The Power Ball

By John Lymington

Subjects: speculative fiction, British science fiction, science fiction

Description: As long ago as 1937 successful inventor and scientist Sir Arthur Barnes created a device which generated electricity on a practical scale without the need for fuel or machinery or power distribution lines. When he died a year later in an accident, he died with his secret intact. No generator was visible, and any notes he had ever made had been hidden or destroyed. Why? War was imminent, and Barnes's nephew, beginning a career at a Government department, was sent down to the house in Cornwall because aircraft testing RDF equipment had detected untranslatable signals coming from there. The nephew found the generator, and perhaps the answer to the mystery of Arthur's silence. The generator gave a by-product, and that product was one which seemed to create the terrible figure of Fate as something real and approaching.