ey 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
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 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."

"I see," repeated the inventor, narrowing his eyes. "And I suppose m