With No Strings Attached | Page 7

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 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 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