The lights popped out.
There were changes that should be made before I tried that again, but
instead I only found a larger fuse for a heavier load and jammed that
in the switchbox.
I flipped my machine into service once again. The lights flickered and
held.
The dials on my control board told me the story. It was hard to take.
But there it was.
The internal Scale showed zero.
I had had a slightly hot bar of silver alloy inside. It was completely
gone. Mass zero. The temperature gauge showed that there had been
no change in centigrade reading that couldn't be explained by the
mechanical operation of the machine itself. There had been no sudden
discharge of electricity or radioactivity. I checked for a standard
anti-gravity effect but there was none. Gravity inside the cylinder had
gone to zero but never to minus.
I was at last violating conservation of energy--not by successfully
inverting the cube of the ionization factor, but by destroying mass ...
by simply making it cease to exist with no cause-and-effect side
effects.
I knew the government wouldn't be interested, since I couldn't explain
how my device worked. No amount of successful demonstration could ever
convince anybody with any scientific training that it actually did work.
But I shrewdly judged that Tony Carmen wouldn't ask an embarrassing
"how" when he was incapable of understanding the explanation.
* * * * *
"Yeah, but how does it work?" Tony Carmen demanded of me, sleeking his
mirror-black hair and staring up at the disk-topped drum.
"Why do you care?" I asked irritably. "It will dispose of your bodies
for you."
"I got a reason that goes beyond the stiff, but let's stick to that
just for now. _Where are these bodies going?_ I don't want them winding
up in the D.A.'s bathtub."
"Why not? How could they trace them back to you?"
"You're the scientist," Tony said hotly. "I got great respect for those
crime lab boys. Maybe the stiff got some of my exclusive brand of talc
on it, I don't know."
"Listen here, Carmen," I said, "what makes you think these bodies are
going somewhere? Think of it only as a kind of--incinerator."
"Not on your life, Professor. The gadget don't get hot so how can it
burn? It don't use enough electricity to fry. It don't cut 'em up
or crush 'em down, or dissolve them in acid. I've seen disappearing
cabinets before."
Mafia or not, I saw red. "Are you daring to suggest that I am working
some trick with trap doors or sliding panels?"
"Easy, Professor," Carmen said, effortlessly shoving me back with one
palm. "I'm not saying you have the machine rigged. It's just that
you have to be dropping the stuff through a sliding panel in--well,
everything around us. You're sliding all that aside and dropping things
through. But I want to know where they wind up. Reasonable?"
Carmen was an uneducated lout and a criminal but he had an instinctive
feel for the mechanics of physics.
"I don't know where the stuff goes, Carmen," I finally admitted. "It
might go into another plane of existence. 'Another dimension' the
writers for the American Weekly would describe it. Or into our past, or
our future."
The swarthy racketeer pursed his lips and apparently did some rapid
calculation.
"I don't mind the first two, but I don't like them going into the
future. If they do that, they may show up again in six months."
"Or six million years."
"You'll have to cut that future part out, Professor."
I was beginning to get a trifle impatient. All those folk tales I had
heard about the Mafia were getting more distant. "See here, Carmen, I
could lie to you and say they went into the prehistoric past and you
would never know the difference. But the truth is, I just don't know
where the processed material goes. There's a chance it may go into
the future, yes. But unless it goes exactly one year or exactly so
many years it would appear in empty space ... because the earth will
have moved from the spot it was transmitted. I don't know for sure.
Perhaps the slight Deneb-ward movement of the Solar System would wreck
a perfect three-point landing even then and cause the dispatched
materials to burn up from atmospheric friction, like meteors. You will
just have to take a chance on the future. That's the best I can do."
Carmen inhaled deeply. "Okay. I'll risk it. Pretty long odds against
any squeal on the play. How many of these things can you turn out,
Professor?"
"I can construct a duplicate of this device so that you may destroy the
unwanted corpses that you would have me believe are delivered to you
with the regularity of the morning milk run."
The racketeer waved that suggestion aside. "I'm talking about a big
operation, Venetti. These things can take the place of incinerators,
garbage disposals, waste baskets...."
"Impractical," I snorted. "You don't realize the tremendous amount of
electrical power these devices require...."
"Nuts! From what you said, the machine is like a TV set; it takes
a lot of power to get it started, but then on it coasts on its own
generators."
* * * * *
"There's something to what you say," I admitted in the face of his
unexpected information. "But I can hardly turn my invention over to
your entirely persuasive salesmen, I'm sure. This is part of the
results of an investigation for the government. Washington will have
to decide what to do with the machine."
"Listen, Professor," Carmen began, "the Mafia--"
"What makes you think I'm any more afraid of the Mafia than I am of the
F.B.I.? I may have already sealed my fate by letting you in on this
much. Machinegunning is hardly a less attractive fate to me than a poor
security rating. To me, being dead professionally would be as bad as
being dead biologically."
Tony Carmen laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. I finally deduced he
intended to be cordial.
"Of course," he said smoothly "you have to give this to Washington but
there are _ways_, Professor. I know. I'm a business man--"
"You _are_?" I said.
He named some of the businesses in which he held large shares of stock.
"You _are_."
"I've had experience in this sort of thing. We simply _leak_ the
information to a few hundred well selected persons about all that your
machine can do. We'll call 'em Expendables, because they can expend
anything."
"I," I interjected, "planned to call it the Venetti Machine."
"Professor, who calls the radio the Marconi these days?"
"There are Geiger-Muller Counters, though," I said.
"You don't have to give a Geiger counter the sex appeal of a TV set or
a hardtop convertible. We'll call them Expendables. No home will be
complete without one."
"Perfect for disposing of unwanted bodies," I mused. "The murder rate
will go alarmingly with those devices within easy reach."
"Did that stop Sam Colt or Henry Ford?" Tony Carmen asked reasonably....
Naturally, I was aware that the government would _not_ be interested in
my machine. I am not a Fortean, a psychic, a psionicist or a screwball.
But the government frequently gets things it doesn't know what to do
with--like airplanes in the 'twenties. When it doesn't know what to do,
it doesn't do it.
There have been hundreds of workable perpetual motion machines
patented, for example. Of course, they weren't vices in the strictest
sense of the word. Many of them used the external power of gravity,
they would wear out or slow down in time from friction, but for the
meanwhile, for some ten to two hundred years they would just sit there,
moving. No one had ever been able to figure out what to do with them.
I knew the AEC wasn't going to dump tons of radioactive waste (with
some possible future reclaimation value) into a machine which they
didn't believe actually could work.
Tony Carmen knew exactly what to do with an Expendable once he got his
hands on it.
Naturally, that was what I had been afraid of.
* * * * *
The closed sedan was warm, even in early December.
Outside, the street was a progression of shadowed block forms. I was
shivering slightly, my teeth rattling like the porcelain they were. Was
this the storied "ride," I wondered?
Carmen finally returned to the car, unlatched the door and slid in. He
did not reinsert the ignition key. I did not feel like sprinting down
the deserted street.
"The boys will have it set up in a minute," Tony the racketeer informed
me.
"What?" The firing squad?
"The Expendable, of course."
"Here? You dragged me out here to see how you have prostituted my
invention? I presume you've set it up with a 'Keep Our City Clean' sign
pasted on it."
He chuckled. It was a somewhat nasty sound, or so I imagined.
A flashlight winked in the sooty twilight.
"Okay. Let's go," Tony said, slapping my shoulder.
I got out of the car, rubbing my flabby bicep. Whenever I took my
teen-age daughter to the beach from my late wife's parents' home, I
frequently found 230 pound bullies did kick sand in my ears.
The machine was installed on the corner, half covered with a gloomy
white shroud, and fearlessly plugged into the city lighting system via
a blanketed streetlamp. Two hoods hovered in a doorway ready to take
care of the first cop with a couple of fifties or a single .38, as
necessity dictated.
Tony guided my elbow. "Okay, Professor, I think I understand the bit
now, but I'll let you run it up with the flagpole for me, to see how it
waves to the national anthem."
"Here?" I spluttered once more. "I told you, Carmen, I wanted nothing
more to do with you. Your check is still on deposit...."
"You didn't want anything to do with me in the first place." The thug's
teeth flashed in the night. "Throw your contraption into gear, buddy."
That was the first time the tone of respect, even if faked, had gone
out of his voice. I moved to the switchboard of my invention. What
remained was as simple as adjusting a modern floor lamp to a medium
light position. I flipped.
Restraining any impulse toward colloqualism, I was also deeply
disturbed by what next occurred.
One of the massive square shapes on the horizon vanished.
"What have you done?" I yelped, ripping the cover off the machine.
Even under the uncertain illumination of the smogged stars I could see
that the unit was half gone--in fact, exactly halved.
"Squint the Seal is one of my boys. He used to be a mechanic in the
old days for Burger, Madle, the guys who used to rob banks and stuff."
There was an unmistakable note of boyish admiration in Carmen's voice.
"He figured the thing would work like that. Separate the poles and you
increase the size of the working area."
"You mean square the operational field. Your idiot doesn't even know
mechanics."
"No, but he knows all about how any kind of machine works."
"You call that working?" I demanded. "Do you realize what you have
there, Carmen?"
"Sure. A disintegrator ray, straight out of _Startling Stories_."
My opinion as to the type of person who followed the pages of
science-fiction magazines with fluttering lips and tracing finger was
upheld.