Page:Karel Čapek - The Absolute at Large (1927).djvu/67

, twenty-two thousand. One hundred and fifty atomic pumps. Three atomic presses. Twelve atomic blast furnaces. Seventy-five atomic wireless stations. One hundred and ten atomic locomotives, all for Russia. We have established general agencies in forty-eight different capitals. The American Steel Trust, the Berlin General Electric Company, the Italian Fiat, Mannesmann, Creusot, and the Swedish steel-works are all making us offers of amalgamation. Krupp's are paying any price for our shares."

"What about the new issue?"

"Thirty-five times over-subscribed. The financial papers predict a super-dividend of two hundred per cent. The other papers are talking of nothing but this business; politics, sport, technology, science, everything's Karburator. We've had seven tons of newspaper cuttings from our agent in Germany, four hundredweight from France, and a truckload from England. The scientific and technical literature dealing with atomotors, to be published this year, is estimated at sixty tons. The Anglo-Japanese war has been broken off owing to the lack of public interest. In England alone there are nine hundred thousand coal-miners out of work. There has been a rising in the Belgian coalfields; about four thousand killed. More than half the mines in the world have ceased working. The surplus petroleum in