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 said, “is absolutely averse to enormous wealth.  Of course there is one thing—­”

He paused.  I stood still.

“It is just possible, you know, that we may not be able to make it after all!  It may be one of those things that are a theoretical possibility, but a practical absurdity.  Or when we make it, there may be some little hitch!”

“We’ll tackle the hitch when it comes.” said I.

Chapter 2

The First Making of Cavorite

But Cavor’s fears were groundless, so far as the actual making was concerned.  On the 14th of October, 1899, this incredible substance was made!

Oddly enough, it was made at last by accident, when Mr. Cavor least expected it.  He had fused together a number of metals and certain other things—­I wish I knew the particulars now!—­and he intended to leave the mixture a week and then allow it to cool slowly.  Unless he had miscalculated, the last stage in the combination would occur when the stuff sank to a temperature of 60 degrees Fahrenheit.  But it chanced that, unknown to Cavor, dissension had arisen about the furnace tending.  Gibbs, who had previously seen to this, had suddenly attempted to shift it to the man who had been a gardener, on the score that coal was soil, being dug, and therefore could not possibly fall within the province of a joiner; the man who had been a jobbing gardener alleged, however, that coal was a metallic or ore-like substance, let