Nothing much had been accomplished so far. Tractor beams would not hold. Nothing material was of any use. Pressors worked after a fashion—vortices could be moved from one place to another. One or two, through sheer luck, had been blown out by heavy charges of duodecaplylatomate. But duodec had taken many lives; and since it scattered a vortex as often as it fed it, duodec had caused vastly 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 were still being tried. Some, such as the perennially appearing one of installing a free drive and flinging the whole neighborhood off into space, were perhaps feasible from an engineering standpoint. They were potentially so capable of making things worse, however, that they could not be used except as last-ditch measures. In short, the control of loose atomic vortices was very much an unsolved problem.
2: Cloud Blasts a Vortex
Number One, the oldest and worst vortex on Tellus, had been pushed out into the badlands, and there, at eight o’clock of the indicated morning, Cloud started to work on it.
The ‘lookout shack’ was in fact a fully-equipped nucleonics laboratory. Its staff was not large—eight men worked in three staggered eight-hour shifts—but the development of its instrumentation had required hundreds of man-years of intensive research. Every factor of the vortex’s activity was measured and recorded continuously, throughout every minute of every day of every year; and all of these measurements were summed up, integrated, into the ‘sigma’ curve. This curve, which to the layman’s eye was only a senselessly zig-zagging line, told the expert everything he wanted to know.
Cloud glanced at the chart and scowled, for one jagged peak, less than half an hour old, almost touched the top line of the paper.
‘Bad, huh, Frank?’
‘Bad, Storm, and getting worse. I wouldn’t wonder if “Calamity” were right—it certainly looks like she’s getting ready to blow her top.’
‘No equation, I suppose,’ Strong said. The Lensman ignored as completely as did the observer, if not as flippantly, the distinct possibility that at any moment the obervatory and all that it contained might be resolved into their sub-atomic components.
‘None,’ Cloud stated. 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 fit that wildly-shifting sigma curve. ‘But most of these recent cycles cut ordinate seven fifty, so I’ll take that for my value. That means nine point nine six zero kilograms of duodec for my basic, and nine four six two and ten point three five eight as alternates. On the wire?’
‘It went out as you said it,’ the observer replied. ‘They’ll be here in five minutes.”
‘QX. I’ll get dressed, then.’
The Lensman and one of the observers helped him into his cumbersome, heavily-padded armor; then all three men went out to the flitter. A tiny speedster, really; a slim torpedo with the
16
17
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. Cloud checked the newly installed triplex launcher, made sure that he knew which bomb was in each tube, and climbed into the tiny operating compartment. The massive door—flitters are too small to have airlocks—rammed shut upon its teflon gaskets, the heavy toggles drove home. A heavily-padded form closed in upon the pilot, leaving only his left arm and his right leg free to move.
‘Everybody in the clear?’
‘All clear.’
Cloud shot the flitter into the air and toward the seething inferno which was Loose Atomic Vortex Number One. The crater was a ragged, jagged hole perhaps two miles from lip to lip and a quarter of a mile in depth. The floor, being largely molten, was almost 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 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 pockmarked scoriae or brilliant planes of obsidian.
For always, at some point or other, there was a torrent of air rushing into that crater. It rushed in as ordinary air. It came out, however, in a ragingly uprushing pillar, as—as something else. No one knows exactly what a vortex does to air. Or, rather, the composition of the effluent gases varies as frequently and as unpredictably as does the activity of the vortex. Thus, the atmosphere emitted from a vortex-crater may be corrosive, it may be poisonous, it may be merely different; but it is no longer the air which we human beings are used to breathing. This conversion and corruption of Earth’s atmosphere, if it could not be stopped, would end the possibility of life upon the planet’s surface long before the world itself could be consumed.
As to the vortex itself … it is difficult indeed to describe such a phenomenon. Practically all of its frightful radiation lies in those octaves of the spectrum which are invisible to the human eye. Suffice it to say, then, that it was a continuously active
atomic reactor, with an effective surface temperature of approximately twenty five thousand degrees Kelvin, and let it go at that.
Neal Cloud, driving his flitter through that murky, radiation-riddled atmosphere, extrapolating his sigma curve by the sheer power of his mathematical-prodigy’s mind, sat appalled. For the activity level was, and even in its lowest dips remained, well above the figure he had chosen. Distant though he was from the rim of that hellish pit, his skin began to prickle and burn. His eyes began to smart and to ache. He knew what those symptoms meant: even the Sitter’s powerful screens were leaking; even his suit-screens and his special goggles were not stopping the stuff. But he wouldn’t quit yet: the activity might—probably would— take a nose-dive any second now. If it did, he’d have to be ready. On the other hand, it might blow up any second, too.
There were two schools of mathematical thought upon that point. One held that a vortex, without any essential change in its nature or behavior, would keep on growing bigger until, uniting with the other vortices of the planet, it had converted all the mass of the world into energy.
The second school, of which the forementioned ‘Calamity’ Carlowitz was the loudest voice, taught that at a certain stage of development the internal energy of the vortex would become so great that generation-radiation equilibrium could not be maintained. This would of course result in an explosion, the nature and consequences of which this Carlowitz was wont to dwell upon in ghoulishly mathematical glee. Neither school could prove its point, however—or, rather, each school proved its point with eminently plausible mathematics—and each hated and derided the other, with heat and at length.
Neal Cloud, as he studied through his almost opaque defences that indescribably ravening fireball, that rapacious monstrosity which might very well have come from the very center of the hottest hell of mythology, felt strangely inclined to agree with Carlowitz. It didn’t seem possible that it could get any worse without exploding.
The activity stayed high; ‘way too high. The tiny control room grew hotter and hotter. His skin burned more and his eyes ached worse. He touched a stud and spoke.
‘Phil? Better get me three more bombs. Like these, except up around. . . .’
18
19
‘I don’t check you. If you do that, it’s apt to drop to a minimum and stay there. I’d suggest a wider interval.’
‘QX—that’d be better. Two, then, instead of three. Four point nine eight zero and thirteen point nine four zero. You might break out a jar of burn-dressing, too; some fairly warm stuff is leaking through.’
•Will do. Come down, fast!’
Cloud landed. He stripped to the skin and his friends smeared him with the thick, gooey stuff that was not only added protection against radiation, but also a sovereign remedy for new burns. He exchanged his goggles for a heavier, darker pair. The two bombs arrived and were substituted for two of the original load.
‘I thought of something while I was up there,’ Cloud said then. ‘Fourteen kilograms of duodec is nobody’s firecracker, but it may be the least of what’s going to go off. Have you got any idea of what’s going to become of the intrinsic energy of the vortex when I snuff it?’
‘Can’t say I have.’ The Lensman frowned in thought. ‘No data.’
‘Neither have I. But I’d say you’d better go back to the new station—the one you were going to move to if it kept on getting worse. The clocks are ticking there, aren’t they?’