"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!"
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.