ahead
“Oh! It’s Dr. Cloud!” Recognition flashed into the guard’s eyes. “I didn’t recognize you at first. It’ll be two or three
miles before you’ll have to put on your armor; you’ll know when better than anyone can tell you. They didn’t tell us
they were going to send for you. It’s just a little new one, and the dope we got was that they were going to shove it
off into the canyon with pressure.”
“They didn’t send for me.” Cloud tried to smile. “I’m just driving around-haven’t my armor along” even. So I guess I
might as well go back.”
He turned the Special around. A loose vortex-new. There might be a hundred of them, scattered over a radius of
two hundred miles. Sisters of the one that bad murdered his family-the hellish spawn of that accursed Number
Eleven vortex that that damnably incompetent bungling ass had tried to blow up. . . . 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 a blow from a
fist.
He thought. Really thought, now; cogently, intensely” clearly. If the could do it . . . could actually blow out the
atomic flame of an atomic vortex … not exactly revenge” but…. By Klono’ s brazen bowels, it would work-it’d have
to work-he’d make it work! And grimly, quietly” but alive in every fiber now, he drove back towards the city practi-
cally as fast as he had come away.
If the Lensman was surprised at Cloud’s sudden reappearance in the laboratory he did not show it. Nor did he offer
any comment as his erstwhile first assistant went to various lockers and cupboards, assembling meters, coils”
tubes” armor, and other paraphernalia and apparatus.
“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”” and 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 is the Patrol’s risk. If, on the other hand, you think that you’re going to
try to snuff a vortex” the stuff stays here. That’s final, Storm.”
“You’re right-and wrong, Phil,” Cloud stated, not at all sheepishly. “I’m going to blow out Number One vortex with
duodec, yes-but I’m really going to blow it out, not merely make a stab at it as an excuse for suicide” as you think.”
“How?” the big Lensman’s query was scepticism incarnate. “It can’t be done” except by an almost impossibly
fortuitous accident. You yourself have been the most bitterly opposed of us all to these suicidal attempts.”
“I know it-I didn’t have the solution myself until a few hours ago-it hit me all at once. Funny I never thought of it
before; it’s been right in sight all the time.”
“That’s the way with most problems”” the Chief admitted. “Plain enough after you see the key equation. Well” I’m
perfectly willing to be convinced” but I warn you that I’ll take a lot of convincing-and someone else will do the
work, not you.”
“When I get done you’ll see why I’ll pretty nearly have to do it myself. But to convince you, exactly what is the
knot?”
“Variability”” snapped the older man. “To be effective” the charge of explosive at the moment of impact must
match, within very close limits, the activity of the vortex itself. Too small a charge scatters it around in vortices
which, 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
super-human effort to avoid it. I’ll take all due precautions, for the sake of the job, 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 per cent 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 oft 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 objec-
tive 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 explosive, 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, nowhere near me.”
“I hope. But do you realize just how busy a man you are going to be during those ten or twelve seconds?” “Fully.”
Cloud’s face grew somber. “But I will be in full control. I won’t be afraid of anything that can happen -anything.