“I haven’t seen you,” said the Professor, “for years.”
“That must be because you haven’t looked,” said I, “for I have both seen and heard you quite recently. Only you were upon the platform and I was on the ground-floor.”
“You are too much upon the ground-floor now,” said the Professor, with a shudder of a Southern European at the dampness around and under foot, “and I advise you to accept a seat in my car.”
And the Baby-Bunting, trembling with excitement at being in the company of so many highly-varnished electric victorias and forty horse-power auto-cars, joined the steadily-flowing stream going west.
“I wonder that you stoop to petrol, Professor,” I said, as the thin, skillful hand in the baggy chamois glove manipulated the driving-wheel, and the little car snaked in and out like a torpedo-boat picking her way between the giant warships of a Channel Squadron.
The Professor’s black brows unbent under the cap-peak, and his thin, tightly-gripped lips relaxed into a mirthless smile.
“Ah, yes; you think that I should drive my car by radio-activity, is it not? And so I could—and would, if the pure radium chloride were not three thousand times the price of gold. From eight tons of uranium ore residues about one gramme—that is fifteen grains—can be extracted by fusing the residue with carbonates of soda, dissolving in hydrochloric acid, precipitating the lead and other metals in solution by the aid of hydrogen-sulphide, and separating from the chlorides that remain—polonium, actinium, barium, and so forth—the chloride of radium. With a single pound of this I could not only drive an auto-car, my friend”—his olive cheek warmed, and his melancholy dark eyes grew oddly lustrous—“I could stop the world!”
“And supposing it was necessary to make it go on again?” I suggested.
“When I speak of the world,” exclaimed the Professor, “I do not refer to the planet upon which we revolve; I speak of the human race which inhabits it.”
“Would the human race be obliged to you, Professor?” I queried.