Nordenholt’s Million

Nordenholt’s Million

By J. J. Connington.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. Dedication
4. Nordenholt’s Million
   1. I: Genesis
   2. II: The Coming of “The Blight”
   3. III: B. Diazotans
   4. IV: Panic
   5. V: Nordenholt
   6. VI: The Psychology of the Breaking-Strain
   7. VII: Nordenholt’s Million
   8. VIII: The Clyde Valley
   9. IX: Intermezzo
   10. X: The Death of the Leviathan
   11. XI: Fata Morgana
   12. XII: Nuit Blanche
   13. XIII: Reconstruction
   14. XIV: Winter in the Outer World
   15. XV: Document B. 53. X. 15
   16. XVI: In the Nitrogen Area
   17. XVII: Per Iter Tenebricosum
   18. XVIII: The Eleventh Hour
   19. XIX: The Breaking-Strain
   20. XX: Asgard
5. Endnotes
6. Colophon
7. Uncopyright

Imprint

This ebook is the product of many hours of hard work by volunteers for Standard Ebooks, and builds on the hard work of other literature lovers made possible by the public domain.

This particular ebook is based on a transcription from Project Gutenberg and on digital scans from Google Books.

The source text and artwork in this ebook are believed to be in the United States public domain; that is, they are believed to be free of copyright restrictions in the United States. They may still be copyrighted in other countries, so users located outside of the United States must check their local laws before using this ebook. The creators of, and contributors to, this ebook dedicate their contributions to the worldwide public domain via the terms in the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. For full license information, see the Uncopyright at the end of this ebook.

Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven project that produces ebook editions of public domain literature using modern typography, technology, and editorial standards, and distributes them free of cost. You can download this and other ebooks carefully produced for true book lovers at standardebooks.org.

To
J. N. C.

Nordenholt’s Million

I

Genesis

I suppose that in the days before the catastrophe I was a very fair representative of the better type of business man. I had been successful in my own line, which was the application of mass-production methods to a better pattern of motorcar than had yet been dealt with upon a large scale; and the Flint car had been a good speculation. I was thinking of bringing out an economical type of gyroscopic two-wheeler just at the time we were overwhelmed. Organisation was my strong point; and much of my commercial success was due to a new system of control which I had introduced into my factories. I mention this point in passing, because it was this capacity of mine which first brought me to the notice of Nordenholt.

Although at the time of which I speak I had become more a director than a designer, I was originally by profession a mechanical engineer; and in my student days I had had a scientific training, some remnants of which still fluttered in tatters in odd corners of my mind. I could check the newspaper accounts of new discoveries in chemistry and physics well enough to know when the reporters blundered grossly; geology I remembered vaguely, though I could barely have distinguished augite from muscovite under a microscope: but the biological group of subjects had never come within my ken. The medical side of science was a closed book as far as I was concerned.

Yet, like many educated men of that time, I took a certain interest in scientific affairs. I read the accounts of the British Association in the newspapers year by year; I bought a copy of Nature now and again when a new line of research caught my attention; and occasionally I glanced through some of these popular réchauffés of various scientific topics by means of which people like myself were able to persuade themselves that they were keeping in touch with the advance of knowledge.

It was this taste of mine which brought me into contact with Wotherspoon; for, beyond his interest in scientific affairs, he and I had little enough in common. It is over a quarter of a century since I saw him last, for he must have died in the first year of our troubles; but I can still recall him very clearly: a short, stout man⁠—“pudgy” is perhaps the word which best describes him⁠—with a drooping, untidy moustache half-covering but not concealing the slackness of his mouth; fair hair, generally brushed in a lank mass to one side of his forehead; and watery eyes which had a look in them as of one crushed beneath a weight of knowledge and responsibility.

As a matter of fact, I doubt if his knowledge was sufficiently profound or extensive to crush any ordinary person; and as he had a private income and no dependants, I could not understand what responsibilities weighed upon him. He certainly held no official post in the scientific world which might have burdened him; for despite numerous applications on his part, none of the Universities had seen fit to utilise his services in even the meanest capacity.

To be quite frank, he was a dabbler. He originated nothing, discovered nothing, improved nothing; and yet, by some means, he had succeeded in imposing himself upon the public mind. He delivered courses of popular lectures on the work of real investigators; and I believe that these lectures were well attended. He wrote numerous books dealing with the researches of other men; and the publication of volume after volume kept him in the public eye. Whenever an important discovery was made by some real scientific expert, Wotherspoon would sit down and compile newspaper articles on the subject with great facility; and by these methods he achieved, among inexperienced readers, the reputation of a sort of arbiter in the scientific field. “As Mr. Wotherspoon says in the article which we