"A little less than the melting point of iron," I said. "Figure about fifteen hundred degrees Centigrade. Why?"
"I just wondered if perhaps the machine might not only double the amount of the fire, but its temperature as well...."
I didn't want to theorize about that. It was summer, and the air was pretty humid, and that meant an awful lot of free hydrogen and oxygen, all at once, ready to re-combine explosively in the heat from the flames that had separated them in the first place, thence to become disrupted again, thence to explode again.... The mind refuses certain contemplations. I turned away from the chaotic display in the distant skies, and said to Artie, "How's chances of the machine getting melted down?"
He shook his head with great sadness. "We made it out of damn near heat-proof metals, remember? So it wouldn't burn up at entry speeds from outer space?"
"Oh, yeah," I said. "So what'll we do, now?"
He glanced at the increasing holocaust on the horizon. "Pray for rain?"
Well, that was yesterday. Today, as I write this, the government has finally gotten wind of the thing, and the area is under martial law. Not that all those uniformed men standing just out of heat-range about the ever-increasing perimeter are going to be of much help. Maybe to keep the crowds back, they'd help, except no one in his right mind is heading any direction but away from the mound. A few trees went up in smoke during the blaze, too, and now, every n-times-twenty seconds, a whole uprooted forest is joining the crash.
No one knows quite what to do about it. The best weapon we possess is Artie's inadvertent disintegrator pistol (remember Venus?), and ever since the Three Day War, they've been banned. There's a proposition up before Congress to un-ban the things and blast the machine, of course, but the opposition keeps putting the kibosh on things by simply asking, "What if the machine doesn't vanish? And what if, during the attempted shooting, it starts duplicating disintegrator-beams?"
The vote was negative.