At this moment Ralph pressed a button nearby, an electromagnet acted, and a heavy plate glass door slid down from above, almost brushing Peter's melancholy countenance, terminating the conversation summarily. Having secured himself against further interruption Ralph returned to the large glass box over which he had been working, and in which one could see, through greenish vapors, a dog, across whose heart was strapped a flat glass box filled with a metal-like substance. The substance in the box was Radium-K. Radium, which had been known for centuries, had the curious property of giving out heat for thousands of years without disintegrating and without apparently obtaining energy from any outside source. In 2009, Anatole M610 B9, the great French physicist, found that Radium obtained all its energy from the ether of space and proved that Radium was one of the few substances having a very strong affinity for the ether. Radium, he found, attracted the ether violently and the latter surging back and forward through the Radium became charged electrically, presenting all the other well known phenomena. Anatole M610 B9 compared the action of Radium on the ether with that of a magnet acting upon a piece of iron. He proved this theory by examining a piece of pure metallic Radium in an etherless space, whereupon it lost all its characteristics and acted like a piece of ordinary metal. Radium-K, as used by Ralph, was not pure Radium, but an alloy composed of Radium and Argonium. This alloy exhibited all the usual phenomena of pure Radium and produced great heat, but did not create burns on animal tissue. It could be handled freely and without danger. The dog lying in the glass box had been "dead" for three years. Just three years previous, in the presence of twenty noted scientists Ralph 124C 41+ had exhibited a live dog and had proceeded to drain off _all_ its blood till the dog was pronounced quite dead and its heart had stopped beating. Thereupon he had refilled the empty blood vessels of the animal with a weak solution of Radium-K bromide, and the large artery through which the solution was pumped into the body had been closed. The flat box containing Radium-K was then strapped over the dog's heart and it was placed in the large glass case. The latter was filled with _Permagatol_, a green gas having the property of preserving animal tissue permanently and indefinitely. The purpose of the box containing Radium-K was to keep the temperature of the dog's body at a fixed point. After the case was completely filled with gas, the glass cover was sealed in such a manner that it was impossible to open the case without breaking the seals. The scientists had agreed to return after a lapse of three years to witness the opening of the box.