With No Strings Attached by Randall Garrett (good summer reads .TXT) 📗

He had a machine in his lab which would begin to turn a flywheel when he blew a chord on a harmonica. He could stop it by blowing a sour note. He claimed that this power was all around, but that it was easiest to get it out of water. He claimed that a pint of his charged water would run a train from Philadelphia to New York and back and only cost a tenth as much as coal.”

The inventor folded his arms across his chest and looked grimly at Colonel Dower. “I see. Go on.”

“Well, he got some wealthy men interested. A lot of them invested money—big money—in the Keely Motor Company. Every so often, he’d bring them down to his lab and show them what progress he was making and then tell them how much more money he needed. He 126 always got them to shell out, and he was living pretty high on the hog. He kept at it for years. Finally, in the late nineties, The Scientific American exposed the whole hoax. Keely died, and his lab was given a thorough going over. It turned out that all his marvelous machines were run by compressed air cleverly channeled through the floor and the legs of tables.”

“I see,” repeated the inventor, narrowing his eyes. “And I suppose my invention is run by compressed air?”

“I didn’t say your invention was a phony,” Colonel Dower said placatingly. “I merely mentioned the Keely Motor to show you why we want to test it out somewhere away from your laboratory. Are you willing to go?”

“Any time you are, colonel.”

A week or so later, they went out into the Mojave and set up the test. The suitcase—

“... The suitcase,” said the colonel, “was connected up to a hundred hundred-watt light bulbs. He let the thing run for ten hours before he shut it off.” He chuckled. “He never would let us look into that suitcase. Naturally, we wouldn’t buy a pig in a poke, as the saying goes. We told him that any time we could be allowed to look at his invention, we’d be glad to see him again. He left in a huff, and that was the last we saw of him.”

“How do you explain,” Thorn said carefully, “the fact that his suitcase did run all those lights?”

The colonel chuckled again. “Hell, we had that figured out. He just had a battery of some kind in the suitcase. No fancy gimmick for deriving power from perpetual motion or anything like that. Nope. Just a battery, that’s all.”

Captain Dean Lacey was grinning hugely.

Thorn said: “Tell me, colonel—what was this fellow’s name?”

“Oh, I don’t recall. Big, blond chap. Had a Swedish name—or maybe Norwegian. Sanderson? No. Something like that, though.”

“Sorensen?” Thorn asked.

“That’s it! Sorensen! Do you know him?”

“We’ve done business with him,” said Thorn dryly.

“He didn’t palm his phony machine off on you, did he?” the colonel asked with a light laugh.

“No, no,” Thorn said. “Nobody sold us a battery disguised as a perpetual motion device. Our relations with him have been quite profitable, thank you.”

“I’d say you still ought to watch him,” said Colonel Dower. “Once a con man, always a con man, is my belief.”

Captain Lacey rubbed his hands together. “Ed, tell me something. Didn’t it ever occur to you that a battery which would do all that—a battery which would hold a hundred kilowatt-hours of energy in a suitcase would be worth the 127 million he was asking for it?”

Colonel Dower looked startled. “Why ... why, no. The man was obviously a phony. He wouldn’t tell us what the power source was. He—” Colonel Dower stopped. Then he set his jaw and went on. “Besides, if it were a battery, why didn’t he say so? A phony like that shouldn’t be—” He stopped again, looking at the naval officer.

Lacey was still grinning. “We have discovered, Ed,” he said in an almost sweet voice, “that Sorensen’s battery will run a submarine.”

“With all due respect to your rank and ability, captain,” Thorn said, “I have a feeling that you’d have been skeptical about any such story, too.”

“Oh, I’ll admit that,” Lacey said. “But I still would have been impressed by the performance.” Then he looked thoughtful. “But I must admit that it lowers my opinion of your inventor to hear that he tells all these cock-and-bull stories. Why not just come out with the truth?”

“Evidently he’d learned something,” Thorn said. “Let me tell you what happened after the contracts had been signed—”

... The contracts had been signed after a week of negotiation. Thorn was, he admitted to himself, a little nervous. As soon as he had seen the test out on Salt Flats, he had realized that Sorensen had developed a battery that was worth every cent he had asked for it. Thorn himself had pushed for the negotiations to get them through without too much friction. A million bucks was a lot of loot, but there was no chance of losing it, really. As Sorensen said, the contract did not call for the delivery of a specific device, it called for a device that would produce specific results. If Sorensen’s device didn’t produce those results, or if they couldn’t be duplicated by Thorn after having had the device explained to him, then the contract wasn’t fulfilled, and the ambitious Mr. Sorensen wouldn’t get any million dollars.

Now the time had come to see what was inside that mysterious Little Black Suitcase. Sorensen had obligingly brought the suitcase to the main testing and development laboratory of North American Carbide & Metals.

Sorensen put it on the lab table, but he didn’t open it right away. “Now I want you to understand, Mr. Thorn,” he began, “that I, myself, don’t exactly know how this thing works. That is, I don’t completely understand what’s going on inside there. I’ve built several of them, and I can show you how to build them, but that doesn’t mean I understand them completely.”

“That’s not unusual in battery work,” Thorn said. “We don’t completely understand what’s going on in a lot of cells. As long as the thing works according 128 to the specifications in the contract, we’ll be satisfied.”

“All right. Fine. But you’re going to be surprised when you see what’s in here.”

“I probably will. I’ve been expecting a surprise,” Thorn said.

What he got was a real surprise.

There was a small pressure tank of hydrogen inside—one of the little ones that are sometimes used to fill toy balloons. There was a small batch of electronic circuitry that looked as though it might be the insides of an FM-AM radio.

All of the rest of the space was taken up by batteries.

And every single one of the cells was a familiar little cannister. They were small, rechargeable nickel-cadmium cells, and every one bore the trademark of North American Carbide & Metals!

One of the other men in the lab said: “What kind of a joke is this?”

“Do you mean, Mr. Sorensen,” Thorn asked with controlled precision, “that your million-dollar process is merely some kind of gimmickry with our own batteries?”

“No,” said Sorensen. “It’s—”

“Wait a minute,” said one of the others, “is it some kind of hydrogen fuel cell?”

“In a way,” Sorensen said. “Yes, in a way. It isn’t as efficient as I’d like, but it gets its power by converting hydrogen to helium. I need those batteries to start the thing. After it gets going, these leads here from the reactor cell keep the batteries charged. The—”

He was interrupted by five different voices all trying to speak at once. He could hardly—

“... He could hardly get a word in edgewise at first,” said Thorn. He was enjoying the look of shocked amazement on Colonel Dower’s face. “When Sorensen finally did get it explained, we still didn’t know much. But we built another one, and it worked as well as the one he had. And the contract didn’t specifically call for a battery. He had us good, he did.”

“Now wait—” Colonel Dower said. “You mean to say it wasn’t a battery after all?”

“Of course not.”

“Then why all the folderol?”

“Colonel,” Thorn said, “Sorensen patented that device nine years ago. It only has eight years to run. But he couldn’t get anyone at all to believe that it would do what he said it would do. After years of beating his head against a stone wall, years of trying to convince people who wouldn’t even look twice at his gadget, he decided to get smart.

“He began to realize that ‘everybody knew’ that hydrogen fusion wasn’t that simple. It was his theory that no one would listen to. As soon as he told anyone that he had a hydrogen fusion device that could be started with a handful of batteries and could be packed into a suitcase, he was instantly dismissed as a nut.

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“I did a little investigating after he gave us the full information on what he had done. (Incidentally, he signed over the patent to us, which was more than the contract called for, in return for a job with our outfit, so that he could help develop the fusion device.)

“As I said, he finally got smart. If the theory was what was making people give him the cold shoulder, he’d tell them nothing.

“You know the results of that, Colonel Dower. At least he got somebody to test the machine. He managed to get somebody to look at what it would do.

“But that wasn’t enough. He didn’t have, apparently, any legitimate excuse for keeping it under wraps that way, so everyone was suspicious.”

“But why tell you it was a battery?” asked Captain Lacey.

“That was probably suggested by Colonel Dower’s reaction to the tests he saw,” Thorn said. “Somebody—I think it was George Gamow, but I’m not certain—once said that just having a theory isn’t enough; the theory has to make sense.

“Well, Sorensen’s theory of hydrogen fusion producing electric current didn’t make sense. It was true, but it didn’t make sense.

“So he came up with a theory that did make sense. If everyone wanted to think it was ‘nothing but a battery’, then, by Heaven, he’d sell it as a battery. And that, gentlemen, was a theory we were perfectly willing to believe. It wasn’t true, but it did make sense.

“As far as I was concerned, it was perfectly natural for a man who had invented a new type of battery to keep it under wraps that way.

“Naturally, after we had invested a million dollars in the thing, we had to investigate it. It worked, and we had to find out why and how.”

“Naturally,” said Colonel Dower, looking somewhat uncomfortable. “I presume this is all under wraps, eh? What about the Russians? Couldn’t they get hold of the patent papers?”

“They could have,” Thorn admitted, “but they didn’t. They dismissed him as a crackpot, too, if they heard about him at all. Certainly they never requested a copy of his patent. The patent number is now top secret, of course, and if anyone does write in for a copy, the Patent Office will reply that there are temporarily no copies available. And the FBI will find out who is making the request.”

“Well,” said Colonel Dower, “at least I’m glad to hear that I was not the only one who didn’t believe him.”

Captain Lacey chuckled. “And Mr. Thorn here believed a lie.”

“Only because it made more sense than the truth,” Thorn said. “And,” he added, “you shouldn’t laugh, captain. Remember, we suckered the Navy in almost the same way.”

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of With No Strings Attached, by Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA David Gordon)