threat of overhanging rocks and mountains go about their business--just
as though the possible was impossible, as though the inevitable was
postponed for ever because it was delayed.

It was in 1953 that the first Holsten-Roberts engine brought induced
radio-activity into the sphere of industrial production, and its first
general use was to replace the steam-engine in electrical generating
stations. Hard upon the appearance of this came the Dass-Tata
engine--the invention of two among the brilliant galaxy of Bengali
inventors the modernisation of Indian thought was producing at this
time--which was used chiefly for automobiles, aeroplanes, waterplanes,
and such-like, mobile purposes. The American Kemp engine, differing
widely in principle but equally practicable, and the Krupp-Erlanger
came hard upon the heels of this, and by the autumn of 1954 a gigantic
replacement of industrial methods and machinery was in progress all
about the habitable globe. Small wonder was this when the cost, even of
these earliest and clumsiest of atomic engines, is compared with that
of the power they superseded. Allowing for lubrication the Dass-Tata
engine, once it was started cost a penny to run thirty-seven miles,
and added only nine and quarter pounds to the weight of the carriage
it drove. It made the heavy alcohol-driven automobile of the time
ridiculous in appearance as well as preposterously costly. For
many years the price of coal and every form of liquid fuel had been
clambering to levels that made even the revival of the draft horse seem
a practicable possibility, and now with the abrupt relaxation of this
stringency, the change in appearance of the traffic upon the world's
roads was instantaneous. In three years the frightful armoured monsters
that had hooted and smoked and thundered about the world for four awful
decades were swept away to the dealers in old metal, and the highways
thronged with light and clean and shimmering shapes of silvered steel.