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!"