Michael Swanwick's Periodic Table of Science Fiction

Radium

226.0254

The Ghost of Pierre Curie Reminisces

She had a radiant smile. It lit up the night. Her name was Marie

Sklodowska when I met her. I was working on crystallography,

piezoelectricity, and the effects of temperature on magnetism at the

time. But the real magnetism was all hers.

We went dancing. So taken with her was I that I stuttered and stammered

and spoke like a fool. It made me flush red with anger at myself. But

then she touched my shoulder with her gloved hand and I looked into those

amazing eyes of hers and was trapped as firmly as a single chromium atom

in a ruby lattice.

We wed. To the world, she became Madame Curie. But to me, she was ever

and always Marie. At the Ecole de Physique et de Chimie Industrielle, she

measured the strength of uranium compounds, and made the surprising

discovery that pitchblende emitted four times more radiation than could

be explained by its uranium content. Seeing the implications immediately,

I joined her in her research. Together we discovered polonium and radium.

We isolated a gram of radium salts, and determined the atomic weights and

properties of both elements.

In 1903, we shared the Nobel Prize in Physics. Oh, the passion we shared

that night in our enormous bed on the top floor of the Grand Hotel in

Stockholm! I would not have traded that evening for a thousand Nobel

Prizes. She fell asleep in my arms, but I stayed up for hours, marveling

at the richness of our life together.

Two years later, I was killed in a wagon accident. Marie grieved, and

soldiered on. She became the first female lecturer at the Sorbonne. In

1911 she received a second Nobel, this time for chemistry. She put all

her energies into the development of the uses of X rays in medicine. Now

she is old and dying and I, a spirit no more tangible than the cosmic

radiation that sleets unhindered through human flesh, hover at her

bedside and whisper endearments that she cannot yet hear.

Oh, Marie, do you remember my arms about you? Do you remember my hands,

my mouth? Do you remember our research, our long and patient hours at the

electrometer? Do you remember that night when you touched my shoulder

with your white-gloved hand and we danced? Around and around we whirled,

like the twin electrons in helium's solitary and self-sufficient shell.

The End