PLUNDERERS IN PARADISE
Meyer, Ernest L.
Plunderers In Paradise By ERNEST L MEYER IT'S ALWAYS bound to happen like that. You are relaxing in a chair on the lawn, weary after a session of chopping down underbrush with a weed-cutter none...
...President Truman has announced that a single atomic bomb has been dumped on a Japanese city of ,'540,000, probably wiping it and most of its inhabitants off the blasted acres of the earth...
...The back door of the house bangs and your son, who has been listening to the radio in his room, comes dashing across the lawn, hair flying, eyes wide with excitement...
...The lawn, parched brown in the long drought ot last year, now is of that incredible emerald tint made famous by picture post-cards of County Cork...
...And in that moment of utter contentment you are aware of a twinge of selfishness that you should, even for a little space, inhabit this corner of Shangri-La from which so many, so fearfully many, have been banished by the flaming sword...
...But what if on some dark tomorrow the baleful foe becomes identified with the Russians or the Chinese, and the rise of a red or a new yellow "menace" threatens the domains of the angelic entente...
...They do not gloss their naked lust for life with pious phrases...
...Vines strangle the poplar saplings...
...The interminable rains of July and early August brought mildew, and sugar caked in the bowls, and salt never flowed from the shakers, but the rains and the scattered days of sunshine biought, too, their riches...
...The only difference between the coal in your furnace, the phosphorous in the match that lights it and the oxygen in the air that makes them burn is that their atoms are made of slightly different arrangements of the same electrical forces...
...The atoms of the various chemical elements are built of different numbers of electrons...
...You hug that hope only because you know that man, above all other animals, has the power to alter, often radically and swiftly, the world in which he seeks blunderingly for happiness...
...And by the light of that very candor, that forth-rightness in ferocity, the insects and animals merit and no doubt will achieve a longer sojourn on our punished planet than that of man who with an hypocrisy undreamed of by the lowest viper labels an atomic bomb that murders a hundred thousand men, women and children as a benign gift from the just, the merciful Creator of all things...
...Will it be duplicated by the enemy who by that time will have caught up with the latest styles in slaughter...
...Above all, besides all, and permeating everything is that indefinable feeling of peace that you soak in through your pores as you absorb the sunlight...
...All Is Atoms By Science Service THE atom is the one fundamental unit of matter in the universe...
...He blurts the news that THR miracle has happened...
...The leaves of a wild cherry are riddled lacelike by the borings of beetles...
...But your hope for a brave new world of tomorrow is not boldened by the fact that mankind through the ages has had Eden within its grasp but has always contrived, for reasons eminently saintly, to plunder and befoul its own paradise...
...The long rows of zinnias, portulacas, bee-balm, petunias, and nasturtiums pattern a gay flag at the foot of the terrace, and in the back garden the vines hang heavy with tomatoes, and the bold yellow of squash already ripe speckles the shadows under the great dark leaves...
...AND then it happens...
...This shattering radio broadcast has proved it again...
...Its first use is hellish beyond the dreams of the devil, but we are bidden to rejoice that the thunderbolt had not been discovered first by a German or Japanese...
...The sounds blur as you doze a bit...
...They deserve to inherit whatever shards of splintered earth mankind is pleased to leave them...
...We are reassured that it is truly an instrument for peace, that it is poised only against a baleful foe and will shorten the war against Nippon...
...Gloria in excelsis...
...This was the situation at the beginning of the war...
...It is accented by the little noises that, compounded, make up the so-called silence of the country...
...Scientists believe they are too large to hold together and that this accounts for the fact that this heavy metal is constantly breaking down into lighter elements, thorium, radium and lead, giving off the strange gas, radon, which is heavier than lead, and showing loss of energy by glowing in the dark...
...A patch of berry-bushes in the backwoods is withered in the shade of rank weeds...
...The atom has been split, its terrific power controlled and shaped into a thunderbolt of a vengeful Jahveh...
...The President has added with gratification that the atomic bomb means "harnessing of the basic power of the universe...
...Here and there a few electrons would break away from their tiny orbits, throwing the system into confusion, liberating energy as heat and light...
...Our scientists were almost on the verge of this discovery...
...Wherever you look, on the sod and over it, victors and vanquished in the universal battle...
...The very stuff of God, then, moulded to the hands of Satan but used—oh, to be sure—in a righteous, a glorious cause, and all people of peace, good-will, and kindliness should gloat and sing paeans on the edge of that enormous crater where tens of thousands of mangled bodies fester in the stench of death...
...Compared to the size of the atom, the quantities of energy liberated are enormous...
...On a low branch of a birch overhead a fat black spider has woven its web, and in it is entangled a live blue moth, scaring with its fluttering the tentative advances of its captor...
...For nearly half a century the fact of atomic disintegration has been known...
...the chirk of a colony of katydids sliced by the more strident sawing of a distant cicada, the staccato scolding of a red squirrel infuriated by the invasion of a 'ray cousin, and the wash of the wind through the roadside maples...
...You reflect, as you study again the signs of warfare in the garden, that insects and animals are more honest...
...TURN your gaze to the trees and the garden and you glimpse but a fragment of the eternal warfare among all things that grow and creep and fly and walk...
...And all animate things war one against the other...
...You reflect, gratefully, that never before have the flower and vegetable beds behind the little house looked so lush...
...But so were the Germans...
...THESE are idle speculations, perhaps sick and silly...
...A power unheralded save by visionaries is ours...
...The atoms of uranium are the largest known...
...You enter the house to hear the radio, with details red and raw as dripping flesh, elaborate on the theme that humanity has been advanced by holocaust...
...It is these electrical forces that disintegrate the atom and give out atomic power...
...Everything is made of atoms...
...They do not maintain that each of their fangs, their poisons, their intricate webs are made holy by a lord of the jungle...
...Then why, you reflect somberly, cling to the hope that humanity will ever know enduring peace save, perhaps, in that cataclysmic moment when all of earth's atoms explode and the world vanishes into the blissful void...
...The chatter of the red squirrel is a battle cry,and it will sink sharp teeth into its gray cousin if it can...
...But no one could predict just when the atoms would explode, or make them do it where the released energy could be made to do useful work...
...Will the thunderbolt of Jahveh be unloosed again...
...You are relaxing in a chair on the lawn, weary after a session of chopping down underbrush with a weed-cutter none too sharp...
...Atoms are like miniature solar systems, whose suns are spots of positive electricity and whose planets are electrons...
...The race for solving the problem of using the energy locked up in the quiet atoms has been won by our side, and just in time...
...But no one knew how to make use of the energy given off by the exploding atoms...
...Will the whole thing end with the world an invisible mass of electrons and neutrons rocketing through a skyway of dead stars...
...And when you return to the outdoors, spent and shaken, you become^aware suddenly that even here in this slice of Shangri-La the feeling of peace is but a fraud and delusion...
Vol. 9 • August 1945 • No. 34
