The Vortex Blaster | Page 5

so--until at zero time the activity, extrapolated to
zero time, matches one of my bombs. I cut that bomb loose, shoot
myself off in a sharp curve, and Z-W-E-E-E-T--POWIE! She's out!"
With an expressive, sweeping gesture.
"You hope," the Lensman was frankly dubious. "And there you are,
right in the middle of that explosion, with two duodec bombs outside
your armor--or just inside your flitter."
"Oh, no. I've shot them away several seconds ago, so that they explode
somewhere else, nowhere near me."
"I hope. But do you realize just how busy a man you are going to be
during those ten or twelve seconds?"

"Fully." Cloud's face grew somber. "But I will be in full control. I won't
be afraid of anything that can happen--anything. And," he went on,
under his breath, "that's the hell of it."
"QX," the Lensman admitted finally, "you can go. There are a lot of
things you haven't mentioned, but you'll probably be able to work them
out as you go along. I think I'll go out and work with the boys in the
lookout station while you're doing your stuff. When are you figuring on
starting?"
"How long will it take to get the flitter ready?"
"A couple of days. Say we meet you there Saturday morning?"
"Saturday the tenth, at eight o'clock. I'll be there."
* * * * *
And again Neal Cloud and Babe, the big blue ox, hit the road. And as
he rolled the physicist mulled over in his mind the assignment to which
he had set himself.
Like fire, only worse, intra-atomic energy was a good servant, but a
terrible master. Man had liberated it before he could really control it. In
fact, control was not yet, and perhaps never would be, perfect. Up to a
certain size and activity, yes. They, the millions upon millions of
self-limiting ones, were the servants. They could be handled, fenced in,
controlled; indeed, if they were not kept under an exciting
bombardment and very carefully fed, they would go out. But at long
intervals, for some one of a dozen reasons--science knew so little,
fundamentally, of the true inwardness of the intra-atomic reactions--one
of these small, tame, self-limiting vortices flared, nova-like, into a large,
wild, self-sustaining one. It ceased being a servant then, and became a
master. Such flare-ups occurred, perhaps, only once or twice in a
century on Earth; the trouble was that they were so utterly, damnably
permanent. They never went out. And no data were ever secured: for
every living thing in the vicinity of a flare-up died; every instrument
and every other solid thing within a radius of a hundred 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--otherwise Civilization would scarcely have had a planet left.
And unless something could be done about loose vortices before too
many years, the consequences would be really serious. That was why
his laboratory had been established in the first place.
Nothing much had been accomplished so far. The tractor beam that
would take hold of them had never been designed. Nothing material
was of any use; it melted. Pressors worked, after a fashion: it was by
the use of these beams that they shoved the vortices around, off into the
waste places--unless it proved cheaper to allow the places where they
had come into being to remain waste places. A few, through sheer luck,
had been blown into self-limiting bits by duodec. Duodecaplylatomate,
the most powerful, the most frightfully detonant explosive ever
invented upon all the known planets of the First Galaxy. But duodec
had taken an awful toll of life. Also, since it usually scattered a vortex
instead of extinguishing it, duodec had actually caused far 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 of them were still being tried. Some, such as
the perennially-appearing one of building a huge hemispherical hull in
the ground under and around the vortex, installing an inertialess drive,
and shooting the whole neighborhood out into space, were perhaps
feasible from an engineering standpoint. They were, however,
potentially so capable of making things worse that they would not be
tried save as last-ditch measures. In short, the control of loose vortices
was very much an unsolved problem.
* * * * *
Number One vortex, the oldest and worst upon Tellus, had been pushed
out into the Badlands; and there, at eight o'clock on the tenth, Cloud
started to work upon it.

The "lookout station," instead of being some such ramshackle structure
as might have been deduced from the Lensman's casual terminology,
was in