A Columbus of Space | Page 2

achievements of mankind, this extraordinary person turned his
back upon the colossal fortune which he had but to stretch forth his
hand and grasp, refused to seize the unlimited power which his genius
had laid at his feet, and used his unparalleled discovery for a purpose so
eccentric, so wildly unpractical, so utterly beyond the pale of waking
life, that to any ordinary man he must have seemed a lunatic lost in an
endless dream of bedlam. And to this day I cannot, without a nervous
thrill, think how the desire of all the ages, the ideal that has been the
loadstar for thousands of philosophers, savants, inventors, prophets,
and dreamers, was actually realized upon the earth; and yet of all its
fifteen hundred million inhabitants but a single one knew it, possessed
it, controlled it--and he would not reveal it, but hoarded and used his
knowledge for the accomplishment of the craziest design that ever took
shape in a human brain.
Now, to be more specific. Of Stonewall's antecedents I know very little.
I only know that, in a moderate way, he was wealthy, and that he had
no immediate family ties. He was somewhere near thirty years of age,
and held the diploma of one of our oldest universities. But he was not,
in a general way, sociable, and I never knew him to attend any of the
reunions of his former classmates, or to show the slightest interest in
any of the events or functions of society, although its doors were open
to him through some distant relatives who were widely connected in
New York, and who at times tried to draw him into their circle. He
would certainly have adorned it, but it had no attraction for him.
Nevertheless he was a member of the Olympus Club, where he
frequently spent his evenings. But he made very few acquaintances
even there, and I believe that except myself, Jack Ashton, Henry

Darton, and Will Church, he had no intimates. And we knew him only
at the club. There, when he was alone with us, he sometimes partly
opened up his mind, and we were charmed by his variety of knowledge
and the singularity of his conversation. I shall not disguise the fact that
we thought him extremely eccentric, although the idea of anything in
the nature of insanity never entered our heads. We knew that he was
engaged in recondite researches of a scientific nature, and that he
possessed a private laboratory, although none of us had ever entered it.
Occasionally he would speak of some new advance of science,
throwing a flood of light by his clear expositions upon things of which
we should otherwise have remained profoundly ignorant. His
imagination flashed like lightning over the subject of his talk, revealing
it at the most unexpected angles, and often he roused us to real
enthusiasm for things the very names of which we almost forgot amidst
the next day's occupations.
There was one subject on which he was particularly
eloquent--radioactivity; that most strange property of matter whose
discovery had been the crowning glory of science in the closing decade
of the nineteenth century. None of us really knew anything about it
except what Stonewall taught us. If some new incomprehensible
announcement appeared in the newspapers we skipped it, being sure
that Edmund would make it all clear at the club in the evening. He
made us understand, in a dim way, that some vast, tremendous secret
lay behind it all. I recall his saying, on one occasion, not long before
the blow fell:
"Listen to this! Here's Professor Thomson declaring that a single grain
of radium contains in its padlocked atoms energy enough to lift a
million tons three hundred yards high. Professor Thomson is too
modest in his estimates, and he hasn't the ghost of an idea how to get at
that energy. Neither has Professor Rutherford, nor Lord Kelvin; but
somebody will get at it, just the same."
He positively thrilled us when he spoke thus, for there was a look in his
eyes which seemed to penetrate depths unfathomable to our intelligence.
Yet we had not the faintest conception of what was really passing in his

mind. If we had understood it, if we had caught a single clear glimpse
of the workings of his intellect, we should have been appalled. And if
we had known how close we stood to the verge of an abyss of mystery
about to be lighted by such a gleam as had never before been emitted
from the human spirit, I believe that we would have started from our
chairs and fled in dismay.
But we understood nothing, except that Edmund was indulging in one
of his eccentric dreams, and Jack, in his large, careless, good-natured
way broke in