With No Strings Attached | Page 7

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 might be the
insides of an FM-AM radio.
All of the rest