cornflakes," I said, and when he nodded in comprehension,went on, "--pretty soon the word'll get to the government."
"Or," said Artie, hopefully, "the batteries and engine'll wear out....Won't they?"
"It's a radium-powered motor," I said, as we slipped into the coolnessof a booth at the rear of the bar. "The power-source will deplete itselfby half in about six hundred years, maybe. Meantime, what'll we do withall those cornflakes?"
The waiter came by and we ordered two beers.
"Wait--" said Artie, gripping my sleeve. "As the machine reaches theupper atmosphere, the soundwaves'll thin out, weaken, as the mediumgrows scarce."
"Sure," I said, prying my cuff free of his fingers, "so we only getbombarded with _badly made_ artifacts by the time the thing gets tenmiles up. But that's about fifty-thousand artifacts per foot rise,Artie, at that height! No, I take that back. Fifty thousand _sets_! Andat five items per set (if we don't count the precise number of flakesper batch of cereal), we have twenty-five thousand items per foot perbatch, merely a _rough_ estimate!"
The beers came, and we ordered two more, the orders to keep coming untilwe said whoa.
* * * * *
"You know," said Artie, after draining half the bottle, "I just had ahorrible thought--"
"Horrible above and beyond the _present_ horrors?" I said, horrified.
He nodded, thoughtfully. "What happens to anything that gets sucked intothe machine under the lip of the reflector? Does the machine just use itas more raw material ... Or does it start duplicating _that_?"
"Holy hell!" I choked. "As if there weren't too many pigeons already!"
"There's no room for a pigeon to fit under that lip," said Artie,patting the back of my hand as though he thought it was soothing me (itwasn't), "or any other bird, for that matter. What I was thinking of wasstuff like nits and gnats and mosquitoes and--"
"Stop!" I shuddered, reaching for my beer and finding the bottle empty.I looked for the waiter, but he was at the front window, watchinga crowd that was gathering in the street. They were looking in thedirection of the lab. It was a few miles away, of course, but thatmachine was--if on time, and why shouldn't it be?--due to deliverfifty-two sets just about now, and even a few miles away, fifty-twobowl-spoon-napkin-toothpick-cereal combinations, shimmering in the airas they took form, would be hard to miss if you were looking in theright direction. I said as much to Artie, but he shook his head.
"It's ten o'clock of a moonless night, Burt. They couldn't see a damnedthing, unless there were some kind of illumination--" I saw by his facethat he'd thought of a possible source.
"What?" I said.
"Fireflies?" he hypothesized weakly.
* * * * *
We got out of the booth and joined our waiter as he hurried out into thestreet. And there, in the distant blackness of the skies, was a sightlike a Fourth of July celebration gone berserk. From the number of thosefireflies, I figure the first one got sucked in at about the fifteenmark, and possibly a few of his pals with him.
"Despite everything--" said Artie, softly, "it sure is beautiful."
"A gorgeous sight," I had to agree. "But--What the hell is that thing inthe air under the fireflies? You can just make it out in the reflectedflashes. It kind of looks like the--the _lab_...."
Artie's fingers sank into my forearm. "But. It _is_ the lab! Not _the_lab, but another like it! With all those falling bowls and things,enough plaster-dust and wood-splinters and glass-spicules must've beensucked in to let the machine make a dupl--_There it goes!_"
A one-story building dropping from a height of around thirty feet ontoanother one-story building covered over with spoons, crunchy cereal,and broken pottery makes much more racket than can be absorbed by thecushioning effect of thousands of napkins and rubber toothpicks. We werea few miles off, so the sound--when it finally got to us--was muted bydistance, but it was still a lulu.
"And to think," Artie murmured, "that this is happening because we triedto make it _noiseless_!"
"What I'm worried about," I said sickly, "is that new cloud of dustrising from the latest debris. There are crumbs of _two_ smashedbuildings in it, Artie. And in roughly twenty minutes the process isgoing to repeat, and there'll be crumbs from _four_ labs in the air; twolabs that'll be the second duplicate of the original, and two that'll bethe first duplicate of the original-plus-first-duplicate!"
Artie shook his head sadly. "Crumbs from _six_, Burt. Remember, whenthose four new labs fall in twenty minutes, they're going to raise dustfrom the wreckage of the two _already_ on the ground!"
"Maybe," I said, less lackadaisically than I'd spoken when we left thephone booth for the bar, "you'd better get your man in Washington,again."
"He'll never believe I'm sober, _now_!" Artie complained.
"Oops--Never mind, Artie," I said, resignedly, looking at the latestdevelopment in the distant sky. "He'll get the word indirectly, from theforest rangers."
"Huh?" said Artie, and looked toward the machine.
* * * * *
Amid the sparking cloud of fireflies, fluttering cornflakes, glintingspoons, and a foursome of hazy, still-processing new labs, there was anewcomer to the chaos. Something in one of the plunging artifacts musthave rubbed something else the wrong way, made a spark, and--Well, themachine was complacently sucking in raw blazing energy, now, tongue upontongue of orange flame and black, spiralling smoke that rose from thepyre of shattered synthetics. It was the first geometrically cone-shapedblaze I'd ever seen in my life, but that suction was going pretty good,now. And all that glaring heat was going to be suddenly re-created goingin the _other_ direction in about twenty minutes. But--
"Flames go _up_," said Artie, his thought-processes apparently runningparallel to mine. "So the new fires...."
"Will be sucked in with the next batch," I finished. "And come outdouble-strength next time around."
"Burt--" said Artie, "What's the temperature at which water breaks downinto free hydrogen and oxygen again?"
"A little less than the melting point of iron," I said. "Figure aboutfifteen hundred degrees Centigrade. Why?"
"I just wondered if perhaps the machine might not only double the amountof the fire, but its temperature as well...."
I didn't _want_ to theorize about _that_. It was summer, and the airwas pretty humid, and that meant an awful lot of free hydrogen andoxygen, all at once, ready to re-combine explosively in the heat fromthe flames that had separated them in the first place, thence to becomedisrupted again, thence to explode again.... The mind refuses certaincontemplations. I turned away from the chaotic display in the distantskies, and said to Artie, "How's chances of the _machine_ getting melteddown?"
He shook his head with great sadness. "We made it out of damn nearheat-proof metals, remember? So it wouldn't burn up at entry speeds fromouter space?"
"Oh, yeah," I said. "So what'll we do, now?"
He glanced at the increasing holocaust on the horizon. "Pray for rain?"
* * * * *
Well, that was yesterday. Today, as I write this, the government hasfinally gotten wind of the thing, and the area is under martial law. Notthat all those uniformed men standing just out of heat-range about theever-increasing perimeter are going to be of much help. Maybe to keepthe crowds back, they'd help, except no one in his right mind is headingany direction but away from the mound. A few trees went up in smokeduring the blaze, too, and now, every _n_-times-twenty seconds, a wholeuprooted forest is joining the crash.
No one knows quite what to do about it. The best weapon we possess isArtie's inadvertent disintegrator pistol (remember Venus?), and eversince the Three Day War, they've been banned. There's a proposition upbefore Congress to un-ban the things and blast the machine, of course,but the opposition keeps putting the kibosh on things by simply asking,"What if the machine doesn't vanish? And what if, during the attemptedshooting, it starts duplicating disintegr
ator-beams?"
The vote was negative.
We figure it'll take quite a few years before the machine getsbeyond the point where the atmosphere stops acting as a medium forthe soundwaves. And that, of course, is only if the machine isn'tduplicating the atmosphere, too. And why couldn't it be?
In the meantime, the avian population in the region is on the increase,thanks to all those cornflakes-and-firefly dinners. Not to mention thebirds the machine has started to produce since a few