ll the new fine things that science was giving to the
world, nationalities, all sorts of political bodies, the churches and
sects, proprietorship, seizing upon those treat powers and limitless
possibilities and turning them to evil uses. And they would not suffer
open speech, they would not permit of education, they would let no one
be educated to the needs of the new time.... You who are younger cannot
imagine the mixture of desperate hope and protesting despair in which we
who could believe in the possibilities of science lived in those years
before atomic energy came....

'It was not only that the mass of people would not attend, would not
understand, but that those who did understand lacked the power of real
belief. They said the things, they saw the things, and the things meant
nothing to them....

'I have been reading some old papers lately. It is wonderful how our
fathers bore themselves towards science. They hated it. They feared
it. They permitted a few scientific men to exist and work--a pitiful
handful.... "Don't find out anything about us," they said to them;
"don't inflict vision upon us, spare our little ways of life from the
fearful shaft of understanding. But do tricks for us, little limited
tricks. Give us cheap lighting. And cure us of certain disagreeable
things, cure us of cancer, cure us of consumption, cure our colds and
relieve us after repletion...." We have changed all that, Gardener.
Science is no longer our servant. We know it for something greater than
our little individual selves. It is the awakening mind of the race, and
in a little while----In a little while----I wish indeed I could watch
for that little while, now that the curtain has risen....

'While I lie here they are clearing up what is left of the bombs in
London,' he said. 'Then they are going to repair the ruins and make it
all as like as possible to its former condition before the bombs fell.
Perhaps they will dig out the old house in St John's Wood to which
my father went after his expulsion from Russia.... That London of my
memories seems to me like a place in another world. For you younger
people it must seem like a place that could never have existed.'

'Is there much left standing?' asked Edith Haydon.

'Square miles that are scarcely shaken in the south and north-west, they
say; and most of the bridges and large areas of dock. Westminster, which
held most of the government offices, suffered badly from the small bomb
th