The Vortex Blaster | Page 3

found out how fast one of
those brutal big souped-up Sixteens can wheel. They simply haven't got
what it takes to open one up.
"Storm" Cloud found out that day. He held that two-and-a-half-ton
Juggernaut on the road, wide open, for two solid hours. But it didn't
help. Drive as he would, he could not outrun 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 Jo's pet name for it; because, like Paul Bunyan's
fabulous beast, it was pretty nearly six feet between the eyes.
Everything they had ever had was that way. She was in the seat beside
him. Every dear, every sweet, every luscious, lovely memory of her

was there ... and behind him, just out of eye-corner visibility, were the
three kids. And a whole lifetime of this loomed ahead--a vista of
emptiness more vacuous far than the emptiest reaches of intergalactic
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 his accelerator, eased
down his mighty brakes. He pulled up at the control station and a
trimly-uniformed officer made a gesture.
"Sorry, sir," the policeman said, "but you'll have to detour here. There's
a loose atomic vortex beside the road up ahead--
"Oh! It's Dr. Cloud!" Recognition flashed into the guard's eyes. "I didn't
recognize you at first. You can go ahead, of course. It'll be two or three
miles before you'll have to put on your armor; you'll know when better
than anyone can tell you. They didn't tell us they were going to send for
you. It's just a little new one, and the dope we got was that they were
going to shove it off into the canyon with pressure."
"They didn't send for me." Cloud tried to smile. "I'm just driving
around--haven't my armor along, even. So I guess I might as well go
back."
He turned the Special around. A loose vortex--new. There might be a
hundred of them, scattered over a radius of two hundred miles. Sisters
of the one that had murdered his family--the hellish spawn of that
accursed Number Eleven vortex that that damnably incompetent
bungling ass had tried to blow up.... 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 a blow from a fist.
He thought. Really thought, now; cogently, intensely, clearly. If he
could do it ... could actually blow out the atomic flame of an atomic
vortex ... not exactly revenge, but.... By Klono's brazen bowels, it
would work--it'd have to work--he'd make it work! And grimly, quietly,
but alive in every fiber now, he drove back toward the city practically
as fast as he had come away.

* * * * *
If the Lensman was surprised at Cloud's sudden reappearance in the
laboratory he did not show it. Nor did he offer any comment as his
erstwhile first assistant went to various lockers and cupboards,
assembling meters, coils, tubes, armor, and other paraphernalia and
apparatus.
"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," and 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 is the Patrol's risk. If, on the other hand, you
think that you're going to try to snuff a vortex, the stuff stays here.
That's final, Storm."
"You're right--and wrong, Phil," Cloud stated, not at all sheepishly.
"I'm going to blow out Number One vortex with duodec, yes--but I'm
really going to blow it out, not merely make a stab at it as an excuse for
suicide, as you think."
"How?" The big Lensman's query was skepticism incarnate. "It can't be
done, except by an almost impossibly fortuitous accident. You yourself
have been the most bitterly opposed of us all to these suicidal
attempts."
"I know it--I didn't have the solution myself until a few hours ago--it hit
me all at once. Funny I never thought of it before; it's been right in
sight all the time."
"That's the way with most problems," the Chief admitted. "Plain
enough after you see the key equation. Well, I'm perfectly willing to be
convinced, but I warn you that I'll take a lot of convincing--and
someone else will do the work, not you."
"When I get done you'll see