The Vortex Blaster.
by Edward Elmer Smith.
Safety devices that do not protect.
The "unsinkable" ships that, before the days of Bergenholm and of atomic and cosmic energy, sank into the waters of the 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, it may attract and upon occasion has attracted the stupendous force of lightning. Then, fused, volatilized, flaming incandescent throughout the length, breadth, 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, gla.s.s, and plastic home of Neal Cloud. Those rods were adequately grounded, grounded with copper-silver cables the bigness of a strong man"s arm; for Neal 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 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-gray 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 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 circ.u.mambient s.p.a.ce with lethal radiations.
Cosmically, 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 ma.s.s 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 pa.s.sing 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 focussed 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 enshrining it 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 of now, Phil, if it"s QX with you."
The Gray Lensman took the doc.u.ment, 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 pa.s.s.""
"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-b.u.mpers 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 Jo"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 s.p.a.ce. d.a.m.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 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 ahead--
"Oh! It"s Dr. Cloud!" Recognition flashed into the guard"s eyes. "I didn"t recognize you at first. You can go ahead, of course. 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 had murdered his family--the h.e.l.lish sp.a.w.n of that accursed Number Eleven vortex that that d.a.m.nably incompetent bungling a.s.s 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 he 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 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 offer any comment as his erstwhile first a.s.sistant went to various lockers and cupboards, a.s.sembling 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 skepticism 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."