Free Perpetual Motion by Jeff Fulmer Page B

one,
Cynthia.”
    “I said I’ll see what I can do,” she
repeated, not sounding very enthused.
    “Thanks,” he said, meaning it.
    Hanging up, he leaned back and thought about
his missing person. Just for kicks, he did a quick Google search
and located a three year old paper entitled “Magnetically Charged
States” by a Cal Tech student named M. Dexter. The language was so
densely laden with scientific mumbo jumbo it might as well have
been written in Chinese.
    There were also postings that mentioned
Dexter’s name in a couple of ‘free-energy’ forums. The posters
often referred to “The Dex” with the kind of awe reserved for comic
book superheroes. But these people didn’t seem to actually know
“The Dex,” they just passed along rumors about his work.
    Cynical looked up ‘perpetual motion,’ along
with other often used phrases like, ‘free energy’ and ‘over-unity.’
Mostly what he found was the modern day equivalents of alchemists
who claimed they could spin gold out of cow pies. Water powered
cars, quick start fuel free generators, and ‘cold fusion’ were a
few of the miracle devices. Even if Cynical couldn’t follow the
science, he could smell a rat in most of them.
    The most common characteristic of the
get-rich-quick artists was their ability to tell a good yarn. They
were all ushering in a new age of energy independence, all the
while going to make their investors wildly rich in the process.
Some had drawn up plans which they would build once they had enough
investment capital. Others had built contraptions that appeared to
work, at least in their homemade videos.
    As he read on, he found many of the
inventions had wilted under the hot lights of critical scrutiny.
But, even if the inventions were debunked, it did not necessarily
mean the inventor’s ride on the ‘free energy’ gravy train was over.
Just because an egghead couldn’t wrap his head around a radical
breakthrough didn’t mean it wouldn’t work, eventually. Set-backs
were just opportunities to take on new investors.
    Mr. Mancuso, however, was not a starry-eyed
idealist or a rube to fall for a fast talking salesman. He was a
hard-nosed business man who didn’t look like anyone’s fool. And
yet, he seemed to be taking this inventor of a perpetual motion
machine seriously. So seriously, he’d pay a million dollars simply
to talk to him again.
    Over the next couple of hours, the
x-detective delved deeper into the world of free-energy, finding a
handful of true geniuses that had dabbled in the field, including
Nikola Tesla. Among other inventions, Tesla had come up with the
AC/DC system still used for electricity today. In 1889, he
submitted a patent on a “self-sustaining” apparatus called a
“Dynamo-Electric Machine,” which had metal disks that rotated
between magnets to produce an electrical charge.
    In the 1600s, having invented the first
digital calculator and pushed the limits of known geometry, Blaise
Pascal was considered a brilliant mathematician and philosopher. In
his spare time, he liked to tinker with a perpetual motion machine
and built a device in the shape of a wheel to conduct his
experiments on. As legend had it, one of his friends suggested
using the wheel for gambling, and the roulette wheel was born.
    No wonder “ Pascal ” was the name
Michael had used as his alias at the hotel. As Cynical pondered the
connection, he suddenly had an idea. Maybe it wasn’t a stroke of
genius exactly, but it was good detective work….When in doubt, go
back to the last place the missing person had been seen. Picking up
the phone, he dialed national information.
    “Connect me with the Mirage Hotel, Las Vegas,
Nevada.”

CHAPTER
20
     
     
    Waiting on the phone line, Cynical came up
with the semblance of a story; now he just had to sell it. A few
seconds later, the operator came on announcing, “The Mirage.”
    “Front desk please,” he said, getting into
character.
    A couple of rings later, a rushed voice