"I always have time to see a representative of Power Utilities, Mr.

Olcott," Bending said. "Though I must admit that I"m more used to dealing with various engineers who work for your subsidiaries."

"Not subsidiaries, please," Olcott admonished in a friendly tone. "Like the Bell Telephone Company, Power Utilities is actually a group of independent but mutually co-operative companies organized under a parent company."

Bending grinned. "I stand corrected. What did you have on your mind, Mr.

Olcott?"

Olcott"s hesitation was of half-second duration, but it was perceptible.

"Mr. Bending," he began, "I understand that you have been ... ah ...

working on a new and ... ah ... radically different method of power generation. Er ... is that substantially correct?"

Bending looked at the man, his blocky, big-jawed face expressionless.

"I"ve been doing experimenting with power generators, yes," he said after a moment. "That"s my business."

"Oh, quite, quite. I understand that," Olcott said hurriedly.

"I ... ah ... took the trouble to look up your record before I came.

I"m well aware of the invaluable work you"ve done in the power field."

"Thank you," Bending said agreeably. He waited to see what the other would say next. It was his move.

"However," Olcott said, "that"s not the sort of thing I was referring to." He leaned forward in his chair, and his bright gray eyes seemed to take on a new life; his manner seemed to alter subtly.

"Let me put my ... _our_ cards on the table, Mr. Bending. We understand that you have designed, and are experimenting with, an amazingly compact power source. We understand that little remains but to get the bugs out of your pilot model.

"Naturally, we are interested. Our business is supplying the nation with power. Anything from a new type solar battery on up is of interest to us." He stopped, waiting for Bending to speak.

Bending obliged. "I see Petternek let the cat out of the bag prematurely," he said with a smile. "I hadn"t intended to spring it until it was a polished work of engineering art. It"s been more of a hobby than anything else, you see."

Olcott smiled disarmingly. "I"m not acquainted with Mr. Petternek; to be quite honest, I have no idea where our engineers picked up the information."

"He"s an engineer," Bending said. "Friends of mine. He probably got a little enthusiastic in a conversation with one of your boys. He seemed quite impressed by my Converter."

"Possibly that is the explanation." Olcott paused. "Converter, you say?

That"s what you call it?"

"That"s right. I couldn"t think up any fancier name for it. Oh, I suppose I could have, but I didn"t want anything too descriptive."

"And the word "converter" isn"t descriptive?"

"Hardly," said Bending with a short laugh. "Every power supply is a converter of some kind. A nickel-cadmium battery converts chemical energy into electrical energy. A solar battery converts radiation into electrical current. The old-fashioned, oil- or coal-burning power plants converted chemical energy into heat energy, converted that into kinetic energy, and that, in turn was converted into electrical energy. The heavy-metal atomic plant does almost the same thing, except that it uses nuclear reactions instead of chemical reactions to produce the heat. The stellarator is a converter, too.

"About the only exception I can think of is the electrostatic condenser, and you could say that it converts static electricity into a current flow if you wanted to stretch a point. On the other hand, a condenser isn"t usually considered as a power supply."

Olcott chuckled. "I see your point. Could you give me a rough idea of the principle on which your Converter operates?"

Bending allowed himself a thoughtful frown. "I"d rather not, just now, Mr. Olcott. As I said, I want to sort of spring this full-blown on the world." He grinned. He looked like a small boy who had just discovered that people liked him; but it was a calculated expression, not an automatic one.

Olcott looked into Bending"s eyes without seeing them. He ran his tongue carefully over the inside of his teeth before he spoke. "Mr. Bending."

Pause. "Mr. Bending, we--and by "we", I mean, of course, Power Utilities,--have heard a great deal about this ... this Converter." His chocolate-brown eyes bored deep into the gray eyes of Samson Bending.

"Frankly," he continued, "we are inclined to discount ninety per cent of the rumors that come to us. Most of them are based on purely crackpot ideas. None the less, we investigate them. If someone _does_ discover a new process of producing power, we can"t afford to be blind to new ideas just because they happen to come from ... ah ... unorthodox sources.

"You, Mr. Bending, are an unusual case. Any rumor concerning your work, no matter how fantastic, is worth looking into on your reputation alone, even though the claims may be utterly absurd."

"I have made no claims," Bending interposed.

Olcott raised a lean hand. "I understand that, Mr. Bending. None the less, others--who may or may not know what they are talking about--have made this claim _for_ you." Olcott settled back in his chair and folded his hands across his slight paunch. "You"ve worked with us before, Mr.

Bending; you know that we can--and _do_--pay well for advances in the power field which are contributed by our engineers. As you know, our contract is the standard one--any discovery made by an engineer while in our employ is automatically ours. None the less, we give such men a handsome royalty." He paused, opened his brief case, and pulled out a notebook. After referring to it, he looked up at Bending and said:

"You, yourself have benefitted by this policy. According to our records, you are drawing royalties from three patented improvements in the stellarator which were discovered at times when you were employed by us--or, rather, by one of our a.s.sociative corporations--in an advisory capacity. Those discoveries were, by contract, ours. By law, we could use them as we saw fit without recompense to you, other than our regular fee. None the less, we chose to pay you a royalty because that is our normal policy with all our engineers and scientific research men. We find it more expedient to operate thus."

Bending was getting a little tired of Olcott"s "none the less," but he didn"t show it. "Are you trying to say that my Converter was invented during my employ with your company, Mr. Olcott?"

Olcott cleared his throat and shook his head. "No. Not necessarily. It is true that we might have a case on those grounds, but, under the circ.u.mstances, we feel it inexpedient to pursue such a course."

_Which means_, Bending thought, _that you don"t have a case at all_.

"Then just what are you driving at, Mr. Olcott?" he asked aloud.

"I"ll put my cards on the table, Mr. Bending," Olcott said.

_You"ve already said that_, Bending thought, _and I"ve seen no evidence of it_. "Go ahead," he said.

"Thank you." He cleared his throat again. "If your invention is ... ah ... worth while, we are prepared to negotiate with you for use and/or purchase of it."

Bending had always disliked people who said or wrote "and/or," but he had no desire to antagonize the Power Utilities representative by showing personal pique. "Let me understand you clearly," he said. "Power Utilities wants to buy my rights to the Converter. Right?"

Olcott cleared his throat a third time. "In a word, yes. Provided, of course, that it is actually worth our while. Remember, we know almost nothing about it; the claims made for it by our ... ah ... anonymous informer are ... well, ah ... rather fantastic. But your reputation--" He let the sentence hang.

Bending was not at all immune to flattery. He grinned. "Do you mean that you came to me to talk about buying an invention you weren"t even sure existed--just because of my reputation?"

"Frankly, yes," said Olcott. "Your reputation is ... ah ... shall we say, a good one in power engineering circles."

"Are you an engineer?" Bending asked suddenly.

Olcott blinked. "Why, no. No, I am not. I"m a lawyer. I thought you understood that."

"Sorry," Bending said. "I didn"t. Most of the financial work around here is done through my Mr. Luckman. I"m not acquainted with the monetary end of the business."

Olcott smiled. "Quite all right. Evidently I am not as well known to you as you are to me. Not that it matters. Why did you ask?"

Bending stood up. "I"m going to show you something, Mr. Olcott," he said. "Would you care to come with me to the lab?"

Olcott was on his feet in a second. "I"d be glad to, Mr. Bending."

Bending led the man into the lab. "Over here," he said. At the far end of the laboratory was a thick-legged table cluttered with lengths of wire, vacuum tubes, transistors, a soldering gun, a couple of meters, and the other various paraphernalia of an electronics workshop. In the center of the table, surrounded by the clutter, sat an oblong box. It didn"t look like much; it was just an eighteen by twelve by ten box, made of black plastic, featureless, except for a couple of dials and k.n.o.bs on the top of it, and a pair of copper studs sticking out of the end.