“The fact is,” said Gorman, “I don’t want Ascher to join. I don’t want him to put down a penny of money. All I want him to do is to back us. Of course he’ll get his whack of whatever we make, and if he likes to be the nominal owner of some bonus shares in our company he can. That would regularise his position. The way the thing stands is this.”
I had finished my breakfast and lit a cigar. Gorman pulled out his pipe and sat down opposite to me. I am not, I regret to say, a business man, but I succeeded in understanding fairly well what he told me.
His brother’s cash register, if properly advertised and put on the market, would drive out every other cash register in the world. In the long run nothing could stand against it. Of that Gorman was perfectly convinced. But the proprietors of the existing cash registers would not submit without a struggle.
Gorman nodded gravely when he told me this. Evidently their struggles were the very essence of the situation.
“What can they do?” I said. “If your machine is much better than theirs surely——”
“They’ll do what people always do on these occasions. They’ll infringe our patents.”
“But the law——”
“Yes,” said Gorman, “the law. It’s just winning law suits that would ruin us. Every time we got a judgment in our favour the case would be appealed to a higher court. That would happen here and in England and in France and in every country in the world civilised enough to use cash registers. Sooner or later, pretty soon too—we should have no money left to fight with.”
“Bankrupt,” I said, “as a consequence of your own success. What an odd situation!”
“Now,” said Gorman, “you see where Ascher comes in.”