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“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: