“I do. But I don’t expect he’ll spend his firm’s money fighting speculative law suits all over the world just to please you.”
“You don’t see the position in the least. There’ll be no law suits and he won’t spend a penny. Once it’s known that his firm is behind us no one will attempt to touch our patent. People aren’t such fools as to start playing beggar-my-neighbour with Ascher, Stutz & Co. The whole world knows that their firm has money enough to go on paying lawyers right on until the day of judgment.”
“I hope to goodness,” I said, “that we shan’t meet lawyers then.”
Gorman smiled. Up to that point it had been impossible to move him from his desperate earnestness, but a joke at the expense of lawyers is sure of a smile under any circumstances. With the possible exception of the mother-in-law joke, the lawyer joke is the oldest in the world and like all well tested jokes it may be relied on.
“There won’t be any lawyers then,” said Gorman. “They’ll go straight to hell without the formality of a trial.”
This seemed to me to be carrying the joke too far. I have known several lawyers who were no worse than other professional men, quite upright and honourable compared to doctors. I should have liked to argue the point with Gorman. But for the moment I was more interested in the future of the new cash register than in the ultimate destiny of lawyers.
“If you get Ascher to back you,” I said, “and your patents are safe, you’ll want to begin making machines on a big scale. Where will you get the money for that?”
“You haven’t quite caught on yet,” said Gorman. “I don’t want to make the things at all. Why should I? There would have to be a large company. I have neither time nor inclination to manage it. Tim hasn’t that kind of brains. Besides it would be risky. Somebody might come along any day with a better machine and knock ours out. People are always inventing things, you know. What I want is a nice large sum of hard cash without any bother or risk. Don’t you see that the other people, the owners of the present cash registers, will have to buy us out? If our machine is the best and they daren’t go to law with us they must buy us out. There’s no other course open to them. What’s more, they’ll have to pay pretty nearly what we ask. In fact, if we put up a good bluff there’s hardly any end to the extent to which we can bleed them. See?”
I saw something which looked to me like a modernised form of highway robbery.
“Is that sort of thing common?” I said.