form of human industry.  The chance that had brought me into the very birth-chamber of this 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