Jo was in the seat beside him. Every dear, every sweet, every luscious, lovely memory of her was there … and behind him, just beyond eye-corner visibility, were the three kids. And a whole lifetime of this loomed ahead—a vista of emptiness more vacuous by far than the emptiest reaches of inter-galactic 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 on the accelerator; eased down on the brake-pedal; took his place in the line of almost-stalled traffic. There was a barrier and a trimly-uniformed policeman.
‘Sorry, sir,’ the officer said, with a sweeping, turning gesture, but you’ll have to detour over to Twenty. There’s a loose atomic vortex beside the road up ahead … Oh, it’s you, Doctor Cloud! You can go ahead, of course. Couple of miles yet before you’ll need your armor. They didn’t tell us they were sending for you.
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It’s just a little new one, and the dope we got was that they were going to shove it over into the badlands with pressors.’
‘They didn’t send for me.’ Cloud tried to smile. ‘I’m just driving around. No armor, even, so I might as well go back.’
He turned the Special around. A loose vortex—new. There might be three or four of them, scattered over that many counties. Sisters of the one that had murdered his family—spawn of that damned Number Eleven that that bungling nitwit had tried to blow out… 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 the blow of a fist.
He thought. Really thought, now; intensely and clearly. If he could do it—could actually blow out the atomic flame of an atomic vortex … not exactly revenge, but … it would work … it would have to work—he’d make it work! And grimly, quietly, but alive now in every fiber, he drove back to the city almost as fast as he had come away.
If Philip Strong was surprised at Cloud’s sudden reappearance in the laboratory he did not show it. Nor did he offer any comment as his erstwhile assistant went to various lockers and cupboards, assembling coils, tubes, armor, and other paraphernalia.
‘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.’ 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’s the Patrol’s risk. But if you’re thinking of trying to snuff a vortex, the stuff stays here. That’s out, Storm.’
‘But I’m going to really snuff ’em, starting with Number One and taking ’em in order. No suicide.’
‘Huh?’ Skepticism incarnate. ‘It can’t be done, except by an almost impossibly fortuitous accident, which is why you yourself have always been as opposed to such attempts as the rest of us. The charge of explosive must match, within very narrow limits, the activity of the vortex itself at the instant of detonation; and that activity varies so greatly and so unpredictably that all attempts at accurate extrapolation have failed. Even the Conference of Scientists couldn’t develop a usable formula,
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any more than they could work out a tractor that could be used as a tow-line on one.’
‘Wait a minute!’ Cloud protested. ‘They found that it could be forecast, for a length of time proportional to the length of the cycle in question, by an extension of the calculus of warped surfaces.’
‘Humph! I said a usable formula!’ the Lensman snorted. What good is a ten-second forecast when it takes a GOMEAC twice that long to solve … Oh!’ he broke off, staring. –
‘Oh,’ he repeated, slowly. ‘I forgot for a minute that you were born with a super-GOMEAC in your head. But there are other things.’
‘There were. Now there are none.’
‘No?’
‘NO. I couldn’t take such chances before, and I’d’ve tied myself up into knots if I did. Now nothing can throw me. I can compute all the elements of a sigma curve in nothing flat. A ten-second prediction gives me ten seconds of action. That’s plenty.’
‘I see.’ Strong pondered, his fingers drumming softly upon his desk. Lensmen did not ordinarily use their Lenses on their Lensless friends, but this was no ordinary occasion. ‘You aren’t afraid of death any more. But you won’t invite it? And do you mind if I Lens you on that?’
‘Come in. I’ll not invite it, 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 one gets me, what the hell?’
‘QX.’ The Lensman withdrew from Cloud’s mind. ‘Not too good, but good enough. What’s your plan? You won’t have time for the usual method of attack.’
‘Like this.’ Cloud found a sheet of drafting paper and sketched rapidly. ‘There’s the crater, with the vortex at the bottom—there. From the sigma curve I estimate the most probable value of the activity I’ll have to shoot at. Then I select three duodec bombs from the hundred or so I’ll have made up in advance—one on the mark, one each five percent over and under the mark. The bombs, of course, will be cased in neocarb-alloy thick enough for penetration. Then I take off in a shielded armored flying suit, say about here …’
‘If you take off at all, you and your suit will be inside a flitter,’ the Lensman interrupted. ‘Too many instruments for a suit, to
say nothing of bombs, and you’ll need heavier screen than a suit can put out. We can adapt a flitter for bomb-throwing easily enough.’
‘That’d be better, of course. QX, I set my flitter into a projectile trajectory toward the center of disturbance. Twelve seconds away, at about this point here, I take my instantaneous readings, solve the equations of that particular warped surface for some definite zero time….’
‘But s’pose the cycle won’t give you a ten-second solution?’
‘Then I’ll swing around and try again until a long-enough 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 assumed value…’
‘Assume it isn’t—it probably won’t be.’
‘I accelerate or decelerate….”
‘Solving new equations—differential equations at that—all the while?’
‘Certainly. Don’t interrupt so. I stick around until the sigma curve, extrapolated to zero time, matches one of my bombs. I build up the right velocity, cut that bomb loose, shoot myself off in a sharp curve, and Z-W-E-E-T—POWIE! She’s out.’ With an expressive, sweeping gesture.
‘You hope.’ Strong was frankly dubious. ‘And there you are, right in the middle of the damndest explosion you ever saw.’
‘Oh, no. I’ve gone free in the meantime, so nothing can touch me.’
7 hope! But do you realize just how busy you are going to be during those ten or twelve seconds?’
‘Yes.’ Cloud’s face grew somber. ‘But I’ll be in full control. I won’t be afraid of anything that can happen—of anything that can happen. From my standpoint, that’s the hell of it.’
‘QX,’ The Lensman decided, ‘You can go. We’ll iron out the kinks as we go.’
‘We?’
‘I’ll be in the lookout shack with the boys, at least on the first ones. When do you want to start?’
‘How long will it take to fix up the flitter?’
‘Two days. Say we meet you there Saturday morning?”
‘I’ll be there,’ and again Neal Cloud and Babe, the big blue ox, hit the road; and as he rolled along the physicist mulled
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15
over in his mind the assignment to which he had set himself.
Like fire, only worse, atomic energy was a good servant, but a very bad master. Man had liberated it before he could really control it. In fact, control was not yet, and probably never would be, perfect. True, all except a minute fraction of one percent of the multitudes of small, tame, self-limiting vortices were perfect servants. But at long intervals, for some unknown reason—science knew so little, fundamentally, of nuclear reactions—one of them flared, nova-like, into a huge, wild, self-sustaining monster. It ceased being a servant, then, and became a master.
Such flare-ups occurred very infrequently; the trouble was that the loose vortices were so utterly, so damnably permanent. They never went out; and no data were ever obtained. Every living thing in the vicinity of a flare-up died; every instrument and every other solid thing within a radius of hundreds of 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. But even so, unless something could be done about loose vortices before too many years, the situation would become extremely serious. That was why the Laboratory had been established in the first place.