Iam.”

“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. 125 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.”

125

“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 

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