Quotation

Here, for the next six months, would be thrown together all the nations whose complex relationships, whose conflicts and alliances, whose fraught, tangled histories had shaped and would continue to shape the destiny of mankind. And this gigantic brilliant folly was at the heart of it: a gigantic latticework of spheres, interconnected, imperishable, each one emblematic of that tiny mysterious unit which man had so recently learned how to divide: the atom