Double or Nothing by Jack Sharkey

Author:Jack Sharkey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620136072
Publisher: Duke Classics

*

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.

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

"Burt—" he said excitedly. "Do you realize what we've done? We've invented a syntheticizer!"

Even as he was saying it, the objects completed their mid-air materialization (time: five seconds, start to finish), 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 (or as logically as could be expected under the circumstances), "what about the rubber, or the fabrics?"

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