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 End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Double or Nothing, by Jack Sharkey