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We again refer you to your nine stringed Cosmic Harp. You will find radium on the 9th string. Remember that all bodies are dying from the 5th string to the 9th, although they are trying very hard to live. Look at carbon with that thought in mind. Imagine its relationship to matured life such as you would find in a virile athlete of forty. Its cube crystal form indicates its perfection of body. Now look at silicon on the 5th string. The athlete is now a virile man of fifty, but not his equal of ten years ago. Silicon and silicates can reach amplitude and the hexagon in crystal structure, but cannot reach the balanced cube.

Now look at the 6th and 7th strings. The athlete is dying with great spasmodic efforts to live. He can never reach amplitude again, however. Carbon was enabled to void its metallic quality by the union of a pair. In the 6th and 7th octaves, however, that amplitude collision is not consummated, even though five terrific efforts are made to accomplish it. The yield has been but five pairs of metals, and their inability to create a sphere with one center of gravity, instead of five pairs of centers, has yielded the high pressured metals known as cobalt in the 6th octave, and rhodium in the 7th.

Beyond the 7th octave the effort to live becomes greater. That tremendous effort to compress multiplies the power to die. Thirteen efforts in pairs are made in the eighth octave with the yield of a prototype of cobalt known as lutecium. You may study all of these pairs of metals by examining The Russell Periodic Chart No. 1.

In the radium octave these pairs of efforts are detectable on the red side of the spectrum, but not on the blue side, for reasons which would occupy too much space to tell here, and not sufficiently necessary to this story. As a part of it, however, take note that all of the worst radio-active killer metals are on the red side.

Now, as to radium. What is it? Let us examine its ancestry.

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Beryllium, in the 4th octave, which has a pressure intensity of 32,768, begat magnesium, which has an explosive pressure intensity of 262,144. Magnesium begat calcium, which has an explosive pressure of 2,097,152. Calcium begat strontium, at 16,777,216 units of pressure. Strontium begat barium, at 134,217,728, and barium begat radium which has accumulated the enormous power to eject its bullets of 1,073,741,824 times that which it had at birth 9 octaves back.

Your greatest comprehension of the deadliness of the radio-active elements can come by the study of radium. We cite radium, for you can very easily visualize its deadliness by purchasing a little inexpensive instrument called a spinthariscope at any opticians for about three dollars. Within it is a fine needle which has touched a long empty, supposedly used up small vial of that very expensive radium. We cite this fact to drive home to you the potency of so inconceivable an element as this, which cannot seemingly ever be used up. It may be that several hundred thousand more spinthariscopes can still be made from that empty vial.

If you look through the lens toward a fluorescent screen you will see a sight so glorious that it could not be matched except by looking through a telescope at a star cluster. Thousands of stars seem to be exploding against that screen. What you see are the death rays of one of the most poisonous of the radio-active elements. You are seeing the luminous metallic expansion bullets which leave their metallic quality in their target to continue their expansion, and pass through, and beyond it into an inert gas named niton, then through another named zenon, then through another named krypton, and another named argon, and still another named neon until it finds its final resting place in helium. In passing through all these they have expanded them all to get back to the low pressures of the 4th octave. Further description of this principle must be deferred until the inert gases can be more fully explained in Chapter XI. We can add, however, that plutonium bullets are not content to stop at helium. They continue right through to the inert gas of the beginning of Creation in octave 1.

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The wonderful, and amazing fact of this little instrument is that you could still see it as it now is for thousands of years. That fact should answer for you the question as to the ability of man to protect you from it after thousands of tons of the still more deadly plutonium are distributed all over the country in solid ten ton piles, and not just in the scrapings of an empty milligram vial.

An interesting story is told about radium when it was first discovered. For awhile it was thought that the life principle had at last been found. This was so sincerely believed that instruments were made to charge drinking water with these "life giving rays." Such instruments were purchased by the wealthy for as high as $1,000. Very soon, however, the tragic error was discovered before it became serious. Today, however, the danger is so well known that the number of seconds in which one is exposed to X rays, or any radio-active effect, are checked and counted to prevent too much exposure to these now known death rays.

In closing this description of radium we feel that your decision as to whether or not YOU can be protected from its dangers would be affected by the following story of the tragedy which resulted from a slight accident in a laboratory, which we are quoting from an article from Colliers. Such things are impossible to prevent. In reading it remember that it is only radium, the lesser radioactive element in that octave. That might also happen with plutonium, which is many times stronger.

"A graphic example of how fast and far contamination can spread occurred a few years ago when someone in a Navy laboratory on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay stepped on a glass vial containing a barely visible amount of radium salt. The accident was discovered late in the afternoon, and by the time decontamination crews got on the job 16 hours later, the radium had already spread throughout the San Francisco area for a radius of 20 miles.

Automobiles used by students and instructors in the lab were heavily contaminated, especially the steering wheels and floor mats. Their homes were jumping with radioactivity. "It was un-

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canny," recalls Lieutenant Commander Royce K. Skow, who directed much of the decontamination work. "With our instruments, we could trace the movements of the men just as though their tracks were visible. A sofa showed the outline of a student's body where he had lain down. We traced one young father from his living room to his child's crib. Two 'hot' spots showed where he had put his hands on the railing of the crib."

In a typical home, seven miles from the laboratory, a student had contaminated doorknobs, towels and water faucets. His bedspread and pillow, his slippers, his armchair, a writing desk and his pencils, his clothes - all showed radioactivity.

Since the contamination had spread outside the laboratory, where it could have been handled more effectively, drastic measures were called for. Decontamination teams ripped out carpets from a dozen homes. Automobile mats and seat covers were junked. Shoes which were only lightly affected were scrubbed again and again until instruments indicated they were clean.

The laboratory building was permeated with radioactivity and showed concentrations of radon, radio-active gas given off by radium; men entering the building wore special respirators. After a few days, crews went into the structure and burned the surface of concrete areas with scaling torches. Paint was removed. Every foot of the building was washed down. Linoleum was peeled up.

Two hundred drums of highly contaminated objects, principally carpets, clothing, linoleum and cleaning rags, were weighted with concrete and dumped into 100 fathoms of water far at sea. The building itself, a 31-room structure, could not be used for three months.

Everything connected with radioactivity is complicated by its indestructibility. A piece of contaminated newspaper cannot be burned except in a special incinerator. Even then, the ash must be carefully disposed of and gases and smokes given off in the burning must be washed or filtered. Then the poisoned water and filters must be isolated or buried."

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