fire-ball had spent itself. There was hardly anything recognisable in the heap of debris. The wooden planks had been torn and broken with tremendous force. The little balcony was filled with sticks which had been thrown outward by the explosion; and, as we found afterwards, a good deal of material had been projected half-way across the road. Of the denitrifying bacteria cultures or their cases there was hardly a trace, except a few tiny splinters of glass.
I did not wait much longer with Wotherspoon; for, to tell the truth, my nerves were badly shaken by my experiences. I got him to come downstairs with me and we had a stiff glass of brandy each; and then I telephoned for a taxi to take me home. My own car was standing at the door; but I did not trust my ability to drive it in traffic at that moment. It seemed better to send my man round for it after I got home.
I went back in the taxi, with my nerves on edge.
CHAPTER II
THE COMING OF “THE BLIGHT”
NEXT morning I still felt the effects of the shock; and decided not to go to my office. I stayed indoors all day. When the evening papers came, I found in them brief accounts of the fire-ball; and in one case there was an article by Wotherspoon under the heading: “Well-known Scientist’s Strange Experience.” One or two reporters called at my house later in the day in search of copy, but I sent them on to Cumberland Terrace. In some of the reports I figured as “a well-known motor manufacturer,” whilst in others I was referred to simply as “a friend of Mr. Wotherspoon.” I had little difficulty in surmising the authorship of the latter group.
In the ordinary course of events, the fire-ball would have been much less than a nine days’ wonder, even in spite of Wotherspoon’s industry in compiling accounts of it and digging out parallel cases from the correspondence columns of old volumes of Nature and Knowledge; actually its career as a news item was made briefer still. An entirely different phenomenon shouldered it out of the limelight almost immediately.
After staying indoors all day, I felt the need of fresh air; and resolved to walk across the Park to Cumberland Terrace to see whether Wotherspoon had quite recovered from the shock. I had not much doubt in my mind upon the point; for the traces of his journalistic activity were plain enough; and showed that he was certainly not incapacitated. However, as I wanted a stroll and as I might as well have an object before me, I decided to go and see him.
Twilight was coming on as I crossed the suspension bridge. Even after the thunderstorm on the previous night there had been no rainfall; and although the temperature had fallen until the air was almost chilly, there was as yet no dew on the ground. I stopped on the bridge to watch the tints of the western sky; for these London after-glow effects always pleased me.
As I leaned on the rail, I heard the low drone of aerial engines; and in a few seconds the broad wings of the Australian Express swept between me and the sky. Even in those days I could never see one of these vast argosies passing overhead without a throb in my veins.
The great air-services had just come to their own; and aeroplanes started from London four and five times daily for America, Asia, Africa, and Australia. In the windows of the air-offices the flight of these vessels could be followed hour by hour on the huge world-maps over which moved tiny models showing the exact positions of the various aeroplanes on the globe. Watching the dots moving across the surface of the charts, one could call up, with very little imagination, the landscapes which were sweeping into the view of travellers on board the real machines as they glided through these far-distant spaces of the air. This one, two days out from London, would be sighting the pagoda roofs of Peking as the night was coming on; that one, on the Pacific route, had just finished filling up its tanks at Singapore and was starting on the long course to Australia; the passengers on this other would be watching the sun standing high over Victoria Nyanza; while, on the Atlantic, the Western Ocean Express and the South American Mail were racing the daylight into a fourth continent.
I think it was these maps which first brought home to me distinctly how the spaces of the world had shrunk on the “time-scale” with the coming of the giant aeroplanes. The pace had been growing swifter and ever swifter since the middle of the nineteenth century. Up to that day, there had been little advance since the time of the earlier sailing-vessels. Then came the change from sail to steam; and the Atlantic crossing contracted in its duration. The great Trans-continental railways quickened transit once more; again there was a shrinkage in the time-scale. Vladivostok came within ten days of London; from Cairo to the Cape was only five days. But with the coming of the air-ways the acceleration was greater still; and we reckoned in hours the journeys which, in the nineteenth-century days, had been calculated in weeks and even months. All the outposts of the world were drawing nearer together.
It was not this shrinkage only which the air-maps suggested. In the early twentieth century the telegraphs and submarine cables had spread their network over the world, linking nation to nation and coast to coast; but their ramifications dwindled in perspective when compared with the complex network of the air-ways which now enmeshed the globe. London lay like a spider at the centre of the web of communications, the like of which the world had never seen before; and along each thread the aeroplanes were speeding to and from all the quarters of the earth.
Rapid communication we had had since the days of the extension of the telegraph; but it had been limited to the transmission of thoughts and of news. The coming of the aeroplanes had changed all that. These tracks on the air-maps were not mere wires thrilling with the quiverings of the electric current. Along them material things were passing continually; a constant interchange of passengers and goods was taking place hourly over the multitudinous routes. For good or ill, humanity was becoming linked together until it formed a single unit.
It is curious that all the prophetic writers of the early twentieth century concentrated their attention almost exclusively upon the racial and social reactions which might be expected to follow from this knitting of the world into a connected whole and the resultant increase of traffic between the nations over the now contracted world-spaces. They had seen the interminglings of races which began in the steamship days and they deduced that the process would be intensified in the new era of air-transit; so that, in the end of their dreams, they saw the possibility of a World Federation stretching its rule over the whole globe and bringing with it the end of wars. None of them, strangely enough, had foreseen the real effects which this intercommunication was to bring forth.
To a certain extent, their foresight had been justified. With the coming of the airways, the war-spirit was temporarily exorcised. The vast increase in the size and number of aircraft and the terrors of an aerial war, with all its untested possibilities, served to rein in even the most ardent of military nations. Standing armies still persisted; but their numbers had bee
n diminished to a few thousands; for under the new conditions the old huge and unwieldy terrestrial forces could neither be fed nor protected from aerial attacks.
Thus, as I leaned on the rail of the suspension bridge and looked out over the greenery of the Park, it seemed to me a very pleasant world. Those of the younger generation can hardly imagine how fair it was or how inexhaustible it seemed. Thousands of square miles of Africa and South America were still virgin soil, storehouses of untapped resources waiting for humanity to draw upon their abundance. There was food for all the thousand millions of mankind; and, as the population rose, fresh lands could be brought under cultivation for the mere labour of clearing the soil of its surplus vegetation. It was the Golden Age of humanity; yet few of us recognised it. We looked either backward into the past or forward into the future when we sought the Islands of the Blest: while all about us lay Paradise, and the Earth blossomed like a huge garden which was ours for the taking.
I left my visions with a sigh and continued my way across the Park. The prolonged spell of heat was affecting the vegetation. The trees were dusty; and the grass seemed to have lost something of its brilliant green. I remember that after I had crossed the Broad Walk I noticed especially how moribund all the plant-life of the Park appeared to be. There was an air of decline about it, though no tints of autumn had yet appeared in the leaves.
Wotherspoon was, as usual, in his laboratory. The glass of the windows had been replaced; but otherwise the place was much in its disordered condition. I suspect that he had purposely refrained from getting it cleared up, in order to impress reporters with the actual damage which the explosion had done; and that when the reporters had ceased to call he had left things as they were with the idea of fascinating any visitors who might come.
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