Free Odd John by Olaf Stapledon

to deal with large sums of money, there was not to be any regularized business arrangement between us, no formal agreernent about profit-sharing and liabilities. I suggested a written contract, but he dismissed the idea with contempt. "My dear man," he said, "how could I enforce a contract against you without coming out of hiding, which I must not do on any account? Besides, I know perfectly well that so long as you keep in physical and mental health you're entirely reliable. And you ought to know the same of me. This is to be a friendly show. You can take as much as you like of the dibs, when they begin to come in. I'll bet my boots you won't want to take half as much as your services are worth. Of course, if you start taking that girl of yours to the Riviera by air every week-end, we'll have to begin regularizing things. But you won't."
    I asked him about a banking account. "Oh," he said, "I've had one running for some time at a London branch of the —— Bank. But the payments will have to be made to you at your bank mostly, so as to keep me dark. These gadgets are to go out as yours, not mine, and as the inventions of lots of imaginary people. You're their agent."
    "But," I protested, "don't you see you're giving me absolute power to swindle you out of the whole proceeds? Suppose I just use you? Suppose the taste of power goes to my head, and I collar everything? I'm only Homo sapiens , not Homo superior ." And for once I privately felt that John was perhaps not so superior after all.
    John laughed delightedly at the title, but said, "My dear thing, you just won't. No, no, I refuse to have any business arrangements. That would be too 'sapient' altogether. We should never be able to trust one another. Probably I'd cheat you all round, just for fun."
    "Oh, well," I sighed, "you'll keep accounts and see how the money goes."
    "Keep accounts, man! What in hell do I want with accounts? I keep 'em in my head, but never look at 'em."

CHAPTER VII
FINANCIAL VENTURES
    HENCEFORTH my own work was seriously interfered with by my increasing duties in connexion with John's commercial enterprise. I spent a great deal of my time travelling about the country, visiting patent agents and manufacturers. Quite often John accompanied me. He had always to be introduced as "a young friend of mine who would so like to see the inside of a factory." In this way he picked up a lot of knowledge of the powers and limitations of different kinds of machines, and was thus helped to produce easily manufacturable designs.
    It was on these expeditions that I first came to realize that even John had his disability, his one blind spot, I called it. I approached these industrial gentlemen with painful consciousness that they could do what they liked with me. Generally I was kept from disaster by the advice of the patent agents, who, being primarily scientists, were on our side not only professionally but by sympathy. But quite often the manufacturer managed to get at me direct. On several of these occasions I was pretty badly stung. Nevertheless, I learned in time to be more able to hold my own with the commercial mind. John, on the other hand, seemed incapable of believing that these people were actually less interested in producing ingenious articles than in getting the better of us, and of every one else. Of course, he knew intellectually that it was so. He was as contemptuous of the morality as of the intelligence of Homo sapiens . But he could not "feel it in his bones" that men could really "be such fools as to care so much about sheer money-making as a game of skill." Like any other boy, he could well appreciate the thrill of beating a rival in personal combat, and the thrill of triumph in practical invention. But the battle of industrial competition made no appeal whatever to him, and it took him many months of bitter experience to realize how much it meant to most men. Though he was himself in the thick of a great commercial adventure, he never felt