"You got a _better_ idea?" he snapped. "We tried rubber; it charred and flaked away. We tried plastics; they bubbled, melted, extruded, or burned. We tried metal and mineral honeycombs; they distorted, incandesced, fused or vaporized. Ceramic materials shattered. Fabrics tore, or petrified and cracked. All the regular things failed us. So what's wrong with trying something new?" "Nothing, Artie, nothing. But--_Cornflakes_?" "Well, we sogged 'em down good with water, right? 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_?" "I take it your objections are less scientific than they are esthetic?" he inquired. "Well, something like that," I admitted. "I mean, aw--For pete's sake, Artie! The patent office'll laugh at us. They'll start referring us to the copyright people, as inventors of cookbooks!" "Maybe not," he said philosophically. "The thing _still_ may not _work_, you know." "Well, _there's_ one bright spot, anyhow!" I agreed, fiddling with the starting switch. "So okay, I'm game if you are." "Let 'er rip," he pontificated, and I flicked the switch. * * * * * It worked beautifully. Not even a faint hum. The only way we could tell it was working was from the needle on the--rebuilt again--scale, as it dropped lazily down to the zero mark. Our ears didn't sting, no glass went dusting into crystalline powder, and a quick peek through the door showed no ring of fire surrounding the lab. "We may just have _done_ it!" I said, hopefully, as the silver-nosed machine began to float upward (We hadn't _had_ to mount the parabolic reflector in the position of a nose-cone, but it made the thing look neater, somehow.) It seemed a little torpid in its ascent, but that could be credited to the extra weight of the reflector and cornflakes, not to mention the fact that the helices had to suck all their air in under the lip of the silvery nose-cone before they could thrust properly. But its rise was steady. Six inches, ten inches-- Then, at precisely one foot in height, something unexpected happened. 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.