The Vortex Blaster Read online

ordinary DeKhotinsky Sporter will do ahundred and forty honestly-measured miles in one honestly measured hour;but very few ordinary drivers have ever found out how fast one of thosebrutal big souped-up Sixteens can wheel. They simply haven't got what ittakes to open one up.

  "Storm" Cloud found out that day. He held that two-and-a-half-tonJuggernaut on the road, wide open, for two solid hours. But it didn'thelp. 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 thekids, but mostly Jo. It was Jo's car as much as it was his. "Babe, thebig blue ox," was Jo's pet name for it; because, like Paul Bunyan'sfabulous beast, it was pretty nearly six feet between the eyes.Everything they had ever had was that way. She was in the seat besidehim. Every dear, every sweet, every luscious, lovely memory of her wasthere ... and behind him, just out of eye-corner visibility, were thethree kids. And a whole lifetime of this loomed ahead--a vista ofemptiness more vacuous far than the emptiest reaches of intergalacticspace. Damnation! He couldn't stand much more of--

  High over the roadway, far ahead, a brilliant octagon flared red. Thatmeant "STOP!" in any language. Cloud eased up his accelerator, easeddown his mighty brakes. He pulled up at the control station and atrimly-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 ahead--

  "Oh! It's Dr. Cloud!" Recognition flashed into the guard's eyes. "Ididn't recognize you at first. You can go ahead, of course. It'll be twoor three miles before you'll have to put on your armor; you'll know whenbetter than anyone can tell you. They didn't tell us they were going tosend for _you_. It's just a little new one, and the dope we got was thatthey were going to shove it off into the canyon with pressure."

  "They didn't send for me." Cloud tried to smile. "I'm just drivingaround--haven't my armor along, even. So I guess I might as well goback."

  He turned the Special around. A loose vortex--new. There might be ahundred of them, scattered over a radius of two hundred miles. Sistersof the one that had murdered his family--the hellish spawn of thataccursed Number Eleven vortex that that damnably incompetent bunglingass had tried to blow up.... Into his mind there leaped a picture,wire-sharp, of Number Eleven as he had last seen it, and simultaneouslyan idea hit him like a blow from a fist.

  He thought. _Really_ thought, now; cogently, intensely, clearly. If hecould do it ... could actually blow out the atomic flame of an atomicvortex ... not exactly revenge, but.... By Klono's brazen bowels, itwould work--it'd _have_ to work--he'd _make_ it work! And grimly,quietly, but alive in every fiber now, he drove back toward the citypractically as fast as he had come away.

  * * * * *

  If the Lensman was surprised at Cloud's sudden reappearance in thelaboratory he did not show it. Nor did he offer any comment as hiserstwhile first assistant went to various lockers and cupboards,assembling meters, coils, tubes, armor, and other paraphernalia andapparatus.

  "Guess that's all I'll need, Chief," Cloud remarked, finally. "Here's ablank check. If some of this stuff shouldn't happen to be in usablecondition 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 theresignation. "If you want the stuff for legitimate purposes, you're onPatrol business and it is the Patrol's risk. If, on the other hand, youthink 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 excusefor suicide, as you think."

  "How?" The big Lensman's query was skepticism incarnate. "It can't bedone, except by an almost impossibly fortuitous accident. You yourselfhave been the most bitterly opposed of us all to these suicidalattempts."

  "I know it--I didn't have the solution myself until a few hours ago--ithit me all at once. Funny I never thought of it before; it's been rightin sight all the time."

  "That's the way with most problems," the Chief admitted. "Plain enoughafter you see the key equation. Well, I'm perfectly willing to beconvinced, but I warn you that I'll take a lot of convincing--andsomeone 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 ofexplosive at the moment of impact must match, within very close limits,the activity of the vortex itself. Too small a charge scatters itaround, in vortices which, while much smaller than the original, arestill large enough to be self-sustaining. Too large a charge simplyrekindles the original vortex--still larger--in its original crater. Andthe activity that must be matched varies so tremendously, in magnitude,maxima, and minima, and the cycle is so erratic--ranging from seconds tohours without discoverable rhyme or reason--that all attempts to do soat any predetermined instant have failed completely. Why, even Kinnisonand Cardynge and the Conference of Scientists couldn't solve it, anymore than they could work out a tractor beam that could be used as atow-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 thelength of the cycle in question--by an extension of the calculus ofwarped surfaces."

  "Humph!" the Lensman snorted. "So what? What good is a ten-secondforecast when it takes a calculating machine an hour to solve theequations.... Oh!" He broke off, staring.

  "Oh," he repeated, slowly, "I forgot that you're a lightningcalculator--a mathematical prodigy from the day you were born--who neverhas to use a calculating machine even to compute an orbit.... But thereare other things."

  "I'll say there are; plenty of them. I'd thought of the calculator anglebefore, of course, but there was a worse thing than variability tocontend with...."

  "What?" the Lensman demanded.

  "Fear," Cloud replied, crisply. "At the thought of a hand-to-hand battlewith a vortex my brain froze solid. Fear--the sheer, stark, naturalhuman fear of death, that robs a man of the fine edge of control andbrings on the very death that he is trying so hard to avoid. That's whathad me stopped."

  "Right ... you may be right," the Lensman pondered, his fingers drummingquietly upon his desk. "And you are not afraid of death--now--evensubconsciously. 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 asfar as I'll go in promising. I won't make any superhuman effort to avoidit. I'll take all due precautions, for the sake of the job, but if itgets me, what the hell? The quicker it does, the better--the sooner I'llbe with Jo."

  "You believe that?"

  "Implicitly."

  "The vortices are as good as gone, then. They haven't got any morechance than Boskone has of licking the Patrol."

  "I'm afraid so," almost glumly. "The only way for it to get me is for meto 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 sketchedrapidly. "This is the crater, here, with the vortex at the bottom,there. From the observers' instruments or from a shielded set-up of myown I get my data on mass, emission, maxima, minima, and so on. Then Ihave them make me three duodec bombs--one on the mark of the activityI'm figuring on shooting at, and one each five percent over and underthat figure--cased in neocarballoy of exactly the computed thickness tolast until it gets to the center of the vortex. Then I take off in aflying suit, armored and shielded, say about here...."

  "If you take off at all, you'll take off in a suit, inside a one-manflitter," the Lensman interrupted. "Too many instruments for a suit, tosay nothing of bombs, and you'll need more screen than a suit candeliver. We can ad
apt a flitter for bomb-throwing easily enough."

  "QX; that would be better, of course. In that case, I set my flitterinto a projectile trajectory like this, whose objective is the center ofthe vortex, there. See? Ten seconds or so away, at about this point, Itake my instantaneous readings, solve the equations at that particularwarped 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_ showup."

  "QX. It will, sometime."

  "Sure. Then, having everything set for zero time, and assuming that theactivity 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, extrapolatedto zero time, matches one of my bombs. I cut that bomb loose, shootmyself off in a sharp curve, and Z-W-E-E-E-T--POWIE! She's out!" With anexpressive, sweeping gesture.

  "You hope," the Lensman was frankly dubious. "And there you are, rightin the middle of that explosion, with two duodec bombs outside yourarmor--or just inside your flitter."

  "Oh, no. I've shot them away several seconds ago, so that they explodesomewhere else, nowhere near me."

  "_I_ hope. But do you realize just how busy a man you are going to beduring those ten or twelve seconds?"

  "Fully." Cloud's face grew somber. "But I will be in full control. Iwon't be afraid of anything that can happen--_anything_. And," he wenton, under his breath, "that's the hell of it."

  "QX," the Lensman admitted finally, "you can go. There are a lot ofthings you haven't mentioned, but you'll probably be able to work themout as you go along. I think I'll go out and work with the boys in thelookout station while you're doing your stuff. When are you figuring onstarting?"

  "How 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 herolled the physicist mulled over in his mind the assignment to which hehad set himself.

  Like fire, only worse, intra-atomic energy was a good servant, but aterrible master. Man had liberated it before he could really control it.In fact, control was not yet, and perhaps never would be, perfect. Up toa certain size and activity, yes. They, the millions upon millions ofself-limiting ones, were the servants. They could be handled, fenced in,controlled; indeed, if they were not kept under an exciting bombardmentand very carefully fed, they would go out. But at long intervals, forsome one of a dozen reasons--science knew _so_ little, fundamentally, ofthe 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 amaster. Such flare-ups occurred, perhaps, only once or twice in acentury on Earth; the trouble was that they were so utterly, damnably_permanent_. They never went out. And no data were ever secured: forevery living thing in the vicinity of a flare-up died; every instrumentand every other solid thing within a radius of a hundred feet melteddown into the reeking, boiling slag of its crater.

  Fortunately, the rate of growth was slow--as slow, almost, as it waspersistent--otherwise Civilization would scarcely have had a planetleft. And unless something could be done about loose vortices beforetoo many years, the consequences would be really serious. That was whyhis laboratory had been established in the first place.

  Nothing much had been accomplished so far. The tractor beam that wouldtake hold of them had never been designed. Nothing material was of anyuse; it melted. Pressors worked, after a fashion: it was by the use ofthese beams that they shoved the vortices around, off into the wasteplaces--unless it proved cheaper to allow the places where they had comeinto being to remain waste places. A few, through sheer luck, had beenblown into self-limiting bits by duodec. Duodecaplylatomate, the mostpowerful, the most frightfully detonant explosive ever invented upon allthe known planets of the First Galaxy. But duodec had taken an awfultoll of life. Also, since it usually scattered a vortex instead ofextinguishing it, duodec had actually caused far more damage than it hadcured.

  No end of fantastic schemes had been proposed, of course; of varyingdegrees of fantasy. Some of them sounded almost practical. Some of themhad been tried; some of them were still being tried. Some, such as theperennially-appearing one of building a huge hemispherical hull in theground under and around the vortex, installing an inertialess drive, andshooting the whole neighborhood out into space, were perhaps feasiblefrom an engineering standpoint. They were, however, potentially socapable of making things worse that they would not be tried save aslast-ditch measures. In short, the control of loose vortices was verymuch an unsolved problem.

  * * * * *

  Number One vortex, the oldest and worst upon Tellus, had been pushed outinto the Badlands; and there, at eight o'clock on the tenth, Cloudstarted to work upon it.

  The "lookout station," instead of being some such ramshackle structureas might have been deduced from the Lensman's casual terminology, was infact a fully-equipped observatory. Its staff was not large--eight menworked in three staggered eight-hour shifts of two men each--but theinstruments! To develop them had required hundreds of man-years of timeand near-miracles of research, not the least of the problems having beenthat of developing shielded conductors capable of carrying truly throughfive-ply screens of force the converted impulses of the very radiationsagainst which those screens were most effective. For the observatory,and the one 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 theinstruments were. Every phase and factor of the vortex's existence andactivity were measured and recorded continuously, throughout everyminute of every day of every year. And all of these records were summedup, integrated, into the "Sigma" curve. This curve, while only anincredibly and senselessly tortuous line to the layman's eye, was averitable mine of information to the initiate.

  Cloud glanced along the Sigma curve of the previous forty-eight hoursand scowled, for one jagged peak, scarcely an hour old, actually punchedthrough the top line of the chart.

  "Bad, huh, Frank?" he grunted.

  "Plenty bad, Storm, and getting worse," the observer assented. "Iwouldn't wonder if Carlowitz were right, after all--if she ain't gettingready to blow her top I'm a Zabriskan fontema's maiden aunt."

  "No periodicity--no equation, of course." It was a statement, not aquestion. The Lensman ignored as completely as did the observer, if notas flippantly, the distinct possibility that at any moment theobservatory and all that it contained might be resolved into theircomponent atoms.

  "None whatever," came flatly from Cloud. He did not need to spend hoursat a calculating machine; at one glance he _knew_, without knowing howhe knew, that no equation could be made to fit even the weighted-averagelocus of that wildly-shifting Sigma curve. "But most of the cycles cutthis ordinate here--seven fifty-one--so I'll take that for my value.That means nine point nine oh six kilograms of duodec basic charge, withone five percent over and one five percent under that for alternates.Neocarballoy casing, fifty-three millimeters on the basic, others inproportion. On the wire?"

  "It went out as you said it," the observer reported. "They'll have 'emhere 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 instruments, making sure that theprotective devices of the suit were functioning at full efficiency. Thenall three went out to the flitter. A tiny speedster, really; a torpedobearing the stubby wings and the ludicrous tail-surfaces, themultifarious dri
ving-, braking-, side-, top-, and under-jets socharacteristic of the tricky, cranky, but ultra-maneuverable breed. Butthis one had something that the ordinary speedster or flitter did notcarry; spaced around the needle beak there yawned the open muzzles of atriplex bomb-thrower.

  _Ten seconds in which to solve the equation--to choose, fire, move clear--the flitter bucked._]

  More checking. The Lensman and the armored Cloud both knew that everyone of the dozens of instruments upon the flitter's special board wasright to the hair; nevertheless each one was compared with themaster-instrument of the observatory.

  * * * * *

  The bombs arrived and were loaded in; and Cloud, with a casually-wavedsalute, stepped into the tiny operating compartment. The massivedoor--flitters have no airlocks, as the whole midsection is scarcelybigger than an airlock would have to be--rammed shut upon its fibergaskets, the heavy toggles drove home. A cushioned form closed in uponthe pilot, leaving only his arms and lower legs free.

  Then, making sure that his