Read Ebook: Double or Nothing by Sharkey Jack

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 130 lines and 10451 words, and 3 pages

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...."

"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? 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?"

"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!"

"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.

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.

"Artie--!" I said, uneasily, but by then, he, too, had recognized the objects for what they were.

Even as he was saying it, the objects completed their mid-air materialization , 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. The ceramics formed the bowl, the metals formed the spoon, the cornflakes formed the cornflakes!"

"But," I said logically , "what about the rubber, or the fabrics?"

"Burt--!" Artie yelled joyously, just as I completed the last item, "Look at that, will you?!"

"Hey, Artie--" I began, but he was too busy figuring out this latest development.

"It's the altimeter," he said. "We had it gauged by the foot, but it's taking the numerical calibrations as a kind of output-quota, instead!"

"Look, Artie," I interrupted, as twin napkins and toothpicks dropped down beside the new bowls on the table where the scale lay. "We're going to have a little problem--"

"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!"

"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 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?"

"Are you trying to say, in your roundabout mathematical way, let's grab that thing, fast?"

"Right," I said, glad I had gotten through to him. "I would've said as much sooner, only you never listen until somebody supplies you with all the pertinent data on a crisis first."

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. There's a ladder up at the--"

He'd been going to say "house", but realized that there wasn't a house anymore. "Quick!" he rasped, anxiously. "We can still get there by--" He stopped before saying "helicopter", for similar reasons.

"As usual with your inventions," I said, "we get on the phone and alert the government."

"The phone," said Burt, his face grey, "was in the house."

I felt the hue of my face match his, then. "The car," I blurted. "We'll have to drive someplace where there's a phone!"

We ran out of the lab, dodged a few flying shards of pottery that sprayed out after us from load-eleven-total-sixty-six, and roared off down the road in Artie's roadster. He did the driving, I kept my eyes on my watch, timing the arrivals of each new load.

"What's he say?" I asked Artie, leaning into the phone booth.

"He thinks I'm drunk!" Artie groaned, slamming down the receiver. "I only wish I were!"

I gave a stoical shrug, and pointed to the bright red neon lure across the street. "Don't just stand there wishing. Join me?" I started across toward the bar.

"We did our bit," I said. "You told your contact, right? Well, by tomorrow morning, when the total is up to over three thousand , somebody's sure to notice all the birds in the region, if only an ornithologist, and--"

"Birds?"

"Eating the cornflakes," I said, and when he nodded in comprehension, went on, "--pretty soon the word'll get to the government."

"Or," said Artie, hopefully, "the batteries and engine'll wear out.... Won't they?"

"It's a radium-powered motor," I said, as we slipped into the coolness of a booth at the rear of the bar. "The power-source will deplete itself by half in about six hundred years, maybe. Meantime, what'll we do with all those cornflakes?"

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet