14

AN AGREEMENT IS THEREFORE REACHED whereby Western Union will completely buy out Gregor’s patent rights for $198,000. A ridiculous sum compared to what he should have received, but it’s as if he didn’t realize that. Disagreeable and sure of himself as he is, with a self-regard as great as his disregard for others, one would expect him to negotiate shrewdly for his due but no, he seems not to see the implications of his self-esteem for his daily life. Still, he must know what he’s doing—and of course he does: he’s the first to develop the use of electricity beyond its illuminating and thermal applications. He is the pioneer in what will one day be called the electric everything. As such he could reap more rewards from his discoveries, ask for at least a slight percentage. Some form of profit-sharing, if only a tiny royalty or just a little raise in salary, I mean, whatever. But no, he’s happy as is.

If he’s not chasing after money, maybe it’s because he’d rather not have to think about that. Or perhaps he’s satisfied just to live at the Waldorf, and rather grandly (always on credit, given his prestige), and above all, he enjoys perfect liberty in his laboratory. Maybe it’s also because he doesn’t really have the time.

For throughout the next ten years, many ideas—very many indeed—will strike him in big batches, but his mania for constantly coming up with these ideas prevents him from stopping long enough to work on one of them. Too many opportunities tumble around in his mind for him to go too deeply into them in succession, developing their practical applications and profiting from their commercial value. It’s not that he’s unaware of their worth, on the contrary, but he’s too busy to follow through on that. He just files the patent applications, alerts the press with great fanfare, as he so loves to do, then turns his attention elsewhere.

So perhaps it isn’t that Gregor is inventing things, strictly speaking, but that in the discovery and intuition of those things, he is content to provide the ideas that will produce them. He’s making a mistake, going much too quickly; he ought to spend five minutes on an idea to carry it through, explore the possibilities, especially since his ideas are all so promising, see for yourself. Radio. X-rays. Liquid oxygen. Remote control. Robots. The electron microscope. The particle accelerator. The Internet. And so on and so forth.

As we all know, everyone always thinks up the same thing at the same time, or at least there’s always at least one person who has the same idea you have. But there’s always someone, as well, who with the same idea as everyone else proves more patient, more methodical, or luckier, craftier, less overextended than Gregor, and by focusing completely on the idea, this someone beats everyone else in the world in the race to realize its potential. And it’s this person, the winner, who gives his name to the idea. He’s the one who puts it on the market, makes it his business, and makes the money. Perhaps all this hangs, once in a while, simply on a name. Take the movies, for example. A slew of people invented the cinema at the same time, but among them were two brothers named Lumière: Light. Everything can depend on so little, can’t it; the slightest thing can tip the balance, and with a name like that, it isn’t surprising that the Lumière brothers carried off the prize.

That’s how it will go with Gregor: others will discreetly make off with his ideas while he spends his life bubbling away with new ones. But it’s not enough to keep things boiling, one must then decant, filter, dry, crush, mill, and analyze. Count, weigh, sort out. Gregor never has the time to cope with all that. The others, off in their corners, will take the time they need to carry out his ideas while he, dashing on, will have already pounced on something else. And his patent applications won’t help, won’t any more keep Roentgen from claiming the X-ray than they’ll prevent Marconi later on from saying he invented radio.

It’s also that Gregor’s a little pushy, always trumpeting his discoveries, less concerned with securely staking his claim than with making the biggest possible splash. And without stinting on the hyperbole, going all out with shameless exaggeration. Take the robots. Hardly has he come up with the concept than there he is, spouting away for the photographers: quite soon he’ll be showing them an automaton that, all on its own, will behave as if it were endowed with reason, without the impetus of any exterior commands. Well, Gregor isn’t there yet. Although one of these days, who knows?

But he does have one major preoccupation, based on a coil for electromagnets, U.S. patent 512340, which ought to allow the cost-free production of important quantities of energy, since a small part of that energy would keep the device itself running. A huge idea. Like a car that could constantly refill its own gas tank, yet use only a gallon to go a hundred gallons’ worth of distance. This would be the first milestone in his chief objective: a system that would at no expense provide free energy to everyone.

This is another window onto his weird conception of money. Because his attitude does not jibe with the logic of big industry, which is always governed by self-interest. And although the newspapers fall instantly in love with this idea, announcing that Gregor will electrify the entire planet, that he has just found the way to transmit a universal energy without costing anyone anything, one can imagine that at the top echelons of companies listed on the Stock Exchange, this news causes account books to slam open, faces to frown, and voices to firmly suggest that measures be taken, that meetings be held to take a closer look at this guy.

In the evenings, however, still buoyed by success, Gregor often welcomes celebrities as before to his laboratory, where they happily pose for the first photographs lighted by gaseous tube lights and still love to watch Gregor complacently showing off in a shower of trailing sparks from his high-frequency transformers, or brandishing one of his long tubes of glowing glass—only this time, his other hand isn’t touching any wire at all. Mysterious progress.

One evening, leaving his office, he spots a wounded pigeon hiding behind a trash can on a corner of the sidewalk, having dragged itself that far as if to die there in peace. Coming closer, Gregor diagnoses a broken wing and leg, but the pigeon returns his gaze with a weary look, as if advising him not to bother, before turning its round eye away. As Gregor continues his examination, however, the bird, seemingly touched by his interest, returns his gaze, and for a long time, they contemplate each other as if they were about to speak.

Delicately, he picks up the creature, wraps it in one of his three spotless white handkerchiefs, then gently stows it beneath his jacket, near his armpit, as if covering it with a wing. Then, without a thought for the dreaded microbes that everyone knows infest the plumage of these filthy pigeons (not to mention fleas, ticks, lice, mites, and tiny flies), he takes it back to his room at the Waldorf.

Before turning his attention to first aid, and always happy to putter around, Gregor first builds a kind of nest out of cardboard and bed linen. Next, of course, he disinfects and nourishes the patient before splinting the injured limbs with tiny arrangements of pins and matchsticks secured by rubber bands.

Since Gregor is pretty knowledgeable about anatomy, too, the bird is quickly patched up and Gregor, anxious to respect the house rule forbidding animals in the rooms, builds a cage that he moves discreetly to the hotel’s roof. After three days of convalescence, the pigeon flies free in tiptop shape. And Gregor is rather pleased.