Professor Wentworth smiled wanly.
“Suppose you step into my study and see what I have found.”
He led the way toward the little makeshift laboratory that for many days and nights had been the scene of his efforts.
It was littered with strange devices now, strangest of all perhaps a huge glass tube like a cannon, mounted on some sort of swivel base.
Ignoring this for the moment, he turned to a smaller tube set upright on a table at the far end of the room. In it, glowed a sinister orange lump that made the whole tube fluorescent.
“Behold one of your monsters in captivity!” said the professor, again with a wan smile. “In miniature, of course. What I have done is to condense some of that vapor into a solid.”
The process, he explained, was similar to that employed by Madame Curie in obtaining metallic radium—electrolyzing a radium chloride solution with mercury as a cathode, then driving off the mercury by heat in a current of hydrogen—only he had used the new element instead of radium.
“Incidentally, I have learned that this new element is far more radioactive than radium and possesses many curious properties. Among them, it decomposes violently in water—particularly salt water—producing harmless hydrogen and chloride compounds. So we have nothing to fear from those seeds that fell in our oceans, lakes and rivers.”
“Well, that’s something, anyway,” said Jim. “But have you found any way to combat the ones that have already hatched?”
“Before I answer that question,” Professor Wentworth replied, “I shall let you witness a little demonstration.”