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."