And,” he went on, under his breath, “that’s the hell of it.”
“QX,” the Lensman admitted finally, “you can go. There are a lot of things you haven’t mentioned, but you’ll prob-
ably be able to work them out as you go along. I think I’ll go out and work with the boys in the lookout station while
you’re doing your stuff. When are you figuring on starting?” “Now long will it take to get the flitter ready?”
“A couple of days. Say we meet you there Saturday morning?”
“Saturday, the tenth, at eight o’clock. I’ll be there.”
And again Neal Cloud and Babe, the big blue ox, hit the road. And as he rolled, the physicist mulled over in his
mind the assignment to which he had set himself.
Like fire, only worse, intra-atomic energy was a good servant, but a terrible master. Man had liberated it before be
could really control it. In fact, control was not yet, and perhaps never would be, perfect. Up to a certain size and
activity, yes. They, the millions upon millions of self-limiting ones, were the servants. They could be handled,
fenced in, controlled; indeed, if they were not kept under an exciting bombardment and very carefully fed, they
would go out. But at long intervals, for some one of a dozen reasons-science knew so little, fundamentally, of the
true inwardness of the intra-atomic reactions-one of these small, tame, self-limiting vortices flared, nova-like, into
a large, wild, self-sustaining one. It ceased being a servant then, and became a master. Such flare-ups occurred, per-
haps, only once or twice in a century on Earth; the trouble was that they were so utterly, damnably permanent.
They never went out. And no data were ever secured for every living thing in the vicinity of a flare-up died; every
instrument and every other solid thing within a radius of a hundred 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-otherwise Civilization would
scarcely have had a planet left. And unless something could be done about loose vortices before too many years,
the consequences would be really serious. That was why his laboratory had been established in the first place.
Nothing much had been accomplished so far. The tractor beam that would take hold of them had never been
designed. Nothing material was of any use, it melted. Pressors worked, after a fashion: it was by the use of these
beams that they shoved the vortices around, off into the waste places-unless it proved cheaper to allow the places
where they had come into being to remain waste places. A few, through sheer luck, had been blown into
self-limiting bits by duodec. Duodec-aplylatomate, the most powerful” the most frightfully detonant explosive ever
invented upon all the known planets of the First Galaxy. But duodec had taken an awful toll of life. Also, since it
usually scattered a vortex instead of extinguishing it, duodec had actually caused far 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 of them were still being tried. Some” such as the
perennially-appearing one of building a huge hemispherical hull in the ground under and around the vortex,
installing an inertialess drive, and shooting the whole neighborhood out into space, were perhaps feasible from an
engineering standpoint. They were, however” potentially so capable of making things worse that they would not be
tried save as last ditch measures. In short, the control of loose vortices was very much an unsolved problem.
Number One vortex, the oldest and worst upon Tellus, had been pushed out into the Badlands; and there, at eight
o’clock on the tenth” Cloud started to work upon it.
The “lookout station,” instead of being some such ramshackle structure as might have been deduced from the
Lensman’s casual terminology, was in fact a fully-equipped observatory. Its staff was not large-eight men worked in
three staggered eight-hour shifts of two men each-but the instruments! To develop them had required hundreds of
man-years of time and near miracles of research, not the least of the problems having been that of developing
shielded conductors capable of carrying truly through fiveply screens of force the converted impulses of the very
radiations against which those screens were most effective. For the observatory” and the long approach to it as
well, had to be screened heavily; without such protection no life could exist there.
This problem and many others had been solved, however” and there the instruments were. Every phase and factor of
the vortex’s existence and activity were measured and recorded continuously, throughout every minute of every day
of every year. And all of these records were summed up”
integrated, into the “Sigma” curve. This curve, while only an incredibly and senselessly tortuous line to the layman’s
eye, was a veritable mine of information to the initiate.
Cloud glanced along the Sigma curve of the previous forty-eight hours and scowled, for one jagged peak, scarcely
an hour old, actually punched through the top line of the chart.
“Bad, huh, Frank?” he grunted.
“Plenty bad, Storm, and getting worse,” the observer assented. “I wouldn’t wonder if Carlowitz were right, after
all-if she ain’t getting ready to blow her top I’m a Zabriskan fontema’s maiden aunt.”
“No periodicity-no equation, of course.” It was a statement, not a question. The Lensman ignored as completely as
did the observer, if not as flippantly, the distinct possibility that at any moment the observatory and all that it
contained might be resolved into their component atoms.
“None whatever,” came flatly from Cloud. 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 be made to fit even the weighted-average locus of that
wildly-shifting Sigma curve. “But most of the cycles cut this ordinate here-seven fifty-one-so I’ll take that for my
value. That means nine point nine or six kilograms of duodec basic charge, with one five per cent over and one five
per cent under that for alternates. Neocarballoy casting, fifty-three millimeters on the basic, others in proportion.
On the wire?”
“It went out as you said it,” the observer reported. “They’ll have ’em here in fifteen minutes.”
“QX-I’ll get dressed, then.”
The Lensman and the observer helped him into his cumbersome, heavily-padded armor. They checked his instru-
ments, making sure that the protective devices of the suit were functioning at full efficiency. Then all three went
out to the flitter. A tiny speedster, really; a torpedo bearing the 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. But this one had something that the ordinary speedster or flitter did not carry; spaced
around the needle beak there yawned the open muzzles of a triplex bomb-thrower.
More checking. The Lensman and the armored Cloud both knew that every one of the dozens of instruments upon
the flitter’s special board was right to the bair; nevertheless each one was compared with the master-instrument of
the observatory.
The bombs arrived and were loaded in; and Cloud, with a casually-waved salute, stepped into the tiny operating
compartment. The massive door-hitters have no airlocks” as the whole midsection is scarcely bigger than an
airlock would have to be-rammed shut upon its fiber gaskets” the heavy toggles drove home. A cushioned form
closed in upon the pilot, leaving only his arms and lower legs free.
Then, making sure that his two companions had ducked for cover, Cloud shot his hitter into the air and toward the
seething inferno which was Loose Atomic Vortex Number One. For it was seething, no fooling; and it was an
inferno. The crater was a ragged, jagged hole a full mile from lip to lip and perhaps a quarter of that in depth. It was
not, however, a perfect cone, for the floor, being largely incandescently molten, was practically 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 hardness and 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 in rushing 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 pock-marked scoriae or into brilliant planes of obsidian.
For always, somewhere, there was an enormous volume of air pouring into that crater. It rushed in as ordinary air. It
came out, however, in a ragingly-up rushing pillar, as -as something else. No one knew-or knows yet, for that
matter-exactly what a loose vortex does to the molecules and atoms of air. In fact, due to the extreme variability