"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." * * * * *