She got her pad and pencil ready.
"Wheedling form letter to Better Mousetraps. Where are our royalties
for the last quarter of the year? We know we didn't have a full three
months with our Expendable Field in operation on the new traps, but we
want the payola for what we have coming.
"Condescending form letter to Humane Lethal Equipment. Absolutely do
not send the California penal system any chambers equipped with our
patented field until legislature officially approves them. We got away
with it in New Mexico, but we're older and wiser now.
"Rush priority telegram to President, United States, any time in
the next ten days. Thanks for citation, et cetera. Glad buddy system
working out well in training battlefield disintegrator teams.
"Indignant form letter to Arcivox. We do not feel we are properly a
co-respondent in your damage suits. Small children and appliances have
always been a problem, viz ice boxes and refrigerators. Suggest you put
a more complicated latch on the handles of the dangerously inferior
doors you have covering our efficient, patented field."
I leaned back and took a breather. There was no getting around it--I
just wasn't happy as a business man. I had been counting on being only
a figurehead in the Expendable Patent Holding Corporation, but Tony
Carmen didn't like office work. And he hadn't anyone he trusted any
more than me. Even.
I jerked open a drawer and pulled off a paper towel from the roll I
had stolen in the men's room. Scrubbing my chest and neck with it, I
smoothed it out and dropped it into the wastebasket. It slid down the
tapering sides and through the narrow slot above the Expendable Field.
I had redesigned the wastebaskets after a janitor had stepped in one.
But Gimpy was happy now, with the $50,000 we paid him.
I opened my mouth and Miss Brown's pencil perked up its eraser,
reflecting her fierce alertness.
Tony Carmen banged open the door, and I closed my mouth.
"G-men on the way here," he blurted and collapsed into a chair opposite
Miss Brown.
"Don't revert to type," I warned him. "What kind of G-Men? FBI? FCC?
CIA? FDA? USTD?"
"Investigators for the Atomic Energy Commission."
The solemn, conservatively dressed young man in the door touched the
edge of his snap-brim hat as he said it.
"Miss Brown, would you mind letting our visitor use your chair?" I
asked.
"Not at all, sir," she said dreamily.
"May I suggest," I said, "that we might get more business done if you
then removed yourself from the chair first."
Miss Brown leaped to her feet with a healthy galvanic response and quit
the vicinity with her usual efficiency.
* * * * *
Once seated, the AEC man said "I'll get right to the point. You may
find this troublesome, gentlemen, but your government intends to
confiscate all of the devices using your so-called Expendable field,
and forever bar their manufacture in this country or their importation."
"You stinking G-men aren't getting away with this," Carmen said
ingratiatingly. "Ever hear of the Mafia?"
"Not much," the young man admitted earnestly, "since the FBI finished
with its deportations a few years back."
I cleared my throat. "I must admit that the destruction of a
multi-billion business is disconcerting before lunch. May we ask why
you took this step?"
The agent inserted a finger between his collar and tie. "Have you
noticed how unseasonably warm it is?"
"I wondered if you had. You're going to have heat prostration if you
keep that suit coat on five minutes more."
The young man collapsed back in his chair, loosening the top button of
his ivy league jacket, looking from my naked hide to the gossomer scrap
of sport shirt Carmen wore. "We have to dress inconspicuously in the
service," he panted weakly.
I nodded understandingly. "What does the heat have to do with the
outlawing of the Expendables?"
"At first we thought there might be some truth in the folk nonsense
that nuclear tests had something to do with raising the mean
temperature of the world," the AEC man said. "But our scientists
quickly found they weren't to blame."
"Clever of them."
"Yes, they saw that the widespread use of your machines was responsible
for the higher temperature. Your device violates the law of
conservation of energy, _seemingly_. It _seemingly_ destroys matter
without creating energy. Actually--"
He paused dramatically.
"Actually, your device added the energy it created in destroying matter
to the energy potential of the planet in the form of _heat_. You see
what that means? If your devices continue in operation, the mean
temperature of Earth will rise to the point where we burst into flame.
They must be outlawed!"
"I agree," I said reluctantly.
Tony Carmen spoke up. "No, you don't, Professor. We don't agree to
that."