Four cups and two pipes later, after Johnny, that's our fourteen-year-old, and Mary had gone to bed, Jim and I were still just sitting. He was obviously thinking, and I was mostly sitting. Not much thinking. The trouble with my thinking was that a background of selling everything from Encyclopedias to, at present, used cars, and an education consisting mostly of high school and hard knocks just didn't qualify me in Jim's league. The silence lengthened. Pretty soon he stirred in his chair, cleared his throat and said, "Let's go look again." "Have you come to any conclusions?" "Well, yes and no," Jim said. "Look at it this way Pop; suppose this is not a fluke and I'm able to duplicate this thing. Suppose I'm able to take this transformer and duplicate it too. All on a larger scale. How could it be used to good advantage? It'd probably do away with elevators in most cases, except you'd have to walk down. But then, by making the field weaker, maybe I could fix it so's you'd float down. Then too, I wonder if it can be applied to aircraft of any kind ... I suppose you could take it and ..." his eyes were shining. I interrupted; "Jim, you haven't really tested what the thing will do and it _is_ late, so before you go into many more schemes, let's sleep on it. We can get right after it in the morning. You can, that is, because all I can do is watch." The next morning bright and early I was awakened by Johnny, who was dancing around the room, shouting something on the order of "Hey! Somebody's gottoget'erdown! Somebody's gottoget'erdown!" Making myself heard over the din, I hollered, "Who's got to get who down? For Pete's sake, stop yelling so loud!" Having been out-shouted, Johnny calmed down enough to catch his breath and gasp, "Say, Dad, Duchess is in Jim's room and she's on the ceiling, and yougottoget'erdown!" Well, it dawned on me then what he was talking about. Duchess is our nine-months-old Great Dane pup. Weighs about a hundred pounds. So, pulling on bathrobe and slippers, I went down stairs, and hurried into Jim's room. Sure enough, plastered on the ceiling and looking mighty scared and sick and sheepish was Duchess. When I came in she wagged a feeble tail at me and squirmed a bit. Mary, Johnny and Jim were all standing looking at her. "Dad, I don't know how it happened," Jim said. "Guess I forgot to pull the plug last night. First I knew was when I heard a thump and a yelp ... woke up and she was practically right over my bed." Duchess was apparently unhurt, so I walked over and reached up to coax her down. Just then Jim shouted, "Dad! Don't do...!" And my head hit the ceiling! Like a fool I had walked right over the plastic plate! * * * * *