"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?