And
that was all he saw! He would have dropped this bombshell into the world
as though he had discovered a new species of gnat, if it had not happened
that I had come along. And there it would have lain and fizzled, like one
or two other little things these scientific people have lit and dropped
about us.
When I realised this, it was I did the talking, and Cavor who said, "Go
on!" I jumped up. I paced the room, gesticulating like a boy of twenty.
I tried to make him understand his duties and responsibilities in the
matter--_our_ duties and responsibilities in the matter. I assured him we
might make wealth enough to work any sort of social revolution we fancied,
we might own and order the whole world. I told him of companies and
patents, and the case for secret processes. All these things seemed to
take him much as his mathematics had taken me. A look of perplexity came
into his ruddy little face. He stammered something about indifference to
wealth, but I brushed all that aside. He had got to be rich, and it was no
good his stammering. I gave him to understand the sort of man I was, and
that I had had very considerable business experience. I did not tell him
I was an undischarged bankrupt at the time, because that was temporary,
but I think I reconciled my evident poverty with my financial claims. And
quite insensibly, in the way such projects grow, the understanding of a
Cavorite monopoly grew up between us. He was to make the stuff, and I was
to make the boom.
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