Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [62]
The audience, almost exclusively female, applauded warmly.
Mrs. Meloney congratulated her listeners for their fortitude in coming out only one day after the terrible tragedy on Wall Street. “It has always been woman’s lot,” she said, “to persevere when man’s violent passions overwhelm him. And persevere we must. The cost of a gram of radium is appalling—a hundred thousand dollars—but the sum must be raised. The honor of America’s women has been pledged. I myself pledged it—to Madame Curie herself, at her home in Paris—and it is now the obligation of every one of us to contribute generously to the Fund, or make our husbands contribute.”
As the ladies applauded once again, the front door of the church creaked noisily.
“Thank heavens,” said Mrs. Meloney, “here is Miss Rousseau at last. We were growing concerned, my dear.”
The audience of fashionable ladies swiveled. Colette walked up the cavernous central aisle in silence, a picture of self-consciousness, lugging with two hands the heavy case of sample ores and radioactive elements. She murmured an apology, but her faint voice failed to carry in the huge, dimly lit Gothic church, with its great columns and vaulted ceiling. Colette had expected a few women in a small lecture room, not two hundred in a place of worship, assembled before a pulpit with a larger-than-life-sized crucifix-ion on the enormous reredos behind it.
“Over the last several weekends,” Mrs. Meloney continued, “along with Miss Rousseau—who studied with Madame Curie herself in Paris and who will shortly enlighten us on ‘The Wonders of Radium’—I have been making a tour of the largest factories in America where radium products are made. We have sought to impress upon the owners of these factories how much they owe to Madame Curie. Our efforts have not been in vain, as I will soon have the pleasure of announcing to you.”
Here Mrs. Meloney exchanged a knowing glance with a plump, impeccably dressed gentleman seated to her left, who gestured to the audience munificently. She then turned the pulpit over to Colette, who, smiling to cover her strenuous effort, hoisted the case of elements up the steps to the chancel.
“Thank you, Mrs. Meloney,” said Colette. The pallor of her cheeks was attributed by her audience to her foreign birth. “It is my warm honor and my privilege to give whatever small assistance I can to the Marie Curie Radium Fund.”
Colette paused, somehow expecting that her audience might applaud the name of Marie Curie. Instead there was a noticeable silence.
“Well, I begin,” she resumed, trying to press flat onto the lectern the curling pages on which she had carefully written out her presentation. “Twenty-four years ago, Henri Becquerel, a French scientist, placed a dish of uranium crystals next to a wrapped photographic plate in a closed drawer and left them there for over a week. Was he conducting an experiment? No—Monsieur Becquerel was only cleaning up his laboratory, and he forgot where he put his uranium!”
Colette waited for laughter; none came.
“But when he unwrapped the photographic plate, he found an image on it—which should have been impossible, because the plate had not been exposed to light. Thus was the mystery of atomic radiation discovered, quite by accident! Two years later, in 1898, Marie Curie and her husband, Pierre, solved this mystery. Madame Curie proved that uranium’s atoms emit invisible rays, and she coined a word for this phenomenon—radioactivity. Working in almost complete isolation, Madame Curie discovered two new elements previously unknown to man. The first she called polonium, after her native Poland; the second and by far the more powerful, she called radium. The potential energy of radium is so great it is almost impossible to describe with normal measures. You are familiar with horsepower? A single gram of radium contains an energy equivalent to that of eighty thousand million horses.”
Colette paused again, expecting a gasp at so enormous a figure. The