But Carolinum, which belonged to the beta group of Hyslop's so-called
'suspended degenerator' elements, once its degenerative process had
been induced, continued a furious radiation of energy and nothing could
arrest it. Of all Hyslop's artificial elements, Carolinum was the most
heavily stored with energy and the most dangerous to make and handle. To
this day it remains the most potent degenerator known. What the earlier
twentieth-century chemists called its half period was seventeen days;
that is to say, it poured out half of the huge store of energy in its
great molecules in the space of seventeen days, the next seventeen days'
emission was a half of that first period's outpouring, and so on. As
with all radio-active substances this Carolinum, though every seventeen
days its power is halved, though constantly it diminishes towards
the imperceptible, is never entirely exhausted, and to this day the
battle-fields and bomb fields of that frantic time in human history are
sprinkled with radiant matter, and so centres of inconvenient rays.
What happened when the celluloid stud was opened was that the inducive
oxidised and became active. Then the surface of the Carolinum began to
degenerate. This degeneration passed only slowly into the substance of
the bomb.
Pages:
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113