“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.