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 126 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.”

126

“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.”

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