Disintegrator

“ Pick five good men for a landing party, two of them portable disintegrator ray operators, with equipment. The others will be provided with ethon lamps, pistols, and atomic grenades. Get the men to the trap as quickly as possible, please. ”

“ During all these years in which he has given exhibitions of the operation of his generators, liberators, and disintegrators, in turn, each being an improvement, successively, on the preceding one, no one has attempted to give to the public any theory, or even so much as a sensible conjecture, of the origin of the force. ”

“ He pulled another lever over. There was a sputter from within the borer, then a furious roar that sent great echoes beating through the cavern. A cloud of dust reared up before the bottom of the machine, whipped madly for a moment, and sank as the bellow of sound died down. Sue saw that a rocky rise in the floor directly in front of the disintegrators had been planed off levelly.
Phil scrambled out. "The disintegrators work," he said, "but a lot of good they do us. The borer's hopelessly cracked." ”

“ Now, if all that may be known and desired is reduced to this material expression, how dull and beggarly does not life become,—mere atomic integration and disintegration, the poor human pneumatic-machine purring along the dusty road of matter, bound and helpless and soulless as a clanking engine! ”

“ To my clairvoyant vision, as I now at this moment look at you, every minute atom of your physical organism is in the subtle process of depolarization from unity toward chaos and disintegration. You are not yourself conscious of this condition only as it has been revealed to you, for your soul is so alive that it has become almost unconscious of its physical expression and for this very reason the shock of dissolution would be all the greater when it did come ”

“ Like a flood that slowly undermines a bank, and which the proprietor regards not when he sees so tiny a current dribbling and oozing through, and scarcely bowing the grass between which it trickles, so came the Destroyer—slowly and almost imperceptibly undermining the current of life, and eating out the foundations, until there needed but one mighty rush, and all was over beyond recovery, and the work of destruction was completed. ”

“ Poor creatures! The explosion carried them away like grains of dust into the abyss of universal doubt.
It was a degeneration of all things of heaven and of earth that might be termed disenchantment, or if you preferred, despair; as if humanity in lethargy had been pronounced dead by those who held its place. Like a soldier who was asked: "In what do you believe?" and who replied: "In myself." Thus the youth of France, hearing that question, replied: "In nothing." ”

“ The clamor oppressed the spirit, the dust fretted the nostrils and blinded the eyes, the sweltering heat baked and exhausted the body, and everything-buildings, men, pavement—seemed strained, breaking, ready to burst, losing patience, on the verge of exploding into some immense catastrophe, some outbreak, after which one would be able to breathe freely and easily in the air refreshed by it. ”

“ As a tortoise puts forth its body out of its shell and again draws that body into it, so out of Love the twenty-three principles are projected, and drawn, in the fullness of time, back into its bosom again. This reaction or journey of the universe back to its source is called universal destruction, or dissolution, or disintegration. This universal dissolution takes place when the Three Cardinal Attributes of creation, out of which all the composing principles have sprung, fall into equilibrium; in other words, become equal in power or tension. ”

“ For that which is non-existent does not exist. But when bodies are disintegrated, and experience a change, a dissolution of them takes place; so that a part of them goes to earth, a part to air, and a part to something else. ”

“ The frightful destruction which attends the explosion of a steam-engine, would be more than paralleled by the sudden rending asunder of the bands of society, when physical force, released from the government of religious and moral influence, bursts forth with the full sweep of its tremendous powers. ”

“ The gross body disintegrates every time a man dies. The soul not being made of any particles must be indestructible. What do we mean by destruction? Destruction is disintegration of the materials out of which anything is composed. If this glass is broken into pieces, the materials will disintegrate, and that will be the destruction of the glass. Disintegration of particles is what we mean by destruction. It naturally follows that nothing that is not composed of particles can be destroyed, can ever be disintegrated. The soul is not composed of any materials. ”

“ Disintegration is quite painless, I assure you–but I want you to see them. ”

“ I will not now attempt to estimate the extent of that ruin,—to determine whether the earth would still move on its course, in cold, dark and lifeless desolation, or whether the elementary particles of which it is composed, being released from all sustaining or combining force, would be dissolved and dissipated through the immensity of space. It is sufficient to see that there would instantly follow an entire destruction of all that now renders the earth a habitation for man. For all practical uses the destruction would be as total as if the earth were annihilated. ”

“ One sees these things in glimpses, in illuminated moments, as if through a driving reek of clouds, going on all over the world. It was the dissolution of an age; it was the collapse of the civilisation that had trusted to machinery, and the instruments of its destruction were machines. But while the collapse of the previous great civilisation, that of Rome, had been a matter of centuries, had been a thing of phase and phase, like the ageing and dying of a man, this, like his killing by railway or motor car, was one swift, conclusive smashing and an end. ”

“ We perceive only what is nearest to us, namely, the scattered movements of the pulverized explosions. From them we have to go back, stage by stage, to the original movement.
When a shell bursts, the particular way it breaks is explained both by the explosive force of the powder it contains and by the resistance of the metal. So of the way life breaks into individuals and species. It depends, we think, on two series of causes: the resistance life meets from inert matter, and the explosive force—due to an unstable balance of tendencies—which life bears within itself. ”

“ But the idea of original sin is so strongly implanted in the minds of most men, that an assumption that disintegrating force can only enter where it is invited is inevitable. It must be clearly understood that attack by forces of disintegration does not imply weakness, or fear, or sinful desire. It implies only a desire on the part of the attacking force to destroy. That there are individuals given to disintegration is another matter. Those most desirous of construction and progress are more often attacked by persistent, massed forces of destructive purpose. ”

“ Destiny plainly meant more and more iron dug from the ground and turned into steel machinery, larger, more powerful automobiles, taller and taller buildings, swifter and swifter elevators, more and more capacious freight cars, and destiny would not tolerate stopping all this for the insanity of destruction. ”

“ Hundreds of tons of loosened rock and earth were crashing down-wards, and the horror-stricken men who saw what was happening were shouting, screaming, gesticulating, for well they knew the fate of any who should be struck unawares by the swift-descending mass. ”

“ Looking at this crowd of people here in the streets of Columbia City, I was more affected by their futility and pathos—life’s futility and pathos for the mass—than by anything else so far. What could these people do, even by banding together, to control the giants at the top? ”

“ Imagine the floor so crammed with machinery for economy of space as to allow bare room for the workers to writhe about among the flying arms and jaws of steel, a false motion meaning death or mutilation. Imagine the air space above filled, instead of air, with a mixture of stenches of oil and filth, unwashed human bodies, and foul clothing. Conceive a perpetual clang and clash of machinery like the screech of a tornado. ”

“ This composite association of the elements in the form of a human body is, therefore, subject to disintegration, which we call death, but after disintegration the elements themselves persist unchanged. Therefore, total annihilation is an impossibility, and existence can never become nonexistence. ”

“ The forces of disintegration are gathering for a titanic struggle, of which your Great War is only the beginning. Had Germany won there, they would have a foothold with you that we would find it difficult, if not impossible, to combat effectively for many years. The spirits of free men would have been soiled with fear and despair, and the forces of doubt and disintegration would have held civilization captive.
“Germany has felt her forces weaken and fail under the onslaught of freedom, light, and progress, and the forces of disintegration are deserting her. ”

“ I have tried to prevent the sharp discussions of the foreground, the dramatic moments and eloquent passages, from blinding us to the dark and darkening background of Old World affairs. I have tried to show that even the horrors of war are not the whole or the main disaster which results from human disunion and disorder in the presence of increasing mechanical power. I have stressed the theme of economic and social dissolution. ”

“ Whilst dispersing indignation and a blood frenzy swayed them, a frenzy augmented by that invisible magnetic force, the murmuring, raging force of 3,000 strong men. One could feel that helpless feeling of being lifted up by some invisible force, forced, thrown against the flux of raging, elemental passion of resentment, against the Kozaks of this State. ”

“ It matters little whether we regard it as the deepening or the destruction of the scientific universe. It matters little whether we say that grander abysses have opened in it, or merely that the bottom has fallen out of it. ”

“ But finally it is compelled to give way; the force applied becomes too great for its powers of resistance. A crack, beginning at the bottom, is opened, with a fearful crash. The crack widens, and when it is completed to the top a fragment is detached. This fragment is buoyed up to its proper level; and while the loud noise of the disruption is echoing among the hills, and the great waves of its creating are rolling away, the monstrous mass is coming171 slowly to rest, ready to float off with the current to the ocean. ”

“ The policy of drift, which we seem to favour, is bound to lead us to disaster, and when we couple with it inefficacious resistance and bigoted obstruction we cannot be surprised if, in the end, it only yields us bitter disappointment, extensive losses, enmity and derision. ”

“ If the floor is of stone, the back of the watch may be wrenched away, the wheels of its delicate machinery jarred asunder. Destruction has come upon it, and not merely an extraneous accident. In consequence of altered surroundings, dissolution is wrought within. ”

“ I shall perish molecule by molecule, feeling my own death, able to appreciate every change, every stage in the inevitable progress of corruption. That lingering process of annihilation which other men suffer unconsciously underground I shall suffer consciously above ground. ”

“ It all lies now within our skin, within the ego of humanity.
So circumscribed within the outer nullity, we give ourselves up to the flux of death, to analysis, to introspection, to mechanical war and destruction, to humanitarian absorption in the body politic, the poor, the birth-rate, the mortality of infants, like a man absorbed in his own flesh and members, looking for ever at himself. It is the continued activity of{54} disintegration—disintegration, separating, setting apart, investigation, research, the resolution back to the original void. ”

“ After some time it would be discovered that this powerful and beneficent agent, the solar fire, was the most potent destroyer, and hence would arise the first idea of a Creator and Destroyer united in the same person. But much time would not elapse before it must have been observed, that the destruction caused by this powerful being was destruction only in appearance, that destruction was only reproduction in another form—regeneration ”

“ As the impatient and sluggish breathing of the Destroyer drew near, with a sound as of Earthquake and Pestilence laboring afar off, there appeared upon the outermost verge of the scaffold, near the fortress, a man of a simple and majestic presence, wearing no symbol of power, no badge of authority, before whom the multitude gave way with headlong precipitation, as though but to touch the hem of his garment were death itself, or something yet worse than death. ”

“ And thus our finding that the dissolution of matter, in which living beings were most nearly interested, is not their dissolution; and that the destruction of several of the organs and instruments of perception and of motion belonging to them, is not their destruction; shows demonstratively, that there is no ground to think that the dissolution of any other matter, or destruction of any other organs and instruments, will be the dissolution or destruction of living agents, from the like kind of relation. ”

“ The difficulties, too, about the corruption and dissolution of dead bodies,—that one is turned into dust, while another evaporates into the air; that some are devoured by beasts, some by fire, while some perish by shipwreck or by drowning in one shape or other, so that their bodies decay into liquid, these difficulties give them immoderate alarm, and they believe that all those dissolved elements cannot be gathered again and reconstructed into a body. ”