“Simple,” I said. “You just let the machine turn a flywheel or lift weights and drop them, or something like that, outside your house. You have an air intake inside. And if, in the winter, you don’t want to lose heat, you just mount the thing in an outside building, attach it to your generator and use the power to do whatever you want—heat your house, say. There’s plenty of heat in the outside air even in December.”

“John,” said Farnsworth, “you are very ingenious. It might work.”

“Of course it’ll work.” Pictures were beginning to light up in my head. “And don’t you realize that this is the answer to the solar power problem? Why, mirrors and selenium are, at best, ten percent efficient! Think of big pumping stations on the Sahara! All that heat, all that need for power, for irrigation!” I paused a moment for effect. “Farnsworth, this can change the very shape of the earth!”

Farnsworth seemed to be lost in thought. Finally he looked at me strangely and said, “Perhaps we had better try to build a model.”

***

I was so excited by the thing that I couldn’t sleep that night. I kept dreaming of power stations, ocean liners, even automobiles, being operated by balls bouncing back and forth in cylinders.

I even worked out a spaceship in my mind, a bullet-shaped affair with a huge rubber ball on its end, gyroscopes to keep it oriented properly, the ball serving as solution to that biggest of missile-engineering problems, excess heat. You’d build a huge concrete launching field, supported all the way down to bedrock, hop in the ship and start bouncing. Of course it would be kind of a rough ride…

In the morning, I called my superintendent and told him to get a substitute for the rest of the week; I was going to be busy.

Then I started working in the machine shop in Farnsworth’s basement, trying to turn out a working model of a device that, by means of a crankshaft, oleo dampers and a reciprocating cylinder, would pick up some of that random kinetic energy from the bouncing ball and do something useful with it, like turning a drive shaft. I was just working out a convection-and-air-pump system for circulating hot air around the ball when Farnsworth came in.

He had a sphere of about the size of a basketball and, if he had made it to my specifications, weighing thirty-five pounds. He had a worried frown on his forehead.

“It looks good,” I said. “What’s the trouble?”

“There seems to be a slight hitch,” he said. “I’ve been testing for conductivity. It seems to be quite low.”

“That’s what I’m working on now. It’s just a mechanical problem of pumping enough warm air back to the ball. We can do it with no more than a twenty percent efficiency loss. In an engine, that’s nothing.”