EXCERPT FROM CORWIN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 390, 13 December 1946, Page 28

EXCERPT FROM CORWIN

"Set Your Clock at U235"

— ~ When he was in Australia recently,

NORMAN

CORWIN

ee | read, in

an ABC "Guest of Honour" broadcast, excerpts from his latest radio drama, "Set Your Clock at U235." It deals with the significance to. all men of the uranium isotope (U235) which is the core of the atom bomb. Publication of these excerpts was permitted by the author. -- see. Oe eS See ee Ee RE RE ee ae re eee ee ee eee ee 2 oe ae ee ee. ee

OW we are in it together. The

rich with their automatic comforts, and the family bunking seven in a room: The highly trained, who understand the poems and the engines; and those whose culture measures five hundred words across the middle. Old people tired of wars and winters, and children who do not yet know they are made -of matter: The famous face in four colours, nationalised on the cover of the magazine; and the crowd face, the background face, grey, nameless, out of focus: Now we are in it, in it together. HE secrets of the earth have been peeled, one by one, until the core is bare: The nations have heard of the fission of the atom and have seen the photographs: skies aboil with interlocking

fury, mushrooms of uranium smoke ascending to where angels patrol uneasily. HERE have been improvements since: the atom can be far more sullen than has yet been shown. Attack it with another thrust of algebraic symbols and the cutting edge of an equation, and there will be the grand reaction: The first news of it will arrive in your district as a shuddering in the sky: A glow, far off, brightening: heat beating outward in concentric waves: the atmosphere a band of fire, the seas themselves, the wet seas, tinder:

The hills that looked on Christ will heave and crackle, and quarries vaporise as eagerly as the dust of Pharaohs: The earth, the tamed and _ tonsured earth, with all its gardens and substances, its places, breeds, and patterns, its letters and its airs, will plummet out of grace; will fail its orbit: And soon enough will be a blistered ash, its moon trailing lonely and ungoverned, like a dog after his master’s corpse. Do not smile, do not smile as though knowing better. It could happen. The model is any suicide. The model is Samson, destroying the temple and himself.

/ E are all in the zone of danger: we are in it together: Hang a red lantern on your pillow. It could happen, for man’s time will not outride another war. S for the latest war, what’s to become of its victors and their victory? Their dear-bought, blood-begotten, towering, and grave victory? Need the laurel wither? Need the sword go blunt again with the rusting disease of men and metals? Need the worker be lucky to work? Need an epoch hang on the tailored charms of a diplomat? Need there be guts and gore on every map again? O not search the sky for answers to these and kindred questions: Don’t trust the editorials in picture weeklies. Tea leaves are more reliable. The answers are in us together. For only if we’ve learned that every multiple of one comes but to ONE in the arithmetic of nations. Then only was the long trip back from Munich necessary. Then only can it be explained to echelons of airmen who left their mark in air And to Marines whose. faces rubbed off on the cinders of Iwo; (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) Then only was it worth the concentration in the camps, and what it was that happened to the little and the lost and unremembered. Unless we work at it together, at a single earth, Then do not bother to lay wreaths for sailors who went down burning in winter seas, Nor mourn privates anonymous, who bled their names and all they knew and were into the mud of Europe. For there will be others out of the just-born and the not-yet-contracted-for who Will die for our invisible daily mistakes. There will be others, yes, but with this difference: Next time, the fighting heart shall be unemployed: shall be replaced by a coil of wire: The secret weapons of the spirit rooted out by an ounce or two of restless elements. Valor no. more shall be the truss of armies. The regimental banners, the. order of the day, the skill of killing drilled into the recruit, the encampments, the massive embarkations-they have arranged themselves and withdrawn to the museum, they have retired. Now the control board and its buttons, the air-conditioned | laboratory, dustless and remote, by the waters of the lake: these are the armed forces. . UT alarm is easier than pride to point with: We are in it together, and that, when held up to a proper light, gleams good as much as ill. Oneness is our destination: has long been: is far the best of places to arrive at. The signs along the way, at Galilee and Philadelphia and Gettysburg said: ALL CREATED EQUAL, STRAIGHT AHEAD, KEEP GOING, STICK TOGETHER, ALL IS ONE, RENEATH the loud and glooming auguries of doom are modest. noises |. of beginning, keenly awaited as the cry of the newborn or the first cuckoo. It can well be an entrance, not an exit, that we made between pillars of flame arising from bombs one and two. The chemicking that could destroy us, together with our pots and pans and allies, can also do as bidden by us: outperform whole teams of genii: be servile

to the meek: reform'our wayward systems peacefully. The choice rests in the trusteeship of victory: One or nothing; wealth, or laying waste: Men, or Jew and Gentile; men, or the colour of, men; Jobs above eile or Profits above jobs: These are the choices, and we make them daily. They want to know. WHat will it be sir? Madam? Make up your minds, please, and the sooner much the better. Your children are growing.