"Sure I remember," said the colonel. "What about it?"
"Oh, nothing," Lacey said with elaborate unconcern, "I just thought
Mr. Thorn, here, might like to hear the story--that is, if it isn't
classified."
Colonel Dower chuckled. "Nothing classified about it. Just another
crackpot inventor. Had a little suitcase that he claimed was a
marvelous new power source. Wanted a million dollars cash for it, tax
free, no strings attached, but he wouldn't show us what was in it. Not
really very interesting."
"Go ahead, colonel," said Thorn. "I'm interested. Really I am."
"Well, as I said, there's nothing much to it," the colonel said. "He
showed us a lot of impressive-looking stuff in his laboratory, but it
didn't mean a thing. He had this suitcase, as I told you. There were 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 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.