'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
the year 1933. From the first detection of radio-activity to its first
subjugation to human purpose measured little more than a quarter of
a century.
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