Sam grasped Ellen by the arm. "Come inside, Ellen," he said. "I've got to make a few tests."
He did this very quickly, working in the beam of his flashlight, which the girl held for him. Meanwhile he made a complete confession, telling her what he'd found on Mars and what he'd been doing.
He found now that he couldn't keep an electroscope charged. This meant that the air was ionized—that it would promptly conduct away any electrical charge that the instrument might hold. And atmospheric ionization meant, or could mean, the presence of radioactivity—of atomic disturbances.
He tried exposing a bit of photographic film in the dark. In the developing fluids it turned entirely black. There were strong invisible rays then, to affect it; rays coming from the walls, the ground, the very air itself perhaps. Rays probably from bursting atoms. The sound—the humming—must be some incidental phenomenon of their breakdown.
Dully Sam felt of the walls. Their temperature was already higher than that of the air and they vibrated distinctly with that steady hum. Sam's whole body felt hot, as though a strange flame was blazing in his own flesh.
He was sure, then. He had started a slow, progressive form of atomic disintegration in all the materials around him. In his own body too! It hadn't been the sudden fire of violent incandescence. That might have come. It had just been missed. The igniting spark hadn't been quite strong enough. Instead there was only a sort of smouldering. But, undeniably, atomic power was being released in a deadly, and uncontrollable if gradual, form.
The flashlight lay on the table shedding its white beam. Sam saw that Ellen's face was pale and her eyes glassy.
Sam had not the faintest idea of what he might do to check what he had started. "Get out of here, Ellen," he growled thickly. "Beat it! I've gone and tried to play God. And now hell's broken loose! Tell everybody to scram away from here!"
Very unsteadily the girl arose from the chair where she had seated herself. "I don't want to go, Sam," she stammered. "I can't leave you now."
He had to stumble forward then, to catch her before she fell. Her face was hot and damp with a weird fever. Her body had been affected too, by coming into the zone of influence. Sam Conway winced with an awful anguish as he picked Ellen up and tried to carry her toward the open door, and the safer night air outside.