catching of the breath that many an actor or
orator might have envied.

The lecture was over, the audience hung silent for a few seconds,
sighed, became audible, stirred, fluttered, prepared for dispersal. More
light was turned on and what had been a dim mass of figures became a
bright confusion of movement. Some of the people signalled to friends,
some crowded down towards the platform to examine the lecturer's
apparatus and make notes of his diagrams. But the chuckle-headed lad
with the scrub hair wanted no such detailed frittering away of the
thoughts that had inspired him. He wanted to be alone with them; he
elbowed his way out almost fiercely, he made himself as angular and
bony as a cow, fearing lest some one should speak to him, lest some one
should invade his glowing sphere of enthusiasm.

He went through the streets with a rapt face, like a saint who sees
visions. He had arms disproportionately long, and ridiculous big feet.

He must get alone, get somewhere high out of all this crowding of
commonness, of everyday life.

He made his way to the top of Arthur's Seat, and there he sat for a long
time in the golden evening sunshine, still, except that ever and again
he whispered to himself some precious phrase that had stuck in his mind.

'If,' he whispered, 'if only we could pick that lock. . . .'

The sun was sinking over the distant hills. Already it was shorn of its
beams, a globe of ruddy gold, hanging over the great banks of cloud that
would presently engulf it.

'Eh!' said the youngster. 'Eh!'

He seemed to wake up at last out of his entrancement, and the red
sun was there before his eyes. He stared at it, at first without
intelligence, and then with a gathering recognition. Into his mind
came a strange echo of that ancestral fancy, that fancy of a Stone Age
savage, dead and scattered bones among the drift two hundred thousand
years ago.

'Ye auld thing,' he said--and his eyes were shining, and he made a kind
of grabbing gesture with his hand; 'ye auld red thing.... We'll have ye
YET.'

CHAPTER THE FIRST

THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY

Section 1

The problem which was already being mooted by such scientific men as
Ramsay, Rutherford, and Soddy, in the very beginning of the twentieth
century, the problem of inducing radio-activity in the heavier elements
and so tapping the internal energy of atoms, was solved by a wonderful
combination of induction, intuition, and luck by Holsten so soon as