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Always before in the development of warfare the shells and
rockets fired had been but momentarily explosive, they had gone
off in an instant once for all, and if there was nothing living
or valuable within reach of the concussion and the flying
fragments then they were spent and over. But Carolinum, which
belonged to the beta group of Hyslop's so-called 'suspended
degenerator' elements, once its degenerative process had been
induced, continued a furious radiation of energy and nothing
could arrest it. Of all Hyslop's artificial elements, Carolinum
was the most heavily stored with energy and the most dangerous to
make and handle. To this day it remains the most potent
degenerator known. What the earlier twentieth-century chemists
called its half period was seventeen days; that is to say, it
poured out half of the huge store of energy in its great
molecules in the space of seventeen days, the next seventeen
days' emission was a half of that first period's outpouring, and
so on. As with all radio-active substances this Carolinum,
though every seventeen days its power is halved, though
constantly it diminishes towards the imperceptible, is never
entirely exhausted, and to this day the battle-fields and bomb
fields of that frantic time in human history are sprinkled with
radiant matter, and so centres of inconvenient rays.
What happened when the celluloid stud was opened was that the
inducive oxidised and became active. Then the surface of the
Carolinum began to degenerate. This degeneration passed only
slowly into the substance of the bomb. A moment or so after its
explosion began it was still mainly an inert sphere exploding
superficially, a big, inanimate nucleus wrapped in flame and
thunder. Those that were thrown from aeroplanes fell in this
state, they reached the ground still mainly solid, and, melting
soil and rock in their progress, bored into the earth. There, as
more and more of the Carolinum became active, the bomb spread
itself out into a monstrous cavern of fiery energy at the base of
what became very speedily a miniature active volcano. The
Carolinum, unable to disperse, freely drove into and mixed up
with a boiling confusion of molten soil and superheated steam,
and so remained spinning furiously and maintaining an eruption
that lasted for years or months or weeks according to the size of
the bomb employed and the chances of its dispersal. Once
launched, the bomb was absolutely unapproachable and
uncontrollable until its forces were nearly exhausted, and from
the crater that burst open above it, puffs of heavy incandescent
vapour and fragments of viciously punitive rock and mud,
saturated with Carolinum, and each a centre of scorching and
blistering energy, were flung high and far.
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