The Vortex Blaster

The Vortex Blaster, by Edward
Elmer Smith

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Title: The Vortex Blaster
Author: Edward Elmer Smith
Release Date: September 16, 2007 [EBook #22629]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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[Illustration: The Lensman and the observer helped Storm into his
heavily padded armor. Their movements were automatic--the ointment,
the devices--]

INTRODUCING "Storm" Cloud, who, through tragedy, is destined to
become the most noted figure in the galaxy--THE
VORTEX BLASTER
(Complete in this issue!)
by E. E. SMITH, Ph.D.
Author of "The Skylark," "Skylark Three," "The Skylark of Valeron,"
the Lensman stories, etc.

Safety devices that do not protect.
The "unsinkable" ships that, before the days of Bergenholm and of
atomic and cosmic energy, sank into the waters of the 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 against accidental external shorts; but,
inadequately grounded as it must of necessity be, it may attract and
upon occasion has attracted the stupendous force of lightning. Then,
fused, volatilized, flaming incandescent throughout the length, breadth,
and height of a dwelling, that dwelling'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, grounded with copper-silver cables the bigness of
a strong man's arm; for Neal Cloud, atomic physicist, knew his
lightning and he was taking no chances whatever with the safety of his
lovely wife and their three wonderful kids.
He did not know, he did not even suspect, that under certain conditions
of atmospheric potential and of ground-magnetic stress his perfectly
designed lightning-rod system would become a super-powerful magnet

for flying vortices of atomic disintegration.
And now Neal Cloud, atomic physicist, 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 a luckless wight had attempted to abate the nuisance of a
"loose" atomic vortex. That wight died, of course--they almost always
do--and the vortex, instead of being destroyed, was simply broken up
into an indefinite number of widely-scattered new vortices. And one of
these bits of furious, uncontrolled energy, resembling more nearly a
handful of material rived from a sun than anything else with which
ordinary man is familiar, darted toward and crashed downward to earth
through Neal Cloud's new house.
That home did not burn; it simply exploded. Nothing of it, in it, or
around it stood a chance, for in a fractional second of time the place
where it had been was a crater of seething, boiling lava--a crater which
filled the atmosphere to a height of miles with poisonous vapors; which
flooded all circumambient space with lethal radiations.
Cosmically, the whole thing was infinitesimal. Ever since man learned
how to liberate intra-atomic energy, the vortices of disintegration had
been breaking out of control. Such accidents had been happening, were
happening, and would continue indefinitely 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 an ocean beach five thousand miles long, a
hundred miles wide, and ten miles deep?
And 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 of negligible importance. 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. And well before that could happen--before
even the oldest of Tellus' loose vortices had eaten away much of her
mass or poisoned much of her atmosphere, her scientists would have
solved