To: 2 Grunts & 1 Cluck
From: BCE ATP, Grants Processing Department
Re: Your grant proposal

Dear Mr. 1 Cluck,

Thank you for your recent funding request to the Herd Council's high-risk Advanced Technology Program. Your reputation precedes you, as we've been following your failed attempts at cave capital funding for your so-called "wheel" contraption.

Frankly, I don't know how you even got in the cave opening of a respected investment firm with your futuristic sci-fi notions. "Wheels" that just roll through our hunting and grazing land on their own power, with humans somehow aboard and moving faster than our game animals! Indeed. Don't you know that faster-than-foot travel defies the laws of physics? Please, Mr. 1 Cluck, tell me about this new physics?

Unable to secure private funding, you're now asking us to waste the herd's resources on your crackpot ideas. You're asking, in a time of wood and stone scarcity, to borrow a few sticks and rocks to experiment with creation and control of fire! Let's forget, for a moment, the serious environmental and societal consequences of such an invention (What if, for example, a rival herd or an infiltrator within our own ranks got hold of such a technology and used it irresponsibly?), and let's talk about the serious physical barriers to such a fire assembler.

We all know that fire comes only from the sky, and only in rare instances when the cloud gods are in a generous, playful or destructive mood. Such a thing occurs in nature, but only under the proper conditions and cannot be recreated through human intervention. What dry medium will you use? How are you going to replace the loss of breathable air as you orchestrate precise three-dimensional placement of spark and flame? And what are you going to do with those rocks and sticks, anyway? I suppose you can use them to club passers-by who stop to mock you.