With No Strings Attached | Page 6

a couple of thick copper electrodes coming out of the side of it, and he claimed that they could be tapped for tremendous amounts of power. Well, we listened, and we watched his demonstrations in the lab. He ran some heavy-duty motors off it and a few other things like that. I don't remember what all."
"And he wanted to sell it to you sight-unseen?" Thorn asked.
"That's right," said the colonel. "Well, actually, he wasn't trying to sell it to the Army. As you know, we don't buy ideas; all we buy is hardware, the equipment itself, or the components. But the company he was trying to sell his gadget to wanted me to take a look at it as an observer. I've had experience with that sort of thing, and they wanted my opinion."
"I see," Thorn said. "What happened?"
"Well," said the colonel, "we wanted him to give us a demonstration out in the Mojave Desert--"
* * * * *
"... Out in the Mojave Desert?" the inventor asked. "Whatever for, Colonel Dower?"
"We just want to make sure you haven't got any hidden power sources hooked up to that suitcase of yours. We know a place out in the Mojave where there aren't any power lines for miles. We'll pick the place."
The inventor frowned at him out of pale blue eyes. "Look." He gestured at the suitcase sitting on the laboratory table. "You can see there's nothing faked about that."
Colonel Dower shook his head. "You won't tell us what's in that suitcase. All we know is that it's supposed to produce power. From what? How? You won't tell us. Did you ever hear of the Keely Motor?"
"No. What was the Keely Motor?"
"Something along the lines of what you have here," the colonel said dryly, "except that Keely at least had an explanation for where he was getting his power. Back around 1874, a man named John Keely claimed he had invented a wonderful new power source. He called it a breakthrough in the field of perpetual motion. An undiscovered source of power, he said, controlled by harmony. 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 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 Americanexposed 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?