Three years passed, and Marvin was in the high school without having
blown his eyes out. He was distinctly tamer now, though still afflicted
with excess of leisure because his mathematics cost him so little. He
always had time for sports, and the boy of fifteen was madly fond of
dancing.
That summer his father took him on a long prospecting trip in the wilds
of Canada and watched him develop into young manhood. Every morning they
had their swim together in the pellucid purity of some lake rarely seen
by the eyes of white men. All day long they searched ravine and gully,
moving slowly from east to west across the continental formation. Every
night they lay by the camp-fire and talked about many things, sometimes
about the future. It was agreed that Marvin should be a chemist, but
Chase kept drilling it in that early specialization was bad. He had
suffered from it all his life, and wanted his boy to go slow.
Near the end of the trip the mining engineer slipped in crossing a slope
of rock, and fell. When he arose, his right hand was so useless and
painful that he suspected some bones had been broken. The first thing he
did on reaching Chicago was to proceed to the hospital and have the
swollen hand radiographed. One bone was found to be split, and the
sufferer was led to another room that the hand might be immobilized.
Thus left alone with the X-ray man, Marvin plied him with questions. He
so fascinated the radiographer that presently he was rewarded with a
mystery even greater than that of the subtle unseen light. He was taken
into a dark closet and permitted to peer into a small instrument
containing salts of radium.
He saw a flight of stars, a sheaf of rays, a faint fierce sparkling! The
heavy metallic radium atom was exploding! It was bombarding a small
black screen with cannon flashes!
Instantly the boy inquired why somebody did not capture the power of
that explosion and set it to work. He was told that any such achievement
was impossible. The show was not affected by heat or cold, and would
continue for a thousand years or more till the radium was all used up.
What were those flashes? How could he learn more about them? He must
wait till he had enough physics to follow the writings of a man named
Rutherford.
He was sorry to wait, but he was glad that some human being was at work
on the job. He went home full of wonder and impatience. He never forgot
the marvelous show. All through the year he kept seeing those immortal
fireflies charging the darkness and wasting energy. He no longer broke
the law by helping his mates with their mathematics, but spent extra
time each day in reading mathematics beyond the requirements.
And so his high-school years went by. Athletics and girls, Latin and
French and German went far to divert his mind from the mysteries of
radium.
It was not until 1911, when he was about to graduate and enter Yale,
that he ran on an article by the mysterious Rutherford and found himself
able to understand some of it.
He had long since learned that even solid iron is full of spaces, and
that within the spaces are minute particles in constant motion. He was
now to learn that the minute particles are themselves hollow—that an
atom is a central nucleus of positive electricity which holds in its sky
one or more moons of negative electricity.
In other words, the cheek of a girl, which feels so smooth to the lips,
is really a starry sky full of electric suns and moons. The tension
between each sun and its moons is all that keeps the cheek from
exploding when you kiss it. And here he had been calling them all
“darlin’”! Well, he might have known that girls were composed of
electricity. He had often felt it thrilling up his arm.
An atom of hydrogen was one charge of positive electricity balanced by
one charge of negative. At least, he guessed that if you could ever get
a hydrogen atom off by itself, it could be called a balance. But it was
not a perfect balance, for the touch of fire would make the moon slip
off and combine with the moons of oxygen in a sharp explosion.
An atom of helium was heavier, as if four positive charges were balanced
by four negatives. Rutherford did not tell the young mind just how those
four positive charges—which would naturally fly apart—were cemented into
the nucleus, but Marvin guessed that two of the negatives did the work,
leaving two moons in the sky. This balance was very strong. The gas
never burns or explodes, and can be pressed into a liquid so cold that
it boils far below the point where mercury freezes.
A girl composed entirely of helium would be perfectly neutral, incapable
of sending out one flash or thrill. All the girls he knew were composed
of flesh and blood, which of course were chemical substances but very
far from neutral.
Now at last he understood what those flashes of light from the radium
had been and still were, for the bombardment was steadily going on there
in the dark corner of the hospital. They were the reflection of helium
atoms that had lost two moons and came shooting out of the radium to
find them. They would pick up the two missing satellites and again
become the quiet inert gas. What bully stuff to put in a balloon, if
only there were enough of it!
He wondered just how much electricity lay packed in the nucleus of a
radium atom. The nucleus of every atom evidently carried a charge, an
excess of positive over negative. He used to go up into the den, from
which his father was generally absent, and think about it. He would pick
up that old sieve of phosphor bronze and tilt it to an angle of thirty
degrees and look at the minerals in the cabinet. If he could only get a
spectrum from the positive electricity concealed in the heart of each
atom, he could number the elements from hydrogen up. Just now they went
by weights, but ought not cobalt to come before nickel, even if it was
heavier? Cobalt was more like iron, and ought to come right after iron.