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 127 million he was asking for it?”

127

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 

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