"You know," said Arch, "I never thought of that."
He lifted the ridiculously small object which was his new current source and placed it inside the hood. He had had to add two pieces of strap iron to hold it in position. "Why a regular motor?" he mused. "If you have D.C. coming out at a controlled rate, you could use it to turn your main drive shaft by a very simple and cheap arrangement."
"Oh, sure," said Robert scornfully. "That's what I meant. Any backyard mechanic could fix that up—if he didn't electrocute himself first. But how about it, Dr. Arch? How much would you want for a piece like that?"
"I haven't the time," said the physicist. "Tell you what, though, I'll give you a copy of the specs and you can make your own. There's nothing to it, if your mother will let you have the oven for a day. Cost you maybe five dollars for materials."
"Sell it for twenty-five," said Bob dreamily. "Look, Dr. Arch, would you like to go into business with me? I'll pay you whatever royalty seems right."
"I'm going to Boston with just that in mind," said Arch, fumbling with the cables. "However, go ahead. Consider yourself a licensee. I want ten percent of the selling price, and I'll trust a Scotch Yankee like you to make me a million."
He had no business sense. It would have saved him much grief if he had.
The countryside looked clean, full of hope and springtime. Now and then a chrome-plated monster of an automobile whipped past Arch's sedately chugging antique. He observed them with a certain contempt, an engineer's eye for the Goldbergian inefficiency of a mechanism which turned this rod to push that cam to rotate such and such a gear, and needed a cooling system to throw away most of the energy generated. Bob Culquhoun, he reflected, had a saner outlook. Not only was electricity cheaper in the first place, but the wasted power would be minimal and the "prime mover"—the capacitor itself—simply would not wear out.
Automobiles could be sold for perhaps five hundred dollars and built to last, not to run up repair bills till the owner was driven to buying a new model. The world's waning resources of petroleum could go into something useful: generating power at central stations, forming a base for organic syntheses; they would stretch out for centuries more. Coal could really come back into its own.