MASTERS OF THE VORTEX
(_original title_: THE VORTEX BLASTER)
E. E. Smith
NEW YORK
Copyright 1960 Edward E. Smith, Ph.D.
All Rights Reserved
Printed in the United States of America
[Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any
evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
THE VORTEX BLASTER
—“Storm” Cloud, the only man who could destroy the ravening
nuclear vortices that struck and killed at random.
THE VORTEX BLASTER
was also the name of Cloud’s space-ship, an incredibly advanced
arsenal of modern science, in which Cloud and his crew of
colorful space castaways hunted the source of the lethal
vortices, battled a criminal mastermind, developed unheard-of
sciences, and made an ultimate discovery of shattering
importance to the destiny of the Universe!
THE VORTEX BLASTERS
team up in a saga of crisis and adventure in the worlds of the
Lensmen—“Doc” Smith’s most enduring creation.
_Novels of science fiction_
by
“DOC” SMITH
_The Skylark series_
THE SKYLARK OF SPACE
SKYLARK OF VALERON
SKYLARK THREE
SKYLARK DUQUESNE
_The Lensman series_
TRIPLANETARY
FIRST LENSMAN
GALACTIC PATROL
GRAY LENSMAN
SECOND STAGE LENSMEN
CHILDREN OF THE LENS
MASTERS OF THE VORTEX
(_original title_: The Vortex Blaster)
_To_
_Bob Heinlein_
_With Admiration and Esteem_
CONTENTS
_Chapter_ _Page_
1 Catastrophe 7
2 Cloud Blasts a Vortex 15
3 Cloud Loses an Arm 24
4 “Storm” Cloud on Deka 34
5 The Boneheads 48
6 Driving Jets are Weapons 54
7 The Blaster Acquires a Crew 70
8 Vesta the Vegian 77
9 Trouble on Tominga 89
10 Janowick 99
11 Joan the Telepath 106
12 Vesta Practices Spaceal 115
13 Games Within Games 123
14 Vesta the Gambler 138
15 Joan and Her Brains 147
16 Vegian Justice 158
17 The Call 171
18 Cahuita 183
_Chapter 1_
▂▂▂▂▂▂CATASTROPHE
SAFETY DEVICES that do not protect.
“Unsinkable” ships that, before the days of Bergenholm and of atomic and
cosmic energy, sank into the waters of Earth.
More particularly, safety devices which, while protecting against one
agent of destruction, attract magnet-like another and worse. Such as the
armored cable within the walls of a wooden house. It protects the
electrical conductors within it against accidental external shorts; but,
inadequately grounded, it may attract and upon occasion has attracted
the stupendous force of lightning. Then, steel armor exploding into
incandescence inside walls and ceilings, that house’s existence
thereafter is to be measured in minutes.
Specifically, four lightning rods. The lightning rods protecting the
chromium, glass, and plastic home of Neal Cloud. Those rods were
adequately grounded, with copper-silver cables the size of a big man’s
forefinger; for Neal Cloud, Doctor of Nucleonics, knew his lightning and
was taking no chances whatever with the safety of his wife and children.
He did not know, did not even suspect, that under certain conditions of
atmospheric potential and of ground-magnetic stress his
perfectly-designed and perfectly-installed system would become a
super-powerful attractor for flying vortices of atomic disintegration.
So now Neal Cloud, nucleonicist, sat at his desk in a strained, dull
apathy. His face was a yellowish-gray white, his tendoned hands gripped
rigidly the arms of his chair. His eyes, hard and lifeless, stared
unseeingly past the small, three-dimensional block portrait of all that
had made life worth living.
For his guardian against lightning had been a vortex-magnet at the
moment when some luckless wight had tried to abate the nuisance of a
“loose” atomic vortex. That wight dies, of course—they almost always
did—and the vortex, instead of being destroyed, was simply broken up
into a number of widely-scattered new vortices. And one of those bits of
furious, uncontrolled energy, resembling a handful of substance torn
from the depths of a sun, darted toward and shot downward to earth
through Neal Cloud’s new house.
That house did not burn; it exploded. Nothing of it, in it, or near it
stood a chance, for in a few seconds the place where it had been was a
crater of seething, boiling lava—a crater which filled the atmosphere
with poisonous vapors; which flooded all nearby space with lethal
radiations.
Cosmically, the whole thing was infinitesimal. Ever since man learned
how to use atomic power the vortices of disintegration had been breaking
out of control. Such accidents had been happening, and would continue to
happen. More than one world, perhaps, had been or would be consumed to
the last gram by such loose atomic vortices. What of that? Of what real
importance are a few grains of sand to a pile five thousand miles long,
a hundred miles wide, and ten miles deep?
Even to that individual grain of sand called “Earth”—or, in modern
parlance, “Sol Three,” or “Tellus of Sol,” or simply “Tellus”—the
affair was negligible. One man had died; but, in dying, he had added one
more page to the thick bulk of negative results already on file. That
Mrs. Cloud and her children had perished was merely unfortunate. The
vortex itself was not yet a real threat to Tellus. It was a “new” one,
and thus it would be a long time before it would become other than a
local menace.
Nor, to any except a tiny fraction of Earth’s inhabitants, was the
question of loose atomic vortices a matter of concern. It was
unthinkable that Tellus, the point of origin and the very center of
Galactic Civilization, could cease to exist. Long before such vortices
could eat away much of her mass, or poison much of her atmosphere,
Earth’s scientists would have solved the problem.
But to Neal Cloud the accident was ultimate catastrophe. His personal
universe had crashed in ruins; what was left was not worth picking up.
He and Jo had been married for more than fifteen years and the bonds
between them had grown stronger, deeper, truer with every passing day.
And the kids . . . it _couldn’t_ have happened . . . fate COULDN’T do
this to him . . . but it had . . . it could. Gone . . . _gone_ . . .
GONE!
And to Neal Cloud, sitting there at his desk in black abstraction, with
maggots of thought gnawing holes in his mind, the catastrophe was doubly
galling because of its cruel irony. For he was second from the top in
the Vortex Control Laboratory; his life’s work had been a search for a
means or method of extinguishing loose atomic vortices.
His eyes focused vaguely upon the portrait. Wavy brown hair . . . clear,
honest gray eyes . . . lines of character, of strength and of humor
. . . sweetly curved lips, ready to smile or to kiss. . . .
He wrenched his attention away and scribbled briefly upon a sheet of
paper. Then, getting up stiffly, he took the portrait and moved woodenly
across the room to a furnace. After the flaming arc had done its work he
turned and handed the paper to a tall man, with a Lens glowing upon his
wrist, who had been watching him with quiet, understanding eyes.
Significant enough, to the initiate, of the importance of the laboratory
is the fact that it was headed by a Lensman.
“As of now, Phil, if it’s QX with you.”
The Lensman took the document, glanced at it, and slowly, meticulously,
tore it into sixteen equal pieces.
“Uh-uh, Storm,” he denied, gently. “Not a resignation. Leave of absence,
perhaps, but not severance.”
“Why not?” It was scarcely a question; Cloud’s voice was level,
uninflected. “I wouldn’t be worth the paper I’d waste.”
“Now, no; but the future’s another matter. I haven’t said anything so
far, because I knew you and Jo. Nothing could be said.” Two hands
gripped and held. “For the future, though, four words that were spoken
long ago have never been improved upon. ‘This, too, shall pass’.”
“You think so?”
“I know so, Storm. I’ve been round a long time. You’re too good a man to
go down out of control. You’ve got a place in the world and a job to do.
You’ll be back—” a thought struck the Lensman and he went on, in a
strangely altered tone: “But you wouldn’t—of course you wouldn’t—you
couldn’t.”
“I don’t think so. No.” Suicide, tempting although it might be, was not
the answer. “Good-bye, Phil.”
“Not good-bye, Storm. Au revoir.”
“Maybe.” Cloud left the laboratory and took an elevator down to the
garage. Into his big blue DeKhotinsky Special and away.
Through traffic so heavy that front-, rear-, and side-bumpers almost
touched he drove with his wonted cool skill; even though he did not
know, consciously, that the other cars were there. He slowed, turned,
stopped, “shoveled on the coal,” all correctly—and all purely
automatically.
He did not know where he was going, nor care. His numbed brain was
simply trying to run away from its own bitter imaginings—which, if he
had thought at all, he would have known hopeless of accomplishment. But
he did not think. He simply acted; dumbly, miserably.
Into a one-way skyway he rocketed; along it over the suburbs and into
the trans-continental super-highway. Edging inward, lane after lane, he
reached the “unlimited” way—unlimited, that is, except for being
limited to cars of not less than seven hundred horsepower, in perfect
mechanical condition, driven by registered, tested drivers at not less
than one hundred twenty five miles per hour—flashed his number at the
control station, and shoved his right foot down to the floor.
Everyone knows that an ordinary DeKhotinsky Sporter will do a hundred
and forty honestly-measured miles in one honestly-timed hour; but very
few drivers have ever found out how fast one of those brutal big
souped-up Specials can wheel. Most people simply haven’t got what it
takes to open one up.
“Storm” Cloud found out that day. He held that six-thousand-pound
Juggernaut onto the road, wide open, for mile after mile after mile. But
it didn’t help. Drive as he would, he could not out-run that which rode
with him. Beside him and within him and behind him; for Jo was there.
Jo and the kids, but mostly Jo. It was Jo’s car as much as it was his.
“Babe, the big blue ox,” was her pet name for it; because, like Paul
Bunyan’s fabulous beast, it was pretty nearly six feet between the eyes.
Jo was in the seat beside him. Every dear, every sweet, every luscious,
lovely memory of her was there . . . and behind him, just beyond
eye-corner visibility, were the three kids. And a whole lifetime of this
loomed ahead—a vista of emptiness more vacuous by far than the emptiest
reaches of inter-galactic space. Damnation! he couldn’t stand much more
of. . . .
High over the roadway, far ahead, a brilliant octagon flared red. That
meant “STOP!” in any language. Cloud eased up on the accelerator; eased
down on the brake-pedal; took his place in the line of almost-stalled
traffic. There was a barrier and a trimly-uniformed policeman.
“Sorry, sir,” the officer said, with a sweeping, turning gesture, “but
you’ll have to detour over to Twenty. There’s a loose atomic vortex
beside the road up ahead. . . . Oh, it’s you, Doctor Cloud! You can go
ahead, of course. Couple of miles yet before you’ll need your armor.
They didn’t tell us they were sending for _you_. It’s just a little new
one, and the dope we got was that they were going to shove it over into
the badlands with pressors.”
“They didn’t send for me.” Cloud tried to smile. “I’m just driving
around. No armor, even, so I might as well go back.”
He turned the Special around. A loose vortex—new. There might be three
or four of them, scattered over that many counties. Sisters of the one
that had murdered his family—spawn of that damned Number Eleven that
that bungling nitwit had tried to blow out. . . . Into his mind there
leaped a picture, wire-sharp, of Number Eleven as he had last seen it,
and simultaneously an idea hit him like the blow of a fist.
He thought. _Really_ thought, now; intensely and clearly. If he could do
it—could actually blow out the atomic flame of an atomic vortex . . .
not exactly revenge, but . . . it _would_ work . . . it would _have_ to
work—he’d _make_ it work! And grimly, quietly, but alive now in every
fiber, he drove back to the city almost as fast as he had come away.
If Philip Strong was surprised at Cloud’s sudden reappearance in the
laboratory he did not show it. Nor did he offer any comment as his
erstwhile assistant went to various lockers and cupboards, assembling
coils, tubes, armor, and other paraphernalia.
“Guess that’s all I’ll need, chief,” Cloud remarked, finally. “Here’s a
blank check. If some of this stuff shouldn’t happen to be in usable
condition when I get done with it, fill it out to suit, will you?”
“No.” The Lensman tore up the check just as he had torn up the
resignation. “If you want the stuff for legitimate purposes, you’re on
Patrol business and it’s the Patrol’s risk. But if you’re thinking of
trying to snuff a vortex, the stuff stays here. That’s out, Storm.
“But I’m going to _really_ snuff ’em, starting with Number One and
taking ’em in order. No suicide.”
“Huh?” Skepticism incarnate. “It can’t be done, except by an almost
impossibly fortuitous accident, which is why you yourself have always
been as opposed to such attempts as the rest of us. The charge of
explosive must match, within very narrow limits, the activity of the
vortex itself at the instant of detonation; and that activity varies so
greatly and so unpredictably that all attempts at accurate extrapolation
have failed. Even the Conference of Scientists couldn’t develop a usable
formula, any more than they could work out a tractor that could be used
as a tow-line on one.”
“Wait a minute!” Cloud protested. “They found that it could be forecast,
for a length of time proportional to the length of the cycle in
question, by an extension of the calculus of warped surfaces.”
“Humph! I said a _usable_ formula!” the Lensman snorted. “What good is a
ten-second forecast when it takes a GOMEAC twice that long to
solve. . . . Oh!” he broke off, staring.
“Oh,” he repeated, slowly. “I forgot for a minute that you were born
with a super-GOMEAC in your head. But there are other things.”
“There were. Now there are none.”
“No?”
“NO. I couldn’t take such chances before, and I’d’ve tied myself up into
knots if I did. Now nothing can throw me. I can compute all the elements
of a sigma curve in nothing flat. A ten-second prediction gives me ten
seconds of action. That’s plenty.”
“I see.” Strong pondered, his fingers drumming softly upon his desk.
Lensmen did not ordinarily use their Lenses on their Lensless friends,
but this was no ordinary occasion. “You aren’t afraid of death any more.
But you won’t invite it? And do you mind if I Lens you on that?”
“Come in. I’ll not invite it, but that’s as far as I’ll go in promising.
I won’t make any superhuman effort to avoid it. I’ll take all due
precautions, for the sake of the job, but if one gets me, what the
hell?”
“QX.” The Lensman withdrew from Cloud’s mind. “Not too good, but good
enough. What’s your plan? You won’t have time for the usual method of
attack.”
“Like this.” Cloud found a sheet of drafting paper and sketched rapidly.
“There’s the crater, with the vortex at the bottom—there. From the
sigma curve I estimate the most probable value of the activity I’ll have
to shoot at. Then I select three duodec bombs from the hundred or so
I’ll have made up in advance—one on the mark, one each five percent
over and under the mark. The bombs, of course, will be cased in
neocarballoy thick enough for penetration. Then I take off in a shielded
armored flying suit, say about here. . . .”
“If you take off at all, you and your suit will be inside a flitter,”
the Lensman interrupted. “Too many instruments for a suit, to say
nothing of bombs, and you’ll need heavier screen than a suit can put
out. We can adapt a flitter for bomb-throwing easily enough.”
“That’d be better, of course. QX, I set my flitter into a projectile
trajectory toward the center of disturbance. Twelve seconds away, at
about this point here, I take my instantaneous readings, solve the
equations of that particular warped surface for some definite zero
time. . . .”
“But s’pose the cycle won’t give you a ten-second solution?”
“Then I’ll swing around and try again until a long-enough cycle _does_
show up.”
“QX. It will, sometime.”
“Sure. Then, having everything set for zero time, and assuming that the
activity is somewhere near my assumed value. . . .”
“Assume it isn’t—it probably won’t be.”
“I accelerate or decelerate. . . .”
“Solving new equations—differential equations at that—all the while?”
“Certainly. Don’t interrupt so. I stick around until the sigma curve,
extrapolated to zero time, matches one of my bombs. I build up the right
velocity, cut that bomb loose, shoot myself off in a sharp curve, and
Z-W-E-E-T—POWIE! She’s out.” With an expressive, sweeping gesture.
“You hope.” Strong was frankly dubious. “And there you are, right in the
middle of the damndest explosion you ever saw.”
“Oh, no. I’ve gone free in the meantime, so nothing can touch me.”
“_I_ hope! But do you realize just how busy you are going to be during
those ten or twelve seconds?”
“Yes.” Cloud’s face grew somber. “But I’ll be in full control. I won’t
be afraid of anything that can happen—of _anything_ that can happen.
From my standpoint, that’s the hell of it.”
“QX,” the Lensman decided, “You can go. We’ll iron out the kinks as we
go.”
“We?”
“I’ll be in the lookout shack with the boys, at least on the first ones.
When do you want to start?”
“How long will it take to fix up the flitter?”
“Two days. Say we meet you there Saturday morning?”
“I’ll be there,” and again Neal Cloud and Babe, the big blue ox, hit the
road; and as he rolled along the physicist mulled over in his mind the
assignment to which he had set himself.
Like fire, only worse, atomic energy was a good servant, but a very bad
master. Man had liberated it before he could really control it. In fact,
control was not yet, and probably never would be, perfect. True, all
except a minute fraction of one percent of the multitudes of small,
tame, self-limiting vortices were perfect servants. But at long
intervals, for some unknown reason—science knew so little,
fundamentally, of nuclear reactions—one of them flared, nova-like, into
a huge, wild, self-sustaining monster. It ceased being a servant, then,
and became a master.
Such flare-ups occurred very infrequently; the trouble was that the
loose vortices were so utterly, so damnably _permanent_. They never went
out; and no data were ever obtained. Every living thing in the vicinity
of a flare-up died; every instrument and every other solid thing within
a radius of hundreds of feet melted down into the reeking, boiling slag
of its crater.
Fortunately, the rate of growth was slow—as slow, almost, as it was
persistent. But even so, unless something could be done about loose
vortices before too many years, the situation would become extremely
serious. That was why the Laboratory had been established in the first
place.
Nothing much had been accomplished so far. Tractor beams would not hold.
Nothing material was of any use. Pressors worked after a
fashion—vortices _could_ be moved from one place to another. One or
two, through sheer luck, had been blown out by heavy charges of
duodecaplylatomate. But duodec had taken many lives; and since it
scattered a vortex as often as it fed it, duodec had caused vastly more
damage than it had cured.
No end of fantastic schemes had been proposed, of course; of varying
degrees of fantasy. Some of them sounded almost practical. Some of them
had been tried; some were still being tried. Some, such as the
perennially-appearing one of installing a free drive and flinging the
whole neighborhood off into space, were perhaps feasible from an
engineering standpoint. They were potentially so capable of making
things worse, however, that they could not be used except as last-ditch
measures. In short, the control of loose atomic vortices was very much
an unsolved problem.
_Chapter 2_
▂▂▂▂▂▂CLOUD BLASTS A VORTEX
NUMBER ONE, the oldest and worst vortex on Tellus, had been pushed out
into the badlands, and there, at eight o’clock of the indicated morning,
Cloud started to work on it.
The “lookout shack” was in fact a fully-equipped nucleonics laboratory.
Its staff was not large—eight men worked in three staggered eight-hour
shifts—but the development of its instrumentation had required hundreds
of man-years of intensive research. Every factor of the vortex’s
activity was measured and recorded continuously, throughout every minute
of every day of every year; and all of these measurements were summed
up, integrated, into the “sigma” curve. This curve, which to the
layman’s eye was only a senselessly zig-zagging line, told the expert
everything he wanted to know.
Cloud glanced at the chart and scowled, for one jagged peak, less than
half an hour old, almost touched the top line of the paper.
“Bad, huh, Frank?”
“Bad, Storm, and getting worse. I wouldn’t wonder if ‘Calamity’ were
right—it certainly looks like she’s getting ready to blow her top.”
“No equation, I suppose,” Strong said. The Lensman ignored as completely
as did the observer, if not as flippantly, the distinct possibility that
at any moment the observatory and all that it contained might be
resolved into their sub-atomic components.
“None,” Cloud stated. He did not need to spend hours at a calculating
machine; at one glance he knew, without knowing how he knew, that no
equation could fit that wildly-shifting sigma curve. “But most of these
recent cycles cut ordinate seven fifty, so I’ll take that for my value.
That means nine point nine six zero kilograms of duodec for my basic,
and nine four six two and ten point three five eight as alternates. On
the wire?”
“It went out as you said it,” the observer replied. “They’ll be here in
five minutes.”
“QX. I’ll get dressed, then.”
The Lensman and one of the observers helped him into his cumbersome,
heavily-padded armor; then all three men went out to the flitter. A tiny
speedster, really; a slim torpedo with the stubby wings and the
ludicrous tail-surfaces, the multifarious driving-, braking-, side-,
top-, and under-jets so characteristic of the tricky, cranky, but
ultra-maneuverable breed. Cloud checked the newly installed triplex
launcher, made sure that he knew which bomb was in each tube, and
climbed into the tiny operating compartment. The massive door—flitters
are too small to have airlocks—rammed shut upon its teflon gaskets, the
heavy toggles drove home. A heavily-padded form closed in upon the
pilot, leaving only his left arm and his right leg free to move.
“Everybody in the clear?”
“All clear.”
Cloud shot the flitter into the air and toward the seething inferno
which was Loose Atomic Vortex Number One. The crater was a ragged,
jagged hole perhaps two miles from lip to lip and a quarter of a mile in
depth. The floor, being largely molten, was almost level except for a
depression at the center, where the actual vortex lay. The walls of the
pit were steeply, unstably irregular, varying in pitch and shape with
the refractoriness of the strata composing them. Now a section would
glare into an unbearably blinding white, puffing away in sparkling
vapor. Again, cooled by an inrushing blast of air, it would subside into
an angry scarlet, its surface crawling in a sluggish flow of lava.
Occasionally a part of the wall might even go black, into pockmarked
scoriae or brilliant planes of obsidian.
For always, at some point or other, there was a torrent of air rushing
into that crater. It rushed in as ordinary air. It came out, however, in
a ragingly uprushing pillar, as—as something else. No one knows exactly
what a vortex does to air. Or, rather, the composition of the effluent
gases varies as frequently and as unpredictably as does the activity of
the vortex. Thus, the atmosphere emitted from a vortex-crater may be
corrosive, it may be poisonous, it may be merely different; but it is no
longer the air which we human beings are used to breathing. This
conversion and corruption of Earth’s atmosphere, if it could not be
stopped, would end the possibility of life upon the planet’s surface
long before the world itself could be consumed.
As to the vortex itself . . . it is difficult indeed to describe such a
phenomenon. Practically all of its frightful radiation lies in those
octaves of the spectrum which are invisible to the human eye. Suffice it
to say, then, that it was a continuously active atomic reactor, with an
effective surface temperature of approximately twenty five thousand
degrees Kelvin, and let it go at that.
Neal Cloud, driving his flitter through that murky, radiation-riddled
atmosphere, extrapolating his sigma curve by the sheer power of his
mathematical-prodigy’s mind, sat appalled. For the activity level was,
and even in its lowest dips remained, well above the figure he had
chosen. Distant though he was from the rim of that hellish pit, his skin
began to prickle and to burn. His eyes began to smart and to ache. He
knew what those symptoms meant: even the flitter’s powerful screens were
leaking; even his suit-screens and his special goggles were not stopping
the stuff. But he wouldn’t quit yet: the activity might—probably
would—take a nose-dive any second now. If it did, he’d have to be
ready. On the other hand, it might blow up any second, too.
There were two schools of mathematical thought upon that point. One held
that a vortex, without any essential change in its nature or behavior,
would keep on growing bigger until, uniting with the other vortices of
the planet, it had converted all the mass of the world into energy.
The second school, of which the forementioned “Calamity” Carlowitz was
the loudest voice, taught that at a certain stage of development the
internal energy of the vortex would become so great that
generation-radiation equilibrium could not be maintained. This would of
course result in an explosion, the nature and consequences of which this
Carlowitz was wont to dwell upon in ghoulishly mathematical glee.
Neither school could prove its point, however—or, rather, each school
proved its point with eminently plausible mathematics—and each hated
and derided the other, with heat and at length.
Neal Cloud, as he studied through his almost opaque defenses that
indescribably ravening fireball, that rapacious monstrosity which might
very well have come from the very center of the hottest hell of
mythology, felt strangely inclined to agree with Carlowitz. It didn’t
seem possible that it _could_ get any worse without exploding.
The activity stayed high; ’way too high. The tiny control room grew
hotter and hotter. His skin burned more and his eyes ached worse. He
touched a stud and spoke.
“Phil? Better get me three more bombs. Like these, except up
around. . . .”
“I don’t check you. If you do that, it’s apt to drop to a minimum and
stay there. I’d suggest a wider interval.”
“QX—that’d be better. Two, then, instead of three. Four point nine
eight zero and thirteen point nine four zero. You might break out a jar
of burn-dressing, too; some fairly warm stuff is leaking through.”
“Will do. Come down, fast!”
Cloud landed. He stripped to the skin and his friends smeared him with
the thick, gooey stuff that was not only added protection against
radiation, but also a sovereign remedy for new burns. He exchanged his
goggles for a heavier, darker pair. The two bombs arrived and were
substituted for two of the original load.
“I thought of something while I was up there,” Cloud said then.
“Fourteen kilograms of duodec is nobody’s firecracker, but it may be the
least of what’s going to go off. Have you got any idea of what’s going
to become of the intrinsic energy of the vortex when I snuff it?”
“Can’t say I have.” The Lensman frowned in thought. “No data.”
“Neither have I. But I’d say you’d better go back to the new
station—the one you were going to move to if it kept on getting worse.
The clocks are ticking there, aren’t they?”
“Yes. It might be the smart thing to do—just in case.”
Again in air, Cloud found that the activity, while still very high, was
not too high for his heaviest bomb, but that it was fluctuating too
rapidly. He could not get even five seconds of trustworthy prediction,
to say nothing of ten. So he waited, as close to the horrible center of
disintegration as he dared.
The flitter hung poised in air, motionless, upon softly hissing
under-jets. Cloud knew to a fraction his height above the ground. He
knew to a fraction his distance from the vortex. He knew the density of
the atmosphere and the velocity and direction of the wind. Hence, since
he could also read, closely enough, the momentary variations in the
cyclonic storms within the crater, he could compute very easily the
course and velocity necessary to land the bomb in the exact center of
the vortex at any given instant of time. The hard part—the thing that
no one had as yet succeeded in doing—was to predict, for a time far
enough ahead to be of any use, a usably close approximation to the
vortex’s quantitative activity.
Therefore Cloud concentrated upon the dials and gauges in front of him;
concentrated with every fiber of his being and with every cell of his
brain.
Suddenly, almost imperceptably, the sigma curve gave signs of flattening
out. Cloud’s mind pounced. Simultaneous differential equations; nine of
them. A quadruple integration in four dimensions. No matter—Cloud did
not solve problems laboriously, one operation at a time. Without knowing
how he had arrived at it, he knew the answer; just as the Posenian or
the Rigellian can perceive every separate component particle of an
opaque, three-dimensional solid, but without being able to explain to
any Tellurian how his sense of perception works. It just _is_, that’s
all.
By virtue of whatever sense or ability it is which makes a mathematical
prodigy what he is, Cloud knew that in exactly seven and three-tenths
seconds from that observed instant the activity of the vortex would
match precisely the rating of his heaviest bomb. Another flick of his
mental switch and he knew exactly the velocity he would require. His
hand swept over the studs, his right foot tramped down hard upon the
firing pedal; and, even as the quivering flitter rammed forward under
five Tellurian gravities of acceleration, he knew to the thousandth of a
second how long he would have to hold that acceleration to attain that
velocity. While not really long—in seconds—it was much too long for
comfort. It would take him much closer to the vortex than he wanted to
be; in fact, it would take him almost to the crater’s rim.
But he stuck to the calculated course, and at the precisely correct
instant he released his largest bomb and cut his dive. Then, in a
continuation of the same motion, his hand slashed down through the beam
of light whose cutting would activate the Bergenholm and make the vessel
inertialess—safe from any form whatever of physical violence. For an
instant nothing happened, and for that instant Cloud sat appalled.
_Neutralization of inertia took time!_ Not that he had ever been told
that it was instantaneous—he had just assumed so. He had never noticed
any time-lapse before, but now it seemed to be taking forever!
After that one instant of shocked inaction he went into ultra-speed
action; kicking in the little vessel’s all-out eight-G drive and
whirling her around as only a flitter or a speedster can whirl; only to
see in his plate the vortex opening up like a bell-flower, or like a sun
going nova.
Cloud’s forebodings were more than materialized then, for it was not
only the bomb that was going off. The staggeringly immense energy of the
vortex was merging with that of the detonating duodec to form an utterly
indescribable explosion.
In part the flood of incandescent lava in the pit was beaten downward by
the sheer, stupendous force of the blow; in part it was hurled abroad in
masses, gouts, and streamers. And the raging blast of the explosion’s
front seized the fragments and tore and worried them to bits, hurling
them still faster along their paths of violence. And air, so densely
compressed as to act like a solid, smote the walls of the crater. Those
walls crumbled, crushed outward through the hard-packed ground, broke up
into jaggedly irregular blocks which hurtled screamingly in all
directions.
The blast-wave or explosion front buffeted the flyer while she was still
partially inert and while Cloud was almost blacked out and physically
helpless from the frightful linear and angular accelerations. The impact
broke his left arm and his right leg; the only parts of his body not
pressure-packed. Then, milliseconds later, the debris began to arrive.
Chunks of solid or semi-molten rock slammed against the hull, knocking
off wings and control-surfaces. Gobs of viscous slag slapped it
liquidly, freezing into and clogging up jets and orifices. The little
ship was knocked hither and thither by forces she could no more resist
than can a floating leaf resist a cataract; Cloud’s brain was addled as
an egg by the vicious concussions which were hitting him so nearly
simultaneously from so many different directions.
The concussions and the sluggings lightened . . . stopped . . . a vast
peace descended, blanket-wise. The flitter was free—was riding
effortlessly away on the outermost, most tenuous fringes of the storm!
Cloud wanted to faint, then, but he didn’t—quite. With one arm and leg
and what few cells of his brain were still in working order, he was
still in the fight. It did not even occur to him, until long afterward,
that he was not going to make any effort whatever to avoid death.
Foggily, he tried to look at the crater. Nine-tenths of his visiplates
were dead, but he finally got a view. Good—it was out. He wasn’t
surprised—he knew it would be.
His next effort was to locate the secondary observatory, where he would
have to land; and in that, too, he was successful. He had enough
intelligence left to realize that, with practically all of his jets
clogged and his wings and tail shot off, he couldn’t land his flitter
inert. He’d _have_ to land her free.
Neal Cloud was not the world’s best pilot. Nevertheless, by dint of
light and somewhat unorthodox use of what few jets he had left, he did
land her free. A very good landing, considering—he almost hit the
observatory’s field, which was only one mile square—and having landed
her, he inerted her.
But, as has been intimated, his brain wasn’t working quite so good; he
had held his ship inertialess for quite a few seconds longer than he
thought, and he did not even think of the terrific buffetings she had
taken. As a result of these things, however, her intrinsic velocity did
not match, anywhere nearly, that of the ground upon which she lay. Thus,
when Cloud cut his Bergenholm, restoring thereby to the flitter the
absolute velocity and the inertia she had before going free, there
resulted a distinctly anticlimactic crash.
There was a last terrific bump as the motionless vessel collided with
the equally motionless ground; and “Storm” Cloud, Vortex Blaster, went
out like the proverbial light.
Help came, of course; on the double. Cloud was unconscious and the
flitter’s port could not be opened from the outside, but those were not
insuperable obstacles. A plate, already loose, was torn away; the pilot
was unclamped and rushed to Base Hospital in the “meat-crate” standing
by.
Later, in a private office of that hospital, the head of the Vortex
Control Laboratory sat and waited—not patiently.
“How is he, Lacy?” he demanded, as the surgeon-marshal entered the room.
“He’s going to live?”
“Oh, yes, Phil—definitely yes,” Lacy replied, briskly. “A very good
skeleton; very good indeed. His screens stopped all the really bad
radiation, so the damage will yield quite readily to treatment. He
doesn’t really need the Phillips we gave him—for the replacement of
damaged parts, you know—except for a few torn muscles and so on.”
“But he was pretty badly smashed up—I helped take him out, you
know—how about that arm and leg? He was a mess.”
“Merely simple fractures—entirely negligible.” Lacy waved aside with an
airy gesture such minor ills as broken bones. “He’ll be out in a couple
of weeks.”
“How soon can I see him? Business can wait, but there’s a personal
matter that can’t.”
“I know what you mean.” Lacy pursed his lips. “Ordinarily I wouldn’t
allow it, but you see him now. Not too long, though, Phil; he’s weak.
Ten minutes at most.”
“QX. Thanks.” A nurse led the visiting Lensman to Cloud’s bedside.
“Hi, stupe!” he boomed, cheerfully. “‘Stupe’ being short for
‘stupendous’, this time.”
“Ho, chief. Glad to see somebody. Sit down.”
“You’re the most-wanted man in the galaxy, not excepting Kimball
Kinnison. Here’s a spool of tape, which you can look at as soon as Lacy
will let you have a scanner. It’s only the first one. As soon as any
planet finds out that we’ve got a sure-enough-vortex-blower-outer who
can really call his shots—and _that_ news gets around mighty fast—it
sends in a double-urgent, Class A Prime demand for you.
“Sirius IV got in first by a whisker, but it was a photo finish with
Aldebaran II and all channels have been jammed ever since. Canopus,
Vega, Rigel, Spica. Everybody, from Alsakan to Zabriska. We announced
right off that we wouldn’t receive personal delegations—we had to
almost throw a couple of pink-haired Chickladorians out bodily to make
them believe we meant it—that our own evaluation of necessity, not
priority of requisition, would govern. QX?”
“Absolutely,” Cloud agreed. “That’s the only way to handle it, I should
think.”
“So forget this psychic trauma. . . . No, I don’t mean that,” the
Lensman corrected himself hastily. “You know what I mean. The will to
live is the most important factor in any man’s recovery, and too many
worlds need you too badly to have you quit now. Check?”
“I suppose so,” Cloud acquiesced, but somberly, “and I’ve got more will
to live than I thought I had. I’ll keep on pecking away as long as I
last.”
“Then you’ll die of old age, Buster,” the Lensman assured him. “We got
full data. We know exactly how long it takes to go from fully inert to
fully free. We know exactly what to do to your screens. Next time
nothing will come through except light, and only as much of that as you
like. You can wait as close to a vortex as you please, for as long as is
necessary to get exactly the conditions you want. You’ll be as safe as
if you were in Klono’s hip pocket.”
“Sure of that?”
“Absolutely—or at least, as sure as we can be of anything that hasn’t
happened yet. But your guardian angel here is eyeing her clock a bit
pointedly, so I’d better do a flit before she tosses me out on my ear.
Clear ether, Storm!”
“Clear ether, chief!”
Thus “Storm” Cloud, nucleonicist, became the most narrowly-specialized
specialist in the long annals of science; became “Storm” Cloud, the
Vortex Blaster.
And that night Lensman Philip Strong, instead of sleeping, thought and
thought and thought. What could he do—what could _anybody_ do—if Cloud
should get himself killed? _Somebody_ would have to do _something_ . . .
but who? And what? Could—or could not—another Vortex Blaster be found?
Or trained?
And next morning, early, he Lensed a thought.
“Kinnison? Phil Strong. I’ve got a high-priority problem that will take
a lot of work and a lot more weight than I carry. Are you free to listen
for a few minutes?”
“I’m free. Go ahead.”
_Chapter 3_
▂▂▂▂▂▂CLOUD LOSES AN ARM
TELLURIAN PHARMACEUTICALS, INC., was Civilization’s oldest and most
conservative drug house. “Hide-bound” was the term most frequently used,
not only by its younger employees, but also by its more progressive
competitors. But, corporatively, Tellurian Pharmaceuticals, Inc., did
not care. Its board of directors was limited by an iron-clad, if
unwritten, law to men of seventy years more; and against the inertia of
that ruling body the impetuosity of the younger generation was exactly
as efficacious as the dashing of ocean waves against an adamantine
cliff—and in very much the same fashion.
Ocean waves do in time cut into even the hardest rock; and, every
century or two, TPI did take forward step—after a hundred years of
testing by others had proved conclusively that the “new” idea conformed
in every particular with the exalted standards of the Galactic Medical
Association.
TPI’s plant upon the planet Deka (Dekanore III, on the charts) filled
the valley of Clear Creek and the steep, high hills on its sides, from
the mountain spring which was the creek’s source to its confluence with
the Spokane River.
The valley floor was a riot of color, devoted as it was to the intensive
cultivation of medicinal plants. Along both edges of the valley extended
row after row of hydroponics sheds. Upon the mountains’ sides there were
snake dens, lizard pens, and enclosures for many other species of fauna.
Nor was the surface all that was in use. The hills were hollow:
honeycombed into hundreds of rooms in which, under precisely controlled
environments of temperature, atmosphere, and radiation, were grown
hundreds of widely-variant forms of life.
At the confluence of creek and river, just inside the city limits of
Newspoke—originally New Spokane—there reared and sprawled the
Company’s headquarters buildings; offices, processing and synthesizing
plants, laboratories, and so on. In one of the laboratories, three
levels below ground, two men faced each other. Works Manager Graves was
tall and fat; Fenton V. Fairchild, M.D., Nu.D., F.C.R., Consultant in
Radiation, was tall and thin.
“Everything set, Graves?”
“Yes. Twelve hours, you said.”
“For the full cycle. Seven to the point of maximum yield.”
“Go ahead.”
“Here are the seeds. Treconian broadleaf. For the present you will have
to take my word for it that they did not come from Trenco. These are
standard hydroponics tanks, size one. The formula of the nutrient
solution, while complex and highly critical, contains nothing either
rare or unduly expensive. I plant the seed, thus, in each of the two
tanks. I cover each tank with a plastic hood, transparent to the
frequencies to be used. I cover both with a larger hood—so. I align the
projectors—thus. We will now put on armor, as the radiation is severe
and the atmosphere, of which there may be leakage when the pollenating
blast is turned on, is more than slightly toxic. I then admit Trenconian
atmosphere from this cylinder. . . .”
“Synthetic or imported?” Graves interrupted.
“Imported. Synthesis is possible, but prohibitively expensive and
difficult. Importation in tankers is simple and comparatively cheap. I
now energize the projectors. Growth has begun.”
In the glare of blue-green radiance the atmosphere inside the hoods, the
very ether, warped and writhed. In spite of the distortion of vision,
however, it could be seen that growth was taking place, and at an
astounding rate. In a few minutes the seeds had sprouted; in an hour the
thick, broad, purplish-green leaves were inches long. In seven hours
each tank was full of a lushly luxuriant tangle of foliage.
“This is the point of maximum yield,” Fairchild remarked, as he shut off
the projectors. “We will now process one tank, if you like.”
“Certainly I like. How else could I know it’s the clear quill?”
“By the looks,” came the scientist’s dry rejoinder. “Pick your tank.”
One tank was removed. The leaves were processed. The full cycle of
growth of the remaining tank was completed. Graves himself harvested the
seeds, and himself carried them away.
Six days, six samples, six generations of seed, and the eminently
skeptical Graves was convinced.
“You’ve got something there, Doc,” he admitted then. “We can really go
to town on that. Now, how about notes, or stuff from your old place, or
people who may have smelled a rat?”
“I’m perfectly clean. None of my boys know anything important, and none
ever will. I assemble all apparatus myself, from standard parts, and
disassemble it myself. I’ve been around, Graves.”
“Well, we can’t be too sure.” The fat man’s eyes were piercing and cold.
“Leakers don’t live very long. We don’t want you to die, at least not
until we get in production here.”
“Nor then, if you know when you’re well off,” the scientist countered,
cynically. “I’m a fellow of the College of Radiation, and it took me
five years to learn this technique. None of your hatchetmen could _ever_
learn it. Remember that, my friend.”
“So?”
“So don’t get off on the wrong foot and don’t get any funny ideas. I
know how to run things like this and I’ve got the manpower and equipment
to do it. If I come in I’m running it, not you. Take it or leave it.”
The fat man pondered for minutes, then decided. “I’ll take it. You’re
in, Doc. You can have a cave—two hundred seventeen is empty—and we’ll
go up and get things started right now.”
* * * * *
Less than a year later, the same two men sat in Graves’ office. They
waited while a red light upon a peculiarly complicated deskboard faded
through pink into pure white.
“All clear. This way, Doc.” Graves pushed a yellow button on his desk
and a section of blank wall slid aside.
In the elevator thus revealed the two men went down to a sub-basement.
Along a dimly-lit corridor, through an elaborately locked steel door,
and into a steel-lined room. Four inert bodies lay upon the floor.
Graves thrust a key into an orifice and a plate swung open, revealing a
chute into which the bodies were dumped. The two retraced their steps to
the manager’s office.
“Well, that’s all we can feed to the disintegrator.” Fairchild lit an
Alsakanite cigarette and exhaled appreciatively.
“Why? Going soft on us?”
“No. The ice is getting too thin.”
“Whaddya mean, ‘thin’?” Graves demanded. “The Patrol inspectors are
ours—all that count. Our records are fixed. Everything’s on the green.”
“That’s what _you_ think,” the scientist sneered. “You’re supposed to be
smart. Are you? Our accident rate is up three hundredths; industrial
hazard rate and employee turnover about three and a half; and the
Narcotics Division alone knows how much we have upped total bootleg
sales. Those figures are all in the Patrol’s books. How can you give
such facts the brush-off?”
“We don’t have to.” Graves laughed comfortably. “Even a half of one
percent wouldn’t excite suspicion. Our distribution is so uniform
throughout the galaxy that they can’t center it. They can’t possibly
trace anything back to us. Besides, with our lily-white reputation,
other firms would get knocked off in time to give us plenty of warning.
Lutzenschiffer’s, for instance, is putting out Heroin by the ton.”
“So what?” Fairchild remained entirely unconvinced. “Nobody else is
putting out what comes out of cave two seventeen—demand and price prove
that. What you don’t seem to get, Graves, is that some of those damned
Lensmen have _brains_. Suppose they decide to put a couple of Lensmen
onto this job—then what? The minute anybody runs a rigid statistical
analysis on us, we’re done for.”
“Um . . . m.” This was a distinctly disquieting thought, in view of the
impossibility of concealing anything from a Lensman who was really on
the prowl. “That wouldn’t be so good. What would you do?”
“I’d shut down two seventeen—and the whole hush-hush end—until we can
get our records straight and our death-rate down to the old ten-year
average. That’s the only way we can be really safe.”
“Shut down! The way they’re pushing us for production? Don’t be an
idiot—the chief would toss us both down the chute.”
“Oh, I don’t mean without permission. Talk him into it. It’d be best for
everybody, over the long pull, believe me.”
“Not a chance. He’d blow his stack. If we can’t dope out something
better than that, we go on as is.”
“The next-best thing would be to use some new form of death to clean up
our books.”
“Wonderful!” Graves snorted contemptuously. “What would we add to what
we’ve got now—bubonic plague?”
“A loose atomic vortex.”
“Wh-o-o-o-sh!” The fat man deflated, then came back up, gasping for air.
“Man, you’re completely _nuts_! There’s only one on the planet, and it’s
. . . or do you mean . . . but _nobody_ ever touched one of those things
off deliberately . . . can it be done?”
“Yes. It isn’t simple, but we of the College of Radiation know
how—theoretically—the transformation can be made to occur. It has
never been done because it has been impossible to extinguish the things;
but now Neal Cloud is putting them out. The fact that the idea is new
makes it all the better.”