"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.