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“This is your pilot model?” Olcott asked.

“One of them, yes. Want to watch it go through its paces?”

“Very much.”

“O.K. First, though, just how good is your technical education? I mean, how basic do I have to get?” Sam Bending was not exactly a diplomat.

Olcott, however, didn’t look offended. “Let’s say that if you keep it on the level of college freshman physics I’ll get the general drift. All right?”

“Sure. I don’t intend to get any more technical than that, anyway. I’m going to tell you what the Converter does–not how.”

“Fair enough–for the moment. Go ahead.”

“Right.” Sam flipped a switch on the top of the box. “Takes a minute or so to warm up,” he said.

When the “minute or so” had passed, Bending, who had been watching the meters on the top of the machine, said: “See this?” He pointed at a dial face. “That’s the voltage. It’s controlled by this vernier knob here.” He turned the knob, and the needle on the voltmeter moved obligingly upwards. “Anything from ten to a thousand volts,” he said. “Easily adjusted to suit your taste.”

“I don’t think I’d like the taste of a thousand volts,” Olcott said solemnly. “Might affect the tongue adversely.” Olcott didn’t look particularly impressed. Why should he? Anyone can build a machine that can generate high voltage.

“Is that AC or DC?” he asked.

“DC,” said Bending. “But it can easily be converted to AC. Depends on what you want to use it for.”

Olcott nodded. “How much power does that thing deliver?”

Sam Bending had been waiting for that question. He delivered his answer with all the nonchalance of a man dropping a burnt match in an ash tray.

“Five hundred horsepower.”

Olcott’s face simply couldn’t hold its expressionless expression against something like that. His lips twitched, and his eyes blinked. “Five hundred what?“

“I will not make the obvious pun,” said Bending. “I said ‘five hundred horsepower’–unquote. About three hundred and seventy-five kilowatts, maximum.”

Olcott appeared to be unable to say anything. He simply stared at the small, innocuous-looking Converter. Bending was unable to decide whether Olcott was overawed by the truth or simply stricken dumb by what must sound like a monstrous lie.

Olcott licked his lips with the tip of his small, pink tongue. “Five hundred horsepower. Hm-m-m.” He took a deep breath. “No wonder those copper studs are so thick.”

“Yeah,” said Bending. “If I short ’em across at low voltage, they get hot.”

“Short them across?” Olcott’s voice sounded harsh.

Bending was in his seventh heaven, and he showed it. His grin was running as high an energy output as that he claimed for the Converter. “Sure. The amperage is self-limiting. You can only draw about four hundred amps off the thing, no matter how low you put the voltage. When I said five hundred HP, I meant at a thousand volts. As a matter of fact, the available power in horsepower is roughly half the voltage. But that only applies to this small model. A bigger one could supply more, of course.”

“What does it weigh?” asked Olcott, in a hushed voice.

“Little over a hundred pounds,” Bending said.

Olcott tore his eyes away from the fantastic little box and looked into Sam Bending’s eyes. “May I ask where you’re getting power like that?”

“Sure. Hydrogen fusion, same as the stellarator.”

“It’s powered by deuterium?”

Bending delivered his bombshell. “Nope. Water. Plain, ordinary aitch-two-oh. See those little vents at the side? They exhaust oxygen and helium. It burns about four hundred milligrams of water per hour at maximum capacity.”

Olcott had either regained control of himself or had passed the saturation point; Sam couldn’t tell which. Olcott said: “Where do you put the water?”

“Why put water in it?” Sam asked coolly. “That small whirring sound you hear isn’t the hydrogen-helium conversion; it’s a fan blowing air through a cooling coil. Even in the Sahara Desert there’s enough moisture in the air to run this baby.”

“And the fan is powered–“

“… By the machine itself, naturally,” said Bending. “It’s a self-contained unit. Of course, with a really big unit, you might have to hire someone to hang out their laundry somewhere in the neighborhood, but only in case of emergencies.”