"Oh?" he said, as four shimmering discs began to coalesce and shape themselves. "What, then?" "It's not that I don't appreciate the side-effect benefits of free cornflake dinners," I said, speaking carefully and somberly, to hold his attention. "But isn't it going to put a crimp in our anti-gravity machine sales? Even at a mere mile in height, it means that the spot beneath it is due for a deluge of five-thousand-two-hundred-eighty bowls of cornflakes. Not to mention all those toothpicks, napkins and spoons!" Artie's face went grave. "Not to mention the five-thousand-two-hundred-seventy-nine of the same that the spot beneath would get from the gadget when it was just one foot _short_ of the mile!" "Of course," I said, calculating rapidly as the five-foot mark produced a neat quintet of everything, a quintet which crashed noisily onto the ten lookalikes below it as the machine bobbed silently to the six-foot mark, "we have one interesting thing in our favor: the time element." "How so?" said Artie, craning over my shoulder to try and read my lousy calligraphics on the pad. * * * * * "Well," I said, pointing to each notation in turn, "the first batch, bowl-to-toothpick, took twenty seconds, if we include the time-lapse while the machine was ascending to the one-foot mark." "Uh-huh," he nodded. "I see. So?" "So the second batch took double. Forty seconds. Not only did it require thirty-six seconds for the formation of the stuff, it took the machine twice as many seconds to reach the two-foot mark." "I get it," he said. "So I suppose it took three times the base number for the third batch?" "Right. A full minute. And the materialization of the objects is--Boy, that's noisy!" I interrupted myself as batch number six came smashing down. "--always at a point where the objects fit into a theoretical conical section below the machine." "How's that again?" said Artie. "Well, bowl number one formed just below the exhaust vent of the central cylinder. Bowls two and three, or--if you prefer--bowl-batch two, formed about six inches lower, edge to edge, at the cross-section of an imaginary cone (whose rather truncated apex is the exhaust vent) that seems to form a vertical angle of thirty degrees." "In other words," said Artie, "each new formation comes in a spot beneath this cone where it's possible for the new formations to materialize side-by-side, right?" When I nodded, he said, "Fine. But so what?" "It means that each new materialization occurs at a steadily increasing height, but one which--" I calculated briefly on the pad "--is never greater than two-thirds the height of the machine itself." Artie looked blank. "Thank you very kindly for the math lesson," he said finally, "but I still don't see what you are driving at, Burt. How does this present a problem?"