Jack Sharkey

“ Artie's fingers sank into my forearm. "But. It is the lab! Not the lab, but another like it! With all those falling bowls and things, enough plaster-dust and wood-splinters and glass-spicules must've been sucked in to let the machine make a dupl—There it goes!"
A one-story building dropping from a height of around thirty feet onto another one-story building covered over with spoons, crunchy cereal, and broken pottery makes much more racket than can be absorbed by the cushioning effect of thousands of napkins and rubber toothpicks. ”

“ Meantime, what'll we do with all those cornflakes?"
The waiter came by and we ordered two beers.
"Wait—" said Artie, gripping my sleeve. "As the machine reaches the upper atmosphere, the soundwaves'll thin out, weaken, as the medium grows scarce."
"Sure," I said, prying my cuff free of his fingers, "so we only get bombarded with badly made artifacts by the time the thing gets ten miles up. But that's about fifty-thousand artifacts per foot rise, Artie, at that height! No, I take that back. Fifty thousand sets! ”

“ We figure it'll take quite a few years before the machine gets beyond the point where the atmosphere stops acting as a medium for the soundwaves. And that, of course, is only if the machine isn't duplicating the atmosphere, too. And why couldn't it be?
In the meantime, the avian population in the region is on the increase, thanks to all those cornflakes-and-firefly dinners. Not to mention the birds the machine has started to produce since a few foolish sparrows got incinerated in the blaze.
Artie figures that if enough snow falls on the machine, it may weight it down and stop the process. ”

“ It was summer, and the air was pretty humid, and that meant an awful lot of free hydrogen and oxygen, all at once, ready to re-combine explosively in the heat from the flames that had separated them in the first place, thence to become disrupted again, thence to explode again.... The mind refuses certain contemplations. I turned away from the chaotic display in the distant skies, and said to Artie, "How's chances of the machine getting melted down?" ”

“ I said, since I'd been sold on his gadget the moment I pictured that umbrella moving ferruleward like a whirling arrow. "Still, it looks like you're getting something for nothing. A kind of by-your-own-bootstraps maneuver...."
"An inventor," said Artie, quoting his favorite self-coined aphorism, "must never think like a scientist!"
"But"—I said, more to stem the tide I expected than to really make a coherent objection.
"An inventor," he went dreamily onward, "is essentially a dreamer; a scientist is an observer. An inventor tries to make a result he wants happen ”

“ Under the base of the machine, where the sound-heated air was at its most torrid, a shimmering disc-like thing began to materialize, and warp, and hollow out slightly, and beside it, a glinting metal rod-thing flattened at one end, then the flat end went concave in the center and kind of oval about the perimeter, and something brownish and shreddy plopped and hissed into the now-very-concave disc-like thing.
"Artie—!" I said, uneasily, but by then, he, too, had recognized the objects for what they were.
"Burt—" he said excitedly. "Do you realize what we've done? ”

“ And I found that I could lift the machine into the air, and it'd stay where it was put, just whistling and whirling its cones. But then it started to settle." I beckoned him back inside.
"Settle? Why?" Artie asked.
"Dust," I said. "There's always a little dust settling out of the air. It doesn't weigh much, but it made the machine weigh at least what the dust-weight equalled, and down it went. Slow and easy, but down."
Artie looked at the gadget, sitting and whistling on the floor of the lab, then turned a bleak-but-still-hopeful glance my way. ”

“ Artie can't seem to slip a radio tube into its socket without shattering the glass, twist a screwdriver without gouging pieces out of his thumb, nor even solder an electrical connection without needing skin-grafts for the hole he usually burns in his hand. ”

“ I hedged, eight days later, looking at the repaired, refurbished, and amended gadget on the table. "Remember, Artie, the more parts to an invention, the more things can go wrong with it. In geometric progression...."
"Unh-uh," he shook his head. "Not the more parts, Burt. The more moving parts. All we've done is added a parabolic sound-reflector, to force all the waves the cones make down through a tube in the middle of the machine. And we've insulated the tube to keep extraneous vibration from shattering it with super-induced metal fatigue." ”

“ And they've still got enough interstices between the particles to act as sound-baffles, right? And by the time they get good and hot and dry, they'll cook onto the metal, right? (Ask anyone who ever tried to clean a pot after scorching cereal just how hard they'll stick!) And even when most of them flake away, the random distribution of char will circumvent any chance the soundwaves have of setting up the regular pulse-beat necessary to fatigue the metal in the tube, okay?"
"Yeah, sure, Artie, it's okay, but—Cornflakes?" ”

“ And how he'd theorized that there was once a genuine Philosopher's Stone, probably a hunk of pure U-235, that someone had managed to make, which might explain why so many alchemists (lacking, unfortunately, any knowledge of heavy radiations or Geiger counters) sort of died off in their quest for the stone. ”

“ So I locked myself in the lab for a week, and built his gadget, while he spent his time pacing through his fourteen-room mansion across the way from the lab building (the "way" being the flat grassy region on Artie's estate that housed his swimming pool, private heliport, and movie theatre) , trying to coin a nifty name for the thing. We both finished in a dead heat. ”

“ Even as he was saying it, the objects completed their mid-air materialization (time: five seconds, start to finish) , and clattered and clinked onto the scale. We stood and looked down at them: A bowl of cornflakes and a silver spoon.
"How—?" I said, but Artie was already figuring it out, aloud.
"It's the soundwaves," he said. "At ultrasonic, molecule-disrupting vibrations, they're doing just what that Philosopher's Stone was supposed to: Transmuting. Somehow, we didn't clean out the reflector sufficiently, and some of the traces of our other trial insulations remained inside. ”

“ Not that all those uniformed men standing just out of heat-range about the ever-increasing perimeter are going to be of much help. Maybe to keep the crowds back, they'd help, except no one in his right mind is heading any direction but away from the mound. ”

“ Bowl + cereal + spoon: 5 seconds. Lag: 10 seconds. Napkin + toothpick: 3 seconds. Total synthesizing time: 18 seconds. Allowance for rise of machine per foot: 2 seconds.
"Burt—!" Artie yelled joyously, just as I completed the last item, "Look at that, will you?!"
I looked, and had my first presentiment of disaster. At two feet, the machine was busily fabricating—out of the air molecules themselves, for all I knew—two bowls, two spoons, and two bowlfuls of cereal. ”

“ Load number nine banged and splintered down into the lab, bringing the cumulative total of bowl-cereal-spoon-napkin-toothpick debris up to forty-five.
"Come on, Burt," said Artie. "We'll have to get to the roof of the lab. ”