"You see my problem, Professor?" Tony Carmen held his pinkly manicured, flashily ringed hands wide.
I saw his problem and it was warmly embarrassing.
"Really, Mr. Carmen," I said, "this isn't the sort of thing you discuss with a total stranger. I'm not a doctor—not of medicine, anyway—or a lawyer."
"They can't help me. I need an operator in your line."
"I work for the United States government. I can't become involved in anything illegal."
Carmen smoothed down the front of his too-tight midnight blue suit and touched the diamond sticking in his silver tie. "You can't, Professor Venetti? Ever hear of the Mafia?"
"I've heard of it," I said uneasily. "An old fraternal organization something like the Moose or Rosicrucians, founded in Sicily. It allegedly controls organized crime in the U.S. But that is a responsibility-eluding myth that honest Italian-Americans are stamping out. We don't even like to see the word in print."
"I can understand honest Italian-Americans feeling that way. But guys like me know the Mafia is still with it. We can put the squeeze on marks like you pretty easy."
You don't have to tell even a third generation American about the Mafia. Maybe that was the trouble. I had heard too much and for too long. All the stories I had ever heard about the Mafia, true or false, built up an unendurable threat.
"All right, I'll try to help you, Carmen. But ... that is, you didn't kill any of these people?"
He snorted. "I haven't killed anybody since early 1943."
"Please," I said weakly. "You needn't incriminate yourself with me."
"I was in the Marines," Carmen said hotly. "Listen, Professor, these aren't no Prohibition times. Not many people get made for a hit these days. Mother, most of these bodies they keep ditching at my club haven't been murdered by anybody. They're accident victims. Rumbums with too much anti-freeze for a summer's day, Spanish-American War vets going to visit Teddy in the natural course of events. Harry Keno just stows them at my place to embarrass me. Figures to make me lose my liquor license or take a contempt before the Grand Jury."
"I don't suppose you could just go to the police—" I saw the answer in his eyes. "No. I don't suppose you could."
"I told you once, Professor, but I'll tell you again. I have to get rid of these bodies they keep leaving in my kitchen. I can take 'em and throw them in the river, sure. But what if me or my boys are stopped en route by some tipped badge?"
"Quicklime?" I suggested automatically.
"What are you talking about? Are you sure you're some kind of scientist? Lime doesn't do much to a stiff at all. Kind of putrifies them like...."
"I forgot," I admitted. "I'd read it in so many stories I'd forgotten it wouldn't work. And I suppose the furnace leaves ashes and there's always traces of hair and teeth in the garbage disposal... An interesting problem, at that."
"I figured you could handle it," Carmen said, leaning back comfortably in the favorite chair of my bachelor apartment. "I heard you were working on something to get rid of trash for the government."
"That," I told him, "is restricted information. I subcontracted that work from the big telephone laboratories. How did you find it out?"
"Ways, Professor, ways."
The government did want me to find a way to dispose of wastes—radioactive wastes. It was the most important problem any country could have in this time of growing atomic industry. Now a small-time gangster was asking me to use this research to help him dispose of hot corpses. It made my scientific blood seethe. But the shadow of the Black Hand cooled it off.
"Maybe I can find something in that area of research to help you," I said. "I'll call you."
"Don't take too long, Professor," Carmen said cordially.
The big drum topped with a metallic coolie's hat had started out as a neutralizer for radioactivity. Now I didn't know what to call it.
The AEC had found burying canisters of hot rubbish in the desert or in the Gulf had eventually proved unsatisfactory. Earth tremors or changes of temperature split the tanks in the ground, causing leaks. The undersea containers rusted and corroded through the time, poisoning fish and fishermen.
Through the SBA I had been awarded a subcontract to work on the problem. The ideal solution would be to find a way to neutralize radioactive emanations, alpha, beta, X et cetera. (No, my dear, et cetera rays aren't any more dangerous than the rest.) But this is easier written than done.
Of course, getting energy to destroy energy without producing energy or matter is a violation of the maxim of the conservation of energy. But I didn't let that stop me—any more than I would have let the velocity of light put any limitations on a spacecraft engine had I been engaged to work on one. You can't allow other people's ideas to tie you hand and foot. There are some who tell me, however, that my refusal to honor such time-tested cliches is why I only have a small private laboratory owned by myself, my late wife's father and the bank, instead of working in the vast facilities of Bell, Du Pont, or General Motors. To this, I can only smile and nod.
But even refusing to be balked by conservative ideas, I failed.
I could not neutralize radioactivity. All I had been able to do (by a basic disturbance in the electromagnetogravitational co-ordinant system for Earth-Sun) was to reduce the mass of the radioactive matter.
This only concentrated the radiations, as in boiling contaminated water. It did make the hot stuff vaguely easier to handle, but it was no breakthrough on the central problem.
Now, in the middle of this, I was supposed to find a way to get rid of some damned bodies for Carmen.
Pressed for time and knowing the results wouldn't have to be so precise or carefully defined for a racketeer as for the United States government, I began experimenting.
I cut corners.
I bypassed complete safety circuits.
I put dangerous overloads on some transformers and doodled with the wiring diagrams. If I got some kind of passable incinerator I would be happy.
I turned the machine on.
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 la............