Free Worlds Apart by J. T. McIntosh

you weren't at the office at nine you might be fired and then you'd have to look for another job. You wouldn't get any money while you were looking for another job, and when you got it you'd still have to be there to do it at nine o'clock in the morning. So June would be helping you to be at the office at nine. She hadn't taken time to dress, but had put on a wrap over her pajamas. She would have leisure to dress after she got you off to work.
    "You went down the elevator, right down into the basement where your car was garaged. I don't know how many thousand parts there were in a car -- quite a few. You drove it up the ramp and into the street. You were surrounded immediately by cars, trucks, streetcars, vans, motor bikes, water wagons, buses -- "
    "Take it we've got the picture," suggested Rog.
    "All right. It needed some form of power to keep this vast machine moving. Once it was steam, like our water pumps and generator, but then it wasn't such a big machine. Later it was steam, gasoline, heavy oil, electricity. But the machine got too big for any of these, or even all of them.
    "It needed atomic power to run it."
    June gave a little gasp. She had never thought much about atomic power, one way or the other, but she knew people didn't talk about it. Bentley put his hand on her shoulder reassuringly.
    "If you've got power of any kind," he went on, "and you're ingenious enough, you can make it up into packages of exactly the size you want. If machines can't use your power raw, you put it into something they can use. At first all men could do with the atom was make a big bang with it, a bang that would destroy a city. But later it could be used for everything. To run your clock, bring the water to your shower, make your clothes, move the elevator, power your car, anything at all."
    Bentley paused, because his thoughts ran into channels where Dick, June, and Rog couldn't possibly follow him.
    People who still thought of the atom as a little black dot surrounded by little white dots drawing concentric circles round it, like the illustrations in the pocket magazines, were generally the victims of double conditioning. The atom bomb was horror, grief, misery, death; the peaceful, industrial use of radioactivity was the white hope of the future, peaches and cream for everybody, cake instead of bread, and by some quirk of rationalization -- an insurance against the atom bomb. They thought, using a curious mechanism of self-delusion, that the use of atomic power for heating, lighting, transport, and industry precluded the unleashing of atomic power for terrible destruction.
    Therefore, use more and more atomic power. Convert everything to atomic power. Put all the old equipment on the junkheap. Placate the god of the atom by sacrificing everything to it.
    "In a system like that," said Bentley soberly, "the scientists, who knew better, were ruled by the businessmen and clerks and milkmen who didn't. That's why I tried to give you the picture. It was no use some technician saying 'There's something wrong here -- let's hold everything while we find out what, and put it right.' The scientists learned, they advanced, but always they were a little behind, a little late. The crowd was behind them, pushing."
    "Exactly what was the danger?" asked Rog bluntly.
    "I can't tell you exactly what. The Inner Council still won't let me. Probably they're right -- you heard the discussion. But it was a thing called radiation. Radioactivity. You can guard against it, dispose of it harmlessly, if you're careful enough. And at first, when there was very little of it, this was done. But soon it was leaking all over the place. It did less harm than people expected. The warnings given by the early overflows of radiation, instead of slowing the rush, speeded it up. For each time the disaster was limited by brave men, who limited it with their lives. The danger became accepted. It was a part of everyday life."
    "Let's stop there," said Rog. "I don't understand