Vlookup across multiple sheets

[Gwen@YouWantWhat?]

I want to do a VLOOKUP that can search several different sheets in a 2004 Excel document.
The way my document is set up, column A has the type of thing I'm looking for, column B has the exact item, and column C has the price for that item. Each type listed in column A has its own sheet (steel, lumber, etc).

What I would like to do is something like this:
cell C1=VLOOKUP($B1,'INDIRECT($A1)'!$A:$B,2,FALSE)

My hope/intention was that it would populate the sheet name from A1, and therefore only need to search one sheet, but it doesn't seem to be working. Any ideas for tweaks to the formula?

(The only other potential solution seems to be a large, unwieldy, nested if statement with vlookup inside. If I can get this to work, it would be a lot more elegant, though.)

[ChemistB]

Try
=VLOOKUP($B1,INDIRECT($A1 & "!$A:$B"),2,FALSE)

[Gwen@YouWantWhat?]

That did the trick- thank you!