The Vortex Blaster | Page 6

fact a fully-equipped observatory. Its staff was not large--eight
men worked in three staggered eight-hour shifts of two men each--but
the instruments! To develop them had required hundreds of man-years
of time and near-miracles of research, not the least of the problems
having been that of developing shielded conductors capable of carrying
truly through five-ply screens of force the converted impulses of the
very radiations against which those screens were most effective. For the
observatory, and the one long approach to it as well, had to be screened
heavily; without such protection no life could exist there.
This problem and many others had been solved, however, and there the
instruments were. Every phase and factor of the vortex's existence and
activity were measured and recorded continuously, throughout every
minute of every day of every year. And all of these records were
summed up, integrated, into the "Sigma" curve. This curve, while only
an incredibly and senselessly tortuous line to the layman's eye, was a
veritable mine of information to the initiate.
Cloud glanced along the Sigma curve of the previous forty-eight hours
and scowled, for one jagged peak, scarcely an hour old, actually
punched through the top line of the chart.
"Bad, huh, Frank?" he grunted.
"Plenty bad, Storm, and getting worse," the observer assented. "I
wouldn't wonder if Carlowitz were right, after all--if she ain't getting
ready to blow her top I'm a Zabriskan fontema's maiden aunt."
"No periodicity--no equation, of course." It was a statement, not a
question. 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
component atoms.
"None whatever," came flatly from Cloud. 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 be made to fit even the
weighted-average locus of that wildly-shifting Sigma curve. "But most
of the cycles cut this ordinate here--seven fifty-one--so I'll take that for
my value. That means nine point nine oh six kilograms of duodec basic
charge, with one five percent over and one five percent under that for
alternates. Neocarballoy casing, fifty-three millimeters on the basic,
others in proportion. On the wire?"
"It went out as you said it," the observer reported. "They'll have 'em
here in fifteen minutes."
"QX--I'll get dressed, then."
The Lensman and the observer helped him into his cumbersome,
heavily-padded armor. They checked his instruments, making sure that
the protective devices of the suit were functioning at full efficiency.
Then all three went out to the flitter. A tiny speedster, really; a torpedo
bearing 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. But
this one had something that the ordinary speedster or flitter did not
carry; spaced around the needle beak there yawned the open muzzles of
a triplex bomb-thrower.
[Illustration: Ten seconds in which to solve the equation--to choose, fire,
move clear--the flitter bucked.]
More checking. The Lensman and the armored Cloud both knew that
every one of the dozens of instruments upon the flitter's special board
was right to the hair; nevertheless each one was compared with the
master-instrument of the observatory.
* * * * *
The bombs arrived and were loaded in; and Cloud, with a
casually-waved salute, stepped into the tiny operating compartment.
The massive door--flitters have no airlocks, as the whole midsection is
scarcely bigger than an airlock would have to be--rammed shut upon its

fiber gaskets, the heavy toggles drove home. A cushioned form closed
in upon the pilot, leaving only his arms and lower legs free.
Then, making sure that his two companions had ducked for cover,
Cloud shot his flitter into the air and toward the seething inferno which
was Loose Atomic Vortex Number One. For it was seething, no fooling;
and it was an inferno. The crater was a ragged, jagged hole a full mile
from lip to lip and perhaps a quarter of that in depth. It was not,
however, a perfect cone, for the floor, being largely incandescently
molten, was practically 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 hardness and
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 pock-marked
scoriae or into brilliant planes of obsidian.
For always, somewhere, there