The First Men in the Moon | Page 9

new time - it was an
epoch, no less - was one of those chances that come once in a thousand
years. The thing unrolled, it expanded and expanded. Among other
things I saw in it my redemption as a business man. I saw a parent
company, and daughter companies, applications to right of us,
applications to left, rings and trusts, privileges, and concessions
spreading and spreading, until one vast, stupendous Cavorite company
ran and ruled the world.
And I was in it!

I took my line straight away. I knew I was staking everything, but I
jumped there and then.
"We're on absolutely the biggest thing that has ever been invented," I
said, and put the accent on "we." "If you want to keep me out of this,
you'll have to do it with a gun. I'm coming down to be your fourth
labourer to-morrow."
He seemed surprised at my enthusiasm, but not a bit suspicious or
hostile. Rather, he was self-depreciatory. He looked at me doubtfully.
"But do you really think - ?" he said. "And your play! How about that
play? "
" It's vanished!" I cried. "My dear sir, don't you see what you've got?
Don't you see what you're going to do?"
That was merely a rhetorical turn, but positively, he didn't. At first I
could not believe it. He had not had the beginning of the inkling of an
idea. This astonishing little man had been working on purely theoretical
grounds the whole time; When he said it was "the most important"
research the world had ever seen, he simply meant it squared up so
many theories, settled so much that was in doubt; he had troubled no
more about the application of the stuff he was going to turn out than if
he had been a machine that makes guns. This was a possible substance,
and he was going to make it! V'la tout, as the Frenchman says.
Beyond that, he was childish; If he made it, it would go down to
posterity as Cavorite or Cavorine, and he would be made an F.R.S., and
his portrait given away as a scientific worthy with Nature, and things
like that. 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.
I stuck like a leech to the "we" - "you" and "I" didn't exist for me.
His idea was that the profits I spoke of might go to endow research, but
that, of course, was a matter we had to settle later. "That's all right," I
shouted, " that's all right." The great point, as I insisted, was to get the
thing done.
"Here is a substance," I cried, "no home, no factory, no fortress, no ship
can dare to be without - more universally applicable even than a patent
medicine. There isn't a solitary aspect of it, not one of its ten thousand
possible uses that will not make us rich, Cavor, beyond the dreams of
avarice! "
"No!" he said. "I begin to see. It's extraordinary how one gets new
points of view by talking over things!"
"And as it happens you have just talked to the right man! "
" I suppose no one," he