With No Strings Attached | Page 4

men about, Mr. Thorn."

"What's that?" Thorn asked.
"If any of 'em tries to open that suitcase, they're likely to get blown sky
high. And I don't want 'em getting funny with me, either."
He had his hand in his trouser pocket, and Thorn was suddenly quite
certain that the man was holding a revolver. He could see the outlines
against the cloth.
Thorn sighed. "Don't worry, Mr. Sorensen. We don't have any ulterior
designs on your invention." He did not add that the investigators of
NAC&M had already assumed that anyone who was asking one million
dollars for an invention which was, in effect, a pig in a poke, would be
expected to take drastic methods to protect his gadget. But there would
be no point in telling Sorensen that his protective efforts had already
been anticipated and that the technicians had already been warned
against touching the Black Suitcase any more than necessary to connect
the leads. Giving Sorensen that information might make him even more
touchy.
Thorn only hoped that the bomb, or whatever it was that Sorensen had
put in the suitcase, was well built, properly fused, and provided with
adequate safeties.
When everything was set up, Sorensen walked over to his device and
turned it on by shoving the blade of a heavy-duty switch into place.
"O.K.," he said.
One of the technicians began flipping other switches, and a bank of
ordinary incandescent light bulbs came on, four at a time. Finally there
were one hundred of them burning, each one a hundred-watt bulb that
glowed brightly but did not appear to be contributing much to the
general brightness of the Utah sun. The technicians checked their
recording voltmeters and ammeters and reported that, sure enough,
some ten kilowatts of power at a little less than one hundred fifteen
volts D.C. was coming from the Black Suitcase.
Sorensen and Thorn sat in the tent which had been erected to ward off

the sun's rays. They watched the lights shine.
* * * * * * * * * *
One of the technicians came in, wiping his forehead with a big blue
bandana. "Well, there she goes. Mr. Sorensen, if that thing is dangerous,
hadn't we better back off a little way from it?"
"It isn't dangerous," Sorensen said. "Nothing's going to happen."
The technician looked unhappy. "Then I don't see why we couldn't've
tested the thing back in the shop. Would've been a lot easier there. To
say nothing of more comfortable."
Thorn lit a cigarette in silence.
Sorensen nodded and said, "Yes, Mr. Siegel, it would've been."
Siegel sat down on one of the camp stools and lit a cigarette. "Mr.
Sorensen," he asked in all innocence, "have you got a patent on that
battery?"
The humorous glint returned to Sorensen's eyes as he said, "Nope. I
didn't patent the battery in that suitcase. That's why I don't want
anybody fooling around with it."
"How come you don't patent it?" Siegel asked. "Nobody could steal it if
you patented it."
"Couldn't they?" Sorensen asked with a touch of acid in his voice. "Do
you know anything about batteries, Mr. Siegel?"
"A little. I'm not an expert on 'em, or anything like that. I'm an
electrician. But I know a little bit about 'em."
Sorensen nodded. "Then you should know, Mr. Siegel, that
battery-making is an art, not a science. You don't just stick a couple of
electrodes into a solution of electrolyte and consider that your work is
done. With the same two metals and the same electrolyte, you could

make batteries that would run the gamut from terrible to excellent.
Some of 'em, maybe, wouldn't hold a charge more than an hour, while
others would have a shelf-life, fully charged, of as much as a year.
Batteries don't work according to theory. If they did, potassium chlorate
would be a better depolarizer than manganese dioxide, instead of the
other way around. What you get out of a voltaic cell depends on the
composition and strength of the electrolyte, the kind of depolarizer
used, the shape of the electrodes, the kind of surface they have, their
arrangement and spacing, and a hundred other little things."
"I've heard that," Siegel said.
* * * * * * * * * *
[Illustration]
Thorn smoked in silence. He had heard Sorensen's arguments before.
Sorensen didn't mind discussing his battery in the abstract, but he was
awfully close-mouthed when it came to talking about it in concrete
terms. He would talk about batteries-in-general, but not about
this-battery-in-particular.
Not that Thorn blamed him in the least. Sorensen was absolutely
correct in his statements about the state of the art of making voltaic
cells. If Sorensen had something new--and Thorn was almost totally
convinced that he did--then he was playing it