Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [148]
“You never told me you worked with Americans,” Madame Curie said to Colette. “We all have our secrets, don’t we? Let me make some tea. How do you find America, my child?”
“Anything is possible there,” answered Colette. “For good or bad—that’s how one feels. You should see their radium refinery. Black smoke pours from the chimneys. Trucks roll up one after the other, depositing ore brought by train from mines in Colorado, two thousand miles away. The factory runs day and night—using your isolation process, Madame. They work with an ore called carnotite, not pitchblende. They say there is enough carnotite in America to make nine hundred grams of radium.”
Madame Curie went still for a long moment. “Nine hundred grams,” she said at last. “What I might do with ten. Forgive me. I’m not bitter. But you know that Pierre and I could have patented our discoveries long ago, when no one on earth had ever heard of radium or dreamt of radioactivity. Everyone told us to take out patents on our isolation processes, but we refused. That’s not what science is for. Radium belongs to all mankind. Still, had we behaved a little more selfishly, I would not be without radium today, and with just a little radium we could do such things—cure so many—save the infant who might have grown up to be the next Newton. I have none left at all now. Only radon vapor. We have so many experiments waiting to be performed. Patients by the dozen whom we turn away.”
No one spoke.
“And how is the irrepressible Mrs. Meloney?” Madame Curie asked Colette, resuming her energetic and cheerful tone. “She is certainly one of your anything-is-possible Americans. Is there any chance she’ll raise enough money to buy a gram of radium for us?”
“I’m afraid the fund is still short, Madame,” said Colette sadly. “Very short.”
“Well, I never believed it would happen,” replied Madame Curie. “She has a good heart, Mrs. Meloney, but she is not very scientific in her thinking. Don’t worry. If there is no American gram of radium for us, I won’t be unhappy. I won’t have to travel across the ocean and make a lot of speeches. You know how I hate that sort of thing. I’m much too tired for it. But what can I do for you, Dr. Younger?”
“I had hoped,” said Younger, “with your permission, Madame, that I might make a drawing for you. I took some radiographs of a young woman’s neck not long ago. The X-rays made a pattern I had never seen before. I can draw it, though, and I was hoping you might be able to tell me if it means anything to you.”
“Madame is not a roentgenologist, Stratham,” Colette chided him. “She works with radium, not X-rays.”
“It’s quite all right,” replied Madame Curie. “Let him make us his drawing. I’m curious.”
Younger was given pen and paper; he proceeded to draw. He filled a page with the strange, undulating, cross-hatched shadow pattern that he had seen after X-raying the McDonald girl. When he had finished, Madame Curie held the sheet of paper close to her eyes, then far away, then close again. “The X-rays,” she said, “didn’t pass through the woman’s neck.”
“Exactly,” replied Younger. “Something blocked them.”
“Or rather interfered with them,” replied Madame Curie. “You’re sure what you saw were X-rays of a person—not an object of some kind?”
“I took them myself. The young woman had a growth on her neck and jaw. Granular. Larger than any such growth I’d ever seen.”
“I know this pattern. Quite well.”
“It’s radium, isn’t it?” asked Younger.
“Radium?” repeated Colette.
“Without question,” said Madame Curie.
“But how—?” asked Colette.
“Radium is roentgenopaque—impervious to X-rays,” explained Madame Curie. “What’s more, the gamma rays emitted by radium atoms have physical properties virtually identical to X-rays. As a result, the two sets of waves interfere with one another. When an object containing radium is X-rayed, what we see is an interference pattern—this pattern.”
“What would happen,” asked Younger, “to a person who had radium inside her body for an extended period of time?”
Madame Curie set