He did not know” he did not even suspect, that under certain conditions of atmospheric potential and of ground-
magnetic stress his perfectly designed lightning-rod system would become a super-powerful magnet for flying
vortices of atomic disintegration.
And now Neal Cloud, atomic physicist” sat at his desk in a strained, dull apathy. His face was a yellowish-grey
white, his tendoned hands gripped rigidly the arms of his chair. His eyes” hard and lifeless, stared unseeingly past
the small, three-dimensional block portrait of all that had made life worth living.
For his guardian against lightning had been a vortex magnet at the moment when a luckless wight had attempted to
abate the nuisance of a “loose” atomic vortex. That wight died, of course-they almost always do-and the vortex,
instead of being destroyed, was simply broken up into an indefinite number of widely-scattered new vortices. And
one of these bits of furious, uncontrolled energy, resembling more nearly a handful of material rived from a sun
than anything else with which ordinary man is familiar, darted toward and crashed downward to earth through Neal
Cloud’s new house.
That home did not burn it; it simply exploded. Nothing of it, in it, or around it stood a chance, for in a fractional
second of time the place where it had been was a crater of seething, boiling lava-a crater which filled the atmos-
phere to a height of miles with poisonous vapors; which flooded all circumambient space with lethal radiations.
Cosmiscally, the whole thing was infinitesimal. Ever since man learned how to liberate intra-atomic energy, the
vortices of disintegration had been breaking out of control. Such accidents had been happening, were happening,
and would continue indefinitely to happen. More than one world, perhaps, had been or would be consumed to the
last gram by such loose atomic vortices. What of that? Of what real importance are a few grains of sand to an ocean
beach five thousand miles long, a hundred miles wide, and ten miles deep?
And even to that individual grain of sand called “Earth”-or, in modern parlance, “Sol Three,” or “Tellus of Sol,” or
simply “Tellus”-the affair was of negligible importance. One man had died; but” in dying” he had added one more
page to the thick bulk of negative results already on file. That Mrs. Cloud and her children had perished was merely
unfortunate. The vortex itself was not yet a real threat to Tellus. It was a “new” one, and thus it would be a long time
before it would become other than a local menace. And well before that could happen before even the oldest of
Tellus’ loose vortices had eaten away much of her mass or poisoned much of her atmosphere, her scientists would
have solved the problem. It was unthinkable that Tellus, the point of origin, and the very center of Galactic
Civilization, should cease to exist.
But to Neal Cloud the accident was the ultimate catastrophe. His personal universe had crashed in ruins; what was
left was not worth picking up. He and Jo had been married for almost twenty years and the bonds between them had
grown stronger, deeper, truer with every passing day. And the kids. . . . It couldn’t have happened . . . fate
COULDN’T do this to him.. . but it had … it could. Gone … gone … GONE.
And to Neal Cloud, atomic physicist, sitting there at his desk in torn, despairing abstraction, with black maggots of
thought gnawing holes in his brain, the catastrophe was doubly galling because of its cruel irony. For he was second
from the top in the Atomic Research Laboratory; his life’s work had been a search for a means of extinguishment
of exactly such loose vortices as had destroyed his all.
His eyes focused vaguely upon the portrait. Clear” honest grey eyes . . . lines of character and humor . . . sweetly
curved lips, ready to smile or to kiss. . . .
He wrenched his eyes away and scribbled briefly upon a sheet of paper. Then, getting up stiffly, he took the portrait
and moved woodenly across the room to a furnace. As though enshrining it he placed the plastic block upon a
refractory between the electrodes and threw a switch. After the flaming arc bad done its work be turned and handed
the paper to a tall man, dressed in plain grey leather” who had been watching him with quiet, understanding eyes.
Significant enough to the initiated of the importance of this laboratory is the fact that it was headed by an
Unattached Lensman.
“As of now, Phil, if it’s QX with you.”
The Grey Lensman took the document, glanced at it, and slowly, meticulously” tore it into sixteen equal pieces.
“Uh, uh, Storm,” he denied, gently. “Not a resignation. Leave of absence” yes-indefinite-but not a resignation.”
“Why?” It was scarcely a question; Cloud’s voice was level, uninflected. “I won’t be worth the paper I’d waste.” “Now,
no,” the Lensman conceded, “but the future’s another matter. I haven’t said anything so far, because to anyone who
knew you and Jo as I knew you it was abundantly clear that nothing could be said.” Two hands gripped and held. “For
the future, though, four words were uttered long ago, that have never been improved upon. `This, too, shall pass.'”
“You think so?”
“I don’t think so, Storm-I know so. I’ve been around a long time. You are too good a man, and the world has too
much use for you, for you to go down permanently out of control. You’ve got a place in the world, and you’ll be
back-” A thought struck the Lensman, and he went on in an altered tone. “You wouldn’t-but of course you wouldn’t
-you couldn’t.”
“I don’t think so. No I won’t-that never was any kind of a solution to any problem.”
Nor was it. Until that moment, suicide had not entered Cloud’s mind, and he rejected it instantly. His kind of man
did not take the easy way out.
After a brief farewell Cloud made his way to an elevator and was whisked down to the garage. Into his big blue
DeKhotinsky Sixteen Special and away.
Through traffic so heavy that front-, rear-, and side bumpers almost touched he drove with his wonted cool skill;
even though, consciously, he did not know that the other cars were there. He slowed, turned, stopped, “gave her the
oof,” all in correct response to flashing signals in all shapes and colors-purely automatically. Consciously” he did
not know where he was going, nor care. If he thought at all, his numbed brain was simply trying to run away from its
own bitter imaging-which, if he had thought at all” he would have known to be a hopeless task. But he did not think;
he simply acted, dumbly, miserably. His eyes saw, optically; his body, reacted, mechanically; his thinking brain was
completely in abeyance.
Into a one-way skyway he rocketed” along it over the suburbs and into the transcontinental super-highway. Edging
inward, lane after lane, he reached the “unlimited” way -unlimited, that is” except for being limited to cars of not
less than seven hundred horsepower; in perfect mechanical condition, driven by registered, tested drivers at speeds
not less than one hundred and twenty-five miles an hour flashed his registry number at the control station, and
shoved his right foot down to the floor.
Now everyone knows that an ordinary DeKhotinsky Sporter will do a hundred and forty honestly-measured miles in
one honestly measured hour; but very few ordinary drivers have ever found out how fast one of those, brutal big
souped-up Sixteens can wheel. They simply haven’t got what it takes to open one up.
“Storm” Cloud found out that day. He held that two and-a-half-ton Juggernaut on the road, wide open, for two solid
hours. But it didn’t help. Drive as he would, he could not outrun that which rode with him. Beside him and within
him and behind him. For Jo was there. Jo and the kids, but mostly Jo. It was Jo’s car as much as it was his. “Babe,
the big blue ox,” was Joe’s pet name for it; because, like Paul Bunyan’s fabulous beast, it was pretty nearly six feet
between the eyes. Everything they had ever had was that way. She was in the seat beside him. Every dear, every
sweet, every luscious, lovely memory of her was there … and behind him, just out of eye-corner visibility, were the
three kids. And a whole lifetime of this loomed ahead-a vista of emptiness more vacuous far than the emptiest
reaches of intergalactic 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 his accelerator, eased down his
mighty brakes. He pulled up at the control station and a trimly-uniformed officer made a gesture.
“Sorry, sir,” the policeman said” “but you’ll have to detour here. There’s a loose atomic vortex beside the road up