"This," replied Lamson, putting his hand into his hip-pocket and pulling out some crumpled sheets of paper. "You thought I was mad when I asked you if you'd like to be master of the world. When you've read that you'll see that you can be. They're what I found in that tin box. There's no name or address or any mark of identification on them, but they were written by a man, a Frenchman, who has discovered a means, as one might say, of soaking up all the electricity of the earth in one huge storage system, and then doling it out to the peoples of the earth like gas or water or electric light."
"Great Scott, what a gorgeous idea!" exclaimed Hardress, jumping from his seat and holding out his hand for the papers. "Why do you want to get ill over a thing like that, man? Don't you see there are millions in it if it's true, and of course you'll come in on the ground-floor? Great Caesar's ghost! It'll be the very thing for old Vandel. The Morgan Steel Trust won't be in it with this."
"I thought you'd say that," said Lamson. "That's the American blood talking in you. Now, I'll tell you candidly that I've only given you those papers from a sense of honour and friendship. I admit that my first impulse was to throw them out of the port-hole; and my second," he went on, after a little pause, "was to keep them to myself, and tell you some lie about the box being empty."
"You might have done the first, old man, but you couldn't have done the second," replied Hardress, putting the papers into his hand. "There, take them back; I don't suppose I should understand them. Anyhow, you can make a better use of them than I can; and if there's anything in it we'll share alike. In fact, after all, the whole thing really belongs to you, for if you hadn't discovered the body, it might have drifted around till it went down to feed the fishes. Really, I don't see what there is to be so upset about in it."
"My dear fellow, hasn't it struck you yet," said Lamson, "that if this discovery works out all right, as I'm certain it will, it will really mean, as I said just now, the mastery of the world? For instance, to put the thing into a nut-shell: Here we are, on this seven-hundred-ton yacht of yours, steaming at a speed of eighteen or twenty knots, engines working smoothly, and so on. Now, if this man's scheme were put into practice, the _Nadine_ would be, as I might say, for want of a better word, electrolised. That is to say, every atom of metal in her would lose its tone; the boilers would burst, the engines fly to pieces, and even the hull would splinter up into a thousand fragments, just as though she were made of glass, and she got hit with a hundred sledge-hammers at the same minute."