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.