With No Strings Attached by Randall Garrett (classic literature books .TXT) đ
- Author: Randall Garrett
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The inventor folded his arms across his chest and looked grimly at Colonel Dower. âI see. Go on.â
âWell, he got some wealthy men interested. A lot of them invested moneyâbig moneyâin the Keely Motor Company. Every so often, heâd 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.â
âI see,â repeated the inventor, narrowing his eyes. âAnd I suppose my invention is run by compressed air?â
âI didnât say your invention was a phony,â Colonel Dower said placatingly. âI 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?â
âAny time you are, colonel.â
A week or so later, they went out into the Mojave and set up the test. The suitcaseâ
â... The suitcase,â said the colonel, âwas connected up to a hundred hundred-watt light bulbs. He let the thing run for ten hours before he shut it off.â He chuckled. âHe never would let us look into that suitcase. Naturally, we wouldnât 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, weâd be glad to see him again. He left in a huff, and that was the last we saw of him.â
âHow do you explain,â Thorn said carefully, âthe fact that his suitcase did run all those lights?â
The colonel chuckled again. âHell, 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, thatâs all.â
Captain Dean Lacey was grinning hugely.
Thorn said: âTell me, colonelâwhat was this fellowâs name?â
âOh, I donât recall. Big, blond chap. Had a Swedish nameâor maybe Norwegian. Sanderson? No. Something like that, though.â
âSorensen?â Thorn asked.
âThatâs it! Sorensen! Do you know him?â
âWeâve done business with him,â said Thorn dryly.
âHe didnât palm his phony machine off on you, did he?â the colonel asked with a light laugh.
âNo, no,â Thorn said. âNobody sold us a battery disguised as a perpetual motion device. Our relations with him have been quite profitable, thank you.â
âIâd say you still ought to watch him,â said Colonel Dower. âOnce a con man, always a con man, is my belief.â
Captain Lacey rubbed his hands together. âEd, tell me something. Didnât it ever occur to you that a battery which would do all thatâa battery which would hold a hundred kilowatt-hours of energy in a suitcase would be worth the 127 million he was asking for it?â
Colonel Dower looked startled. âWhy ... why, no. The man was obviously a phony. He wouldnât tell us what the power source was. Heââ Colonel Dower stopped. Then he set his jaw and went on. âBesides, if it were a battery, why didnât he say so? A phony like that shouldnât beââ He stopped again, looking at the naval officer.
Lacey was still grinning. âWe have discovered, Ed,â he said in an almost sweet voice, âthat Sorensenâs battery will run a submarine.â
âWith all due respect to your rank and ability, captain,â Thorn said, âI have a feeling that youâd have been skeptical about any such story, too.â
âOh, Iâll admit that,â Lacey said. âBut I still would have been impressed by the performance.â Then he looked thoughtful. âBut 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?â
âEvidently heâd learned something,â Thorn said. âLet me tell you what happened after the contracts had been signedââ
... 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 Sorensenâs device didnât produce those results, or if they couldnât be duplicated by Thorn after having had the device explained to him, then the contract wasnât fulfilled, and the ambitious Mr. Sorensen wouldnât 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 didnât open it right away. âNow I want you to understand, Mr. Thorn,â he began, âthat I, myself, donât exactly know how this thing works. That is, I donât completely understand whatâs going on inside there. Iâve built several of them, and I can show you how to build them, but that doesnât mean I understand them completely.â
âThatâs not unusual in battery work,â Thorn said. âWe donât completely understand whatâs going on in a lot of cells. As long as the thing works according 128 to the specifications in the contract, weâll be satisfied.â
âAll right. Fine. But youâre going to be surprised when you see whatâs in here.â
âI probably will. Iâve been expecting a surprise,â Thorn said.
What he got was a real surprise.
There was a small pressure tank of hydrogen insideâone 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: âWhat kind of a joke is this?â
âDo you mean, Mr. Sorensen,â Thorn asked with controlled precision, âthat your million-dollar process is merely some kind of gimmickry with our own batteries?â
âNo,â said Sorensen. âItâsââ
âWait a minute,â said one of the others, âis it some kind of hydrogen fuel cell?â
âIn a way,â Sorensen said. âYes, in a way. It isnât as efficient as Iâd 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. Theââ
He was interrupted by five different voices all trying to speak at once. He could hardlyâ
â... He could hardly get a word in edgewise at first,â said Thorn. He was enjoying the look of shocked amazement on Colonel Dowerâs face. âWhen Sorensen finally did get it explained, we still didnât know much. But we built another one, and it worked as well as the one he had. And the contract didnât specifically call for a battery. He had us good, he did.â
âNow waitââ Colonel Dower said. âYou mean to say it wasnât a battery after all?â
âOf course not.â
âThen why all the folderol?â
âColonel,â Thorn said, âSorensen patented that device nine years ago. It only has eight years to run. But he couldnât 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 wouldnât even look twice at his gadget, he decided to get smart.
âHe began to realize that âeverybody knewâ that hydrogen fusion wasnât 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.
129âI 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.)
âAs I said, he finally got smart. If the theory was what was making people give him the cold shoulder, heâd tell them nothing.
âYou 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.
âBut that wasnât enough. He didnât have, apparently, any legitimate excuse for keeping it under wraps that way, so everyone was suspicious.â
âBut why tell you it was a battery?â asked Captain Lacey.
âThat was probably suggested by Colonel Dowerâs reaction to the tests he saw,â Thorn said. âSomebodyâI think it was George Gamow, but Iâm not certainâonce said that just having a theory isnât enough; the theory has to make sense.
âWell, Sorensenâs theory of hydrogen fusion producing electric current didnât make sense. It was true, but it didnât make sense.
âSo he came up with a theory that did make sense. If everyone wanted to think it was ânothing but a batteryâ, then, by Heaven, heâd sell it as a battery. And that, gentlemen, was a theory we were perfectly willing to believe. It wasnât true, but it did make sense.
âAs 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.
âNaturally, 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.â
âNaturally,â said Colonel Dower, looking somewhat uncomfortable. âI presume this is all under wraps, eh? What about the Russians? Couldnât they get hold of the patent papers?â
âThey could have,â Thorn admitted, âbut they didnât. 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.â
âWell,â said Colonel Dower, âat least Iâm glad to hear that I was not the only one who didnât believe him.â
Captain Lacey chuckled. âAnd Mr. Thorn here believed a lie.â
âOnly because it made more sense than the truth,â Thorn said. âAnd,â he added, âyou shouldnât laugh, captain. Remember, we suckered the Navy in almost the same way.â
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of With No Strings Attached, by Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA David Gordon)
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