“Now wait a minute,” I said. “I only teach physics in high school, but I know better than that. Moving around in warm air doesn’t make anything cold except by evaporation.”
“Well, there’s your input and output, John,” he said. “The ball lost heat and took on motion. Simple conversion.”
My jaw must have dropped to my waist. “Do you mean that that little thing is converting heat to kinetic energy?”
“Apparently.”
“But that’s impossible!”
He was beginning to smile thoughtfully. The ball was not as cold now as it had been and I was holding it in my lap.
“A steam engine does it,” he said, “and a steam turbine. Of course, they’re not very efficient.”
“They work mechanically, too, and only because water expands when it turns to steam.”
“This seems to do it differently,” he said, sipping thoughtfully at his dark-brown martini. “I don’t know exactly how—maybe something piezo-electric about the way its molecules slide about. I ran some tests—measured its impact energy in foot pounds and compared that with the heat loss in BTUs. Seemed to be about 98 per cent efficient, as close as I could tell. Apparently it converts heat into bounce very well. Interesting, isn’t it?”
“Interesting?” I almost came flying out of my chair. My mind was beginning to spin like crazy. “If you’re not pulling my leg with this thing, Farnsworth, you’ve got something by the tail there that’s just a little bit bigger than the discovery of fire.”