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The Battery of Hate

BY JOHN W. CAMPBELL, JR.

CHAPTER I

BRUCE KENNEDY looked delightedly at the ampere-hour-meter on the laboratory bench, at the voltmeter, and finally at the ammeter. Then he drew out the notebook from the left-hand desk drawer and carefully wrote in the new entries.

"Wednesday, May 28, 1938, nine-thirty A.M. Ampere-hours, five thousand, six hundred seventy-two; watt-hours, twenty-three thousand, eight hundred twenty-two; volts, four-point-two; amperes, eighty-five. Sweet spirits of niter, isn't she a brute for work!" He looked happily at the squat, black case on the floor, two feet long, eighteen inches wide, and two feet high. A small, humped projection at one end seemed the source of a faint whine that filled the cellar-laboratory. A mass of heavy leads ran from two thick copper terminals at the top of the black case, up to the table which served as a laboratory bench. Over on one side of the room, where the angle of the concrete cellar wall joined the wallboard, a pile of unused apparatus of various sorts was heaped in disarray. Inductances, voltmeters, heavy resistance coils, all the apparatus of an experimenter in electrophysics. On the concrete wall, sections of shelves had been placed, holding rows of various chemicals; in a rack on the floor below the window that let a patch of bright golden sunshine on the floor hung a dozen curious rectangles of a black, lustrous material. They were just the shape of the end of the black case on the floor, plates for the battery evidently, black, lustrous plates, soft black graphite.

To one side of the door through the wallboard was a frame of

pipes, and, attached to it by porcelain insulators was a network of wires that resembled a gigantic electric toaster. A plate of zinc hung behind it, evidently protecting from the heat the more or less combustible wallboard, which had, nevertheless, been scorched slightly.

The room was terrifically, uncomfortably hot, though both door and window were opened, for it was a warm May day, and the huge heater certainly did nothing to alleviate the temperature.

Kennedy wiped the perspiration from his forehead, happily, however, and smiled down at his battery.

"The fuel batteryЧthe ideal source of power! Electricity directly from coalЧor graphite. Electricity produced so cheaply nothing can compete! Electric automobiles ten times more powerful and a hundred times simpler than the best todayЧelectric airplanes, noiseless and unfailing, because an electric motor has just two bearings and a magnetic field. These batteries won't failЧthey can't.

"Lord, the world will be a better place, I guess." He smiled and stretched himself ecstatically. Some men get more pleasure out of proving the world isn't a bad place, and making their fellows like it better, than from cornering the means to bring what pleasures the world already has to themselves. Bruce Kennedy was one of the first kind. He smiled whimsically at his "toaster" now. "You were all right when I started these experiments last January, but May in New Jersey and you don't get along. Guess it's time to test those batteries on a refrigerating machine." He stopped, as still another thought struck him. Success was here and the thousand and one tiny but irritating problems were ironed out, and now the great problem of its use came before him. "Another thing people will haveЧhome cooling will be worthwhile when electric power comes at ten dollars a ton!"

Bruce Kennedy saw the good his invention of the fuel battery would bring the world. A plate of graphite, cheaper and more plentiful than coal, down there in the Archiazoic Period, oxygen from the air, a plate of copper, plated with a thin layer of gold merely to collect current, and a cheaply made solution. Power. Power, as he said, at "ten dollars a ton," for the air was free; the graphite alone had to be renewed. The little whining motor, run by the battery itself, served to force the bubbles of air through the solution, to keep it saturated with oxygen.

So Bruce Kennedy blithely set about patenting the great invention and making himself an electric automobile to be driven by these super-batteries. Had someone pointed out to him the terrible path of

hate and bloodshed that lay ahead of that squat, rounded block of power on his cellar floor, and ahead of him, he would not have believed it, for he was young enough to think that men worked for the good of men, as he himself did.

CHAPTER II

Marcus Charles Gardner, large, very friendly, and popularly known as M. Chas. Gardner, the big power of finance, was looking in some surprise at his secretary.

"What? Who's this wants in? What's he got that's so important and confidential, he can't tell you?"

"I don't know, for of course he didn't say, Mr. Gardner, but he's one of your patent examiners. It might well be important."

"Oh, well. He might have waited till later in the morning anyway. Everybody knows I hate to do or listen to anything important before lunch. Send him in; it probably isn't much."

A small, shrewd-looking man came in. His clothes were very neat and very somber. He looked like a successful lawyer, and was one, a patent lawyer.

"Mr. Gardner?"

"Yes," replied the magnate.

"I'm Peasley Jamison, as you have seen, and I have some news I am sure you will want to hear. Perhaps I should not be certain, perhaps you will certainly not want to hear it. At any rate"Чhe smiled at the bigger man ironicallyЧ"there's a new invention. I've been watching for it for the last twenty years, hoping I'd get hold of it. Hardwell and Thomas got it, new firm, not big at all, but they tied it up beautifully. Very skillfully drawn patent. Very pretty work."

"I," said M. Chas. Gardner angrily, "don't give a damn how beautiful it is. What is it?"

Still the lawyer did not seem content to disclose his mystery. "I believe you have control of North American Super-power? And proxy-control of most of the oil fields of the country?"