"I _would_ agree," I said, "except that it wouldn't work. Explain the
danger to the public, let them feel the heat rise themselves, and they
will hoard Expendables against seizure and continue to use them, until
we do burst into flame, as you put it so religiously."
"Why?" the young man demanded.
"Because Expendables are convenient. There is a ban on frivolous use
of water due to the dire need. But the police still have to go stop
people from watering lawns, and I suspect not a few swimming pools are
being filled on the sly. Water is somebody else's worry. So will be
generating enough heat to turn Eden into Hell."
"Mass psychology isn't my strongest point," the young man said
worriedly. "But I suspect you may be right. Then--we'll be damned?"
"No, not necessarily," I told him comfortingly. "All we have to do is
_use up_ the excess energy with engines of a specific design."
"But can we design those engines in time?" the young man wondered with
uncharacteristic gloom.
"Certainly," I said, practising the power of positive thinking. "Now
that your world-wide testing laboratories have confirmed a vague fear
of mine, I can easily reverse the field of the Expendable device and
create a rather low-efficiency engine that consumes the excess energy
in our planetary potential."
* * * * *
The agent of the AEC whose name I can never remember was present along
with Tony Carmen the night my assistants finished with the work I had
outlined.
While it was midnight outside, the fluorescents made the scene more
visible than sunlight. My Disexpendable was a medium-sized drum in a
tripod frame with an unturned coolie's hat at the bottom.
Breathlessly, I closed the switch and the scooped disc began slowly to
revolve.
"Is it my imagination," the agent asked, "or is it getting cooler in
here?"
"Professor." Carmen gave me a warning nudge.
There was now something on the revolving disc. It was a bar of some
shiny gray metal.
"Kill the power, Professor," Carmen said.
"Can it be," I wondered, "that the machine is somehow recreating or
drawing back the processed material from some other time or dimension?"
"Shut the thing off, Venetti!" the racketeer demanded.
But too late.
There was now a somewhat dead man sitting in the saddle of the turning
circle of metal.
If Harry Keno had only been sane when he turned up on that
merry-go-round in Boston I feel we would have learned much of immense
value on the nature of time and space.
As it is, I feel that it is a miscarriage of justice to hold me in
connection with the murders I am sure Tony Carmen did commit.
I hope this personal account when published will end the vicious
story supported by the district attorney that it was I who sought Tony
Carmen out and offered to dispose of his enemies and that I sought his
financial backing for the exploitation of my invention.
This is the true, and only true, account of the development of the
machine known as the Expendable.
I am only sorry, now that the temperature has been standardized once
more, that the Expendable's antithesis, the Disexpendable, is of too
low an order of efficiency to be of much value as a power source in
these days of nuclear and solar energy. So the world is again stuck
with the problem of waste disposal ... including all that I dumped
before. But as a great American once said, you can't win 'em all.
If you so desire, you may send your generous and fruitful letters
towards my upcoming defense in care of this civic-minded publication.