Tim Pratt - Sympathy for the Devil

By request, he explained why he thought so.

“Because power was so costly, then, and everything goes by power-the steam-ship, the locomotive and everything else. Coal, you see! You have to have it; no steam and no electricity without it; and it’s such a waste-for you burn it up, and it’s gone! But radium-that’s another matter! With my nine hundred pounds you could light the world, and heat it, and run all its ships and machines and railways a hundred million years, and not use up five pounds of it in the whole time! And then-”

“Quick-my soul is yours, dear Ancestor; take it-we’ll start a company!”

But he asked my age, which is sixty-eight, then politely sidetracked the proposition, probably not wishing to take advantage of himself. Then he went on talking admiringly of radium, and how with its own natural and inherent heat it could go on melting its own weight of ice twenty-four times in twenty-four hours, and keep it up forever without losing bulk or weight; and how a pound of it, if exposed in this room, would blast the place like a breath from hell, and burn me to a crisp in a quarter of a minute-and was going on like that, but I interrupted and said:

“But you are here, Majesty-nine hundred pounds-and the temperature is balmy and pleasant. I don’t understand.”

“Well,” he said, hesitatingly, “it is a secret, but I may as well reveal it, for these prying and impertinent chemists are going to find it out sometime or other, anyway. Perhaps you have read what Madame Curie says about radium; how she goes searching among its splendid secrets and seizes upon one after another of them and italicizes its specialty; how she says ‘the compounds of radium are spontaneously luminous’-require no coal in the production of light, you see; how she says, ‘a glass vessel containing radium spontaneously charges itself with electricity’-no coal or water power required to generate it, you see; how she says ‘radium possesses the remarkable property of liberating heat spontaneously and continuously’-no coal required to fire-up on the world’s machinery, you see. She ransacks the pitch-blende for its radioactive substances, and captures three and labels them; one, which is embodied with bismuth, she names polonium; one, which is embodied with barium, she names radium; the name given to the third was actinium. Now listen; she says ‘the question now was to separate the polonium from the bismuth… this is the task that has occupied us for years and has been a most difficult one.’ For years, you see-for years. That is their way, those plagues, those scientists-peg, peg, peg-dig, dig, dig-plod, plod, plod. I wish I could catch a cargo of them for my place; it would be an economy. Yes, for years, you see. They never give up. Patience, hope, faith, perseverance; it is the way of all the breed. Columbus and the rest. In radium this lady has added a new world to the planet’s possessions, and matched-Columbus-and his peer. She has set herself the task of divorcing polonium and bismuth; when she succeeds she will have done-what, should you say?”

“Pray name it, Majesty.”

“It’s another new world added-a gigantic one. I will explain; for you would never divine the size of it, and she herself does not suspect it.”

“Do, Majesty, I beg of you.”

“Polonium, freed from bismuth and made independent, is the one and only power that can control radium, restrain its destructive forces, tame them, reduce them to obedience, and make them do useful and profitable work for your race. Examine my skin. What do you think of it?”

“It is delicate, silky, transparent, thin as a gelatine film-exquisite, beautiful, Majesty!”

“It is made of polonium. All the rest of me is radium. If I should strip off my skin the world would vanish away in a flash of flame and a puff of smoke, and the remnants of the extinguished moon would sift down through space a mere snow-shower of gray ashes!”

I made no comment, I only trembled.

“You understand, now,” he continued. “I burn, I suffer within, my pains are measureless and eternal, but my skin protects you and the globe from harm. Heat is power, energy, but is only useful to man when he can control it and graduate its application to his needs. You cannot do that with radium, now; it will not be prodigiously useful to you until polonium shall put the slave whip in your hand. I can release from my body the radium force in any measure I please, great or small; at my will I can set in motion the works of a lady’s watch or destroy a world. You saw me light that unholy cigar with my finger?”

I remembered it.

“Try to imagine how minute was the fraction of energy released to do that small thing? You are aware that everything is made up of restless and revolving molecules?-everything-furniture, rocks, water, iron, horses, men-everything that exists.”

“Yes.”

“Molecules of scores of different sizes and weights, but none of them big enough to be seen by help of any microscope?”

“Yes.”

“And that each molecule is made up of thousands of separate and never-resting little particles called atoms?”

“Yes.”

“And that up to recent times the smallest atom known to science was the hydrogen atom, which was a thousand times smaller than the atom that went to the building of any other molecule?”

“Yes.”

“Well, the radium atom from the positive pole is 5,000 times smaller that that atom! This unspeakably minute atom is called an electron. Now then, out of my long affection for you and your lineage, I will reveal to you a secret-a secret known to no scientist as yet-the secret of the firefly’s light and the glow-worm’s; it is produced by a single electron imprisoned in a polonium atom.”

“Sire, it is a wonderful thing, and the scientific world would be grateful to know this secret, which has baffled and defeated all its searching for more than two centuries. To think!-a single electron, 5,000 times smaller than the invisible hydrogen atom, to produce that explosion of vivid light which makes the summer night so beautiful!”

“And consider,” said Satan; “it is the only instance in all nature where radium exists in a pure state unencumbered by fettering alliances; where polonium enjoys the like emancipation; and where the pair are enabled to labor together in a gracious and beneficent and effective partnership. Suppose the protecting polonium envelope were removed; the radium spark would flash but once and the firefly would be consumed to vapor! Do you value this old iron letterpress?”

“No, Majesty, for it is not mine.”

“Then I will destroy it and let you see. I lit the ostensible cigar with the heat energy of a single electron, the equipment of a single lightning bug. I will turn on 20,000 electrons now.”

He touched the massive thing and it exploded with a cannon crash, leaving nothing but vacancy where it had stood. For three minutes the air was a dense pink fog of sparks, through which Satan loomed dim and vague, then the place cleared and his soft rich moonlight pervaded it again. He said:

“You see? The radium in 20,000 lightning bugs would run a racing-mobile forever. There’s no waste, no diminution of it.” Then he remarked in a quite casual way, “We use nothing but radium at home.”

I was astonished. And interested, too, for I have friends there, and relatives. I had always believed-in accordance with my early teachings-that the fuel was soft coal and brimstone. He noticed the thought, and answered it.

“Soft coal and brimstone is the tradition, yes, but it is an error. We could use it; at least we could make out with it after a fashion, but it has several defects: it is not cleanly, it ordinarily makes but a temperate fire, and it would be exceedingly difficult, if even possible, to heat it up to standard, Sundays; and as for the supply, all the worlds and systems could not furnish enough to keep us going halfway through eternity. Without radium there would be no hell; certainly not a satisfactory one.”