The Vortex Blaster | Page 4

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 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,