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."