The Vortex Blaster | Page 4

why I'll pretty nearly have to do it myself.

But to convince you, exactly what is the knot?"
"Variability," snapped the older man. "To be effective, the charge of
explosive at the moment of impact must match, within very close limits,
the activity of the vortex itself. Too small a charge scatters it around, in
vortices which, while much smaller than the original, are still large
enough to be self-sustaining. Too large a charge simply rekindles the
original vortex--still larger--in its original crater. And the activity that
must be matched varies so tremendously, in magnitude, maxima, and
minima, and the cycle is so erratic--ranging from seconds to hours
without discoverable rhyme or reason--that all attempts to do so at any
predetermined instant have failed completely. Why, even Kinnison and
Cardynge and the Conference of Scientists couldn't solve it, any more
than they could work out a tractor beam that could be used as a
tow-line on one."
"Not exactly," Cloud demurred. "They found that it could be forecast,
for a few seconds at least--length of time directly proportional to the
length of the cycle in question--by an extension of the calculus of
warped surfaces."
"Humph!" the Lensman snorted. "So what? What good is a ten-second
forecast when it takes a calculating machine an hour to solve the
equations.... Oh!" He broke off, staring.
"Oh," he repeated, slowly, "I forgot that you're a lightning calculator--a
mathematical prodigy from the day you were born--who never has to
use a calculating machine even to compute an orbit.... But there are
other things."
"I'll say there are; plenty of them. I'd thought of the calculator angle
before, of course, but there was a worse thing than variability to
contend with...."
"What?" the Lensman demanded.
"Fear," Cloud replied, crisply. "At the thought of a hand-to-hand battle
with a vortex my brain froze solid. Fear--the sheer, stark, natural

human fear of death, that robs a man of the fine edge of control and
brings on the very death that he is trying so hard to avoid. That's what
had me stopped."
"Right ... you may be right," the Lensman pondered, his fingers
drumming quietly upon his desk. "And you are not afraid of
death--now--even subconsciously. But tell me, Storm, please, that you
won't invite it."
"I will not invite it, sir, now that I've got a job to do. 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 it gets me, what
the hell? The quicker it does, the better--the sooner I'll be with Jo."
"You believe that?"
"Implicitly."
"The vortices are as good as gone, then. They haven't got any more
chance than Boskone has of licking the Patrol."
"I'm afraid so," almost glumly. "The only way for it to get me is for me
to make a mistake, and I don't feel any coming on."
"But what's your angle?" the Lensman asked, interest lighting his eyes.
"You can't use the customary attack; your time will be too short."
"Like this," and, taking down a sheet of drafting paper, Cloud sketched
rapidly. "This is the crater, here, with the vortex at the bottom, there.
From the observers' instruments or from a shielded set-up of my own I
get my data on mass, emission, maxima, minima, and so on. Then I
have them make me three duodec bombs--one on the mark of the
activity I'm figuring on shooting at, and one each five percent over and
under that figure--cased in neocarballoy of exactly the computed
thickness to last until it gets to the center of the vortex. Then I take off
in a flying suit, armored and shielded, say about here...."
"If you take off at all, you'll take off in a suit, inside a one-man flitter,"

the Lensman interrupted. "Too many instruments for a suit, to say
nothing of bombs, and you'll need more screen than a suit can deliver.
We can adapt a flitter for bomb-throwing easily enough."
"QX; that would be better, of course. In that case, I set my flitter into a
projectile trajectory like this, whose objective is the center of the vortex,
there. See? Ten seconds or so away, at about this point, I take my
instantaneous readings, solve the equations at that particular warped
surface for some certain zero time...."
"But suppose that the cycle won't give you a ten-second solution?"
"Then I'll swing around and try again until a long 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 postulated value...."
"Assume that it isn't--it probably won't be," the Chief grunted.
"I accelerate or decelerate--"
"Solving new equations all the while?"
"Sure--don't interrupt