"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.
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.