"How so?" said Artie, craning over my shoulder to try and read my lousy calligraphics on the pad.
"Well," I said, pointing to each notation in turn, "the first batch, bowl-to-toothpick, took twenty seconds, if we include the time-lapse while the machine was ascending to the one-foot mark."
"Uh-huh," he nodded. "I see. So?"
"So the second batch took double. Forty seconds. Not only did it require thirty-six seconds for the formation of the stuff, it took the machine twice as many seconds to reach the two-foot mark."
"I get it," he said. "So I suppose it took three times the base number for the third batch?"
"Right. A full minute. And the materialization of the objects is—Boy, that's noisy!" I interrupted myself as batch number six came smashing down. "—always at a point where the objects fit into a theoretical conical section below the machine."
"How's that again?" said Artie.
"Well, bowl number one formed just below the exhaust vent of the central cylinder. Bowls two and three, or—if you prefer—bowl-batch two, formed about six inches lower, edge to edge, at the cross-section of an imaginary cone (whose rather truncated apex is the exhaust vent) that seems to form a vertical angle of thirty degrees."
"In other words," said Artie, "each new formation comes in a spot beneath this cone where it's possible for the new formations to materialize side-by-side, right?" When I nodded, he said, "Fine. But so what?"