I believe the latter. It would, however, unquestionably devastate the enemy’s nation, obliterate perhaps two-thirds of his people and leave hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of square miles of enemy land radioactive, deadly even to vegetation. It might, according to the uncertain vicissitudes of weather, of high-altitude winds, of the so-called jet of air which waveringly girdles our planet, transport a large amount of this lethal material across the Pacific and conceivably leave here a lesser but real train of death and sickness, sterility, misery and additional fear. That is an indeterminate risk involved in the weapon’s use. It is our third possibility—the only alternative I can offer to a surrender that would surely become unconditional with passing time, or to a continuation of the existing holocaust with present weapons. I shall have a few of the military men and scientists speak to you….”
An hour and a quarter later, it was voted to order the Nautilus to proceed—and to demolish herself, and the foe.
16
They could have seen it from the planets.
On Mars, if there are naked eyes, they could have seen it without other aid.
On that Christmas night, the Baltic Sea erupted. There was no warning. The faint signals the Nautilus received were not intercepted by the beleaguered but seemingly victorious Reds.
She penetrated the Gulf of Finland, dove to bottom and her skipper, summoning the men, prayed, Bashed a last word, and touched a small button installed some hours before on the table directly below the periscope. The rays, the temperatures, vaporized Finland’s Gulf in a split part of an instant. The sea’s bottom was melted. The Light reached out into the Universe.
Finland was not. Lithuania, Latvia, Esthonia, they were not. Kronstadt melted, Leningrad.
The blast kicked up the ashes that once had been Moscow, collected the burning environs and pulverized them and hurled their dust at the Urals. In the ensuing dark, a Thing swelled above the western edge of Russia, alight, alive, of a size to bulge beyond the last particles of earth’s air.
On the wind currents it came forward, forward across the north-sloping plains, a thick dust that widened to a hundred miles, and then five hundred, moving, spreading, descending, blanketing the land that night, and the day after, and the next. It thinned, over Siberia, thinned and spread until it was no longer blinding, till men could no longer see it or smell it or taste it. But still, where it rolled, day or night, they died.