"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.
"And to think," Artie murmured, "that this is happening because we tried to make it noiseless!"
"What I'm worried about," I said sickly, "is that new cloud of dust rising from the latest debris. There are crumbs of two smashed buildings in it, Artie. And in roughly twenty minutes the process is going to repeat, and there'll be crumbs from four labs in the air; two labs that'll be the second duplicate of the original, and two that'll be the first duplicate of the original-plus-first-duplicate!"