“Polonium, freed from bismuth and made independent, is the one and only power that can control radium, restrain its destructive forces, tame them, reduce them to obedience, and make them do useful and profitable work for your race. Examine my skin. What do you think of it?”
“It is delicate, silky, transparent, thin as a gelatine film--exquisite, beautiful, Majesty!”
“It is made of polonium. All the rest of me is radium. If I should strip off my skin the world would vanish away in a flash of flame and a puff of smoke, and the remnants of the extinguished moon would sift down through space a mere snow-shower of gray ashes!”
I made no comment, I only trembled.
“You understand, now,” he continued. “I burn, I suffer within, my pains are measureless and eternal, but my skin protects you and the globe from harm. Heat is power, energy, but is only useful to man when he can control it and graduate its application to his needs. You cannot do that with radium, now; it will not be prodigiously useful to you until polonium shall put the slave whip in your hand. I can release from my body the radium force in any measure I please, great or small; at my will I can set in motion the works of a lady’s watch or destroy a world. You saw me light that unholy cigar with my finger?”
I remembered it.
“Try to imagine how minute was the fraction of energy released to do that small thing! You are aware that everything is made up of restless and revolving molecules?--everything--furniture, rocks, water, iron, horses, men--everything that exists.”
“Yes.”
“Molecules of scores of different sizes and weights, but none of them big enough to be seen by help of any microscope?”
“Yes.”