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