them for his fellow men. He studied and worked and thought, and in
time came to concentrate on the manipulation of the atom, especially
the possibility of contracting and expanding it--a thing of greatest
potential value. For nine years he worked along this line, hoping to
succeed and give new power, new happiness, a new horizon to mankind.
Hermetically sealed in his laboratory, self-exiled from human
contacts, he labored hard.

There came a day when the device into which the fool had poured his
life stood completed and a success. And on that very day an agent
for a certain government entered his laboratory to steal the device.
And in that moment the fool realized what he had done: that, from
the apparatus he had invented, not happiness and new freedom would
come to his fellow men, but instead slaughter and carnage and
drunken power increased a hundredfold. He realized, suddenly, that
men had not yet learned to use fruitfully the precious, powerful
things given to them, but as yet could only play with them like
greedy children--and kill as they played. Already his invention had
brought death. And he realized--even on this day of his
triumph--that it and its secret must be destroyed, and with them he
who had fashioned so blindly.

For the scientist was old, his whole life was the invention, and
with its going there would be nothing more.

And so he used the device's great powers on his own body; and then,
with those powers working on him, he destroyed the device and all
the papers that held its secrets.

Was the fool also mad? Perhaps. But I do not think so. Into his
lonely laboratory, with this marauder, had come the wisdom that men
must wait, that the time is not yet for such power as he was about
to offer. A gesture, his strange death, which you who read this have
seen? Yes, but a useful one, for with it he and his invention and
its hurtful secrets go from you; and a fitting one, for he dies
through his achievement, through his very life.

But, in a better sense, he will not die, for the power of his
achievement will dissolve his very body among you infinitely; you
will breathe him in your air; and in you he will live incarnate
until that later time when another will give you the knowledge he
now destroys, and he will see it used as he wished it used.--E. W.