Part 2

"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."

I waved his protests aside.

"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.