So, swallowing a mouthful and a peg², I went into my laboratory to plan murder—legalised murder—on the biggest scale it ever has been planned. I was on the track of a weapon which would make war not only an affair of a single campaign, but of a single half-hour. It would not want an army to work it either. Once let an individual, or two or three at most, in possession of my weapon-that-was-to-be, get within a mile or so of even the largest body of disciplined troops that ever yet a nation put into the field, and—pouf!—in about the time it takes you to say that they would be all dead men. If weapons of precision, which may be relied upon to slay³, are preservers of the peace—and the man is a fool who says that they are not!—then I was within reach of the finest preserver of the peace imagination ever yet conceived.

 

What a sublime⁴ thought to think that in the hollow of your own hand lies the life and death of nations,—and it was almost in mine.

 

I had in front of me some of the finest destructive agents you could wish to light upon—carbon-monoxide, chlorine-trioxide, mercuric-oxide, conine, potassamide, potassium-carboxide, cyanogen—when Edwards entered. I was wearing a mask of my own invention, a thing that covered ears and head and everything, something like a diver’s helmet—I was dealing⁵ with gases a sniff⁶ of which meant death; only a few days before, unmasked, I had been doing some fool’s trick with a couple of acids—sulphuric and cyanide of potassium—when, somehow, my hand slipped, and, before I knew it, minute portions of them combined. By the mercy of

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