Short Fiction Poul Anderson (reading a book .TXT) 📖

“Whatever for?” asked Arch.

“Run my hot rod off it,” said Bob from the lofty eminence of sixteen years. “Shouldn’t be too hard, should it? Rip out the engine; use the big condenser to turn a D.C. motor⁠—it’d be a lot cheaper than gas, and no plugged fuel lines either.”

“You know,” said Arch, “I never thought of that.”

He lifted the ridiculously small object which was his new current source and placed it inside the hood. He had had to add two pieces of strap iron to hold it in position. “Why a regular motor?” he mused. “If you have D.C. coming out at a controlled rate, you could use it to turn your main drive shaft by a very simple and cheap arrangement.”

“Oh, sure,” said Robert scornfully. “That’s what I meant. Any backyard mechanic could fix that up⁠—if he didn’t electrocute himself first. But how about it, Dr. Arch? How much would you want for a piece like that?”

“I haven’t the time,” said the physicist. “Tell you what, though, I’ll give you a copy of the specs and you can make your own. There’s nothing to it, if your mother will let you have the oven for a day. Cost you maybe five dollars for materials.”

“Sell it for twenty-five,” said Bob dreamily. “Look, Dr. Arch, would you like to go into business with me? I’ll pay you whatever royalty seems right.”

“I’m going to Boston with just that in mind,” said Arch, fumbling with the cables. “However, go ahead. Consider yourself a licensee. I want ten percent of the selling price, and I’ll trust a Scotch Yankee like you to make me a million.”

He had no business sense. It would have saved him much grief if he had.

The countryside looked clean, full of hope and springtime. Now and then a chrome-plated monster of an automobile whipped past Arch’s sedately chugging antique. He observed them with a certain contempt, an engineer’s eye for the Goldbergian inefficiency of a mechanism which turned this rod to push that cam to rotate such and such a gear, and needed a cooling system to throw away most of the energy generated. Bob Culquhoun, he reflected, had a saner outlook. Not only was electricity cheaper in the first place, but the wasted power would be minimal and the “prime mover”⁠—the capacitor itself⁠—simply would not wear out.

Automobiles could be sold for perhaps five hundred dollars and built to last, not to run up repair bills till the owner was driven to buying a new model. The world’s waning resources of petroleum could go into something useful: generating power at central stations, forming a base for organic syntheses; they would stretch out for centuries more. Coal could really come back into its own.

Hm⁠ ⁠… wait. There was no reason why you couldn’t power every type of vehicle with capacitors. Aircraft could stay aloft a month at a time if desired⁠—a year if nothing wore out; ships could be five years at sea. You wouldn’t need those thousands of miles of power line littering the countryside and wasting the energy they carried; you could charge small capacitors for home use right at the station and deliver them to the consumer’s doorstep at a fraction of the present cost.

Come to think of it, there was a lot of remote power, in waterfalls for instance, unused now because the distance over which lines would have to be strung was too great. Not any longer! And the sunlight pouring from this cloudless sky⁠—to dilute to run a machine of any size. But you could focus a lot of it on a generator whose output voltage was jacked up, and charge capacitors with thousands of kilowatt-hours each. Generators everywhere could be made a lot smaller, because they wouldn’t have to handle peak loads but only meet average demand.

This thing is bigger than I realized, he thought with a tingle of excitement. My God, in a year I may be a millionaire!

He got into Boston, only losing his way twice, which is a good record for anyone, and found the office of Addison, his patent attorney. It didn’t take him long to be admitted.

The dusty little man riffled through the pages. “It looks all right,” he said unemotionally. Nothing ever seemed to excite him. “For a change, this seems to be something which can be patented, even under our ridiculous laws. Not the law of nature you’ve discovered, of course, but the process⁠—” He peered up, sharply. “Is there any alternative process?”

“Not that I know of,” said Arch. “On the basis of theory, I’m inclined to doubt it.”

“Very well, very well. I’ll see about putting it through. Hm⁠—you say it’s quite simple and cheap? Better keep your mouth shut for a while, till the application has been approved. Otherwise everybody will start making it, and you’ll have a devil of a time collecting your royalties. A patent is only a license to sue, you know, and you can’t sue fifty million bathtub chemists.”

“Oh,” said Arch, taken aback. “I⁠—well, I’ve told some of my neighbors, of course. One of the local teenagers is going to make a car powered by⁠—”

Addison groaned. “You would! Can’t you shoot the boy?”

“I don’t want to. For a person his age, he’s quite inoffensive.”

“Oh, well, you didn’t want a hundred million dollars anyway, did you? I’ll try to rush this for you, that may help.”

Arch went out again, some of the elation taken from him. But what the hell, he reflected. If he could collect on only one percent of all the capacitite which was going to be manufactured, he’d still have an unreasonable amount of money. And he wanted to publish as soon as possible in all events: he had the normal human desire for prestige.

He got a hamburger and coffee at a diner and went home. Nothing happened for a month except an interview in the local paper. Bob finished his hot rod and drove it all over town. The boy was a little disappointed