With No Strings Attached by Randall Garrett

Author:Randall Garrett [Garrett, Randall]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2007-10-25T16:00:00+00:00

... 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 of the space was taken up by batteries.

And every single one of the cells was a familiar little cannister. They were small, rechargeable nickel-cadmium cells, and every one bore the trademark of North American Carbide & Metals!

One of the other men in the lab said: “What kind of a joke is this?”

“Do you mean, Mr. Sorensen,” Thorn asked with controlled precision, “that your million-dollar process is merely some kind of gimmickry with our own batteries?”

“No,” said Sorensen. “It’s—”

“Wait a minute,” said one of the others, “is it some kind of hydrogen fuel cell?”

“In a way,” Sorensen said. “Yes, in a way. It isn’t as efficient as I’d like, but it gets its power by converting hydrogen to helium. I need those batteries to start the thing. After it gets going, these leads here from the reactor cell keep the batteries charged. The—”

He was interrupted by five different voices all trying to speak at once.

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