“You have completely cured me of that ridiculous habit of humming,” he
explained.
I think I said I was glad to be of any service to him, and he turned
away.
Immediately the train of thought that our conversation had suggested
must have resumed its sway. His arms began to wave in their former
fashion. The faint echo of “zuzzoo” came back to me on the breeze....
Well, after all, that was not my affair....
He came the next day, and again the next day after that, and delivered
two lectures on physics to our mutual satisfaction. He talked with an
air of being extremely lucid about the “ether,” and “tubes of force,”
and “gravitational potential,” and things like that, and I sat in my
other folding-chair and said, “Yes,” “Go on,” “I follow you,” to keep
him going. It was tremendously difficult stuff, but I do not think he
ever suspected how much I did not understand him. There were moments
when I doubted whether I was well employed, but at any rate I was
resting from that confounded play. Now and then things gleamed on me
clearly for a space, only to vanish just when I thought I had hold of
them. Sometimes my attention failed altogether, and I would give it up
and sit and stare at him, wondering whether, after all, it would not be
better to use him as a central figure in a good farce and let all this
other stuff slide. And then, perhaps, I would catch on again for a bit.
At the earliest opportunity I went to see his house. It was large and
carelessly furnished; there were no servants other than his three
assistants, and his dietary and private life were characterised by
a philosophical simplicity. He was a water-drinker, a vegetarian,
and all those logical disciplinary things. But the sight of his
equipment settled many doubts. It looked like business from cellar to
attic--an amazing little place to find in an out-of-the-way village.
The ground-floor rooms contained benches and apparatus, the bakehouse
and scullery boiler had developed into respectable furnaces, dynamos
occupied the cellar, and there was a gasometer in the garden. He showed
it to me with all the confiding zest of a man who has been living
too much alone. His seclusion was overflowing now in an excess of
confidence, and I had the good luck to be the recipient.
The three assistants were creditable specimens of the class of
“handy-men” from which they came. Conscientious if unintelligent,
strong, civil, and willing. One, Spargus, who did the cooking and all
the metal work, had been a sailor; a second, Gibbs, was a joiner;
and the third was an ex-jobbing gardener, and now general assistant.
They were the merest labourers. All the intelligent work was done by
Cavor. Theirs was the darkest ignorance compared even with my muddled
impression.
And now, as to the nature of these inquiries. Here, unhappily, comes a
grave difficulty. I am no scientific expert, and if I were to attempt
to set forth in the highly scientific language of Mr. Cavor the aim to
which his experiments tended, I am afraid I should confuse not only
the reader but myself, and almost certainly I should make some blunder
that would bring upon me the mockery of every up-to-date student of
mathematical physics in the country. The best thing I can do therefore
is, I think, to give my impressions in my own inexact language, without
any attempt to wear a garment of knowledge to which I have no claim.
The object of Mr. Cavor’s search was a substance that should be
“opaque”--he used some other word I have forgotten, but “opaque”
conveys the idea--to “all forms of radiant energy.” “Radiant energy,”
he made me understand, was anything like light or heat, or those
Röntgen Rays there was so much talk about a year or so ago, or the
electric waves of Marconi, or gravitation. All these things, he said,
_radiate_ out from centres, and act on bodies at a distance, whence
comes the term “radiant energy.” Now almost all substances are opaque
to some form or other of radiant energy. Glass, for example, is
transparent to light, but much less so to heat, so that it is useful
as a fire-screen; and alum is transparent to light, but blocks heat
completely. A solution of iodine in carbon bisulphide, on the other
hand, completely blocks light, but is quite transparent to heat. It
will hide a fire from you, but permit all its warmth to reach you.
Metals are not only opaque to light and heat, but also to electrical
energy, which passes through both iodine solution and glass almost as
though they were not interposed. And so on.
Now all known substances are “transparent” to gravitation. You can use
screens of various sorts to cut off the light or heat, or electrical
influence of the sun, or the warmth of the earth from anything;
you can screen things by sheets of metal from Marconi’s rays, but
nothing will cut off the gravitational attraction of the sun or the
gravitational attraction of the earth. Yet why there should be nothing
is hard to say. Cavor did not see why such a substance should not
exist, and certainly I could not tell him. I had never thought of such
a possibility before. He showed me by calculations on paper, which
Lord Kelvin, no doubt, or Professor Lodge, or Professor Karl Pearson,
or any of those great scientific people might have understood, but
which simply reduced me to a hopeless muddle, that not only was such
a substance possible, but that it must satisfy certain conditions. It
was an amazing piece of reasoning. Much as it amazed and exercised me
at the time, it would be impossible to reproduce it here. “Yes,” I said
to it all, “yes; go on!” Suffice it for this story that he believed
he might be able to manufacture this possible substance opaque to
gravitation out of a complicated alloy of metals and something new--a
new element, I fancy--called, I believe, _helium_, which was sent to
him from London in sealed stone jars. Doubt has been thrown upon this
detail, but I am almost certain it was _helium_ he had sent him in
sealed stone jars. It was certainly something very gaseous and thin.
If only I had taken notes....
But then, how was I to foresee the necessity of taking notes?
Any one with the merest germ of an imagination will understand the
extraordinary possibilities of such a substance, and will sympathise a
little with the emotion I felt as this understanding emerged from the
haze of abstruse phrases in which Cavor expressed himself. Comic relief
in a play indeed! It was some time before I would believe that I had
interpreted him aright, and I was very careful not to ask questions
that would have enabled him to gauge the profundity of misunderstanding
into which he dropped his daily exposition. But no one reading the
story of it here will sympathise fully, because from my barren
narrative it will be impossible to gather the strength of my conviction
that this astonishing substance was positively going to be made.
I do not recall that I gave my play an hour’s consecutive work at any
time after my visit to his house. My imagination had other things to
do. There seemed no limit to the possibilities of the stuff; whichever
way I tried I came on miracles and revolutions. For example, if one
wanted to lift a weight, however enormous, one had only to get a
sheet of this substance beneath it, and one might lift it with a
straw. My first natural impulse was to apply this principle to guns
and ironclads, and all the material and methods of war, and from that
to shipping, locomotion, building, every conceivable 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 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.