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He worked absorbedly for perhaps twenty minutes, his eyes intent. At the end of that time he had threads of unwound secondary wire stretched back and forth across a forked stick of dhil weed, and two small pieces of sheet iron twisted together in an extremely improbable manner. He connected the ends of the secondary wire to contacts in his tractor. He climbed into the tractor seat. He threw over the drive control.

The tractor lurched into motion. The Diesel wasn’t running. But the tractor rolled comfortably as Lon drove it, the individual motors in the separate catawheels drawing power from a mere maze of wires across a forked stick—plus two pieces of sheet iron. There was plenty of power.

Lon drove the tractor the rest of the morning and all afternoon with a very peculiar expression on his face. He understood what he had done. Now that he had done it, it seemed the most obvious of expedients. He felt inclined to be incredulous that nobody had ever happened to think of this particular device before. But they very plainly hadn’t. It was a source of all the electric power anybody could possibly want. The voltage would depend on the number of turns of copper wire around a suitably forked stick. The amperage would be whatever that voltage could put through whatever was hooked to it.