Of course there was one other wild suggestion, the suggestion of Lord Fortinbras that Chase Mahan might take his two millions of profit, when he got it, and endow a research laboratory. The notion would never have entered the old baron’s head but for a guilty conscience. Without lifting a hand he had made a million pounds from the sale of virgin American pine. But Chase Mahan would not be warranted in entrusting a research laboratory to a son who was but a tyro in physics.
He had come away from England without making any effort to visit Oxford or Cambridge or Manchester. He leaned over the rail and saw those bits of Eden looking up at him from within the dark crystal. There was the Cavendish laboratory at Cambridge, with Sir Joseph Thomson running his fingers through his ambrosial locks as he evoked hypothesis after hypothesis to be tested by his pupils. Sir Joseph had been the Mecca of the world’s physicists for many a year.
And there at Manchester was Thomson’s most famous pupil. Sir Ernest Rutherford, the man under whom Boltwood and Bohr and Moseley had studied. What was Sir Ernest doing now? Was he continuing Moseley’s work, or was he trying to prove that every atom is built up out of lighter atoms?
Many able chemists denied that it would ever be possible to change one element into another and so release the incredible heat. Though admitting that Rutherford was right in regarding every nucleus as made of positive electricity, they declared that no human skill could pierce that nucleus. But it would be like Rutherford to try. If he did so, it would be by bombarding light substances with radium, in the hope that some helium atom might hit a nucleus and split it.
But these speculations all faded back into the wave as the steamer approached New York.
On landing he called up the laboratory to make sure that Grein was taking the much-needed vacation. He was informed that Dr. Grein was in town and at his work as usual. So uptown went Marvin and burst in upon his friend.
Grein was seated at a desk, figuring. He glanced up.
“Well?”
“I’m glad to see you looking better.”
“But what do you say?”