And the Baby-Bunting, trembling with excitement at being in the company of so many highly-varnished electric victorias and forty horse-power auto-cars, joined the steadily-flowing stream going west.
“I wonder that you stoop to petrol, Professor,” I said, as the thin, skillful hand in the baggy chamois glove manipulated the driving-wheel, and the little car snaked in and out like a torpedo-boat picking her way between the giant warships of a Channel Squadron.
The Professor’s black brows unbent under the cap-peak, and his thin, tightly-gripped lips relaxed into a mirthless smile.
“Ah, yes; you think that I should drive my car by radio-activity, is it not? And so I could—and would, if the pure radium chloride were not three thousand times the price of gold. From eight tons of uranium ore residues about one gramme—that is fifteen grains—can be extracted by fusing the residue with carbonates of soda, dissolving in hydrochloric acid, precipitating the lead and other metals in solution by the aid of hydrogen-sulphide, and separating from the chlorides that remain—polonium, actinium, barium, and so forth—the chloride of radium. With a single pound of this I could not only drive an auto-car, my friend”—his olive cheek warmed, and his melancholy dark eyes grew oddly lustrous—“I could stop the world!”
“And supposing it was necessary to make it go on again?” I suggested.
“When I speak of the world,” exclaimed the Professor, “I do not refer to the planet upon which we revolve; I speak of the human race which inhabits it.”
“Would the human race be obliged to you, Professor?” I queried.
The Professor turned upon me with so sudden a verbal _riposte_ that the Baby-Bunting swerved violently.
“You are not as young as you were when I met you first. To be plain, you are getting middle-aged. Do you like it?”
“I hate it!” I answered, with beautiful sincerity.
“Would you thank the man who should arrest, not the beneficent passage of Time, which means progress, but the wear and tear of nerve and muscle, tissue, and bone, the slow deterioration of the blood by the microbes of old age, for Metchnikoff has shown that there is no difference between the atrophy of senility and the atrophy caused by microbe poison? Would you thank him—the man who should do that for you? Tell me, my friend.”