d populous, and many of the big towns
had so lowered the water level of their available hills that they
suffered a drought every summer. The whole system was rushing towards
bankruptcy. And they were spending every year vaster and vaster
amounts of power and energy upon military preparations, and continually
expanding the debt of industry to capital. The system was already
staggering when Holsten began his researches. So far as the world in
general went there was no sense of danger and no desire for inquiry.
They had no belief that science could save them, nor any idea that there
was a need to be saved. They could not, they would not, see the gulf
beneath their feet. It was pure good luck for mankind at large that
any research at all was in progress. And as I say, sir, if that line
of escape hadn't opened, before now there might have been a crash,
revolution, panic, social disintegration, famine, and--it is
conceivable--complete disorder. . . . The rails might have rusted on the
disused railways by now, the telephone poles have rotted and fallen,
the big liners dropped into sheet-iron in the ports; the burnt, deserted
cities become the ruinous hiding-places of gangs of robbers. We might
have been brigands in a shattered and attenuated world. Ah, you may
smile, but that had happened before in human history. The world is still
studded with the ruins of broken-down civilisations. Barbaric bands
made their fastness upon the Acropolis, and the tomb of Hadrian became a
fortress that warred across the ruins of Rome against the Colosseum....
Had all that possibility of reaction ended so certainly in 1940? Is it
all so very far away even now?'

'It seems far enough away now,' said Edith Haydon.

'But forty years ago?'

'No,' said Karenin with his eyes upon the mountains, 'I think you
underrate the available intelligence in those early decades of the
twentieth century. Officially, I know, politically, that intelligence
didn't tell--but it was there. And I question your hypothesis. I doubt
if that discovery could have been delayed. There is a kind of inevitable
logic now in the progress of research. For a hundred years and more
thought and science have been going their own way regardless of the
common events of life. You see--they have got loose. If there had been
no Holsten there would have been some similar man. If atomic energy had
not come in one year it would have come in another. In decadent Rome
the march of science had