"Oh, I don't recall. Big, blond chap. Had a Swedish name--or maybe
Norwegian. Sanderson? 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!