“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.
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? 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 mi
ght 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 voices all trying to speak at once. He could hardly—
“…He could hardly get a word in edgewise at first,” said Thorn. He was enjoying the look of shocked amazement on Colonel Dower’s face. “When Sorensen finally did get it explained, we still didn’t know much. But we built another one, and it worked as well as the one he had. And the contract didn’t specifically call for a battery. He had us good, he did.”
“Now wait—” Colonel Dower said. “You mean to say it wasn’t a battery after all?”
“Of course not.”
“Then why all the folderol?”
“Colonel,” Thorn said, “Sorensen patented that device nine years ago. It only has eight years to run. But he couldn’t get anyone at all to believe that it would do what he said it would do. After years of beating his head against a stone wall, years of trying to convince people who wouldn’t even look twice at his gadget, he decided to get smart.
“He began to realize that ‘everybody knew’ that hydrogen fusion wasn’t that simple. It was his theory that no one would listen to. As soon as he told anyone that he had a hydrogen fusion device that could be started with a handful of batteries and could be packed into a suitcase, he was instantly dismissed as a nut.
“I did a little investigating after he gave us the full information on what he had done. (Incidentally, he signed over the patent to us, which was more than the contract called for, in return for a job with our outfit, so that he could help develop the fusion device.)
“As I said, he finally got smart. If the theory was what was making people give him the cold shoulder, he’d tell them nothing.
“You know the results of that, Colonel Dower. At least he got somebody to test the machine. He managed to get somebody to look at what it would do.
“But that wasn’t enough. He didn’t have, apparently, any legitimate excuse for keeping it under wraps that way, so everyone was suspicious.”
“But why tell you it was a battery?” asked Captain Lacey.
“That was probably suggested by Colonel Dower’s reaction to the tests he saw,” Thorn said. “Somebody—I think it was George Gamow, but I’m not certain—once said that just having a theory isn’t enough; the theory has to make sense.
“Well, Sorensen’s theory of hydrogen fusion producing electric current didn’t make sense. It was true, but it didn’t make sense.
“So he came up with a theory that did make sense. If everyone wanted to think it was ‘nothing but a battery’, then, by Heaven, he’d sell it as a battery. And that, gentlemen, was a theory we were perfectly willing to believe. It wasn’t true, but it did make sense.
“As far as I was concerned, it was perfectly natural for a man who had invented a new type of battery to keep it under wraps that way.
“Naturally, after we had invested a million dollars in the thing, we had to investigate it. It worked, and we had to find out why and how.”
“Naturally,” said Colonel Dower, looking somewhat uncomfortable. “I presume this is all under wraps, eh? What about the Russians? Couldn’t they get hold of the patent papers?”
“They could have,” Thorn admitted, “but they didn’t. They dismissed him as a crackpot, too, if they heard about him at all. Certainly they never requested a copy of his patent. The patent number is now top secret, of course, and if anyone does write in for a copy, the Patent Office will reply that there are temporarily no copies available. And the FBI will find out who is making the request.”
“Well,” said Colonel Dower, “at least I’m glad to hear that I was not the only one who didn’t believe him.”
Captain Lacey chuckled. “And Mr. Thorn here believed a lie.”
“Only because it made more sense than the truth,” Thorn said. “And,” he added, “you shouldn’t laugh, captain. Remember, we suckered the Navy in almost the same way.”
BRAIN TWISTER (1962)
Written with Laurence M. Janifer
Prologue
In nineteen-fourteen, it was enemy aliens.
In nineteen-thirty, it was Wobblies.
In nineteen-fifty-seven, it was fellow-travelers.
And, in nineteen seventy-one, Kenneth J. Malone rolled wearily out of bed wondering what the hell it was going to be now.
One thing, he told himself, was absolutely certain: it was going to be terrible. It always was.
He managed to stand up, although he was swaying slightly when he walked across the room to the mirror for his usual morning look at himself. He didn’t much like staring at his own face, first thing in the morning, but then, he told himself, it was part of the toughening- up process every FBI agent had to go through. You had to learn to stand up and take it when things got rough, he reminded himself. He blinked and looked into the mirror.
His image blinked back.
He tried a smile. It looked pretty horrible, he thought—but, then, the mirror had a slight ripple in it, and the ripple distorted everything. Malone’s face looked as if it had been gently patted with a waffle-iron.
And, of course, it was still early morning, and that meant he was having a little difficulty in focusing his eyes.
Vaguely, he tried to remember the night before. He was just ending his vacation, and he thought he recalled having a final farewell party for two or three lovely female types he had chanced to meet in what was still the world’s finest City of Opportunity, Washington, D.C. (latest female-to-male ratio, five-and-a-half to one). The party had been a classic of its kind, complete with hot and cold running ideas of all sorts, and lots and lots of nice powerful liquor.
Malone decided sadly that the ripple wasn’t in the mirror, but in his head. He stared at his unshaven face blearily.
Blink. Ripple.
Quite impossible, he told himself. Nobody could conceivably look as horrible as Kenneth J. Malone thought he did. Things just couldn’t be as bad as all that.
Ignoring a still, small voice which asked persistently: “Why not?” he turned away from the mirror and set about finding his clothes. He determined to take his time about getting ready for work: after all, nobody could really complain if he arrived late on his first day after vacation. Everybody knew how tired vacations made a person.
And, besides, there was probably nothing happening anyway. Things had, he recalled with faint pleasure, been pretty quiet lately. Ever since the counterfeiting gang he’d caught had been put away, crime seemed to have dropped to the nice, simple levels of the 1950’s and ’60’s. Maybe, he hoped suddenly, he’d be able to spend some time catching up on his scientific techniques, or his math, or pistol practice….
The thought of pistol practice made his head begin to throb with the authority of a true hangover. There were fifty or sixty small gnomes inside his skull, he realized, all of them with tiny little hammers. They were mining for lead.
“The lead,” Malone said aloud, “is farther down. Not in the skull.”
The gnomes paid him no attention. He shut his eyes and tried to relax. The gnomes went right ahead with the
ir work, and microscopic regiments of Eagle Scouts began marching steadily along his nerves.
There were people, Malone had always understood, who bounced out of their beds and greeted each new day with a smile. It didn’t sound possible, but then again there were some pretty strange people. The head of that counterfeiting ring, for instance: where had he got the idea of picking an alias like André Gide?
Clutching at his whirling thoughts, Malone opened his eyes, winced, and began to get dressed. At least, he thought, it was going to be a peaceful day.
It was at this second that his private intercom buzzed.
Malone winced again. “To hell with you,” he called at the thing, but the buzz went on, ignoring the code shut-off. That meant, he knew, an emergency call, maybe from his Chief of Section. Maybe even from higher up.
“I’m not even late for work yet,” he complained. “I will be, but I’m not yet. What are they screaming about?”
There was, of course, only one way to find out. He shuffled painfully across the room, flipped the switch and said:
“Malone here.” Vaguely, he wondered if it were true. He certainly didn’t feel as if he were here. Or there. Or anywhere at all, in fact.
A familiar voice came tinnily out of the receiver. “Malone, get down here right away!”
The voice belonged to Andrew J. Burris. Malone sighed deeply and felt grateful, for the fiftieth time, that he had never had a TV pickup installed in the intercom. He didn’t want the FBI chief to see him looking as horrible as he did now, all rippled and everything. It wasn’t—well, it wasn’t professional, that was all.
“I’ll get dressed right away,” he assured the intercom. “I should be there in—”
“Don’t bother to get dressed,” Burris snapped. “This is an emergency!”
“But, Chief—”
“And don’t call me Chief!”
“Okay,” Malone said. “Sure. You want me to come down in my pyjamas. Right?”
“I want you to—” Burris stopped. “All right, Malone. If you want to waste time while our country’s life is at stake, you go ahead. Get dressed. After all, Malone, when I say something is an emergency—”
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