I looked, and had my first presentiment of disaster. At two feet, the machine was busily fabricating—out of the air molecules themselves, for all I knew—two bowls, two spoons, and two bowlfuls of cereal.
"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—"
"You're telling me!" he sighed, unhappily. "All those damned random factors! How many times did the machine have to be repaired after each faulty test! What thickness of ceramics, or fabric, or rubber, or metal remained! What was the precise distribution and dampness of each of those soggy cornflakes! Hell, Burt, we may be forever trying to make a duplicate of this!"
"Artie—" I said, as three toothpick-napkin combinations joined the shattered remains of triple bowl-cereal-spoon disasters from the one-yard mark over the scale, "that is not the problem I had in mind."
"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."