The
liquid was extraordinarily light; seemed, in fact, to give the vial
buoyancy. I held it to the light. It was striated, streaked, as though
little living, pulsing veins ran through it. And its blueness, even in
the vial, held an intensity of luminousness.
"Radioactive," said Marakinoff. "Some liquid that is intensely
radioactive; but what it is I know not at all. Upon the living skin it
acts like radium raised to the nth power and with an element most
mysterious added. The solution with which I treated him," he pointed
to Huldricksson, "I had prepared before I came here, from certain
information I had. It is largely salts of radium and its base is
Loeb's formula for the neutralization of radium and X-ray burns.
Taking this man at once, before the degeneration had become really
active, I could negative it. But after two hours I could have done
nothing."
He paused a moment.
"Next I studied the nature of these luminous walls. I concluded that
whoever had made them, knew the secret of the Almighty's manufacture
of light from the ether itself! Colossal! Da! But the substance of
these blocks confines an atomic--how would you say--atomic
manipulation, a conscious arrangement of electrons, light-emitting and
perhaps indefinitely so.
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