Nordenholt’s Million

To
J. N. C.

I

Genesis

I suppose that in the days before the catastrophe I was a very fair representative of the better type of business man. I had been successful in my own line, which was the application of mass-production methods to a better pattern of motorcar than had yet been dealt with upon a large scale; and the Flint car had been a good speculation. I was thinking of bringing out an economical type of gyroscopic two-wheeler just at the time we were overwhelmed. Organisation was my strong point; and much of my commercial success was due to a new system of control which I had introduced into my factories. I mention this point in passing, because it was this capacity of mine which first brought me to the notice of Nordenholt.

Although at the time of which I speak I had become more a director than a designer, I was originally by profession a mechanical engineer; and in my student days I had had a scientific training, some remnants of which still fluttered in tatters in odd corners of my mind. I could check the newspaper accounts of new discoveries in chemistry and physics well enough to know when the reporters blundered grossly; geology I remembered vaguely, though I could barely have distinguished augite from muscovite under a microscope: but the biological group of subjects had never come within my ken. The medical side of science was a closed book as far as I was concerned.

Yet, like many educated men of that time, I took a certain interest in scientific affairs. I read the accounts of the British Association in the newspapers year by year; I bought a copy of Nature now and again when a new line of research caught my attention; and occasionally I glanced through some of these popular réchauffés of various scientific topics by means of which people like myself were able to persuade themselves that they were keeping in touch with the advance of knowledge.

It was this taste of mine which brought me into contact with Wotherspoon; for, beyond his interest in scientific affairs, he and I had little enough in common. It is over a quarter of a century since I saw him last, for he must have died in the first year of our troubles; but I can still recall him very clearly: a short, stout man—“pudgy” is perhaps the word which best describes him—with a drooping, untidy moustache half-covering but not concealing the slackness of his mouth; fair hair, generally brushed in a lank mass to one side of his forehead; and watery eyes which had a look in them as of one crushed beneath a weight of knowledge and responsibility.

As a matter of fact, I doubt if his knowledge was sufficiently profound or extensive to crush any ordinary person; and as he had a private income and no dependants, I could not understand what responsibilities weighed upon him. He certainly held no official post in the scientific world which might have burdened him; for despite numerous applications on his part, none of the Universities had seen fit to utilise his services in even the meanest capacity.

To be quite frank, he was a dabbler. He originated nothing, discovered nothing, improved nothing; and yet, by some means, he had succeeded in imposing himself upon the public mind. He delivered courses of popular lectures on the work of real investigators; and I believe that these lectures were well attended. He wrote numerous books dealing with the researches of other men; and the publication of volume after volume kept him in the public eye. Whenever an important discovery was made by some real scientific expert, Wotherspoon would sit down and compile newspaper articles on the subject with great facility; and by these methods he achieved, among inexperienced readers, the reputation of a sort of arbiter in the scientific field. “As Mr. Wotherspoon says in the article which we publish elsewhere” was a phrase which appeared from time to time in the leader columns of the more sensational Press.

Naturally, he was disliked by the men who actually did the scientific work of the world and who had little time to spare for cultivating notoriety. He was a member of a large number of those societies to which admission can be gained by payment of an entrance fee and subscription; and on the bills of his lectures and the title-pages of his books his name was followed by a string of letters which the uninitiated assumed to imply great scientific ability. His application for admission to the Royal Society had, however, been unsuccessful—a failure which he frequently and publicly attributed to jealousy.

It appears strange that such a man as this should have been selected by Fate as the agent of disaster; and it seems characteristic of him that, when the key of the problem was lying beside him, his energy was entirely engrossed in writing newspaper paragraphs on another matter. His mind worked exclusively through the medium of print and paper; so that even the most striking natural phenomenon escaped his observation.

At that time he lived in one of the houses of Cumberland Terrace, overlooking Regent’s Park. I cannot recall the number; and the place has long ago disappeared; but I remember that it was near St. Katherine’s College and it overlooked the grounds of St. Katherine’s House. Wotherspoon carried his scientific aura even into the arrangement of his residence; for what was normally the drawing-room of the house had been turned into a kind of laboratory-reception-room; so that casual visitors might be impressed by his ardour in the pursuit of knowledge. When anyone called upon him, he was always discovered in this room, fingering apparatus, pouring liquids from one tube into another, producing precipitates or doing something else which would strike the unwary as being part of a recondite process. I had a feeling, when I came upon him in the midst of these manoeuvres, that he had sprung up from his chair at the sound of the door bell and had plunged hastily into his operations. I know enough to distinguish real work from make-believe; and Wotherspoon never gave me the impression that he was engaged in anything better than window-dressing. At any rate, nothing ever was made public with regard to the results of these multitudinous experiments; and when, occasionally, I asked him if he proposed to bring out a paper, he merely launched into a diatribe against the jealousy of scientific men.

It was about this time that Henley-Davenport was making his earlier discoveries in the field of induced radioactivity. The results were too technical for the unscientific man to appreciate; but I had become interested, not so much in details as in possibilities; and I determined to go across the Park and pay a visit to Wotherspoon one evening. I knew that, as far as published information went, he would be in possession of the latest news; and it was easier to get it from him than to read it myself.

It was warm weather then. I decided to use my car instead of walking through the Park. I had a slight headache, and I thought that possibly a short spin later, in the cool of the evening, might take it away. As I drove, I noticed how thunderclouds were banking up on the horizon, and I congratulated myself that even if they broke I should have the shelter of the car and be saved a walk home through the rain.

When I reached Cumberland Terrace, I was, as I expected, shown up into Wotherspoon’s sanctum. I found him, as usual, deeply engrossed in work: he had his eye to the tube of a large microscope, down which he was staring intently. I noticed a slight change in the equipment of the room. There seemed to be fewer retorts, flasks and test-tube racks than there usually were; and two large tables at the windows were littered with flat glass dishes containing thin slabs of pinkish material which seemed to be gelatine. Things like incubators took up a good deal of the remaining space. But I doubt if it is worth while describing what I saw: I know very little of such things; and I question whether his apparatus would have passed muster with an expert in any case.

After a certain amount of fumbling with the microscope, which seemed largely a formal matter leading to nothing, he rose from his seat and greeted me with his customary preoccupied air. For a time we smoked and talked of Henley-Davenport’s work; but after he had answered my questions it became evident that he had no further interest in the subject; and I was not surprised when, after a pause, he broke entirely new ground in his next remark.

“Do you know, Flint,” he said, “I am losing interest in all these investigations of the atomic structure. It seems to me that while unimaginative people like Henley-Davenport are groping into the depths of the material Universe, the real thing is passing them by. After all, what is mere matter in comparison with the problems of life? I have given up atoms and I am going to begin work upon living organisms.”

That was so characteristic of Wotherspoon. He was always “losing interest in” something and “going to begin work” upon something else. I nodded without saying anything. After all, it seemed of very little importance what he “worked” at.

“I wonder if you ever reflect, Flint,” he continued, “if you ever ponder over our position in this Universe? Here we stand, like Dante, ‘midway in this our mortal life’; at the halfway house between the cradle and the grave in time. And in space, too, we represent the middle term between the endless stretches of the Macrocosm and the bottomless deeps of the Microcosm. Look up at the night-sky and your eyes will tingle with the rays from long-dead stars, suns that were blotted out ages ago though the light they sent out before they died still thrills across the ether on its journey to our Earth. Take your microscope, and you find a new world before you; increase the magnification and another, tinier cosmos sweeps into your ken. And so, with ever-growing lens-power, we can peer either upward into stellar space or downward into the regions of the infinitesimal, while between these deeps we ourselves stand for a time on our precarious bridge of Earth.”

I began to suspect that he was trying over some phrases for a coming lecture; but it was early yet and I could not decently make an excuse for leaving him. I took a fresh cigar and let him go on without interruption.

“It always seems strange to me how little the man in the street knows of the things around him. The microscopic world has no existence as far as his mind is concerned. A grain of dust is too small for him to notice; it must blow into his eye before he appreciates that it has perceptible size at all. And yet, all about him and within him there lives this wonderful race of beings, passing to and fro in his veins as we do in the streets and avenues of a great city; coming to birth, going about their concerns, falling ill and dying, just as men do in London at this hour. Think of the battles, the victories, and the defeats which take place minute by minute in the tiniest drop of our blood; and the issue of the war may be the life or death of one of us. They talk of the struggle for existence; but the real struggle for existence is going on within us and not in the outer world. Phagocyte against bacterium—that is where the fitness of an organism comes to its ultimate test. A slight hitch in the reinforcements, a minute’s delay in bringing numbers to bear, and the keystone is out of the edifice; nothing is left but a ruin.

“It always reminds me of those frontier skirmishes—a mere handful of troops engaged on either side—upon the issue of which the fate of an empire may depend. Get a new set of enemies, some novel type of bacteria with fresh tactics which the phagocytes cannot cope with—and down comes a human being. It strikes wonder into me, that, you know. A human body is so colossal in comparison with these bacteria that they can have no idea even of our existence; and yet they can destroy the whole machinery upon which our life depends. It’s almost as if a few shots fired in Africa could crumble the whole Earth into an impalpable dust.

“And it is not only within us that these struggles are going on. When you came in, I was just studying some specimens of organisms which are equally vital to us. Come over here to the microscope, Flint, and have a look at them yourself.”

When I had got the focus adjusted to suit my eyes, I must confess that I was astonished by what I saw. Somehow, in the course of my reading, I had picked up the idea that bacteria were rod-like creatures which floated inertly in liquids at the mercy of the currents; but at the first glance I realised how much below the reality my conception had been. In the field of the instrument I saw a score of objects, rod-like in their main structure, it is true, but so mantled with the fringes of their fine, threadlike cilia that their baculite character was almost concealed. Nor were they the inert things which I had supposed them to be; for, as I watched them, now one and again another would dart with prodigious swiftness from point to point in the circle of illumination. I had rarely seen such relative activity in any creature. The speed of their movements was so great that my eye could not follow them in their tracks. They appeared to be at rest one instant and then to vanish, reappearing as suddenly in some fresh spot. I watched them, fascinated, for some minutes, trying to trace the vibrations of the cilia which projected them from place to place at such enormous speeds; but either my eye was untrained or the movements of the threadlike fringes were too rapid to be seen. It was certainly an illuminating glimpse into the life of the underworld.

When I had risen from the microscope table, Wotherspoon took me over to one of the benches before the window and showed me the glass vessels containing the pinkish gelatine. These slabs, he told me, were cultures of bacteria. One placed a few organisms on the gelatine and there they grew and multiplied enormously.

“These specimens here,” said Wotherspoon, “are not the same variety as the ones on the microscope slide. They have nothing whatever to do with disease; and yet, as I told you, they have an influence upon animal life. I suppose you never heard of nitrifying and denitrifying bacteria?”

I admitted that the names were unfamiliar to me.

“Just so. Few people seem to take any interest in these vital problems. Now you do know that internally we swarm with all sorts of germs, noxious in some cases, beneficent in others; but I suppose it never struck you that our bodies form only a trifling part of the material world; and that outside these living islets there is space for all sorts of microscopic flora and fauna to grow and multiply? And need these creatures be absolutely isolated from the interests of animals? Not at all.

“Now what is the essential thing, apart from air and water, which we derive from the outside world? Food, isn’t it? Did it ever occur to you to inquire where your food comes from, ultimately?”

“Well, of course,” I said, “it comes from all over the world. I don’t know whether the wheat I eat in my bread comes from Canada or the States or Argentina, or was homegrown. It doesn’t seem to me a matter of importance, anyway.”

“That isn’t what I mean at all,” Wotherspoon interrupted, “I want you to look at it in another way. I suppose you had your usual style of dinner today. Just think of the items: soup, fish, meat, bread, and so on. Your soup was made from bones and vegetables; your fish course was originally an animal; so was your joint; your sweet was probably purely vegetable; and your dessert certainly was a plant product. Now don’t you see what I mean?”

“No, I confess I don’t.”

“Haven’t I just shown you that everything you ate comes from either the animal or vegetable kingdom? You don’t bite bits out of the crockery, like the Mad Hatter. Everything you use to keep your physical machine alive is something which has already had life in it? Isn’t that so? You never think of having a meal of pure chemicals, do you?”

“It never occurred to me; and I doubt it I shall begin now. It doesn’t sound very appetising.”

“It would be worse than that; but follow my argument further. Take the case of your joint. Presumably that came from an ox or a sheep. Where did the animal, whatever it was, get its food? From the vegetable kingdom, in the form of grass. Isn’t it clear that everything you yourself eat comes, either directly or indirectly, from the plants? And aren’t all animals on the same footing as yourself—they depend ultimately on the vegetables for their sustenance, don’t they? A fox may live on poultry; but the chickens he kills have grown fat by eating grain; and so you come back to the plants again. If you like to look on it in that way, we are all parasites on the plants; we cannot live without them. Our digestive machinery is so specialised that it will assimilate only a certain type of material—protoplasm—and unless it is supplied with that material, we starve. We can convert the protoplasm of other animals or of plants to our own use; but we cannot manufacture protoplasm from its elements. We have to get it ready-made from the vegetables, either directly or indirectly.

“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 thunderclouds, 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 tonight, 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 thunderclap 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 thunderstorm; 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 fireball, 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 from the 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 fireball 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 halfway 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.