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!"