The Vortex Blaster - E E Smith

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Vortex Blaster by ee Doc Smith introducing Storm Cloud, who,
through tragedy, is destined to become the most noted figure
in the galaxy. The Vortex Blaster. Safety devices that do
not protect the unsinkable ships that, before the days of

(00:21):
Bergenholm and of atomic and cosmic energy sank into the
waters of Earth. More particularly, safety devices which, while protecting
against one agent of destruction, attract magnet like another and worse,
such as the armored cable within the walls of a
wooden house. It protects the electrical conductors within against accidental
external shorts, but inadequately grounded, as it must of necessity be,

(00:44):
it may attract an upon occasion has attracted the stupendous
force of lightning, then fused volatilized flaming incandescent through the length, breath,
and height of a dwelling. That dwelling's existence thereafter is
to be measured in minutes. Specifically, four lightning rods, the
lightning rods protecting the chromium glass and plastic home of

(01:06):
Neil Cloud. Those rods were adequately grounded, grounded with copper
silver cables. The bigness of a strong man's arm for
Neil Cloud atomic physicist knew his lightning, and he was
taking no chances whatever with the safety of his lovely
wife and their three wonderful kids. He did not know.
He did not even suspect that, under certain conditions of

(01:28):
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 Neil Cloud atomic
physicist sat at his desk in a strained, dull apathy.
His face was a yellowish gray white, His tendoned hands
gripped rigidly the arms of his chair. His eyes, hard

(01:50):
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 manet. At
the moment when a luckless White had attempted to abate
the nuisance of a loose atomic vortex, that White died,
of course, they almost always do, and the vortex, instead

(02:10):
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 Neil Cloud's new house. That home did

(02:32):
not burn. 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 atmosphere to a height of miles with poisonous vapors,
which flooded all circumambient space with lethal radiations. Cosmically, the

(02:54):
whole thing was infantasmal. Ever since man learned how to
liberate intra atomic energy, the vortices of decease integration 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 luc atomic vortices. What of that?

(03:16):
Of what real importance are a few grains of sand
to an ocean beach five thousand miles long, one 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 sal Or simply tell Us.
The affair was of negligible importance. One man had died,

(03:37):
but in dying he had added one more page to
the thick bulk of negative results already on file. That
Missus Cloud and her children had perished was merely unfortunate.
The vortex itself was not yet a real threat to
tell Us. 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 can happen.

(03:58):
Before even the oldest of ten tell Us 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 tell Us, the point of origin
and the very center of galactic civilization, should cease to exist.
But to Neil Cloud, the accident was the ultimate catastrophe.
His personal universe had crashed in ruins. What was left

(04:21):
was not worth picking up. He and Joe 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,

(04:44):
And to Neil Cloud, atomic physicists, 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 were
had been a search for a means of extinguishment of
exactly such loose vortices as had destroyed his all. His

(05:07):
eyes focused vaguely upon the portrait, clear honest, gray eyes,
lines of character and of 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 en shrining it.

(05:27):
He placed the plastic block upon a refractory between the
electrodes and threw a switch. After the flaming arc had
done its work, he turned and handed the paper to
a tall man dressed in plain gray 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

(05:50):
of now, Phil, if its QX with you, the gray
Lensman took the document, glanced at it, and slowly, meticulously
tore it into sixteen equal pieces. 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

(06:11):
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 Joe, 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

(06:32):
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

(06:53):
he went on in an altered tone. You wouldn't, But
of course you wouldn't. You couldn't. I don't think so,
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.

(07:14):
After a brief farewell, Cloud made his way to an
elevator and was whisked down to the garage into his
big blue Di Kotynski 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

(07:38):
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

(08:02):
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 horse power in perfect mechanical condition, driven by registered,

(08:24):
tested drivers, that 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, every one knows that an ordinary Di
Karinsky 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,

(08:45):
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 Joe was there, Joe

(09:08):
and the kids, but mostly Joe. It was Joe'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 deer, every sweet,
every luscious, lovely memory of her was there. And behind him,

(09:32):
just out of the 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. Damned nation. 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

(09:53):
his accelerator, eased down his mighty brakes. He pulled up
at the control station, and a trimly uniformed officer 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 doctor Cloud. Recognition flashed into the guard's eyes. I
didn't recognize you at first. You can go ahead. Of course,

(10:15):
it'll be two or three miles before you have to
put on your armor. You'll know when better than many
one 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

(10:36):
I might as well go back. He turned the special
around a loose vortex. Knew there might be a hundred
of them, scattered over a radius of two hundred miles,
sisters of the one that had murdered his family, the
hellish spawn of that accursed number eleven vortex that that
damnably incompetent bungling ass had tried to blow up into

(10:56):
his mind. There leapt a picture wire's sharp of nomblen
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 he could do it,
could actually blow out the atomic flame of an atomic vortex.

(11:17):
Not exactly revenge, but by Klonzo's brazen bows. 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
toward the city, practically 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

(11:39):
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, Jeef
Cloud remarked. Finally, here's a blank check. If some of
this stuff should 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

(12:00):
just as he had torn up the resignation. If you
want the stuff for legitimate purposes, you're on patrol business,
and it's the patrol's risk. If, on the other hand,
you think that you're going to try to snuff of 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 duo deck. Yes, but

(12:23):
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 skepticism incarnate.
It can't be done except by an almost impossibly fortuitous accident.
You yourself have been the most bitterly opposed of us to
all these suicidal attempts. I know it. I didn't have

(12:44):
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 perfect willing to
be convinced, but I warn you that I'll take a
lot of convincing and someone else will do the work,

(13:05):
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 not 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,

(13:29):
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

(13:50):
at any predetermined instant have failed completely. Why even Kinnison
and Cartinge and the Conference of Scientists couldn't solve it
any more than they could work out a tractor beam.
There it could be used as a tow line on
one not exactly cloud demured, 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,

(14:12):
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

(14:33):
never has to use a calculating machine, even to compute
in 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,

(14:57):
natural human fear of death that rob 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

(15:21):
will not invite it, sir, now that I've got a
job to do. But that's as far as I'll go
promising I won't make any superhuman effort to avoid it.
I'll take all due precautions for the sake of the job.
But if it gets me, what the hell. The quicker
it does, the better, the sooner I'll be with Joe.
You believe that implicitly the vortices are as good as gone,

(15:43):
then they haven't got any more chance than Boscone 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

(16:06):
drafting paper, clouds sketched rapidly, this is the crater here,
with the vortex at the bottom there. From the observer's
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 duo
deck bombs one on the mark of the activity I'm
figuring on shooting at and one each five percent over

(16:29):
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 off 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

(16:52):
more screen than a suit can deliver. We can adapt
a flitter for bomb throwing easily enough q X. That
would be better, of course. In that case, I set
my flitter into a projectile trajectory like this, whose objective
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

(17:15):
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

(17:38):
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 zweet powie. She's out.

(17:58):
With an expressive, sweeping gesture. You hope, the lensman was
frankly dubious. And there you are, right in the middle
of that explosion, with two duo deck 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

(18:18):
how busy a man you're 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, And he went on
under his breath. That's the hell of it. Q X,
the lensman admitted, Finally, you can go There are a
lot of things you haven't mentioned, but you'll probably be

(18:39):
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? 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. Neil Cloud and Babe the

(18:59):
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 he 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,

(19:22):
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

(19:44):
of these small, tame, self limiting vortices flared novalich into
a large, wild, self sustaining one. It ceased being a
servant then, and became a master. Such flare ups occurred,
perhaps only once or twice in a century on Earth.
The trouble was that they were so utterly damnably permanent
that they never went out, and no data were ever secured.

(20:05):
For every living thing in the vicinity of a flare
up died, every instrument, and every other solid thing within
a radius of one 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

(20:26):
something could be done about loose vortices before too many years,
the consequences would be really serious. That's 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. Pressers worked after a fashion.

(20:47):
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 Duodeck.
Duodeca ply latimate the most powerful, the most frighteningly detinent

(21:07):
explosive ever invented, upon all the known planets of the
first galaxy. But Duodeck had taken an awful toll of life. Also,
since it usually scattered a vortex instead of extinguishing it,
Duodeck 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,

(21:30):
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 inertialless drive, and shooting
the whole neighborhood out into space, were perhaps feasible from
an engineering standpoint. They were, however, potentially so capable of

(21:50):
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 bad lands, and there, at eight o'clock on
the tenth cloud started to work upon it. The lookout station,

(22:11):
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,

(22:32):
not the least of the problems having been that of
developing shielded conductors capable of carrying truly through five ply
screens of force the converted impulses of the very radiations
against which those screens were most effective for the observatory,
and the one long approach to it as well had
been screened heavily. Without such protection, no life could exist there.

(22:53):
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 those records were summed up integrated into the sigma curve.
This curve, while only an incredibly and senselessly tortuous line

(23:15):
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 gettin worse. The observer assented, I wouldn't

(23:36):
wonder if Carlowitz were right, after all, if she ain't
getting ready to blow her top, I'm as a brisky
in Fontima's maiden aunt. No periodicity, no equation. Of course,
it was a statement, not a question. The landsman 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

(23:57):
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 ordinance here seven fifty one, So i'll

(24:17):
take that for my value. That means nine point nine
oh six kilograms of duo deck basic charge, with one
five percent over and one five percent under that for
alternates neocarballoy casing 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 him here in
fifteen minutes. QX. I'll get dressed. Then the lensman and

(24:41):
the observer helped him into his cumbersome, heavily padded armor.
They checked his instruments, 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 break king side top and under jets,

(25:02):
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

(25:22):
board was right to the hair. 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 flitters have no airlocks, as the whole midsection is
scarcely bigger than an airlock would have to be rammed

(25:43):
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
flitter into the air and toward the seething inferno, which
was loose atomic vortex number one. For it was seething,

(26:03):
no fooling, and it was an inferno. The crater was
a ragged jagged hull 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

(26:24):
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 and 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

(26:47):
part of the wall might even go black, into pock
marked scory eye, 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, It came out, however,
in a ragingly uprushing pillar, as something else. No one knew,
or knows yet, for that matter, exactly what a loose

(27:09):
vortex does to the molecules and atoms of air. In fact,
due to the extreme variability already referred to, it probably
does not do the same thing for more than an
instant at a time that there is little actual combustion
is certain, that is, except for the forced combination of nitrogen, argon, xenon,
and krypton with oxygen. There is, however, consumption, plenty of consumption,

(27:32):
and what that incredibly intense bombardment impinges up is is
altered profoundly and obscurely altered, so that the atmosphere emitted
from the crater is quite definitely no longer air as
we know it. It may be corrosive, it may be
poisonous in one or another of one hundred fashions, it
may be merely new and different, but it is no

(27:52):
longer the air which we human beings are used to breathing.
And it is this fact, rather than the destruction of
the planet itself, which would end the possibility of life
upon Earth's surface. It is difficult, indeed, to describe the
appearance of a loose atomic vortex to those who have
never seen one, and fortunately most people never have. And
practically all of its frightful radiation lies in those octaves

(28:14):
of the spectrum which are invisible to the human eye.
Suffice it to say, then, that it had an average
effective surface temperature of about fifteen thousand degrees absolute, two
and one half times as hot as the sun of Tellus,
and that it was radiating every frequency possible to that
incomprehensible temperature. And let it go at that a neil
cloud scurrying in his flitter through that murky radiation riddled atmosphere,

(28:37):
setting up equations from the readings of his various meters
and gages, and solving those equations almost instantaneously in his
mathematical prodigies, mind sat appalled for the activity level was,
and even in its lowest dips, remained far above the
level he had selected. His skin began to prickle and
to burn, his eyes began to smart and to ache.

(28:58):
He knew what those symptoms meant. Even the flitter's powerful
screens were not stopping all the radiation, Even his suit
screens and his special goggles were not stopping what leaked through.
But he wouldn't quit yet. The activity might probably would
take a nose dive any instant. If it did, he'd
have to be ready. On the other hand, it might
blow up at any instant too. There were two schools

(29:20):
of mathematical thought upon that point. One held that the vortex,
without any essential change in its physical condition or nature,
would keep on growing bigger indefinitely, until uniting with the
other vortices of the planet, it had converted the entire
mass of the world into energy. The second school, of
which the forementioned Carlowitz was the loudest voice, taught that

(29:40):
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 ghoulish mathematical glee. Neither school, however,
could prove its point, or rather, each school proved its

(30:02):
point by means of unimpeachable mathematics, and each hated and
derided the other loudly and heatedly. And now Cloud, as
he studied through his almost opaque defenses, that indescribably ravening fireball,
that as suriently rapacious monstrosity, which might very well have
come from the deepest pit of the hottest hell of mythology,
felt strongly inclined to agree with Karlowitz. It didn't seem

(30:25):
possible that anything could get any worse than that without exploding,
and such an explosion, he felt sure, would certainly blow
everything for miles around into the smitheriest kind of smithereens.
The activity of the vortex stayed high, way too high.
The tiny control room of the flitter grew hotter and hotter.
His skin burned and his eyes ached worse. He touched

(30:46):
a communicator stud and spoke, Phil, better, get me three
more bombs like these, except up around. I don't check you.
If you do that, it's apt to drop to a
minimum and stay there, the lensman reminded him. It's completely unpredictable.
It may be at that, so I'll have to forget
the five percent margin and hit it on the nose,
or not at all. Order me up two more then

(31:07):
one at half of what I've got here, the other
double it, and he reeled off the figures for the
charge and the casing of the explosive. You might break
out a jar of burn dressing too. Some fairly hot
stuff is leaking through. We'll do that. Come down fast.
Cloud landed, he stripped to the skin, and the observer
smeared his every square inch of epidermis with the thick,

(31:28):
gooey stuff that was not only a highly efficient screen
against radiation but also a sovereign remedy for new radiation burns.
He exchanged his goggles for a thicker, darker, heavier pair.
The two bombs arrived and were substituted for two of
the original load. I thought of something while I was
up there, Cloud informed the observers. Then, twenty kilograms of

(31:48):
duo deck 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 energy
inside that vortex when I blow it out? Can't say
that I have. The lensman frowned and thought, no data.
Neither have I. But I'd say you better go back
to the new station, the one you were going to
move to if it kept getting worse. But the instruments,

(32:10):
the lensman was thinking, not of the instruments themselves, which
were valueless in comparison with life, but of the records
those instruments would make. Those records were priceless. I'll have
everything on the tapes in the flitter, Cloud reminded, But
suppose that the flitter stops one two or doesn't stop
it Rather, in that case, your backstation won't be there either,

(32:31):
so it won't make any difference. How mistaken Cloud was QX,
the chief decided, we'll leave when you do, just in case. Again.
In the air, Cloud found that the activity, while still high,
was not too high, but that it was fluctuating too rapidly.
He could not get even five seconds of trustworthy prediction,
to say nothing of ten. So he waited as close

(32:51):
as he dared remain to that horrible center of disintegration.
The flitter hung, poised in air, motionless, upon softly hissing
under jets. Cloud knew to a fraction his height above
the ground. He knew to a fraction his distance from
the vortex. He knew with equal certainty the density of
the atmosphere and the exact velocity and direction of the wind. Hence,

(33:12):
since he could also read closely enough the momentary variations
in the cyclonic storms within the crater, he could compute
very easily the coarse and velocity necessary to land the
bomb in the exact center of the vortex at any
given instant in time. The hard part, the thing that
no one had as yet succeeded in doing, was to predict,
for a time far enough ahead to be of any

(33:33):
use a usably close approximation to the vortex's quantitative activity.
For as has been said, he had to overblast rather
than under if he could not hit it on the nose,
to under blast would scatter it all over the state. Therefore,
Cloud concentrated upon the dials and gages before him, concentrated
with every fiber of his being and every cell of

(33:54):
his brain. Suddenly, almost imperceptibly, the sigma curve gave signs
of flattening out. In instant, Cloud's mind pounced simultaneous equations,
nine of them, involving nine unknowns an integration in four dimensions.
No matter, Cloud did not solve them laboriously, one factor
at a time, without knowing how he had arrived at it.

(34:14):
He knew the answer, just as the Pousinian or the
Rigellian is able to perceive every separate component particle of
an opaque three dimensional solid, but without being able to
explain to anyone how his sense of perception works. It
just is, that's all anyway. By virtue, of whatever sense
or ability it is which makes a mathematical prodigy what
he is. Cloud knew that in exactly eight and three

(34:37):
tenth seconds from that observed instant, the activity of the
vortex would be slightly, but not too far under the
coefficient of his heaviest bomb. Another flick of his mental trigger,
and he knew the exact velocity he would require. His
hands swept over the studs, his right foot tramped down
hard upon the firing lever, and even as the quivering
flitter shot forward under eight Telurian gravities of acceleration, he

(34:59):
knew to the thousandth of a second how long he
would have to hold that acceleration to attain that velocity.
While not really long in seconds, it was much too
long for comfort. It took him much closer to the
vortex than he wanted to be. In fact, it took
him right out over the crater itself. But he stuck
to the calculated course, and at the precisely correct instant,
he cut his drive and released his largest bomb, then

(35:22):
so rapidly that it was one blur of speed. He
again kicked on his eight g's of drive and started
to whirl around as only a speed straw or a
flitter can whirl practically unconscious from the terrific resultant of
the linear and angular accelerations. He ejected the two smaller bombs.
He did not care particularly where they lit, just so
they didn't light in the crater or near the observatory,

(35:44):
and he had already made certain of that. Then, without
waiting even to finish the whirl or to straighten her
out in level flight, Cloud's still flying hand darted towards
the switch, whose closing would energize the Bergenholm and make
the flitter inertialless too late, Hell was out for noon,
with the little speedster still inert. Cloud had moved fast too.

(36:05):
Trained mine and trained body had been working at top
speed and in perfect coordination. There just simply hadn't been
enough time. If he could have got what he wanted
ten full seconds or even nine, he could have made it.
But in spite of what happened, Cloud defended his action
then and thereafter. Damn it all, he had to take
the eight point three second reading another tenth of a

(36:26):
second and his bomb wouldn't have fitted. He didn't have
the five percent leeway he wanted, remember, and no he
couldn't wait for another match either. His screens were leaking
like sieves, and if he had waited for another chance,
they would have picked him up, fried to a greasy
cinder in his own lard. The bomb sped truly and
struck the target in direct central impact, exactly as scheduled.

(36:47):
It penetrated perfectly. The neo car balloy casing lasted just
long enough that frightful charge of duo deck exploded, if
not exactly at the center of the vortex, at least
near enough to the center to do the work. In
other words, Cloud's figuring had been close, very close, but
the time had been altogether too short. The flitter was
not even out of the crater when the bomb went off,

(37:09):
and not only the bomb, for Cloud's vague forebodings were materialized.
And more, the staggeringly immense energy of the vortex merged
with that of the detonating duo deck to form an
utterly incomprehensible hole. In part, the hellish flood of boiling
lava in that Devil's cauldron was beaten downward into a
bowl by the sheer stupendous force of the blow. In part,

(37:30):
it was hurled abroad in masses, in gouts and streamers,
and the raging wind of the explosions front seized the
fragments and tore and worried them into bits, hurling them
still faster along their paths of violence. And air so
densely compressed as to be to all intents and purposes
of solid smote the walls of the crater, smote them
so that they crumbled, crushed outward through the hard packed ground,

(37:54):
broke up into jaggedly irregular blocks, which hurtled screamingly away
through the atmosphere. Also, the concussion wave, or the explosion front,
or flying fragments, or something struck the two loose bombs,
so that they too exploded and added their contribution to
the already stupendous concentration of force. They were not close
enough to the flitter to wreck it of themselves, but

(38:16):
they were close enough so that they didn't do her
or her pilot a bit of good. The first terrific
wave buffeted the flier while Cloud's right hand was in
the air, shooting across the panel to turn on the berg.
The impact jerked the arm downward and sideways, both bones
of the forearms snapping as it struck the ledge. The
second one, an instant later, broke his left leg. Then

(38:38):
the debris began to arrive. Chunks of solid or semi
molten rocks slammed against the hull, knocking off wings and
control surfaces. Gobs of viscous slag slapped it liquidly, freezing
into and clogging up jets and orifices. The little ship
was hurtled hither and yon in the grip of forces.
She could no more resist than can the floating leaf

(38:59):
resist waters of a cataract. And Cloud's brain was as
addled as an egg by the vicious concussions which were
hitting him from so many different directions and so nearly
all at once. Nevertheless, with his one arm and his
one leg, and the few cells of his brain that
were still at work, the physicist was still in the fight.
By sheer force of will and nerve, he forced his

(39:21):
left hand across the gyrating key bank to the Bergenholm switch.
He snapped it, and in the instant of its closing,
a vast calm piece descended blanket like for Fortunately, the
berg still worked, the flitter and all her contents and
appurtenances were inertialless nothing material could buffet her or hurt her.
Now she would waft effortlessly away from a feather's lightest

(39:44):
possible touch. Cloud wanted to faint then, but he didn't quite. Instead, foggily,
he tried to look back at the crater. Nine tenths
of his visiplates were out of commission, but he finally
got a view good. It was out. He wasn't surprised.
He had been quite confident that it would be. It
wasn't scattered around either. It couldn't be, for his only

(40:06):
possibility of smearing the shot was on the upper side,
not the lower. His next effort was to locate the
secondary observatory where he had to land, and in that too,
he was successful. He had enough intelligence left to realize
that with practically all of his jets clogged and his
wings and tail shot off, he couldn't land his vessel
inert Therefore he would have to land her free, and

(40:28):
by dint of light and extremely unorthodox use of what
jets he had left in usable shape, he did land
her free, almost within the limits of the observatory's field,
and having landed, he inerted her. But as has been
intimated his brain was not working so well. He had
held his ship inertialis quite a few seconds longer than
he thought, and he did not even think of the

(40:49):
buffetings she had taken as a result of these things. However,
her intrinsic velocity did not match anywhere near exactly that
of the ground upon which she lay. Thus, when the
cloud cut his Bergenholme, restoring thereby to the flitter the
absolute velocity and inertia she had had before going free,
there resulted a distinctly anti climatic crash. There was a

(41:11):
last terrific bump as the motionless vessel collided with the
equally motionless ground and storm cloud vortex blaster went out
like the proverbial light. Help came, of course, and on
the double. The pilot was unconscious and the flitter's door
could not be opened from the outside, but those were
not insuperable obstacles. A plate already loose was sheared away.

(41:32):
The pilot was carefully lifted out of his prison and
rushed to base hospital in the meat can already in attendance,
and later in a private office of that hospital, the
gray clad chief of the Atomic Research Laboratory sat and waited,
but not patiently. How is he, Lacy, he demanded, as
the Surgeon General entered the room. He's going to live,
isn't he? Oh? Yes, phil definitely yes, Lacey replied briskly.

(41:56):
He has a good skeleton, very good. Indeed, the burns
are superficial and will yield quite readily to treatment. The
deeper delayed effects of the radiation to which he was
exposed can be neutralized entirely effectively. Thus he will not
need even a Philip's treatment for the replacement of damaged parts,
except possibly for a few torn muscles and so on.

(42:17):
But he was smashed up pretty badly, wasn't he. I
know that he had a broken arm and a broken leg,
at least simple fractures only entirely negligible, Lacey waved, aside
with an airy gesture such small ills as broken bones.
He'll be out in a few weeks. How soon can
I see him? The Lensman physicist asked. There are some
important things to take up with him, and I've got

(42:38):
a personal message for him that I must give him
as soon as possible. Lacy pursed his lips. Then you
may see him now, he decided. He is conscious, and
strong enough. Not too long, though, Phil fifteen minutes at most.
QX and thanks, and a nurse led the visiting lensman
to Cloud's bedside. Hi stoop, he boomed, cheerfully, stop being

(43:00):
short for stupendous, not stupid. Hi Chief, glad to see
somebody sit down. You're the most wanted man in the galaxy,
the visitor informed the invalid, not accepting even Kimball Kinnison.
Look at this spool of tape, and it's only the
first one. I brought it along for you to read
at your leisure. As soon as any planet finds out
that we've got a sure enough vortex lower outer, an

(43:23):
expert who can really call his shots, and the news
travels mighty fast, that planet sends in a double urgent
class a prime demand for a first call upon your services.
Serious four got in first, by a whisker, it seems,
but Aldeburhon two was so close a second that it
was a photo finish. And all the channels have been
jammed ever since. Canopus, Vega, Rigel, Spika. They all want you,

(43:46):
everybody from Alsakan to Vandemarin back. We told them right
off that we would not receive personal delegations. We had
to almost throw a couple of pink haired Chicolidorians out
bodily to make them believe that we meant it, and
that the age and condition of the vortex involved, not
priority of requisition, would govern QX. Absolutely. Cloud agreed, that's

(44:07):
the only way it could be. I should think, so
forget about this psychic trauma. No, I don't mean that,
the Lensman corrected himself hastily. You know what I mean.
The will to live is the most important factor in
any man's recovery, and too many worlds need you too
badly to have you quit now, not I suppose, so,
Cloud acquiesced, but somberly. I'll get out of here in

(44:30):
short order, and I'll keep on pecking away until one
of those vortices finishes what this one started. You'll die
of old age, then, son, The Lensman assured him, we
got full data, all the information we need. We know
exactly what to do to your screens next time. Nothing
will come through except light, and only as much of
that as you feel like admitting. You can wait as

(44:51):
close to a vortex as you please, for as long
as you please, until you get exactly the activity in
time interval that you want, you will be just as
comfortable and just as as though you were home in bed.
Sure of that, absolutely, or at least as sure as
we can be of anything that hasn't happened yet. But
I see that your guardian angel here is eyeing her

(45:11):
clock somewhat pointedly, so I'd better be doing a flit
before they tossed me down a shaft. Clear Ether, Storm,
clear Ether Chief. And that is how storm Cloud atomic
physicist became the most narrowly specialized specialist in all the
annals of science. How he became storm Cloud Vortex Blaster,
the galaxy's only vortex blaster. And of the vortex Blaster

(45:40):
by E. E. Doc Smith