to the two-foot level. I was scribbling frantically in mynotebook: _Bowl + cereal + spoon: 5 seconds. Lag: 10 seconds. Napkin +toothpick: 3 seconds. Total synthesizing time: 18 seconds. Allowance forrise of machine per foot: 2 seconds._
"Burt--!" Artie yelled joyously, just as I completed the last item,"Look at that, will you?!"
I looked, and had my first presentiment of disaster. At two feet, themachine was busily fabricating--out of the air molecules themselves, forall I knew--_two_ bowls, _two_ spoons, and _two_ bowlfuls of cereal.
"Hey, Artie--" I began, but he was too busy figuring out this latestdevelopment.
"It's the altimeter," he said. "We had it gauged by the foot, but it'staking the numerical calibrations as a kind of output-quota, instead!"
"Look, Artie," I interrupted, as twin napkins and toothpicks droppeddown beside the new bowls on the table where the scale lay. "We're goingto 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 eachfaulty test! What thickness of ceramics, or fabric, or rubber, or metalremained! What was the precise distribution and dampness of each ofthose soggy cornflakes! Hell, Burt, we may be _forever_ trying to make aduplicate of this!"
"Artie--" I said, as three toothpick-napkin combinations joined theshattered remains of triple bowl-cereal-spoon disasters from theone-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 shapethemselves. "What, then?"
"It's not that I don't appreciate the side-effect benefits of freecornflake dinners," I said, speaking carefully and somberly, to holdhis attention. "But isn't it going to put a crimp in our anti-gravitymachine sales? Even at a mere mile in height, it means that the spotbeneath it is due for a deluge of five-thousand-two-hundred-eighty bowlsof cornflakes. Not to mention all those toothpicks, napkins and spoons!"
Artie's face went grave. "Not to mention thefive-thousand-two-hundred-seventy-nine of the same that the spot beneathwould 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 produceda neat quintet of everything, a quintet which crashed noisily onto theten lookalikes below it as the machine bobbed silently to the six-footmark, "we have one interesting thing in our favor: the time element."
"How so?" said Artie, craning over my shoulder to try and read my lousycalligraphics 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-lapsewhile 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 requirethirty-six seconds for the formation of the stuff, it took the machinetwice as many seconds to reach the two-foot mark."
"I get it," he said. "So I suppose it took three times the base numberfor 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 smashingdown. "--always at a point where the objects fit into a theoreticalconical section below the machine."
"How's that again?" said Artie.
"Well, bowl number one formed just below the exhaust vent of the centralcylinder. Bowls two and three, or--if you prefer--bowl-batch two,formed about six inches lower, edge to edge, at the cross-section of animaginary cone (whose rather truncated apex is the exhaust vent) thatseems to form a vertical angle of thirty degrees."
"In other words," said Artie, "each new formation comes in a spotbeneath this cone where it's possible for the new formations tomaterialize side-by-side, right?" When I nodded, he said, "Fine. But sowhat?"
"It means that each new materialization occurs at a steadily increasingheight, but one which--" I calculated briefly on the pad "--is nevergreater than two-thirds the height of the machine itself."
Artie looked blank. "Thank you very kindly for the math lesson," he saidfinally, "but I still don't see what you are driving at, Burt. How doesthis present a problem?"
I pointed toward the un-repaired hole in the lab ceiling, where themachine, after dutifully disgorging the number-seven load, was slowlyheading. "It means that unless we grab that thing before it gets toomuch higher, the whole damn planet'll be up to its ears in cornflakes.And the one-third machine-height gap between artifacts and machine meansthat we can't even use the mounding products to climb on and get it.We'd always be too low, and an _increasing_ too-low at that!"
"Are you trying to say, in your roundabout mathematical way, let's grabthat thing, fast?"
"Right," I said, glad I had gotten through to him. "I would've said asmuch sooner, only you never listen until somebody supplies you with allthe pertinent data on a crisis first."
* * * * *
Load number nine banged and splintered down into the lab, bringing thecumulative total of bowl-cereal-spoon-napkin-toothpick debris up toforty-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 houseanymore. "Quick!" he rasped, anxiously. "We can still get there by--" Hestopped before saying "helicopter", for similar reasons.
"Burt--" he said, after a pause that allowed the total to rise tofifty-five with a crash. "What'll we _do_?"
"As usual with your inventions," I said, "we get on the phone and alertthe 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'llhave to drive someplace where there's a phone!"
We ran out of the lab, dodged a few flying shards of pottery thatsprayed out after us from load-eleven-total-sixty-six, and roared offdown the road in Artie's roadster. He did the driving, I kept my eyes onmy watch, timing the arrivals of each new load. (Formula: _n x 20 = lagbetween loads in seconds_.)
By the time Artie discovered we were out of gas in the middle of adeserted country road, load number twenty had fallen.
By the time we arrived on foot at the nearest farmhouse, and wereordered off the property by the irate farmer who still had bare boardson his windowless house, and a shotgun in his gnarled brown hands, loadtwenty-five had fallen.
By the time we hitchhiked into town and got on the phone in time to findall the governmental agencies had closed their offices for the day, loadthirty had fallen.
By the time we finally convinced the Washington Operator that thiswas a national emergency that could _not_ (though she kept suggestingit) be handled by the ordinary Civil Defense members (the town had apopulation of two hundred, and a one-percent enrollment in CD. Thosetwo guys wouldn't be any more help than we were, ourselves.), and wereable to locate Artie's congressional contact (he was out at a movie),load fifty had dropped, and I was bone-tired, and it was (since loadfifty took a thousand seconds to form, load one had taken twenty, andtheir total--one thousand twenty seconds--divided by two made anaverage formulation-time of five hundred ten seconds per formulation)over seven hours since that first bowl had started to appear, and mymind, whether I wanted it to or not, gave me the distressing informationthat by now Artie's estate was cluttered with a numbing totality ofone-thousand-two-hundred-seventy-five bowl-cereal-spoon-napkin-toothpicksets. And fifty-one more due in seventeen minutes.
* * * * *
"What's he say?" I asked Artie, leaning into the phone booth.
"He thinks I'm drunk!" Artie groaned, slamming down the receiver. "Ionly wish I were!"
I gave a stoical shrug, and pointed to the bright red neon lure acrossthe street. "Don't just stand there wishing. Join me?" I started acrosstoward the bar.
"But Burt--" Artie babbled, hurrying along beside me. "We can't just_f
orget_ about it...."
"We did our bit," I said. "You told your contact, right? Well, bytomorrow morning, when the total is up to over three thousand (Icalculated five-thousand-fifty sets by the time the machine reaches thehundred-foot mark, a little better than twenty-eight hours from thestarting time), somebody's sure to notice all the birds in the region,if only an ornithologist, and--"
"Birds?"
"Eating the