Part 2

"We may just have _done_ it!" I said, hopefully, as the silver-nosed machine began to float upward (We hadn't _had_ to mount the parabolic reflector in the position of a nose-cone, but it made the thing look neater, somehow.)

It seemed a little torpid in its ascent, but that could be credited to the extra weight of the reflector and cornflakes, not to mention the fact that the helices had to suck all their air in under the lip of the silvery nose-cone before they could thrust properly. But its rise was steady. Six inches, ten inches--

Then, at precisely one foot in height, something unexpected happened. Under the base of the machine, where the sound-heated air was at its most torrid, a shimmering disc-like thing began to materialize, and warp, and hollow out slightly, and beside it, a glinting metal rod-thing flattened at one end, then the flat end went concave in the center and kind of oval about the perimeter, and something brownish and shreddy plopped and hissed into the now-very-concave disc-like thing.

"Artie--!" I said, uneasily, but by then, he, too, had recognized the objects for what they were.

"Burt--" he said excitedly. "Do you realize what we've done? We've invented a _syntheticizer_!"

Even as he was saying it, the objects completed their mid-air materialization (time: five seconds, start to finish), and clattered and clinked onto the scale. We stood and looked down at them: A bowl of cornflakes and a silver spoon.

"How--?" I said, but Artie was already figuring it out, aloud.

"It's the soundwaves," he said. "At ultrasonic, molecule-disrupting vibrations, they're doing just what that Philosopher's Stone was supposed to: Transmuting. Somehow, we didn't clean out the reflector sufficiently, and some of the traces of our other trial insulations remained inside. The ceramics formed the bowl, the metals formed the spoon, the cornflakes formed the cornflakes!"

"But," I said logically (or as logically as could be expected under the circumstances), "what about the rubber, or the fabrics?"

* * * * *

Artie's face lit up, and he nodded toward the machine, still hovering at one foot above the scale. In its wake, amid the distorting turbulence of the sound-tortured air, two more objects were materializing: a neatly folded damask napkin, and a small rubber toothpick. As they dropped down to join their predecessors, the machine gave a satisfied shake, and rose steadily to the two-foot level. I was scribbling frantically in my notebook: _Bowl + cereal + spoon: 5 seconds. Lag: 10 seconds. Napkin + toothpick: 3 seconds. Total synthesizing time: 18 seconds. Allowance for rise 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, 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."

"How so?" said Artie, craning over my shoulder to try and read my lousy calligraphics 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-lapse while 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 require thirty-six seconds for the formation of the stuff, it took the machine twice as many seconds to reach the two-foot mark."

"I get it," he said. "So I suppose it took three times the base number for 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 smashing down. "--always at a point where the objects fit into a theoretical conical section below the machine."

"How's that again?" said Artie.

"Well, bowl number one formed just below the exhaust vent of the central cylinder. Bowls two and three, or--if you prefer--bowl-batch two, formed about six inches lower, edge to edge, at the cross-section of an imaginary cone (whose rather truncated apex is the exhaust vent) that seems to form a vertical angle of thirty degrees."

"In other words," said Artie, "each new formation comes in a spot beneath this cone where it's possible for the new formations to materialize side-by-side, right?" When I nodded, he said, "Fine. But so what?"

"It means that each new materialization occurs at a steadily increasing height, but one which--" I calculated briefly on the pad "--is never greater than two-thirds the height of the machine itself."

Artie looked blank. "Thank you very kindly for the math lesson," he said finally, "but I still don't see what you are driving at, Burt. How does this present a problem?"

I pointed toward the un-repaired hole in the lab ceiling, where the machine, after dutifully disgorging the number-seven load, was slowly heading. "It means that unless we grab that thing before it gets too much higher, the whole damn planet'll be up to its ears in cornflakes. And the one-third machine-height gap between artifacts and machine means that 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 grab that thing, fast?"

"Right," I said, glad I had gotten through to him. "I would've said as much sooner, only you never listen until somebody supplies you with all the pertinent data on a crisis first."

* * * * *

Load number nine banged and splintered down into the lab, bringing the cumulative total of bowl-cereal-spoon-napkin-toothpick debris up to forty-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 house anymore. "Quick!" he rasped, anxiously. "We can still get there by--" He stopped before saying "helicopter", for similar reasons.

"Burt--" he said, after a pause that allowed the total to rise to fifty-five with a crash. "What'll we _do_?"

"As usual with your inventions," I said, "we get on the phone and alert the 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'll have to drive someplace where there's a phone!"

We ran out of the lab, dodged a few flying shards of pottery that sprayed out after us from load-eleven-total-sixty-six, and roared off down the road in Artie's roadster. He did the driving, I kept my eyes on my watch, timing the arrivals of each new load. (Formula: _n × 20 = lag between loads in seconds_.)

By the time Artie discovered we were out of gas in the middle of a deserted country road, load number twenty had fallen.

By the time we arrived on foot at the nearest farmhouse, and were ordered off the property by the irate farmer who still had bare boards on his windowless house, and a shotgun in his gnarled brown hands, load twenty-five had fallen.

By the time we hitchhiked into town and got on the phone in time to find all the governmental agencies had closed their offices for the day, load thirty had fallen.

By the time we finally convinced the Washington Operator that this was a national emergency that could _not_ (though she kept suggesting it) be handled by the ordinary Civil Defense members (the town had a population of two hundred, and a one-percent enrollment in CD. Those two guys wouldn't be any more help than we were, ourselves.), and were able 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 load fifty took a thousand seconds to form, load one had taken twenty, and their total--one thousand twenty seconds--divided by two made an average formulation-time of five hundred ten seconds per formulation) over seven hours since that first bowl had started to appear, and my mind, whether I wanted it to or not, gave me the distressing information that by now Artie's estate was cluttered with a numbing totality of one-thousand-two-hundred-seventy-five bowl-cereal-spoon-napkin-toothpick sets. 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. "I only wish I were!"

I gave a stoical shrug, and pointed to the bright red neon lure across the street. "Don't just stand there wishing. Join me?" I started across toward the bar.

"But Burt--" Artie babbled, hurrying along beside me. "We can't just _forget_ about it...."

"We did our bit," I said. "You told your contact, right? Well, by tomorrow morning, when the total is up to over three thousand (I calculated five-thousand-fifty sets by the time the machine reaches the hundred-foot mark, a little better than twenty-eight hours from the starting time), somebody's sure to notice all the birds in the region, if only an ornithologist, and--"

"Birds?"

"Eating the 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 coolness of a booth at the rear of the bar. "The power-source will deplete itself by half in about six hundred years, maybe. Meantime, what'll we do with all those cornflakes?"

The waiter came by and we ordered two beers.

"Wait--" said Artie, gripping my sleeve. "As the machine reaches the upper atmosphere, the soundwaves'll thin out, weaken, as the medium grows scarce."

"Sure," I said, prying my cuff free of his fingers, "so we only get bombarded with _badly made_ artifacts by the time the thing gets ten miles up. But that's about fifty-thousand artifacts per foot rise, Artie, at that height! No, I take that back. Fifty thousand _sets_! And at five items per set (if we don't count the precise number of flakes per batch of cereal), we have twenty-five thousand items per foot per batch, merely a _rough_ estimate!"

The beers came, and we ordered two more, the orders to keep coming until we said whoa.

* * * * *

"You know," said Artie, after draining half the bottle, "I just had a horrible thought--"

"Horrible above and beyond the _present_ horrors?" I said, horrified.

He nodded, thoughtfully. "What happens to anything that gets sucked into the machine under the lip of the reflector? Does the machine just use it as 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 (it wasn't), "or any other bird, for that matter. What I was thinking of was stuff 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, watching a crowd that was gathering in the street. They were looking in the direction of the lab. It was a few miles away, of course, but that machine was--if on time, and why shouldn't it be?--due to deliver fifty-two sets just about now, and even a few miles away, fifty-two bowl-spoon-napkin-toothpick-cereal combinations, shimmering in the air as they took form, would be hard to miss if you were looking in the right 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 damned thing, unless there were some kind of illumination--" I saw by his face that 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 the street. And there, in the distant blackness of the skies, was a sight like a Fourth of July celebration gone berserk. From the number of those fireflies, I figure the first one got sucked in at about the fifteen mark, 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 in the air under the fireflies? You can just make it out in the reflected flashes. 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 been sucked in to let the machine make a dupl--_There it goes!_"

A one-story building dropping from a height of around thirty feet onto another one-story building covered over with spoons, crunchy cereal, and broken pottery makes much more racket than can be absorbed by the cushioning effect of thousands of napkins and rubber toothpicks. We were a few miles off, so the sound--when it finally got to us--was muted by distance, but it was still a lulu.

"And to think," Artie murmured, "that this is happening because we tried to make it _noiseless_!"

"What I'm worried about," I said sickly, "is that new cloud of dust rising from the latest debris. There are crumbs of _two_ smashed buildings in it, Artie. And in roughly twenty minutes the process is going to repeat, and there'll be crumbs from _four_ labs in the air; two labs that'll be the second duplicate of the original, and two that'll be the first duplicate of the original-plus-first-duplicate!"

Artie shook his head sadly. "Crumbs from _six_, Burt. Remember, when those four new labs fall in twenty minutes, they're going to raise dust from the wreckage of the two _already_ on the ground!"

"Maybe," I said, less lackadaisically than I'd spoken when we left the phone 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 latest development in the distant sky. "He'll get the word indirectly, from the forest rangers."

"Huh?" said Artie, and looked toward the machine.

* * * * *

Amid the sparking cloud of fireflies, fluttering cornflakes, glinting spoons, and a foursome of hazy, still-processing new labs, there was a newcomer to the chaos. Something in one of the plunging artifacts must have rubbed something else the wrong way, made a spark, and--Well, the machine was complacently sucking in raw blazing energy, now, tongue upon tongue of orange flame and black, spiralling smoke that rose from the pyre of shattered synthetics. It was the first geometrically cone-shaped blaze 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 going in the _other_ direction in about twenty minutes. But--

"Flames go _up_," said Artie, his thought-processes apparently running parallel to mine. "So the new fires...."

"Will be sucked in with the next batch," I finished. "And come out double-strength next time around."

"Burt--" said Artie, "What's the temperature at which water breaks down into free hydrogen and oxygen again?"

"A little less than the melting point of iron," I said. "Figure about fifteen hundred degrees Centigrade. Why?"

"I just wondered if perhaps the machine might not only double the amount of the fire, but its temperature as well...."

I didn't _want_ to theorize about _that_. It was summer, and the air was pretty humid, and that meant an awful lot of free hydrogen and oxygen, all at once, ready to re-combine explosively in the heat from the flames that had separated them in the first place, thence to become disrupted again, thence to explode again.... The mind refuses certain contemplations. I turned away from the chaotic display in the distant skies, and said to Artie, "How's chances of the _machine_ getting melted down?"

He shook his head with great sadness. "We made it out of damn near heat-proof metals, remember? So it wouldn't burn up at entry speeds from outer 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 has finally gotten wind of the thing, and the area is under martial law. Not that all those uniformed men standing just out of heat-range about the ever-increasing perimeter are going to be of much help. Maybe to keep the crowds back, they'd help, except no one in his right mind is heading any direction but away from the mound. A few trees went up in smoke during the blaze, too, and now, every _n_-times-twenty seconds, a whole uprooted forest is joining the crash.

No one knows quite what to do about it. The best weapon we possess is Artie's inadvertent disintegrator pistol (remember Venus?), and ever since the Three Day War, they've been banned. There's a proposition up before 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 attempted shooting, it starts duplicating disintegrator-beams?"

The vote was negative.

We figure it'll take quite a few years before the machine gets beyond the point where the atmosphere stops acting as a medium for the soundwaves. And that, of course, is only if the machine isn't duplicating 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 the birds the machine has started to produce since a few foolish sparrows got incinerated in the blaze.

Artie figures that if enough snow falls on the machine, it may weight it down and stop the process. So far, that's the only hope we have. Meantime, it's still the middle of June.

It looks like a long summer.

THE END