Читать книгу City of Endless Night - Milo Hastings - Страница 23

Table of Contents

In the quiet of my new abode I unsealed the package. The first sheet contained the official offer of the rewards in store for success with the research. The further papers explained the occasion for the gravity and secrecy, and outlined the problem.

The colossal consequence of the matter with which I was dealing gripped and thrilled me. Protium, it seemed, was the German name for a rare element of the radium group, which, from its atomic weight and other properties, I recognized as being known to the outside world only as a laboratory curiosity of no industrial significance.

But, as used by the Germans, this element was the essence of life itself, for by the influence of its emanations, they had achieved the synthesis of protein capable of completely nourishing the human body--a thing that could be accomplished in the outside world only through the aid of natural protein derived from plants and animals.

How I wished, as I read, that my uncle could have shared with me this revelation of a secret that he had spent his life in a fruitless effort to unravel. We had long since discovered how the Germans had synthesized the carbohydrate molecule from carbon dioxide and water and built therefrom the sugars, starches and fat needed for human nutrition. We knew quite as well how they had created the simpler nitrogen compounds, that this last step of synthesizing complete food proteins--a step absolutely essential to the support of human life wholly from synthetic foods--the chemists of the outer world had never mastered.

But no less interesting than the mere chemistry of all this was the history of it all, and the light it threw on the larger story of how Germany had survived when the scientists of the world had predicted her speedy annihiliation. The original use of protium had, I found, been discovered late in the Twentieth Century when the protium ores of the Ural Mountains were still available to the German chemists. After Russia had been won by the World Armies, the Germans for a time suffered chronic nitrogen starvation, as they depended on the protium derived from what remained of their agriculture and from the fisheries in the Baltic. As the increasing bombardment from the air herded them within their fast building armoured city, and drove them beneath the soil in all other German territory and from the surface of the sea in the Baltic; they must have perished miserably but for the discovery of a new source of protium.

This source they had found in the uninhabited islands of the Arctic, where the formation of the Ural Mountains extends beneath the sea. Sending their submarines thence in search of platinum ores they had not found platinum but a limited supply of ore containing the even more valuable protium. By this traffic Germany had survived for a century and a half. The quantity of the rare element needed was small, for its effect, like that of radium, was out of all proportion to its bulk. But this little they must have, and it seems that the supply of ore was failing.

Nor was that all to interest me. How did the German submarine get to the Arctic since the World State had succeeded, after half a century of effort, in damming the Baltic by closing up several passes among the Danish Islands and the main pass of the sound between Zealand and Sweden? I remember, as a youngster, the great Jubilee that celebrated the completion of that monumental task, and the joy that hailed from the announcement that the world's shipping would at last be freed from an ancient scourge.

But little had we of the world known the magnitude of the German fears as the Baltic dam neared completion. We had thought merely to protect our commerce from German piracy and perhaps to stop them from getting a little copper and rubber in some remote corner of the earth. But we did not realize that we were about to cut them off from an essential element without which that conceited and defiant race must have speedily run up the white flag of absolute surrender or have died to the last man, like rats in a neglected trap.

But the completion of the Baltic dam evidently had not shut off the supply of Arctic ore, for the annual importation of ore was given right up to date though the Baltic had been closed for nearly a score of years. Eagerly I searched my papers for an item that would give some hint as to how the submarines got out of the dammed-up Baltic. But on that point the documents before me were silent. They referred to the Arctic ore, gave elaborate details as to mineralogy and geology of the strata from which it came, but as to the ways of its coming into Berlin there was not the slightest suggestion. That this ore must come by submarine was obvious. If so, the submarine must be at large in the Atlantic and Arctic seas, and those occasional reports of periscopes sighted off the coast of Norway, which have never been credited, were really true. The submarines, or at least their cargoes, must reach Berlin by some secret passage. Here indeed was a master mystery, a secret which, could I unravel it and escape to the outer world with the knowledge, would put unconditionally within the power of the World State the very life of the three hundred millions of this unholy race that was bred and fed by science in the armoured City of Berlin, or that, working like blind moles of the earth, held the world at bay from off the sterile and pock-marked soil of all that was left of the one-time German Empire.

That night I did not sleep till near the waking hour, and when the breakfast container bumped into the receiving cupboard I was nodding over the chemical papers amid strange and wonderful dreams.