Artie shook his head sadly. "Crumbs from six, Burt. Remember, when those four new labs fall in twenty minutes, they're going to raise dust from the wreckage of the two already on the ground!"
"Maybe," I said, less lackadaisically than I'd spoken when we left the phone booth for the bar, "you'd better get your man in Washington, again."
"He'll never believe I'm sober, now!" Artie complained.
"Oops—Never mind, Artie," I said, resignedly, looking at the latest development in the distant sky. "He'll get the word indirectly, from the forest rangers."
"Huh?" said Artie, and looked toward the machine.
Amid the sparking cloud of fireflies, fluttering cornflakes, glinting spoons, and a foursome of hazy, still-processing new labs, there was a newcomer to the chaos. Something in one of the plunging artifacts must have rubbed something else the wrong way, made a spark, and—Well, the machine was complacently sucking in raw blazing energy, now, tongue upon tongue of orange flame and black, spiralling smoke that rose from the pyre of shattered synthetics. It was the first geometrically cone-shaped blaze I'd ever seen in my life, but that suction was going pretty good, now. And all that glaring heat was going to be suddenly re-created going in the other direction in about twenty minutes. But—
"Flames go up," said Artie, his thought-processes apparently running parallel to mine. "So the new fires...."
"Will be sucked in with the next batch," I finished. "And come out double-strength next time around."
"Burt—" said Artie, "What's the temperature at which water breaks down into free hydrogen and oxygen again?"