d five
bodies were lying neatly side by side, and Pestovitch had an expression
of surprise on his face and the king was chiefly identifiable by his
long white hands and his blonde moustache. The wounded aeronaut had been
carried down to the inn. And after the ex-king had given directions in
what manner the bombs were to be taken to the new special laboratories
above Zurich, where they could be unpacked in an atmosphere of chlorine,
he turned to these five still shapes.

Their five pairs of feet stuck out with a curious stiff unanimity....

'What else was there to do?' he said in answer to some internal protest.

'I wonder, Firmin, if there are any more of them?'

'Bombs, sir?' asked Firmin.

'No, such kings....

'The pitiful folly of it!' said the ex-king, following his thoughts.
'Firmin,' as an ex-professor of International Politics, I think it falls
to you to bury them. There? . . . No, don't put them near the well.
People will have to drink from that well. Bury them over there, some way
off in the field.'

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

THE NEW PHASE

Section 1

The task that lay before the Assembly of Brissago, viewed as we may view
it now from the clarifying standpoint of things accomplished, was in
its broad issues a simple one. Essentially it was to place social
organisation upon the new footing that the swift, accelerated advance
of human knowledge had rendered necessary. The council was gathered
together with the haste of a salvage expedition, and it was confronted
with wreckage; but the wreckage was irreparable wreckage, and the only
possibilities of the case were either the relapse of mankind to the
agricultural barbarism from which it had emerged so painfully or the
acceptance of achieved science as the basis of a new social order. The
old tendencies of human nature, suspicion, jealousy, particularism, and
belligerency, were incompatible with the monstrous destructive power
of the new appliances the inhuman logic of science had produced. The
equilibrium could be restored only by civilisation destroying itself
down to a level at which modern apparatus could no longer be produced,
or by human nature adapting itself in its institutions to the new
conditions. It was for the latter alternative that the assembly existed.

Sooner or later this choice would have confronted mankind. The sudden
development of atomic science did but precipitate and render rapid
and dramatic a clash between the new and the cust