Silence. Beautiful, blissful, silence. There before us twirled the rows of shiny cones, lifting slowly into the air, and there was nothing to hear at all. Beside me, Artie's lips moved, but I couldn't catch a syllable. This time around, we'd looped a rope through a few metal grommets in the base of the machine, and as it rose, Artie slipped the trailing ends under his arms from behind, and proceeded to lash it across his chest, to test the thing's lift-power. As he fumbled with the knot, I shouted at him, "Use a firm hitch!" * * * * * Nothing came out, but Artie wasn't a bad lip-reader. He scowled, and his lips made a "_What?!_" motion, so I repeated my caution. Next thing I knew, he was taking a poke at me, and I, to fend him off, ended up wrestling on the floor with him, while the untended machine burred its way into the ceiling, until the engine overheated and burned away the electrical insulation on the wires, and the machine, plus a good two feet square of lab-ceiling, once more descended to demolish the scale. "--your language!" Artie was snarling, as sound returned. "All I said was 'Use a firm hitch!'" I pleaded, trying to shove his shins off my floor-pinned biceps. Artie stared at me, then rocked off my prostrate body, convulsed in a fit of laughter. "Say it silently in front of a mirror, sometime," he choked out. Before I had time to see what he was talking about, I smelled smoke, above and beyond that engendered by the scorched insulation. I ran to the door, and opened it to observe the last glowing, crackling timbers of the house, the theatre, and the heliport vanish into hot orange sparks, in the grip of a dandy ring of fire that--in a seventy-yard path--had burned up everything in a sixty-five to hundred-thirty-five yard radius of the lab. "I told you those soundwaves had to do something," I said. "Ready to give up?" But Artie was already staring at the debris around the scale and making swift notes on a memo pad.... * * * * * "It looks awfully damned complex--" 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." "Yeah," I said, "but about that _insulation_, Artie--"