VORTEXBLASTER

VORTEX BLASTER

'Storm' Cloud, the only man who could destroy the raging nuclear vortices that struck and killed at random.

VORTEX BLASTER

was also the name of Cloud's spaceship, an amazingly advanced arsenal of modern science, in which Cloud and his colourful crew of space castaways hunted the source of the lethal vortices, battled a criminal master-mind, developed unheard-of sciences, and made an ultimate discovery of shattering importance to the destiny of the universe.

THE VORTEX BLASTERS

team up in a thrilling space-saga of crisis and adventure in the worlds of the Lensmen - 'Doc' Smith's most enduring creation.

The Lensman series is one of the classic works of adventurous science fiction. Each of the seven titles in the series is a complete, exciting SF novel in itself, but to savour the full thrilling effect of 'Doc' Smith's masterly storytelling the addict of space adventure will want to acquire the whole Lensman sequence.

'The Lensman series is similar in its mesmeric effect to the Martian novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs . . . galaxic in scope . . . wonderfully outrageous epics' Edmund Cooper Sunday Times

Also in this series in Panther Science Fiction

Triplanetary

First Lensman

Galactic Patrol

Grey Lensman

Second Stage Lensmen

Children of the Lens

E. E. 'Doc' Smith

Masters of the Vortex

(original title: The Vortex Blaster) The seventh novel of the Lensman series

Granada Publishing Limited Published in 1973 by Panther Books Ltd Frogmore, St Albans, Herts AL2 2NF Reprinted 1973

First published in Great Britain by

W. H. Alien & Co. Ltd 1972

Made and printed in Great Britain by

Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press) Ltd

Bungay, Suffolk

Set in Linotype Plantin

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

This book is published at a net price and is supplied subject to the Publishers Association Standard Conditions of Sale registered under the Restrictive Trade Practices Act, 1956.

MASTERS OF THE VORTEX

Contents

1 Catastrophe 9

2 Cloud Blasts a Vortex 17

3 Cloud Loses an Arm 26

4 Storm' Cloud on Deka 36

5 The Boneheads 49

6 Driving Jets are Weapons 56

7 The Blaster Acquires a Crew 71

8 Vesta the Vegian 79

9 Trouble on Tominga 91

10 Janowick 101

11 Joan the Telepath 107

12 Vesta Practices Spaceal 118

13 Games Within Games 124

14 Vesta the Gambler 139

15 Joan and Her Brains 148

16 Vegian Justice 159

17 The Call 172

18 Cahuita 184

1: Catastrophe

Safety devices that do not protect.

'Unsinkable' ships that, before the days of 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 it against accident external shorts; but, inadequately grounded, it may attract and upon occasion has attracted the stupendous force of lightning. Then, steel armor exploding into incandescence inside walls and ceilings, that house's existence thereafter is to be measured in minutes.

Specifically, four lightning rods. The lightning rods protecting the chromium, glass, and plastic home of Neal Cloud. Those rods were adequately grounded, with copper-silver cables the size of a big man's forefinger; for Neal Cloud, Doctor of Nucleonics, knew his lightning and was taking no chances whatever with the safety of his wife and children.

He did not know, did not even suspect, that under certain conditions of atmospheric potential and of ground-magnetic stress his perfectly-designed and perfectly installed system would become a super-powerful attractor for flying vortices -of atomic disintegration.

So now Neal Cloud, nucleonicist, 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 lighting had been a vortex-magnet at the moment when some luckless wight had tried to abate the nuisance of a 'loose' atomic vortex. That wight dies, of course— they almost always did—and the vortex, instead of being destroyed, was simply broken up into a number of widely-scattered new vortices. And one of those bits of furious, uncontrolled energy, resembling a handful of substance torn from the depths of a sun, darted toward and shot downward to earth through Neal Cloud's new house.

That house did not burn; it exploded. Nothing of it, in it, or near it stood a chance, for in a few seconds the place where it had been was a crater of seething, boiling lava—a crater which filled the atmosphere with poisonous vapors; which flooded all nearby space with lethal radiations.

Oosmically, the whole thing was infinitesimal. Ever since man learned how to use atomic power the vortices of disintegration had been breaking out of control. Such accidents had been happening and would continue 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 a pile five thousand miles long, a hundred miles wide, and ten miles deep?

Even to that individual grain of sand called 'Earth'—or, in modern parlance, 'Sol Three', or 'Tellus of Sol', or simply 'Tel-lus'—the affair was negligible. 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.

Nor, to any except a tiny fraction of Earth's inhabitants, was the question of loose atomic vortices a matter of concern. It was unthinkable that Tellus, the point of origin and the very center of Galactic Civilization, could cease to exist. Long before such vortices could eat away much of her mass, or poison much of her atmosphere, Earth's scientists would have solved the problem.

But to Neal Cloud the accident was ultimate catastrophe. His personal universe had crashed in ruins; what was left was not worth picking up. He and Jo had been married for more than fifteen years and the bonds between them had grown stronger, deeper, truer with every passing day. And the kids ... it couldn't have happend ... fate COULDN'T do this to him ... but it had ... it could. Gone ... gone ... GONE!

And to Neal Cloud, sitting there at his desk in black abstraction, with maggots of thought gnawing holes in his mind, the catastrophe was doubly galling because of its cruel irony. For he was second from the top in the Vortex Control Laboratory; his life's work had been a search for a means or method of extinguishing loose atomic vortices.

His eyes focused vaguely upon the portrait. Wavy brown hair ... clear, honest gray eyes ... lines of character, of strength and of humor ... sweetly curved lips ready to smile or kiss ...

He wrenched his attention 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. After the flaming arc had done its work he turned and handed the paper to a tall man, with a Lens glowing upon his wrist, who had been watching him with quiet, understanding eyes. Significant enough, to the initiate, of the importance of the laboratory is the fact that it was headed by a Lensman.

'As of now, Phil, if it's QX with you.'

The Lensman took the document, glanced at it, and slowly, meticulously, tore it into sixteen equal pieces.

'Uh-uh, Storm,' he denied, gently. 'Not a resignation. Leave of absence, perhaps, but not severance.'

'Why not?' It was scarely a question; Cloud's voice was level, uninfiected. 'I wouldn't be worth the paper I'd waste."

'Now, no; but the future's another matter. I haven't said anything so far, because I knew you and Jo. Nothing could be said.' Two hands gripped and held. 'For the future, though, four words that were spoken long ago have never been improved upon. "This, too, shall pass".'

'You think so?'

'I know so, Storm. I've been round a long time. You're too good a man to go down out of control. You've got a place in the world and a job to do. You'll be back——' a thought struck the Lensman and he went on, in a strangely altered tone: 'But you wouldn't—of course you wouldn't—you couldn't.'

'I don't think so. No.' Suicide, tempting although it might be, was not the answer. 'Good-bye, Phil.'

'Not good-bye, Storm. Au revoir.'

'Maybe.' Cloud left the laboratory and took an elevator down to the garage. Into his big blue DeKhotinsky Special and away.

Through traffic so heavy that front-, rear-, and side-bumpers almost touched he drove with his wonted cool skill; even though he did not know, consciously, that the other cars were there. He slowed, turned, stopped, 'shoveled on the coal', all correctly —and all purely automatically.

He did not know where he was going, nor care. His numbed brain was simply trying to run away from its own bitter imagin-

ings—which, if he had thought at all, he would have known hopeless of accomplishment. But he did not think. He simply acted; dumbly, miserably.

Into a one-way skyway he rocketed; along it over the suburbs and into the trans-continental 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 not less than one hundred twenty five miles per hour—flashed his number at the control station, and shoved his right foot down to the floor.

Everyone knows that an ordinary DeKhotinsky Spotter will do a hundred and forty honestly-measured miles in one honestly-timed hour; but very few drivers have ever found out how fast one of those brutal big souped-up Specials can wheel. Most people simply haven't got what it takes to open one up.

'Storm' Cloud found out that day. He held that six-thousand-pound Juggernaut onto the road, wide open, for mile after mile after mile. But it didn't help. Drive as he would, he could not out-run 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 her pet name for it; because, like Paul Bunyan's fabulous beast, it was pretty nearly six feet between the eyes.

Jo was in the seat beside him. Every dear, every sweet, every luscious, lovely memory of her was there ... and behind him, just beyond eye-corner visibility, were the three kids. And a whole lifetime of this loomed ahead—a vista of emptiness more vacuous by far than the emptiest reaches of inter-galactic space. Damnation! 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 on the accelerator; eased down on the brake-pedal; took his place in the line of almost-stalled traffic. There was a barrier and a trimly-uniformed policeman.

'Sorry, sir,' the officer said, with a sweeping, turning gesture, but you'll have to detour over to Twenty. There's a loose atomic vortex beside the road up ahead ... Oh, it's you, Doctor Cloud! You can go ahead, of course. Couple of miles yet before you'll need your armor. They didn't tell us they were sending for you.

It's just a little new one, and the dope we got was that they were going to shove it over into the badlands with pressors.'

'They didn't send for me.' Cloud tried to smile. 'I'm just driving around. No armor, even, so I might as well go back.'

He turned the Special around. A loose vortex—new. There might be three or four of them, scattered over that many counties. Sisters of the one that had murdered his family—spawn of that damned Number Eleven that that bungling nitwit had tried to blow out... 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 the blow of a fist.

He thought. Really thought, now; intensely and clearly. If he could do it—could actually blow out the atomic flame of an atomic vortex ... not exactly revenge, but ... it would work ... it would have to work—he'd make it work! And grimly, quietly, but alive now in every fiber, he drove back to the city almost as fast as he had come away.

If Philip Strong was surprised at Cloud's sudden reappearance in the laboratory he did not show it. Nor did he offer any comment as his erstwhile assistant went to various lockers and cupboards, assembling coils, tubes, armor, and other paraphernalia.

'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.' 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's the Patrol's risk. But if you're thinking of trying to snuff a vortex, the stuff stays here. That's out, Storm.'

'But I'm going to really snuff 'em, starting with Number One and taking 'em in order. No suicide.'

'Huh?' Skepticism incarnate. 'It can't be done, except by an almost impossibly fortuitous accident, which is why you yourself have always been as opposed to such attempts as the rest of us. The charge of explosive must match, within very narrow limits, the activity of the vortex itself at the instant of detonation; and that activity varies so greatly and so unpredictably that all attempts at accurate extrapolation have failed. Even the Conference of Scientists couldn't develop a usable formula,

any more than they could work out a tractor that could be used as a tow-line on one.'

'Wait a minute!' Cloud protested. 'They found that it could be forecast, for a length of time proportional to the length of the cycle in question, by an extension of the calculus of warped surfaces.'

'Humph! I said a usable formula!' the Lensman snorted. What good is a ten-second forecast when it takes a GOMEAC twice that long to solve ... Oh!' he broke off, staring. -

'Oh,' he repeated, slowly. 'I forgot for a minute that you were born with a super-GOMEAC in your head. But there are other things.'

'There were. Now there are none.'

'No?'

'NO. I couldn't take such chances before, and I'd've tied myself up into knots if I did. Now nothing can throw me. I can compute all the elements of a sigma curve in nothing flat. A ten-second prediction gives me ten seconds of action. That's plenty.'

'I see.' Strong pondered, his fingers drumming softly upon his desk. Lensmen did not ordinarily use their Lenses on their Lensless friends, but this was no ordinary occasion. 'You aren't afraid of death any more. But you won't invite it? And do you mind if I Lens you on that?'

'Come in. I'll not invite it, but that's as far as I'll go in 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 one gets me, what the hell?'

'QX.' The Lensman withdrew from Cloud's mind. 'Not too good, but good enough. What's your plan? You won't have time for the usual method of attack.'

'Like this.' Cloud found a sheet of drafting paper and sketched rapidly. 'There's the crater, with the vortex at the bottom—there. From the sigma curve I estimate the most probable value of the activity I'll have to shoot at. Then I select three duodec bombs from the hundred or so I'll have made up in advance—one on the mark, one each five percent over and under the mark. The bombs, of course, will be cased in neocarb-alloy thick enough for penetration. Then I take off in a shielded armored flying suit, say about here ...'

'If you take off at all, you and your suit will be inside a flitter,' the Lensman interrupted. 'Too many instruments for a suit, to

say nothing of bombs, and you'll need heavier screen than a suit can put out. We can adapt a flitter for bomb-throwing easily enough.'

'That'd be better, of course. QX, I set my flitter into a projectile trajectory toward the center of disturbance. Twelve seconds away, at about this point here, I take my instantaneous readings, solve the equations of that particular warped surface for some definite zero time....'

'But s'pose the cycle won't give you a ten-second solution?'

'Then I'll swing around and try again until a long-enough 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 assumed value...'

'Assume it isn't—it probably won't be.'

'I accelerate or decelerate...."

'Solving new equations—differential equations at that—all the while?'

'Certainly. Don't interrupt so. I stick around until the sigma curve, extrapolated to zero time, matches one of my bombs. I build up the right velocity, cut that bomb loose, shoot myself off in a sharp curve, and Z-W-E-E-T—POWIE! She's out.' With an expressive, sweeping gesture.

'You hope.' Strong was frankly dubious. 'And there you are, right in the middle of the damndest explosion you ever saw.'

'Oh, no. I've gone free in the meantime, so nothing can touch me.'

7 hope! But do you realize just how busy you are going to be during those ten or twelve seconds?'

'Yes.' Cloud's face grew somber. 'But I'll be in full control. I won't be afraid of anything that can happen—of anything that can happen. From my standpoint, that's the hell of it.'

'QX,' The Lensman decided, 'You can go. We'll iron out the kinks as we go.'

'We?'

'I'll be in the lookout shack with the boys, at least on the first ones. When do you want to start?'

'How long will it take to fix up the flitter?'

'Two days. Say we meet you there Saturday morning?"

'I'll be there,' and again Neal Cloud and Babe, the big blue ox, hit the road; and as he rolled along the physicist mulled

over in his mind the assignment to which he had set himself.

Like fire, only worse, atomic energy was a good servant, but a very bad master. Man had liberated it before he could really control it. In fact, control was not yet, and probably never would be, perfect. True, all except a minute fraction of one percent of the multitudes of small, tame, self-limiting vortices were perfect servants. But at long intervals, for some unknown reason—science knew so little, fundamentally, of nuclear reactions—one of them flared, nova-like, into a huge, wild, self-sustaining monster. It ceased being a servant, then, and became a master.

Such flare-ups occurred very infrequently; the trouble was that the loose vortices were so utterly, so damnably permanent. They never went out; and no data were ever obtained. Every living thing in the vicinity of a flare-up died; every instrument and every other solid thing within a radius of hundreds of 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. But even so, unless something could be done about loose vortices before too many years, the situation would become extremely serious. That was why the Laboratory had been established in the first place.

Nothing much had been accomplished so far. Tractor beams would not hold. Nothing material was of any use. Pressors worked after a fashion—vortices could be moved from one place to another. One or two, through sheer luck, had been blown out by heavy charges of duodecaplylatomate. But duodec had taken many lives; and since it scattered a vortex as often as it fed it, duodec had caused vastly 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 were still being tried. Some, such as the perennially appearing one of installing a free drive and flinging the whole neighborhood off into space, were perhaps feasible from an engineering standpoint. They were potentially so capable of making things worse, however, that they could not be used except as last-ditch measures. In short, the control of loose atomic vortices was very much an unsolved problem.

2: Cloud Blasts a Vortex

Number One, the oldest and worst vortex on Tellus, had been pushed out into the badlands, and there, at eight o'clock of the indicated morning, Cloud started to work on it.

The 'lookout shack' was in fact a fully-equipped nucleonics laboratory. Its staff was not large—eight men worked in three staggered eight-hour shifts—but the development of its instrumentation had required hundreds of man-years of intensive research. Every factor of the vortex's activity was measured and recorded continuously, throughout every minute of every day of every year; and all of these measurements were summed up, integrated, into the 'sigma' curve. This curve, which to the layman's eye was only a senselessly zig-zagging line, told the expert everything he wanted to know.

Cloud glanced at the chart and scowled, for one jagged peak, less than half an hour old, almost touched the top line of the paper.

'Bad, huh, Frank?'

'Bad, Storm, and getting worse. I wouldn't wonder if "Calamity" were right—it certainly looks like she's getting ready to blow her top.'

'No equation, I suppose,' Strong said. The Lensman ignored as completely as did the observer, if not as flippantly, the distinct possibility that at any moment the obervatory and all that it contained might be resolved into their sub-atomic components.

'None,' Cloud stated. 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 fit that wildly-shifting sigma curve. 'But most of these recent cycles cut ordinate seven fifty, so I'll take that for my value. That means nine point nine six zero kilograms of duodec for my basic, and nine four six two and ten point three five eight as alternates. On the wire?'

'It went out as you said it,' the observer replied. 'They'll be here in five minutes."

'QX. I'll get dressed, then.'

The Lensman and one of the observers helped him into his cumbersome, heavily-padded armor; then all three men went out to the flitter. A tiny speedster, really; a slim torpedo with 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. Cloud checked the newly installed triplex launcher, made sure that he knew which bomb was in each tube, and climbed into the tiny operating compartment. The massive door—flitters are too small to have airlocks—rammed shut upon its teflon gaskets, the heavy toggles drove home. A heavily-padded form closed in upon the pilot, leaving only his left arm and his right leg free to move.

'Everybody in the clear?'

'All clear.'

Cloud shot the flitter into the air and toward the seething inferno which was Loose Atomic Vortex Number One. The crater was a ragged, jagged hole perhaps two miles from lip to lip and a quarter of a mile in depth. The floor, being largely molten, was almost 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 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 inrushing 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 pockmarked scoriae or brilliant planes of obsidian.

For always, at some point or other, there was a torrent of air rushing into that crater. It rushed in as ordinary air. It came out, however, in a ragingly uprushing pillar, as—as something else. No one knows exactly what a vortex does to air. Or, rather, the composition of the effluent gases varies as frequently and as unpredictably as does the activity of the vortex. Thus, the atmosphere emitted from a vortex-crater may be corrosive, it may be poisonous, it may be merely different; but it is no longer the air which we human beings are used to breathing. This conversion and corruption of Earth's atmosphere, if it could not be stopped, would end the possibility of life upon the planet's surface long before the world itself could be consumed.

As to the vortex itself ... it is difficult indeed to describe such a phenomenon. Practically all of its frightful radiation lies in those octaves of the spectrum which are invisible to the human eye. Suffice it to say, then, that it was a continuously active

atomic reactor, with an effective surface temperature of approximately twenty five thousand degrees Kelvin, and let it go at that.

Neal Cloud, driving his flitter through that murky, radiation-riddled atmosphere, extrapolating his sigma curve by the sheer power of his mathematical-prodigy's mind, sat appalled. For the activity level was, and even in its lowest dips remained, well above the figure he had chosen. Distant though he was from the rim of that hellish pit, his skin began to prickle and burn. His eyes began to smart and to ache. He knew what those symptoms meant: even the Sitter's powerful screens were leaking; even his suit-screens and his special goggles were not stopping the stuff. But he wouldn't quit yet: the activity might—probably would— take a nose-dive any second now. If it did, he'd have to be ready. On the other hand, it might blow up any second, too.

There were two schools of mathematical thought upon that point. One held that a vortex, without any essential change in its nature or behavior, would keep on growing bigger until, uniting with the other vortices of the planet, it had converted all the mass of the world into energy.

The second school, of which the forementioned 'Calamity' Carlowitz was the loudest voice, taught that 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 ghoulishly mathematical glee. Neither school could prove its point, however—or, rather, each school proved its point with eminently plausible mathematics—and each hated and derided the other, with heat and at length.

Neal Cloud, as he studied through his almost opaque defences that indescribably ravening fireball, that rapacious monstrosity which might very well have come from the very center of the hottest hell of mythology, felt strangely inclined to agree with Carlowitz. It didn't seem possible that it could get any worse without exploding.

The activity stayed high; 'way too high. The tiny control room grew hotter and hotter. His skin burned more and his eyes ached worse. He touched a 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. I'd suggest a wider interval.'

'QX—that'd be better. Two, then, instead of three. Four point nine eight zero and thirteen point nine four zero. You might break out a jar of burn-dressing, too; some fairly warm stuff is leaking through.'

•Will do. Come down, fast!'

Cloud landed. He stripped to the skin and his friends smeared him with the thick, gooey stuff that was not only added protection against radiation, but also a sovereign remedy for new burns. He exchanged his goggles for a heavier, darker pair. The two bombs arrived and were substituted for two of the original load.

'I thought of something while I was up there,' Cloud said then. 'Fourteen kilograms of duodec 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 intrinsic energy of the vortex when I snuff it?'

'Can't say I have.' The Lensman frowned in thought. 'No data.'

'Neither have I. But I'd say you'd better go back to the new station—the one you were going to move to if it kept on getting worse. The clocks are ticking there, aren't they?'

'Yes. It might be the smart thing to do—just in case.'

Again in air, Cloud found that the activity, while still very high, was not too high for his heaviest bomb, 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 to the horrible center of disintegration as he dared.

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 the density of the atmosphere and the velocity and direction of the wind. Hence, since he could also read, closely enough, the momentary variations in the cyclonic storms within the crater, he could compute very easily the course and velocity necessary to land the bomb in the exact center of the vortex at any given instant of 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 use, a usably close approximation to the vortex's quantitative activity.

Therefore Cloud concentrated upon the dials and gauges in front of him; concentrated with every fiber of his being and with every cell of his brain.

Suddenly, almost imperceptably, the sigma curve gave signs of flattening out. Cloud's mind pounced. Simultaneous differential equations; nine of them. A quadruple integration in four dimensions. No matter—Cloud did not solve problems laboriously, one operation at a time. Without knowing how he had arrived at it, he knew the answer; just as the Posenian or the Rigellian can perceive every separate component particle of an opaque, three dimensional solid, but without being able to explain to any Tellurian how his sense of perception works. It just is, that's all.

By virtue of whatever sense or ability it is which makes a mathematical prodigy what he is, Cloud knew that in exactly seven and three-tenths seconds from that observed instant the activity of the vortex would match precisely the rating of his heaviest bomb. Another flick of his mental switch and he knew exactly the velocity he would require. His hand swent over the studs, his right foot tramped down hard upon the firing pedal; and, even as the quivering flitter rammed forward under five Tellurian gravities of acceleration, he 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 would take him much closer to the vortex than he wanted to be, in fact, it would take him almost to the crater's rim.

But he stuck to the calculated course, and at the precisely correct instant he released his largest bomb and cut his dive. Then, in a continuation of the same motion, his hand slashed down through the beam of light whose cutting would activate the Bergenholm and make the vessel inertialess—safe from any form whatever of physical violence. For an instant nothing happened, and for that instant Cloud sat appalled. Neutralization of inertia took time! Not that he had ever been told that it was instantaneous—he had just assumed so. He had never noticed any time-lapse before, but now it seemed to be taking forever!

After that one instant of shocked inaction he went into ultra-speed action; kicking in the little vessel's all-out eight-G drive and whirling her around as only a flitter or a speedster can whirl; only to see in his plate the vortex opening up like a bell-

flower, or like a sun going nova.

Cloud's forebodings were more than materialized then for it was not only the bomb that was going off. The staggeringly immense energy of the vortex was merging with that of the detonating duodec to form an utterly indescribable explosion.

In part the flood of incandescent lava in the pit was beaten downward by the sheer, stupendous force of the blow; in part it was hurled abroad in masses, gouts, and streamers. And the raging blast of the explosion's front seized the fragments and tore and worried them to bits, hurling them still faster along their paths of violence. And air, so densely compressed as to act like a solid, smote the walls of the crater, Those walls crumbled, crushed outward through the hard-packed ground, broke up into jaggedly irregular blocks which hurtled screamingly in all directions.

The blast-wave or explosion front buffeted the flyer while she was still partially inert and while Cloud was almost blacked out and physically helpless from the frightful linear and angular accelerations. The impact broke his left arm and right leg; the only parts of his body not pressure-packed. Then, milliseconds later, the debris began to arrive.

Chunks of solid or semi-molten rock 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 knocked hither and thither by forces she could no more resist than can a floating leaf resist a cataract; Cloud's brain was addled as an egg by the vicious concussions which were hitting him so nearly simultaneously from so many different directions.

The concussions and the sluggings lightened ... stopped ... a vast peace descended, blanket-wise. The flitter was free—was riding effortlessly away on the outermost, most tenuous fringes of the storm!

Cloud wanted to faint, then, but he didn't—quite. With one arm and leg and what few cells of his brain were still in working order, he was still in the fight. It did not even occur to him, until long afterwards, that he was not going to make any effort whatever to avoid death.

Foggily, he tried to look at the crater. Nine-tenths of his visiplates were dead, but he finally got a view. Good—it was out. He wasn't surprised—he knew it would be.

His next effort was to locate the secondary observatory, where he would have 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 flitter inert. He'd have to land her free.

Neal Cloud was not the world's best pilot. Nevertheless, by dint of light and somewhat unorthodox use of what few jets he had left, he did land her free. A very good landing, considering —he almost hit the observatory's field, which was only one mile square—and having landed her, he inerted her.

But, as has been intimated, his brain wasn't working quite so good; he had held his ship inertialess for quite a few seconds longer than he thought, and he did not even think of the terrific buffetings she had taken. As a result of these things, however, her intrinsic velocity did not match, anywhere nearly, that of the ground upon which she lay. Thus, when Cloud cut his Ber-genholm, restoring thereby to the flitter the absolute velocity and the inertia she had before going free, there resulted a distinctly anticlimactic crash.

There was a 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; on the double. Cloud was unconscious and the flitter's port could not be opened from the outside, but those were not insuperable obstacles. A plate, already loose, was torn away; the pilot was undamped and rushed to Base Hospital in the 'meat-crate' standing by.

Later, in a private office of that hospital, the head of the Vortex Control Laboratory sat and waited—not patiently.

'How is he, Lacy?' he demanded, as the surgeon-marshal entered the room. 'He's going to live?'

'Oh, yes, Phil—definitely yes,' Lacy replied, briskly. 'A very good skeleton; very good indeed. His screens stopped all the really bad radiation, so the damage will yield quite readily to treatment. He doesn't really need the Phillips we gave him— for the replacement of damaged parts, you know—except for a few torn muscles and so on.'

'But he was pretty badly smashed up—I helped take him out, you know—how about that arm and leg? He was a mess.'

'Merely simple fractures—entirely negligible.' Lacey waved aside with an airy gesture such minor ills as broken bones. 'He'll

be out in a couple of weeks.'

'How soon can I see him? Business can wait, but there's a personal matter that can't.'

'I know what you mean.' Lacy pursed his lips. 'Ordinarily I wouldn't allow it, but you see him now. Not too long, though, Phil; he's weak. Ten minutes at most.'

'QX. Thanks.' A nurse led the visiting Lensman to Cloud's bedside.

'Hi, stupe!' he boomed, cheerfully. ' "Stupe" being short for "stupendous", this time.'

'Ho, chief. Glad to see somebody. Sit down.'

'You're the most-wanted man in the galaxy, not excepting Kimball Kinnison. Here's a spool of tape, which you can look at as soon as Lacy will let you have a scanner. It's only the first one. As soon as any planet finds out that we've got a sure-enough-vortex-blower-outer who can really call his shots—and that news gets around mighty fast—it sends in a double-urgent, Class A Prime demand for you.'

'Sirius IV got in first by a whisker, but it was a photo finish with Aldebaran II and all channels have been jammed ever since. Canopus, Vega, Rigel, Spica. Everybody, from Alsakan to Zabriska. We announced right off that we wouldn't receive personal delegations—we had to almost throw a couple of pink-haired Chickladorians out bodily to make them believe we meant it—that our own evaluation of necessity, not priority of requisition, would govern. QX?'

'Absolutely,' Cloud agreed. 'That's the only way to handle it, I should think.'

'So forget 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. Check?'

'I suppose so,' Cloud acquiesced, but somberly, 'and I've got more will to live than I thought I had. I'll keep on pecking away as long as I last.'

'Then you'll die of old age, Buster,' the Lensman assured him. 'We got full data. We know exactly how long it takes to go from fully inert to fully free. 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 like. You can wait as close to a

vortex as you please, for as long as is necessary to get exactly the conditions you want. You'll be as safe as if you were in Klono's hip pocket.'

'Sure of that?'

'Absolutely—or at least, as sure as we can be of anything that hasn't happened yet. But your guardian angel here is eyeing her clock a bit pointedly, so I'd better do a flit before she tosses me out on my ear. Clear ether, Storm!'

'Clear ether, chief!'

Thus 'Storm' Cloud, nucleonicist, became the most narrowly-specialized specialist in the long annals of science; became 'Storm' Cloud, the Vortex Blaster.

And that night Lensman Philip Strong, instead of sleeping, thought and thought and thought. What could he do—what could anybody do—if Cloud should get himself killed? Somebody would have to do something ... but who? And what? Could—or could not—another Vortex Blaster be found? Or trained?

And next morning, early, he Lensed a thought.

'Kinnison? Phil Strong. I've got a high-priority problem that will take a lot of work and a lot more weight than I carry. Are you free to listen for a few minutes?'

'I'm free. Go ahead.'

3: Cloud Loses an Ann

Tellurian Pharmaceutical, Inc., was Civilization's oldest and most conservative drug house. 'Hide-bound' was the term most frequently used, not only by its younger employees, but also by its more progressive competitors. But, corporatively, Tellurian Pharmaceuticals, Inc., did not care. Its board of directors was limited by an iron-clad, if unwritten, law to men of seventy years or more; and against the inertia of that ruling body the impetuosity of the younger generation was exactly as efficacious as the dashing of ocean waves against an adamantine cliff—and in very much the same fashion.

Ocean waves do in time cut into even the hardest rock; and, every century or two, TPI did take forward step—after a hundred years of testing by others had proved conclusively that the 'new' idea conformed in every particular with the exalted standards of the Galactic Medical Association,

TPI's plant upon the planet Deka (Dekanore III, on the charts) filled the valley of Clear Creek and the steep, high hills on its sides, from the mountain spring which was the creek's source to its confluence with the Spokane River.

The valley floor was a riot of color, devoted as it was to the intensive cultivation of medicinal plants. Along both edges of the valley extended row after row of hydroponics sheds. Upon the mountains' sides there were snake dens, lizard pens, and enclosures for many other species of fauna.

Nor was the surface all that was in use. The hills were hollow; honeycombed into hundreds of rooms in which, under precisely controlled environments of temperature, atmosphere, and radiation, were grown hundreds of widely-variant forms of life.

At the confluence of creek and river, just inside the city limits of Newspoke—originally New Spokane—there reared and sprawled the Company's headquarters buildings; offices, processing and synthesizing plants, laboratories, and so on. In one of the laboratories, three levels below ground, two men faced each other. Works Manager Graves was tall and fat; Fenton V. Fairchild, M.D., Nu.D., F.C.R., Consultant in Radiation, was tall and thin.

'Everything set, Graves?' t

'Yes. Twelve hours, you said.'

'For the full cycle. Seven to the point of maximum yield.'

'Go ahead.'

'Here are the seeds. Trenconian broadleaf. For the present you will have to take my word for it that they did not come from Trenco. These are standard hydroponics tanks, size one. The formula of the nutrient solution, while complex and highly critical, contains nothing either rare or unduly expensive. I plant the seed, thus, in each of the two tanks. I cover each tank with a plastic hood, transparent to the frequencies to be used. I cover both with a larger hood—so. I align the projectors—thus. We will now put on armor, as the radiation is severe and the atmosphere, of which there may be leakage when the pollenating blast is turned on, is more than slightly toxic. I then admit Trenconian atmosphere from this cylinder ...'

'Synthetic or imported?' Graves interrupted.

'Imported. Synthesis is possible, but prohibitively expensive and difficult. Importation in tankers is simple and comparatively cheap. I now energize the projectors. Growth has begun.'

In the glare of blue-green radiance the atmosphere inside the hoods, the very ether, warped and writhed. In spite of the distortion of vision, however, it could be seen that growth was taking place, and at an astounding rate. In a few minutes the seeds had sprouted; in an hour the thick, broad, purplish-green leaves were inches long. In seven hours each tank was full of a lushly luxuriant tangle of foliage.

'This is the point of maximum yield,' Fairchild remarked, as he shut off the projectors. 'We will now process one tank, if you like.'

'Certainly I like. How else could I know it's the clear quill?'

'By the looks,' came the scientist's dry rejoinder. 'Pick your tank.'

One tank was removed. The leaves were processed. The full cycle of growth of the remaining tank was completed. Graves himself harvested the seeds, and himself carried them away.

Six days, six samples, six generations of seed, and the eminently skeptical Graves was convinced.

'You've got something there, Doc,' he admitted then. 'We can really go to town on that. Now, how about notes, or stuff from your old place, or people who may have smelled a rat?'

Tm perfectly clean. None of my boys know anything important, and none ever will. I assemble all apparatus myself, from standard pans, and disassemble it myself. I've been around, Graves.'

'Well, we can't be too sure.' The fat man's eyes were piercing and cold. 'Leakers don't live very long. We don't want you to die, at least not until we get in production here.'

'Nor then, if you know when you're well off,' the scientist countered, cynically. 'I'm a fellow of the College of Radiation, and it took me five years to learn this technique. None of your hatchetmen could ever learn it. Remember that, my friend.'

'So?'

'So don't get off on the wrong foot and don't get any funny ideas. I know how to run things like this and I've got the manpower and equipment to do it. If I come in I'm running it, not you. Take it or leave it.'

The fat man pondered for minutes, then decided. 'I'll take it. You're in, Doc. You can have a cave—two hundred seventeen is empty—and we'll go up and get things started right now.'

Less than a year later, the same two men sat in Graves' office. They waited while a red light upon a peculiarly complicated deskboard faded through pink into pure white.

'All clear. This way, Doc.' Graves pushed a yellow button on his desk and a section of blank wall slid aside.

In the elevator thus revealed the two men went down to a sub-basement. Along a dimly-lit corridor, through an elaborately locked steel door, and into a steel-lined room. Four inert bodies lay upon the floor.

Graves thrust a key into an orifice and a plate swung open, revealing a chute into which the bodies were dumped. The two retraced their steps to the manager's office.

'Well, that's all we can feed to the disintegrator,' Fairchild lit an Alsakanite cigarette and exhaled appreciatively.

'Why? Going soft on us?'

'No. The ice is getting too thin.'

'Whaddya mean, "thin"?' Graves demanded. 'The Patrol inspectors are ours—all that count. Our records are fixed. Everything's on the green.'

'That's what you think,' the scientist sneered. 'You're supposed to be smart. Are you? Our accident rate is up three

hundredths; industrial hazard rate and employee turnover about three and a half; and the Narcotics Division alone knows how much we have upped total bootleg sales. Those figures are all in the Patrol's books. How can you give such facts the brush-off?'

'We don't have to.' Graves laughed comfortably. 'Even a half of one percent wouldn't excite suspicion. Our distribution is so uniform throughout the galaxy that they can't center it. They can't possibly trace anything back to us. Besides, with our lily-white reputation, other firms would get knocked off in time to give us plenty of warning. Lutzenschiffer's, for instance, is putting out Heroin by the ton.'

'So what?' Fairchild remained entirely unconvinced. 'Nobody else is putting out what comes out of cave two seventeen— demand and price prove that. What you don't seem to get, Graves, is that some of those damned Lensmen have brains. Suppose they decide to put a couple of Lensmen onto this job

—then what? The minute anybody runs a rigid statistical analysis on us, we're done for.'

'Um ... m.' This was a distinctly disquieting thought, in view of the impossibility of concealing anything from a Lens-man who was really on the prowl. 'That wouldn't be so good. What would you do?'

'I'd shut down two seventeen—and the whole hush-hush end

—until we can get our records straight and our death-rate down to the old ten-year average. That's the only way we can be really safe.'

'Shut down! The way they're pushing us for production? Don't be an idiot—the chief would toss us both down the chute.'

'Oh, I don't mean without permission. Talk him into it. It'd be best for everybody, over the long pull, believe me.'

'Not a chance. He'd blow his stack. If we can't dope out something better than that, we go on as is.'

'The next-best thing would be to use some new form of death to clean up our books.'

'Wonderful!' Graves snorted contemptuously. 'What would we add to what we've got now—bubonic plague?'

'A loose atomic vortex.'

'Wh-o-o-o-sh!' The fat man deflated, then came back up, gasping for air. 'Man, you're completely nuts! There's only one on the planet, and it's ... or do you mean ... but nobody ever

touched one of those things off deliberately ... can it be done?'

'Yes. It isn't simple, but we of the College of Radiation know how—theoretically—the transformation can be made to occur. It has never been done because it has been impossible to extinguish the things; but now Neal Cloud is putting them out. The fact that the idea is new makes it all the better.'

'I'll say so. Neat ... very neat.' Graves' agile and cunning brain figuratively licked its chops. 'Certain of our employees will presumably have been upon an outing in the upper end of the valley when this terrible accident takes place?'

'Exactly—enough of them to straighten out our books. Then, later, we can dispose of undesirables as they appear. Vortices are absolutely unpredictable, you know. People can die of radiation or of any one of a mixture of various toxic gases and the vortex will take the blame.'

'And later on, when it gets dangerous, Storm Cloud can blow it out for us,' Graves gloated. 'But we won't want him for a long, long time!'

'No, but we'll report it and ask for him the hour it happens ... use your head, Graves!' He silenced the manager's anguished howl of protest. 'Anybody who gets one wants it killed as soon as possible, but here's the joker. Cloud has enough Class-A-double-prime-urgent demands on file already to keep him busy from now on, so we won't be able to get him for a long, long time. See?'

'I see. Nice, Doc. ... very, very nice. But I'll have the boys keep an eye on Cloud just the same.'

At about this same time two minor cogs of TPI's vast machine sat blissfully, arms around each other, on a rustic seat improvised from rocks, branches, and leaves. Below them, almost under their feet, was a den of highly venomous snakes, but neither man or girl saw them. Before them, also unperceived, was a magnificent view of valley and stream and mountain.

All they saw, however, was each other—until their attention was wrenched to a man who was climbing toward them with the aid of a thick club which he used as a staff.

'Oh ... Bob!' The girl stared briefly; then, with a half-articulate moan, shrank even closer against her lover's side.

Ryder, left arm tightening around the girl's waist, felt with his right hand for a club of his own and tensed his muscles, for

the climbing man was completely mad.

His breathing was ... horrible. Mouth tight-clamped, despite his terrific exertion, he was sniffing—sniffing loathsomely, lustfully, each whistling inhalation filling his lungs to bursting. He exhaled explosively, as though begrudging the second of time required to empty himself of air. Wide-open eyes glaring fixedly ahead he blundered upward, paying no attention whatever to his path. He tore through clumps of thorny growth; he stumbled and fell over logs and stones; he caromed away from boulders; as careless of the needles which tore clothing and skin as of the rocks which bruised his flesh to the bone. He struck a great tree and bounced; felt his frenzied way around the obstacle and back into his original line.

He struck the gate of the pen immediately beneath the two appalled watchers and stopped. He moved to the right and paused, whimpering in anxious agony. Back to the gate and over to the left, where he stopped and howled. Whatever the frightful compulsion was, whatever he sought, he could not deviate enough from his line to go around the pen. He looked, then, and for the first time saw the gate and the fence and the ophidian inhabitants of the den. They did not matter. Nothing mattered. He fumbled at the lock, then furiously attacked it and the gate and the fence with his club—fruitlessly. He tried to climb the fence, but failed. He tore off his shoes and socks and, by dint of jamming toes and ringers ruthlessly into the meshes, he began to climb.

No more than he had minded the thorns and the rocks did he mind the eight strands of viciously-barbed wire surmounting that fence; he did not wince as the inch-long steel fangs bit into arms and legs and body. He did, however, watch the snakes. He took pains to drop into an area temporarily clear of them, and he pounded to death the half-dozen serpents bold enough to bar his path.

Then, dropping to the ground, he writhed and scuttled about; sniffing ever harder; nose plowing the ground. He halted; dug his bleeding fingers into the hard soil; thrust his nose into the hole; inhaled tremendously. His body writhed, trembled, shuddered uncontrollably, then stiffened convulsively into a supremely ecstatic rigidity utterly horrible to see.

The terribly labored breathing ceased. The body collapsed bonelessly, even before the snakes crawled up and struck and

struck and struck.

Jacqueline Comstock saw very little erf the outrageous performance. She screamed once, shut both eyes, and, twisting about within the man's encircling arm, burrowed her face into his left shoulder.

Ryder, however—white-faced, set-jawed, sweating—watched the thing to its ghastly end. When it was over he licked his lips and swallowed twice before he could speak.

'It's all over now dear—no danger now,' he managed finally to say. 'We'd better go. We ought to turn in an alarm ,.. make a report or something."

'Oh, I can't, Bob—I can't!' she sobbed. 'If I open my eyes, I just know I'll look, and if I look I'll ... I'll simply turn inside out!'

'Hold everything, Jackie! Keep your eyes shut. I'll pilot you and tell you when we're out of sight.'

More than half carrying his companion, Ryder set off down the rocky trail. Out of sight of what had happened, the girl opened her eyes and they continued their descent in a more usual, more decorous fashion until they met a man hurrying upward.

'Oh, Dr. Fairchild! There was a ...' But the report which Ryder was about to make was unnecessary; the alarm had already been given.

'I know,' the scientist puffed. 'Stop! Stay exactly where you are!' He jabbed a finger emphatically downward to anchor the young couple in the spot the occupied. 'Don't talk—don't say a word until I get back!'

Fairchild returned after a time, unhurried and completely at ease. He did not ask the shaken couple if they had seen what had happened. He knew.

'Bu ... buh... but, doctor,' Ryder began. 'Keep still—don't talk at all.' Fairchild ordered, bruskly. Then, in an ordinary conversational tone, he went on: 'Until we have investigated this extraordinary occurrence thoroughly— sifted it to the bottom—the possibility of sabotage and spying cannot be disregarded. As the only eye-witnesses, your reports will be exceedingly valuable; but you must not say a word until we are in a place which / know is proof against any and all spy-rays. Do you understand?" 'Oh! Yes, we understand.'

'Pull yourselves together, then. Act unconcerned, casual; particularly when we get to the Administration Building. Talk about the weather—or, better yet, about the honeymoon you are going to take on Chickladoria.'

Thus there was nothing visibly unusual about the group of three which strolled into the building and into Graves' private office. The fat man raised an eyebrow.

'I'm taking them to the private laboratory,' Fairchild said, as he touched the yellow button and led the two toward the private elevator. 'Frankly, young folks, I am a scared—yes, a badly scared man."

This statement, so true and yet so misleading, resolved the young couple's inchoate doubts. Entirely unsuspectingly, they followed the Senior Radiationist into the elevator and, after it had stopped, along a corridor. They paused as he unlocked and opened a door; they stepped unquestioningly into the room at his gesture. He did not, however, follow them in. Instead, the heavy metal slab slammed shut, cutting off Jackie's piercing shriek of fear.

'You might as well cut out the racket,' came from a speaker in the steel ceiling of the room. 'Nobody can hear you but me."

'But Mr. Graves, I thought ... Dr. Fairchild told us ... we were going to tell him about...'

'You're going to tell nobody nothing. You saw too much and know too much, that's all.'

'Oh, that's it!' Ryder's mind reeled as some part of the actual significance of what he had seen struck home. 'But listen! Jackie didn't see anything—she had her eyes shut all the time —and doesn't know anything. You don't want to have the murder of such a girl as she is on your mind, I know. Let her go and she'll never say a word—we'll both swear to it—or you could...'

'Why? Just because she's got a face and a shape?' The fat man sneered. 'No soap, Junior. She's not that much of a ...' He broke off as Fairchild entered his office.

'Well, how about it? How bad is it?' Graves demanded.

'Not bad at all. Everything's under control.'

'Listen, doctor!' Ryder pleaded. 'Surely you don't want to murder Jackie here in cold blood? I was just suggesting to Graves that he could get a therapist...'

'Save your breath,' Fairchild ordered. 'We have important

things to think about. You two die.'

'But why?' Ryder cried. He could as yet perceive only a fraction of the tremendous truth. 'I tell you, it's ...'

'We'll let you guess," said Fairchild.

Shock upon shock had been too much for the girl's overstrained nerves. She fainted quietly and Ryder eased her down to the cold steel floor.

'Can't you give her a better cell than this?' he protested then. 'There's no ... it isn't decent!'

'You'll find food and water, and that's enough.' Graves laughed coarsely. 'You won't live long, so don't worry about conveniences. But keep still. If you want to know what's going on, you can listen, but one more word out of you and I cut the circuit. Go ahead, Doc, with what you were going to say.'

'There was a fault in the rock. Very small, but a little of the finest smoke seeped through. Barney must have been a sniffer before to be able to smell the trace of the stuff that was drifting down the hill. I'm having the whole cave tested with a leak-detector and sealed bottle-tight. The record can stand it that Barney—he was a snake-tender, you know—died of snake-bite. That's almost the truth, too, by the way.'

'Fair enough. Now, how about these two?'

'Um ... m. We've got to hold the risk at absolute minimum.' Fairchild pondered briefly. 'We can't disintegrate them this month, that's sure. They've got to be found dead, and our books are full. We'll have to keep them alive—where they are now is as good a place as any—for a week.'

'Why alive? We've kept stiffs in cold storage before now."

'Too chancey. Dead tissues change too much. You weren't courting investigation then; now we are. We've got to keep our noses clean. How about this? They couldn't wait any longer and got married today. You, big-hearted philanthropist that you are, told them they could take their two weeks vacation now for a honeymoon—you'd square it with their department heads. They come back in about ten days, to get settled; go up the valley to see the vortex; and out. Anything in that set-up we can't fake a cover for.'

'It looks perfect to me. We'll let 'em enjoy life for ten days, right where they are now. Hear that, Ryder?'

'Yes, you pot-bellied ...'

The fat man snapped a switch.

It is not necessary to go into the details of the imprisonment. Doggedly and skillfully though he tried, Ryder could open up no avenue of escape or of communication; and Jacqueline, facing the inevitability of death, steadied down to meet it. She was a woman. In minor crises she had shrieked and had hidden her face and had fainted: but in this ultimate one she drew from the depths of her woman's soul not only the power to overcome her own weakness, but also an extra something with which to sustain and fortify her man.

4: 'Storm' Cloud on Deka

In the vortex control laboratory on Tellus, Cloud had just gone into Philip Strong's office.

'No trouble?' the Lensman asked, after greetings had been exchanged.

'Uh-huh. Simple as blowing out a match. You quit worrying about me long ago, didn't you?"

'Pretty much, except for the impossibility of training anybody else to do it. We're still working on that angle, though. You're looking fit.'

He was. He carried no scars—the Phillips treatment had taken care of that. His face looked young and keen; his hard-schooled, resilient body was in surprisingly fine condition for that of a , man crowding forty so nearly. He no longer wore his psychic trauma visibly; it no longer obtruded itself between him and those with whom he worked; but in his own mind he was sure that it still was, and always would be, there. But the Lensman, studying him narrowly—and, if the truth must be known, using his Lens as well—was not sure, and was well content.

'Not bad for an old man, Phil. I could whip a wildcat, and spot him one bite and two scratches. But what I came in here for, as you may have suspected, is—where do I go from here? Spica or Rigel or Canopus? They're the worst, aren't they?'

'Rigel's is probably the worst in property damage and urgency. Before we decide, though, I wish you'd take a good look at this data from Dekanore III. See if you see what I do.'

'Huh? Dekanore III?' Cloud was surprised. 'No trouble there, is there? They've only got one, and it's 'way down in Class Z somewhere.'

'Two now. It's the new one I'm talking about. It's acting funny—damned funny.'

Cloud went through the data, brow furrowed in concentration; then sketched three charts and frowned,

'I see what you mean. "Damned funny" is right. The toxicity is too steady, but at the same time the composition of the effluvium is too varied. Inconsistent. However, there's no real attempt at a gamma analysis—nowhere near enough data for one—this could be right; they're so utterly unpredictable. The

observers were inexperienced, I take it, with medical and chemical bias?"

'Check. That's the way I read it.'

'Well, I'll say this much—I never saw a gamma chart that would accept half of this stuff, and I can't even imagine what the sigma curve would look like. Boss, what say I skip over there and get us a full reading on that baby before she goes orthodox —or, should I say, orthodoxly unorthodox?'

'However you say it, that's my thought exactly; and we have a good exuse for giving it priority. It's killing more people than all three of the bad ones together.'

'If I can't fix the toxicity with exciters I'll throw a solid cordon around it to keep people away. I won't blow it out, though, until I find out why it's acting so—if it is. Clear ether, chief, I'm practically there!'

It did not take long to load Cloud's flitter aboard a Dekanore-bound liner. Half-way there however, an alarm rang out and the dread word 'Pirates!' resounded through the ship.

Consternation reigned, for organized piracy had disappeared with the fall of the Council of Boskone. Furthermore, this was not in any sense a treasure ship; she was an ordinary passenger liner.

She had had little enough warning—her communications officer had sent out only a part of his first distress call when the blanketing interference jammed his channels. The pirate— a first-class superdreadnought—flashed up and a visual beam drove in.

'Go inert,' came the terse command. 'We're coming aboard.'

'Are you completely crazy?' The liner's captain was surprised and disgusted, rather than alarmed. 'If not, you've got the wrong ship. Everything aboard—including any ransom you could get for our passenger list—wouldn't pay your expenses."

'You wouldn't know, of course, that you're carrying a package of Lonabarian jewelry, or would you?' The question was elaborately skeptical.

'I know damned well I'm not.'

'We'll take the package you haven't got, then!' the pirate

snapped. 'Go inert and open up, or I'll do it for you—like this.'

A needle-beam lashed out and expired. 'That was through one

of your holds. The next one will be through your control room.'

Resistance being out of the question, the liner went inert.

While the intrinsic velocities of the two vessels were being matched, the pirate issued further instructions.

'All officers now in the control room, stay there. All other officers, round up all passengers and herd them into the main saloon. Anybody that acts up or doesn't do exactly what he's told will be blasted.'

The pirates boarded. One squad went to the control room. Its leader, seeing that the communications officer was still trying to drive a call through the blanket of interference, beamed him down without a word. At this murder the captain and four or five other officers went for their guns and there was a brief but bloody battle. There were too many pirates.

A larger group invaded the main saloon. Most of them went through, only half a dozen or so posting themselves to guard the passengers. One of the guards, a hook-nosed individual wearing consciously an aura of authority, spoke.

'Take it easy, folks, and nobody'll get hurt. If any of you've got guns, don't go for 'em. That's a specialty that...'

One of his DeLameters flamed briefly. Cloud's right arm, almost to the shoulder, vanished. The man behind him dropped— in two different places.

'Take it easy, I said,' the pirate chief went calmly on. 'You can tie that arm up, fella, if you want to. It was in line with that guy who was trying to pull a gun. You nurse over there—take him to sick-bay and fix up his wing. If anybody stops you tell 'em Number One said to. Now, the rest of you, watch your step. I'll cut down every damn one of you that so much as looks like he wanted to start something.' They obeyed.

In a few minutes the looting parties returned to the saloon. 'Did you get it, Six?' 'Yeah. In the mail, like you said.' 'The safe?'

'Sure. Wasn't much in it, but not too bad, at that.' 'QX. Control room! QX?'

'Ten dead,' the intercom blatted in reply. 'Otherwise QX.' 'Fuse the panels?' 'Natch.' 'Let's go!'

They went. Their vessel flashed away. The passengers rushed to their staterooms. Then:

'Doctor Cloud!' came from the speaker. 'Doctor Neal Cloud! Control room calling Doctor Cloud!' 'Cloud speaking.'

'Report to the control room, please." ,

'Oh—excuse me—I didn't know you were wounded,' the officer apologized as he saw the bandaged stump and the white, sweating face. 'You'd better go to bed.' 'Doing nothing wouldn't help. What did you want me for?' 'Do you know anything about communicators?' 'A little—what a nucleonics man has to know.' 'Good. They killed all our communications officers and blasted the panels, even in the lifeboats. You can't do much with your left hand, of course, but you may be able to boss the job of rigging up a spare.'

'I can do more than you think—I'm left-handed. Give me a couple of technicians and I'll see what we can do."

They set to work, but before they could accomplish anything a cruiser drove up, flashing its identification as a warship of the Galactic Patrol.

'We picked up the partial call you got off," its young commander said, briskly. 'With that and the plotted center of interference we didn't lose any time: Let's make this snappy.' He was itching to be off after the marauder, but he could not leave until he had ascertained the facts and had been given clearance. 'You aren't hurt much—don't need to call a tug, do you?' 'No,' replied the liner's senior surviving officer. 'QX,' and a quick investigation followed. 'Anybody who ships stuff like that open mail ought to lose it, but it's tough on innocent bystanders. Anything else I can do for you?'

'Not unless you can lend us some officers, particularly navigators and communications officers.'

'Sorry, but we're short there ourselves—four of my best are in sick-bay. Sign this clearance, please, and I'll get on that fellow's tail. I'll send your copy of my report to your head office. Clear ether!'

The cruiser shot away. Temporary repairs were made and the

liner, with Cloud and a couple of electronics technicians as

communications officers, finished the voyage to Dekanore III

without more interruption.

The Vortex Blaster was met at the dock by Works Manager

Graves himself. The fat man was effusively sorry that Cloud had lost an arm, but assured him that the accident wouldn't lay him up very long. He, Graves, would get a Posenian surgeon over here so fast that...

If the manager was taken aback to learn that Cloud had already had a Phillips treatment, he did not show it. He escorted the specialist to Deka's best hotel, where he introduced him largely and volubly. Graves took him to supper. Graves took him to a theater and showed him the town. Graves told the hotel management to give the scientist the best rooms and the best valet they had, and that Cloud was not to be allowed to spend any of his own money. All of his activities, whatever their nature, purpose, or extent, were to be charged to Tellurian Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Graves was a grand guy.

Cloud broke loose, finally, and went to the dock to see about getting his flitter.

It had not been unloaded. There would be a slight delay, he was informed, because of the insurance inspections necessitated by the damage—and Cloud had not known that there had been any! When he had learned what had been done to his little ship he swore bitterly and sought out the liner's senior officer. 'Why didn't you tell me we got holed?" he demanded. 'Why, I don't know ... just that you didn't ask, is all, I guess. I don't suppose it occurred to anybody—I know it didn't me— that you might be interested.'

And that was, Cloud knew, strictly true. Passengers were not informed of such occurrences. He had been enough of an officer so that he could have learned anything he wished; but not enough of one to have been informed of such matters as routine. Nor was it surprising that it had not come up in conversation. Damage to cargo meant nothing whatever to the liner's overworked officers, standing double watches; a couple of easily-patched holes in the hull were not worth mentioning. From their standpoint the only damage was done to the communicators, and Cloud himself had set them to rights. This delay was his own fault as much as anybody else's. Yes, more.

'You won't lose anything, though,' the officer said, helpfully. 'Everything's covered, you know.'

'It isn't the money I'm yowling about—it's the time. That apparatus can't be duplicated anywhere except on Tellus, and even there it's all special-order stuff. OH DAMN!' and Cloud

strode away toward his hotel.

During the following days TPI entertained him royally. Not insistently—Graves was an expert in such matters—but simply by giving him the keys to the planet. He could do anything he pleased. He could have all the company he wanted, male or female, to help him to do it. Thus he did—within limits—just about what Graves wanted him to do; and, in spite of the fact that he did not want to enjoy life, he liked it.

One evening, however, he refused to play a slot machine, explaining to his laughing companion that the laws of chance were pretty thoroughly shackled in such mechanisms—and the idle remark backfired. What was the mathematical probability that all the things that had happened to him could have happened by pure chance?

That night he analyzed his data. Six incidents; the probability was extremely small. Seven, if he counted his arm. If it had been his left arm—jet back! Since he wrote with his right hand, very few people knew that he was left-handed. Seven it was; and that made it virtually certain. Accident was out.

But if he was being delayed and hampered deliberately, who was doing it, and why? It didn't make sense. Nevertheless, the idea would not down.

He was a trained observer and an analyst second to none. Therefore he soon found out that he was being shadowed wherever he went, but he could not get any really significant leads. Wherefore:

'Graves, have you got a spy-ray detector?' he asked boldly— and watchfully.

The fat man did not turn a hair. 'No, nobody would want to spy on me. Why?'

'I feel jumpy. I don't know why anybody would be spying on me, either, but—I'm neither a Lensman nor an esper, but I'd swear that somebody's peeking over my shoulder half the time. I think I'll go over to the Patrol station and borrow one.'

'Nerves, my boy; nerves and shock,' Graves diagnosed. 'Losing an arm would knock hell out of anybody's nervous system, I'd say. Maybe the Phillips treatment—the new one growing on— sort of pulls you out of shape.

'Could be,' Cloud assented, moodily. His act had been a flop. If Graves knew anything—and he'd be damned if he could see any grounds for such a suspicion—he hadn't given away a thing.

Nevertheless, Cloud went to the Patrol office, which was of course completely and permanently shielded. There he borrowed the detector and asked the lieutenant in charge to get a special report from the Patrol upon the alleged gems and what it knew about either the cruiser or the pirates. To justify his request he had to explain his suspicions.

After the messages had been sent the young officer drummed thoughtfully upon his desk. 'I wish I could do something, Dr. Cloud, but I don't see how I can,' he decided finally. 'Without a shred of evidence, I can't act."

'I know. I'm not accusing anybody, yet. It may be anybody between here and Andromeda. Just call me, please, as soon as you get that report.'

The report came, and the Patrolman was round-eyed as he imparted the information, that, as far as Prime Base could discover, there had been no Lonabarian gems and the rescuing vessel had not been a Patrol ship at all. Cloud was not surprised.

'I thought so,' he said, flatly. 'This is a hell of a thing to say, but it now becomes a virtual certainty—six sigmas out on the probability curve—that this whole fantastic procedure was designed solely to keep me from analyzing and blowing out that new vortex. As to where the vortex fits in, I haven't even the dimmest possible idea, but one thing is clear. Graves represents TPI—on this planet he is TPI. Now what kind of monkey business would TPI—or, more likely, somebody working under cover in TPI, because undoubtedly the head office doesn't know anything about it—be doing? I ask you.'

'Dope, you mean? Cocaine—heroin—that kind of stuff?'

'Exactly; and here's what I'm going to do about it.' Bending over the desk, even in that ultra-shielded office, Cloud whispered busily for minutes. 'Pass this along to Prime Base immediately, have them alert Narcotics, and have your men ready in case I strike something hot.'

'But listen, man!' the Patrolman protested. 'Wait—let a Lensman do it. They'll almost certainly catch you at it, and if they're clean nothing can keep you from doing ninety days in the clink.'

'But if we wait, the chances are it'll be too late; they'll have had time to cover up. What I'm asking you is, will you back my play if I catch them with the goods?'

'Yes. We'll be here, armored and ready. But I still think

you're nuts.'

'Maybe so, but even if my mathematics is wrong, it's still a fact that my arm will grow back on just as fast in the clink as anywhere else. Clear ether, lieutenant—until tonight!'

Cloud made an engagement with Graves for luncheon. Arriving a few minutes early, he was of course shown into the private office. Since the manager was busily signing papers, Cloud strolled to the side window and seemed to gaze appreciatively at the masses of gorgeous blooms just outside. What he really saw, however, was the detector upon his wrist.

Nobody knew that he had in his sleeve a couple of small, but highly efficient, tools. Nobody knew that he was left-handed. Nobody saw what he did, nor was any signal given that he did anything at all.

That night, however, that window opened alarmlessly to his deft touch. He climbed in, noiselessly. He might be walking straight into trouble, but he had to take that chance. One thing was in his favor; no matter how crooked they were, they couldn't keep armored troops on duty as night-watchmen, and the Patrolmen could get there as fast as their thugs could.

He had brought no weapons. If he was wrong, he would not need any and being armed would only aggravate his offense. If right, there would be plenty of weapons available. There were. A whole drawer full of DeLameters—fully charged—belts and everything. He leaped across the room to Graves' desk; turned on a spy-ray. The sub-basement—'private laboratories', Graves had said—was blocked. He threw switch after switch—no soap. Communicators—ah, he was getting somewhere now—a steel-lined room, a girl and a boy.

'Eureka! Good evening, folks.'

'Eureka? I hope you rot in hell, Graves ...'

'This isn't Graves. Cloud. Storm Cloud, the Vortex Blaster, investigating...'

'Oh, Bob, the Patrol!' the girl screamed.

'Quiet! This is a zwilnik outfit, isn't it?'

'I'll say it is!' Ryder gasped in relief. 'Thionite ...'

'Thionite! How could it be? How could they bring it in here?'

'They don't. They're growing broadleaf and making the stuff. That's why they're going to kill us.'

'Just a minute.' Cloud threw in another switch. 'Lieutenant? Worse than I thought. Thionite! Get over here fast with every-

thing you got. Armor and semi-portables. Blast down the May-ner Street door. Stairway to right, two floors down, corridor to left, half-way along left side. Room B-Twelve. Snap it up, but keep your eyes peeled!'

'But wait, Cloud!' the lieutenant protested. 'Wait 'til we get there—you can't do anything alone!'

'Can't wait—got to get these kids out—evidence!' Cloud broke the circuit and, as rapidly as he could, one-handed, buckled on gun-belts. Graves would have to kill these two youngsters, if he possibly could.

'For God's sake save Jackie, anyway!' Ryder prayed. He knew just how high the stakes were. 'And watch out for gas, radiation, and traps—you must have sprung a dozen alarms already.'

'What kind of traps?' Cloud demanded.

'Beams, deadfalls, sliding doors—I don't know what they haven't got. Graves said he could kill us in here with rays or gas or ...'

'Take Graves' private elevator, Dr. Cloud,' the girl broke in. 'Where is it— which one?'

'It's the blank wall—the yellow button on his desk opens it. Down as far as it will go.'

Cloud jumped up listening with half an ear to the babblings from below as he searched for air-helmets. Radiations, in that metal-lined room, were out—except possibly for a few beam-projectors, which he could deal with easily enough. Gas, though, would be bad; but every drug-house had air-helmets. Ah! Here they were!

He put one on, made shift to hang two more around his neck —he had to keep his one hand free. He punched the yellow button; rode the elevator down until it stopped of itself. He ran along the corridor and drove the narrowest, hottest possible beam of a DeLameter into the lock of B-12. It took time to cut even that small semi-circle in that refractory and conductive alloy—altogether too much time—but the kids would know who it was. Zwilniks would open the cell with a key, not a torch. They knew. When Cloud kicked the door open they fell upon him eagerly.

'A helmet and a Delameter apiece. Get them on quick! Now help me buckle this. Thanks. Jackie, you stay back there, out of the way of our feet. Bob, you lie down here in the doorway.

Keep your gun outside and stick your head out just far enough so you can see. No farther. I'll join you after I see what they've got in the line of radiation.'

A spot of light appeared in a semi-concealed port, then another. Cloud's weapon flamed briefly.

'Projectors like those aren't much good when the prisoners have Delameters,' he commented, 'but I imagine our air right now is pretty foul. It won't be long now. Do you hear anything?'

'Somebody's coming, but suppose it's the Patrol?'

'If so, a few blasts won't hurt 'em—they'll be in G P armor.' Cloud did not add that Graves would probably rush his nearest thugs in just as they were; to kill the two witnesses before help could arrive.

The first detachment to round the corner was in fact un-armored. Cloud's weapon flamed white, followed quickly by Ryder's, and those zwilniks died. Against the next to arrive, however, the DeLameters raved in vain. But only for a second.

'Back!' Cloud ordered, and swung the heavy door shut as the attackers' beams swept past. It could not be locked, but it could be, and was, welded to the jamb with dispatch, if not with neatness. 'We'll cut that trap-door off, and stick it onto the door, too —and any more loose metal we can find.'

'I hope they come in time,' the girl's low voice carried a prayer. Was this brief flare of hope false? Would not only she and her Bob, but also their would-be rescuer, die? 'Oh! That noise—s'pose it's the Patrol?"

It was not really a noise—the cell was sound-proof—it was an occasional jarring of the whole immense structure.

'I wouldn't wonder. Heavy stuff—probably semi-portables. You might grab that bucket, Bob, and throw some of that water that's trickling in. Every little bit helps.'

The heavy metal of the door was glowing bright-to-dull red "over half its area, and that area was spreading rapidly. The air of the room grew hot and hotter. Bursts of live steam billowed out and, condensing, fogged the helmets.

The glowing metal dulled, brightened, dulled. The prisoners could only guess at the intensity of the battle being waged. They could follow its progress only by the ever-shifting temperature of the barrier which the zwilniks were so suicidally determined to bum down. For hours, it seemed, the conflict raged. The thuddings and jarrings grew worse. The water, which had been

a trickle, was now a stream and scalding hot.

Then a blast of bitterly cold air roared from the ventilator, clearing away the gas and steam, and the speaker came to life.

'Good work, Cloud and you other two,' it said, chattily. 'Glad to see you're all on deck. Get into this corner over here, so the zwilniks won't hit you when they hole through. They won't have time to locate you—we've got a semi right at the corner now.'

The door grew hotter, flamed fiercely white. A narrow pencil sizzled through, burning steel sparkling away in all directions— but only for a second. It expired. Through the hole there flared the reflection of a beam brilliant enough to pale the noon-day sun. The portal cooled; heavy streams of water hissed and steamed. Hot water began to spurt into the cell. An atomic-hydrogen cutting torch sliced away the upper two-thirds of the fused and battered door. The grotesquely-armored lieutenant peered in.

'They tell me all three of you are QX. Check?'

'Check.'

'Good. We'll have to carry you out. Step up here where we can get hold of you.'

'I'll walk and I'll carry Jackie myself,' Ryder protested, while two of the armored warriors were draping Cloud tastefully around the helmet of a third.

'You'd get boiled to the hips—this water is deep and hot. Come on!'

The slowly rising water was steaming; the walls and ceiling of the corridor gave mute but eloquent testimony of the appalling forces that had been unleashed. Tile, concrete, plastic, metal —nothing was as it had been. Cavities yawned. Plates and pilasters were warped, crumbled, fused into hellish stalactites; bare girders hung awry. In places complete collapse had necessitated the blasting out of detours.

Through the wreckage of what had been a magnificent building the cavalcade made its way, but when the open air was reached the three rescued ones were not released. Instead, they were escorted by a full platoon of soldiery to an armored car, which was in turn escorted to the Patrol station.

'I'm afraid to take chances with you until we find out who's who and what's what around here,' the young commander explained. 'The Lensmen will be here in the morning, with half

an army, so I think you'd better spend the rest of the night here, don't you?'

'Protective custody, eh?' Cloud grinned. 'I've never been arrested in such a polite way before, but it's QX with me. You, too, I take it?'

'Us, too, decidedly," Ryder assented. 'This is a very nice jail-house, especially in comparison with where we've ...'

'I'll say so!" Jackie broke in, giggling almost hysterically. 'I never thought I'd be tickled to death at getting arrested, but I am!'

Lensmen came, and companies of Patrolmen equipped in various fashions, but it was several weeks before the situation was completely clarified. Then Ellington—Councillor Ellington, the Unattached Lensman in charge of all Narcotics—called the three into the office.

"How about Graves and Fairchild?' Cloud demanded before the councillor could speak.

'Both dead,' Ellington said. 'Graves was shot down just as he took off, but he blasted Fairchild first, just as he intimated he would. There wasn't enough of Fairchild left for positive identification, but it couldn't very well have been anyone else. Nobody left alive seems to know much of anything of the real scope of the thing, so we can release you three now. Thanks, from me as well as the Patrol. There is some talk that you two youngsters have been contemplating a honeymoon out Chick-ladoria way?'

'Oh, no, sir—that is ..." Both spoke at once. 'That was just talk, sir.'

'I realize that the report may have been exaggerated, or premature, or both. However, not as a reward, but simply in appreciation, the Patrol would be very glad to have you as its guests throughout such a trip—all expenses—if you like.'

They liked.

'Thank you. Lieutenant, please take Miss Cochran and Mr. Ryder to the disbursing office. Dr. Cloud, the Patrol will take cognizance of what you have done. In the meantime, however, I would like to say that in uncovering this thing you have been of immense assistance to us.'

'Nothing much sir, I'm afraid. I shudder to think of what's coming. If zwilniks can grow Trenconian broadleaf anywhere ...'

'Not at all, not at all,' Ellington interrupted. 'If such an entirely unsuspected firm as Tellurian Pharmaceuticals, with all their elaborate preparations and precautions, could not do much more than start, it is highly improbable that any other attempt will be a success. You have given us a very potent weapon against zwil-nik operations—not only thionite, but heroin, ladolian, nitrolabe, and the rest.'

'What weapon?" Cloud was puzzled.

'Statistical analysis and correlation of apparently unrelated indices.'

'But they've been used for years!'

'Not the way you used them, my friend. Thus, while we cannot count upon any more such extraordinary help as you gave us, we should not need any. Can I give you a lift back to Tellus?'

'I don't think so, thanks. My stuff is en route now. I'll have to blow out this vortex anyway. Not that I think there's anything unusual about it—those were undoubtedly murders, not vortex casualties at all—but for the record. Also, since I can't do any more exinguishing until my arm finishes itself up, I may as well stay here and keep on practising.'

'Practising? Practising what?'

'Gun-slinging—the lightning draw. I intend to get at least a lunch while the next pirate who pulls a DeLameter on me is getting a square meal.'

And Councillor Ellington conferred with another Gray Lens-man; one who was not even vaguely humanoid.

'Did you take him apart?'

'Practically cell by cell.'

'What do you think the chances are of finding and developing another like him?'

'With a quarter of a million Lensmen working on it now, and the number doubling every day, and with a hundred thousand million planets, with almost that many different cultures, it is my considered opinion that it is merely a matter of time.'

5: The Boneheads

Since becoming the Vortex Blaster, Neal Cloud lived alone. Whenever he decently could, he traveled alone and worked alone. He was alone now, hurtling through a barren region of space toward Rift Seventy One and the vortex next upon his list. In the interests of solitude, convenience, and efficiency he was now driving a scout-class ship which had been converted to one-man and automatic operation. In one hold was his vortex blasting flitter; in the others his duodec bombs and other supplies.

During such periods of inaction as this, he was wont to think flagellantly of Jo and the three kids; especially of Jo. Now, however, and much to his surprise and chagrin, the pictures which had been so vividly clear were beginning to fade. Unless he concentrated consciously, his thoughts strayed elsewhere: to the last meeting of the Society; to the new speculations as to the why and how of supernovae; to food; to bowling—maybe he'd better start that again, to see if he couldn't make his hook roll smoothly into the one-two pocket instead of getting so many seven-ten splits. Back to food—for the first time in the Vortex Blaster's career he was really hungry.

Which buttons would he push for supper? Steak and Venerian mushrooms would be mighty good. So would fried ham and eggs, or high-pressured gameliope ...

An alarm bell jangled, rupturing the silence; a warm-blooded oxygen-breather's distress call, pitifully weak, was coming in. It would have to be weak, Cloud reflected, as he tuned it in as sharply as he could; he was a good eighty-five parsecs—at least an hour at maximum blast—away from the nearest charted traffic lane. It was getting stronger. It hadn't just started, then; he had just gotten into its range. He acknowledged, swung his little ship's needle nose into the line and slammed on full drive. He had not gone far on the new course however, when a tiny but brilliant flash of light showed on his plate and the distress-call stopped. Whatever had occurred was history.

Cloud had to investigate, of course. Both written and unwritten laws are adamant that every call must be heeded by any warm-blooded oxygen-breather receiving it, of whatever race

or class or tonnage or upon whatever mission bound. He broadcast call after call of his own. No reply. He was probably the only being in space who had been within range.

Still driving at max, he went to the rack and pulled down a chart. He had never been in on a space emergency before, but he knew the routine. No use to investigate the wreckage; the brilliance of the flare was evidence enough 'that the vessel and everything near it had ceased to exist. It was lifeboats he was after. They were supposed to stick around to be rescued, but out here they wouldn't. They'd have to head for the nearest planet, to be sure of air. Air was far more important than either food or water; and lifeboats, by the very nature of things, could not carry enough air.

Thus he steered more toward the nearest T-T (Tellus-Type) planet than towards the scene of disaster. He put his communicators, both sending and receiving, on automatic, then sat down at the detector panel. There might not be anything on the visuals or the audio. There had been many cases of boats, jammed with women and children, being launched into space with no one aboard able to operate even a communicator. If any lifeboats had gotten away from the catastrophe, his detectors would find them.

There was one; one only. It was close to the planet, almost into atmosphere. Cloud aimed a solid communicator beam. Still no answer. Either the boat's communicator was smashed or nobody aboard could run it. He'd have to follow them down to the ground.

But what was that? Another boat on the plate? Not a lifeboat—too big—but not big enough to be a ship. Coming out from the planet, apparently ... to rescue? No—what the hell? The lug was beaming the lifeboat!

'Let's go, you sheet-iron lummox!' the Blaster yelled aloud, kicking in his every remaining dyne of drive. Then, very shortly, his plate came suddenly to life. To semi-life, rather, for the video was blurred and blotchy; the audio full of breaks and noise. The lifeboat's pilot was a Chickladorian; characteristically pink except for red-matted hair and red-streamed face. He was in bad shape.

'Whoever it is that's been trying to raise me, snap it up!' the pink man said in 'SpaceaP, the lingua franca of deep space. 'I couldn't answer until I faked up this jury rig. The ape's

aboard and he means business. I'm going to black out, I think, but I've undogged the locks. Take over, pal!'

The picture blurred, vanished. The voice stopped. Cloud swore, viciously.

The planet Dhil and its enormous satellite lune are almost twin worlds, revolving around their common center of gravity and traversing as one the second orbit of their sun. In the third orbit revolves Nhal, a planet strikingly similar to Dhil in every respect of gravity, atmosphere, and climate. Thus Dhilians and Nhalians are, to all intents and purposes, identical.*

The two races had been at war with each other, most of the time, for centuries; and practically all of that warfare had been waged upon luckless Lune. Each race was well advanced in science. Each had atomic power, offensive beams, and defensive screens. Neither had any degree of inertialessness. Neither had ever heard of Civilization or of Boskonia.

At this particular time peace existed, but only on the surface. Any discovery or development giving either side an advantage would rekindle the conflagration without hesitation or warning.

Such was the condition obtaining when Darjeeb of Nhal blasted his little space-ship upward from Lune. He was glowing with pride of accomplishment, suffused with self-esteem. Not only had he touched off an inextinguishable atomic flame exactly where it would do most good, but also, as a crowning achievement, he had captured Luda of Dhil. Luda herself; the coldest, hardest, most efficient Minister of War that Dhil had ever had!