"You're talking too much, Professor," Tony suggested. "Remember, you did it with your machine."
"Yes," I said at length. "And why are we standing here letting those machines sit there?"
There were two small items of interest to me in the Times the following morning.
One two-inch story—barely making page one because of a hole to fill at the bottom of an account of the number of victims of Indian summer heat prostration—told of the incineration of a warehouse on Fleet Street by an ingenious new arson bomb that left "virtually" no trace. (Maybe the fire inspector had planted a few traces to make his explanation more creditable.)
The second item was further over in a science column just off the editorial page. It told of the government—!—developing a new process of waste disposal rivaling the old Buck Rogers disintegrator ray.
This, I presumed, was one of Tony Carmen's information leaks.
If he hoped to arouse the public into demanding my invention I doubted he would succeed. The public had been told repeatedly of a new radioactive process for preserving food and a painless way of spraying injections through the skin. But they were still stuck with refrigerators and hypodermic needles.
I had forced my way half-way through the paper and the terrible coffee I made when the doorbell rang.
I was hardly surprised when it turned out to be Tony Carmen behind the front door.