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 endo