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.