The Expendables
Date: 2020-01-14T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science fiction; Short stories; Inventors -- Fiction; Gangsters -- Fiction; Mafia -- Fiction

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Title: The Expendables

Author: Jim Harmon

Release date: January 14, 2020 [eBook #61171]
Most recently updated: October 17, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EXPENDABLES ***

THE EXPENDABLES

BY JIM HARMON

It was just a little black box,
useful for getting rid of things.
Trouble was, it worked too well!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, May 1962.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

"You see my problem, Professor?" Tony Carmen held his pinkly manicured, flashily ringed hands wide.

I saw his problem and it was warmly embarrassing.

"Really, Mr. Carmen," I said, "this isn't the sort of thing you discuss with a total stranger. I'm not a doctor—not of medicine, anyway—or a lawyer."

"They can't help me. I need an operator in your line."

"I work for the United States government. I can't become involved in anything illegal."

Carmen smoothed down the front of his too-tight midnight blue suit and touched the diamond sticking in his silver tie. "You can't, Professor Venetti? Ever hear of the Mafia?"

"I've heard of it," I said uneasily. "An old fraternal organization something like the Moose or Rosicrucians, founded in Sicily. It allegedly controls organized crime in the U.S. But that is a responsibility-eluding myth that honest Italian-Americans are stamping out. We don't even like to see the word in print."

"I can understand honest Italian-Americans feeling that way. But guys like me know the Mafia is still with it. We can put the squeeze on marks like you pretty easy."

You don't have to tell even a third generation American about the Mafia. Maybe that was the trouble. I had heard too much and for too long. All the stories I had ever heard about the Mafia, true or false, built up an unendurable threat.

"All right, I'll try to help you, Carmen. But ... that is, you didn't kill any of these people?"

He snorted. "I haven't killed anybody since early 1943."

"Please," I said weakly. "You needn't incriminate yourself with me."

"I was in the Marines," Carmen said hotly. "Listen, Professor, these aren't no Prohibition times. Not many people get made for a hit these days. Mother, most of these bodies they keep ditching at my club haven't been murdered by anybody. They're accident victims. Rumbums with too much anti-freeze for a summer's day, Spanish-American War vets going to visit Teddy in the natural course of events. Harry Keno just stows them at my place to embarrass me. Figures to make me lose my liquor license or take a contempt before the Grand Jury."

"I don't suppose you could just go to the police—" I saw the answer in his eyes. "No. I don't suppose you could."

"I told you once, Professor, but I'll tell you again. I have to get rid of these bodies they keep leaving in my kitchen. I can take 'em and throw them in the river, sure. But what if me or my boys are stopped en route by some tipped badge?"

"Quicklime?" I suggested automatically.

"What are you talking about? Are you sure you're some kind of scientist? Lime doesn't do much to a stiff at all. Kind of putrifies them like...."

"I forgot," I admitted. "I'd read it in so many stories I'd forgotten it wouldn't work. And I suppose the furnace leaves ashes and there's always traces of hair and teeth in the garbage disposal... An interesting problem, at that."

"I figured you could handle it," Carmen said, leaning back comfortably in the favorite chair of my bachelor apartment. "I heard you were working on something to get rid of trash for the government."

"That," I told him, "is restricted information. I subcontracted that work from the big telephone laboratories. How did you find it out?"

"Ways, Professor, ways."

The government did want me to find a way to dispose of wastes—radioactive wastes. It was the most important problem any country could have in this time of growing atomic industry. Now a small-time gangster was asking me to use this research to help him dispose of hot corpses. It made my scientific blood seethe. But the shadow of the Black Hand cooled it off.

"Maybe I can find something in that area of research to help you," I said. "I'll call you."

"Don't take too long, Professor," Carmen said cordially.

The big drum topped with a metallic coolie's hat had started out as a neutralizer for radioactivity. Now I didn't know what to call it.

The AEC had found burying canisters of hot rubbish in the desert or in the Gulf had eventually proved unsatisfactory. Earth tremors or changes of temperature split the tanks in the ground, causing leaks. The undersea containers rusted and corroded through the time, poisoning fish and fishermen.

Through the SBA I had been awarded a subcontract to work on the problem. The ideal solution would be to find a way to neutralize radioactive emanations, alpha, beta, X et cetera. (No, my dear, et cetera rays aren't any more dangerous than the rest.) But this is easier written than done.

Of course, getting energy to destroy energy without producing energy or matter is a violation of the maxim of the conservation of energy. But I didn't let that stop me—any more than I would have let the velocity of light put any limitations on a spacecraft engine had I been engaged to work on one. You can't allow other people's ideas to tie you hand and foot. There are some who tell me, however, that my refusal to honor such time-tested cliches is why I only have a small private laboratory owned by myself, my late wife's father and the bank, instead of working in the vast facilities of Bell, Du Pont, or General Motors. To this, I can only smile and nod.

But even refusing to be balked by conservative ideas, I failed.

I could not neutralize radioactivity. All I had been able to do (by a basic disturbance in the electromagnetogravitational co-ordinant system for Earth-Sun) was to reduce the mass of the radioactive matter.

This only concentrated the radiations, as in boiling contaminated water. It did make the hot stuff vaguely easier to handle, but it was no breakthrough on the central problem.

Now, in the middle of this, I was supposed to find a way to get rid of some damned bodies for Carmen.

Pressed for time and knowing the results wouldn't have to be so precise or carefully defined for a racketeer as for the United States government, I began experimenting.

I cut corners.

I bypassed complete safety circuits.

I put dangerous overloads on some transformers and doodled with the wiring diagrams. If I got some kind of passable incinerator I would be happy.

I turned the machine on.

The lights popped out.

There were changes that should be made before I tried that again, but instead I only found a larger fuse for a heavier load and jammed that in the switchbox.

I flipped my machine into service once again. The lights flickered and held.

The dials on my control board told me the story. It was hard to take.

But there it was.

The internal Scale showed zero.

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."

"Listen here, Carmen," I said, "what makes you think these bodies are going somewhere? Think of it only as a kind of—incinerator."

"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."

"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.

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?

Carmen finally returned to the car, unlatched the door and slid in. He did not reinsert the ignition key. I did not feel like sprinting down the deserted street.

"The boys will have it set up in a minute," Tony the racketeer informed me.

"What?" The firing squad?

"The Expendable, of course."

"Here? You dragged me out here to see how you have prostituted my invention? I presume you've set it up with a 'Keep Our City Clean' sign pasted on it."

He chuckled. It was a somewhat nasty sound, or so I imagined.

A flashlight winked in the sooty twilight.

"Okay. Let's go," Tony said, slapping my shoulder.

I got out of the car, rubbing my flabby bicep. Whenever I took my teen-age daughter to the beach from my late wife's parents' home, I frequently found 230 pound bullies did kick sand in my ears.

The machine was installed on the corner, half covered with a gloomy white shroud, and fearlessly plugged into the city lighting system via a blanketed streetlamp. Two hoods hovered in a doorway ready to take care of the first cop with a couple of fifties or a single .38, as necessity dictated.

Tony guided my elbow. "Okay, Professor, I think I understand the bit now, but I'll let you run it up with the flagpole for me, to see how it waves to the national anthem."

"Here?" I spluttered once more. "I told you, Carmen, I wanted nothing more to do with you. Your check is still on deposit...."

"You didn't want anything to do with me in the first place." The thug's teeth flashed in the night. "Throw your contraption into gear, buddy."

That was the first time the tone of respect, even if faked, had gone out of his voice. I moved to the switchboard of my invention. What remained was as simple as adjusting a modern floor lamp to a medium light position. I flipped.

Restraining any impulse toward colloqualism, I was also deeply disturbed by what next occurred.

One of the massive square shapes on the horizon vanished.

"What have you done?" I yelped, ripping the cover off the machine.

Even under the uncertain illumination of the smogged stars I could see that the unit was half gone—in fact, exactly halved.

"Squint the Seal is one of my boys. He used to be a mechanic in the old days for Burger, Madle, the guys who used to rob banks and stuff." There was an unmistakable note of boyish admiration in Carmen's voice. "He figured the thing would work like that. Separate the poles and you increase the size of the working area."

"You mean square the operational field. Your idiot doesn't even know mechanics."

"No, but he knows all about how any kind of machine works."

"You call that working?" I demanded. "Do you realize what you have there, Carmen?"

"Sure. A disintegrator ray, straight out of Startling Stories."

My opinion as to the type of person who followed the pages of science-fiction magazines with fluttering lips and tracing finger was upheld.

I looked at the old warehouse and of course didn't see it.

"What was this a test for?" I asked, fearful of the Frankenstein I had made. "What are you planning to do now?"

"This was no test, Venetti. This was it. I just wiped out Harry Keno and his intimates right in the middle of their confidential squat."

"Good heavens. That's uncouthly old-fashioned of you, Carmen! Why, that's murder."

"Not," Carmen said, "without no corpus delecti."

"The body of the crime remains without the body of the victim," I remembered from my early Ellery Queen training.

"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.

He pushed in, slapping a rolled newspaper in his palm. "Action, Professor."

"The district attorney has indicted you?" I asked hopefully.

"He's not even indicted you, Venetti. No, I got a feeler on this plant in the Times."

I shook my head. "The government will take over the invention, no matter what the public wants."

"The public? Who cares about the public? The Arcivox corporation wants this machine of yours. They have their agents tracing the plant now. They will go from the columnist to his legman to my man and finally to you. Won't be long before they get here. An hour maybe."

"Arcivox makes radios and TV sets. What do they want with the Expendables?"

"Opening up a new appliance line with real innovations. I hear they got a new refrigerator. All open. Just shelves—no doors or sides. They want a revolutionary garbage disposal too."

"Do you own stock in the company? Is that how you know?"

"I own stock in a competitor. That's how I know," Carmen informed me. "Listen, Professor, you can sell to Arcivox and still keep control of the patents through a separate corporation. And I'll give you 49% of its stock."

This was Carmen's idea of a magnanimous offer for my invention. It was a pretty good offer—49% and my good health.

"But will the government let Arcivox have the machine for commercial use?"

"The government would let Arcivox have the hydrogen bomb if they found a commercial use for it."

There was a sturdy knock on the door, not a shrill ring of the bell.

"That must be Arcivox now," Carmen growled. "They have the best detectives in the business. You know what to tell them?"

I knew what to tell them.

I peeled off my wet shirt and threw it across the corner of my desk, casting a reproving eye at the pastel air-conditioner in the window. It wasn't really the machine's fault—The water department reported the reservoir too low to run water-cooled systems. It would be a day or two before I could get the gas type into my office.

Miss Brown, my secretary, was getting a good look at my pale, bony chest. Well, for the salary she got, she could stand to look. Of course, she herself was wearing a modest one-strap sun dress, not shorts and halters like some of the girls.

"My," she observed "it certainly is humid for March, isn't it, Professor Venetti?"

I agreed that it was.

She got her pad and pencil ready.

"Wheedling form letter to Better Mousetraps. Where are our royalties for the last quarter of the year? We know we didn't have a full three months with our Expendable Field in operation on the new traps, but we want the payola for what we have coming.

"Condescending form letter to Humane Lethal Equipment. Absolutely do not send the California penal system any chambers equipped with our patented field until legislature officially approves them. We got away with it in New Mexico, but we're older and wiser now.

"Rush priority telegram to President, United States, any time in the next ten days. Thanks for citation, et cetera. Glad buddy system working out well in training battlefield disintegrator teams.

"Indignant form letter to Arcivox. We do not feel we are properly a co-respondent in your damage suits. Small children and appliances have always been a problem, viz ice boxes and refrigerators. Suggest you put a more complicated latch on the handles of the dangerously inferior doors you have covering our efficient, patented field."

I leaned back and took a breather. There was no getting around it—I just wasn't happy as a business man. I had been counting on being only a figurehead in the Expendable Patent Holding Corporation, but Tony Carmen didn't like office work. And he hadn't anyone he trusted any more than me. Even.

I jerked open a drawer and pulled off a paper towel from the roll I had stolen in the men's room. Scrubbing my chest and neck with it, I smoothed it out and dropped it into the wastebasket. It slid down the tapering sides and through the narrow slot above the Expendable Field. I had redesigned the wastebaskets after a janitor had stepped in one. But Gimpy was happy now, with the $50,000 we paid him.

I opened my mouth and Miss Brown's pencil perked up its eraser, reflecting her fierce alertness.

Tony Carmen banged open the door, and I closed my mouth.

"G-men on the way here," he blurted and collapsed into a chair opposite Miss Brown.

"Don't revert to type," I warned him. "What kind of G-Men? FBI? FCC? CIA? FDA? USTD?"

"Investigators for the Atomic Energy Commission."

The solemn, conservatively dressed young man in the door touched the edge of his snap-brim hat as he said it.

"Miss Brown, would you mind letting our visitor use your chair?" I asked.

"Not at all, sir," she said dreamily.

"May I suggest," I said, "that we might get more business done if you then removed yourself from the chair first."

Miss Brown leaped to her feet with a healthy galvanic response and quit the vicinity with her usual efficiency.

Once seated, the AEC man said "I'll get right to the point. You may find this troublesome, gentlemen, but your government intends to confiscate all of the devices using your so-called Expendable field, and forever bar their manufacture in this country or their importation."

"You stinking G-men aren't getting away with this," Carmen said ingratiatingly. "Ever hear of the Mafia?"

"Not much," the young man admitted earnestly, "since the FBI finished with its deportations a few years back."

I cleared my throat. "I must admit that the destruction of a multi-billion business is disconcerting before lunch. May we ask why you took this step?"

The agent inserted a finger between his collar and tie. "Have you noticed how unseasonably warm it is?"

"I wondered if you had. You're going to have heat prostration if you keep that suit coat on five minutes more."

The young man collapsed back in his chair, loosening the top button of his ivy league jacket, looking from my naked hide to the gossomer scrap of sport shirt Carmen wore. "We have to dress inconspicuously in the service," he panted weakly.

I nodded understandingly. "What does the heat have to do with the outlawing of the Expendables?"

"At first we thought there might be some truth in the folk nonsense that nuclear tests had something to do with raising the mean temperature of the world," the AEC man said. "But our scientists quickly found they weren't to blame."

"Clever of them."

"Yes, they saw that the widespread use of your machines was responsible for the higher temperature. Your device violates the law of conservation of energy, seemingly. It seemingly destroys matter without creating energy. Actually—"

He paused dramatically.

"Actually, your device added the energy it created in destroying matter to the energy potential of the planet in the form of heat. You see what that means? If your devices continue in operation, the mean temperature of Earth will rise to the point where we burst into flame. They must be outlawed!"

"I agree," I said reluctantly.

Tony Carmen spoke up. "No, you don't, Professor. We don't agree to that."

I waved his protests aside.

"I would agree," I said, "except that it wouldn't work. Explain the danger to the public, let them feel the heat rise themselves, and they will hoard Expendables against seizure and continue to use them, until we do burst into flame, as you put it so religiously."

"Why?" the young man demanded.

"Because Expendables are convenient. There is a ban on frivolous use of water due to the dire need. But the police still have to go stop people from watering lawns, and I suspect not a few swimming pools are being filled on the sly. Water is somebody else's worry. So will be generating enough heat to turn Eden into Hell."

"Mass psychology isn't my strongest point," the young man said worriedly. "But I suspect you may be right. Then—we'll be damned?"

"No, not necessarily," I told him comfortingly. "All we have to do is use up the excess energy with engines of a specific design."

"But can we design those engines in time?" the young man wondered with uncharacteristic gloom.

"Certainly," I said, practising the power of positive thinking. "Now that your world-wide testing laboratories have confirmed a vague fear of mine, I can easily reverse the field of the Expendable device and create a rather low-efficiency engine that consumes the excess energy in our planetary potential."

The agent of the AEC whose name I can never remember was present along with Tony Carmen the night my assistants finished with the work I had outlined.

While it was midnight outside, the fluorescents made the scene more visible than sunlight. My Disexpendable was a medium-sized drum in a tripod frame with an unturned coolie's hat at the bottom.

Breathlessly, I closed the switch and the scooped disc began slowly to revolve.

"Is it my imagination," the agent asked, "or is it getting cooler in here?"

"Professor." Carmen gave me a warning nudge.

There was now something on the revolving disc. It was a bar of some shiny gray metal.

"Kill the power, Professor," Carmen said.

"Can it be," I wondered, "that the machine is somehow recreating or drawing back the processed material from some other time or dimension?"

"Shut the thing off, Venetti!" the racketeer demanded.

But too late.

There was now a somewhat dead man sitting in the saddle of the turning circle of metal.

If Harry Keno had only been sane when he turned up on that merry-go-round in Boston I feel we would have learned much of immense value on the nature of time and space.

As it is, I feel that it is a miscarriage of justice to hold me in connection with the murders I am sure Tony Carmen did commit.

I hope this personal account when published will end the vicious story supported by the district attorney that it was I who sought Tony Carmen out and offered to dispose of his enemies and that I sought his financial backing for the exploitation of my invention.

This is the true, and only true, account of the development of the machine known as the Expendable.

I am only sorry, now that the temperature has been standardized once more, that the Expendable's antithesis, the Disexpendable, is of too low an order of efficiency to be of much value as a power source in these days of nuclear and solar energy. So the world is again stuck with the problem of waste disposal ... including all that I dumped before. But as a great American once said, you can't win 'em all.

If you so desire, you may send your generous and fruitful letters towards my upcoming defense in care of this civic-minded publication.

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