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

The First Men In The Moon