Chapter TWO: Vortex Buster

Robert Ryder, Bachelor of Hydroponics from the University of Newspoke, was also, maritally, a bachelor. For a year or so after graduation, while he was making good with Tellurian Pharmaceutical, Inc., he had no reason to be dissatisfied with that state of affairs. However, Mother Nature went to work upon him in her wonted fashion, and, never averse to feminine society, he began to go in for girls in a large and serious way.

In the hydroponics office there was an eminently personable and yet level-headed young filing clerk named Jacqueline Comstock, who was all unconsciously--or was it?--working much more toward her Mrs. degree than for the good of the firm.

It was inevitable, then, that these two should single each other out; that each should come to behold in the other all that made life worth while. They planned, breathtakingly happy.

They saved their money, instead of indulging in expensive amusements; they took long hikes.

Thus they discovered many choice spots affording the maximum of privacy, of comfort, and of view; thus they came to know almost as individuals the birds and beasts and reptiles in the far-flung pens.

They sat blissfully, arms around each other, upon a rustic seat improvised from rocks, branches, and leaves. Below them, almost under their feet, was a den of venomous serpents, but they did not see the snakes.

Before them, equally unperceived, there extended the magnificent vista of stream and valley and mountain.

All they saw, however, was each other--until their attention was literally wrenched to a man who was climbing frantically toward them with the aid of a stout cudgel which he used as a staff. The girl gazed briefly, stared, and then, with a half-articulate moan, shrank even closer against her lover's side. Ryder, even while his left arm tightened around his Jackie's waist, felt with his right hand for a club of his own and tensed his muscles in readiness for strife--for the climbing man was all too apparently mad.

His breathing was horrible. Mouth tight-clamped, in spite of 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 from boulders, as careless of the needles which tore clothing and skin as of the rocks which bruised his flesh to the very bone.

He struck the gate of the pen immediately beneath the two appalled watchers, and then stopped. He moved to the right and paused, whimpering in anxious agony. Back to the gate and over to the left he went, where he stopped and sent forth a blood-curdling howl. Whatever the frightful compulsion was, whatever it was that he sought, he could not deviate enough from his line to go around the pen. He looked, 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 with 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 sandals and socks and, by dint of thrusting fingers and toes ruthlessly into the narrow meshes of the woven wire, he succeeded in getting through.

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, 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; he dug with his bare hands at the hard soil. Thrusting his face into the hole, he inhaled tremendously. His body writhed, trembled, shuddered uncontrollably, then stiffened convulsively into a supremely ecstatic rigidity, terrible to gaze upon.

The horribly labored breathing ceased. The body collapsed bonelessly, even before the outraged serpents crawled up and struck.

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

Ryder, however--white-faced, jaw set, sweating--watched the whole ghastly thing to its grimly cataclysmic end. When it was over he licked his lips and swallowed hard before he could talk.

"It's all over, dear--no danger now," he finally managed to say. "We'd better go. We ought to turn in an alarm--make a report or something. They'll want us as witnesses."

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

"Hold everything, Jackie! Keep your eyes shut. I'll pilot you and tell you when it's safe to look."

* * * * *

More than half carrying his companion, still gripping unconsciously his heavy club, the man set off down the rugged trail. Out of sight of what had happened, the girl opened her eyes and they continued the descent in a more usual, more decorous fashion until they met a man hurrying upwards.

"Oh, Doctor 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 right where you are." He jabbed a finger emphatically downward to anchor the couple in the exact spot they 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 need to ask the shaken couple if they had seen what had occurred. It was plainly evident that they had.

"But--but, Doctor--" Ryder began.

"Keep still! Don't talk at all!" Fairchild ordered brusquely. Then, in an ordinary conversational tone, he went on: "Until we have investigated this extraordinary occurrence thoroughly--sifted it to the bottom--the probability of spying cannot be disregarded. As the only eye-witnesses to what actually happened, your reports will be exceedingly valuable. But I do not want to hear a word until we are in a place which I am sure beyond peradventure is proof against any and all spy-rays. Do you understand?"

"Oh yes, I 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 it was that there was nothing noticeably abnormal about the group of three which strolled into the office building and entered a private automatic elevator. The conveyance, however, went down instead of up.

"I am taking you to my private laboratory, not to my office," Fairchild replied to Ryder's unspoken question. "Frankly, young folks, I am a scared--a badly scared man."

This statement, so true and yet so misleading, resolved thoroughly the young engineer's inchoate doubts. Entirely unsuspectingly the couple accompanied the Senior Radiationist along the grim corridor. They paused as he unlocked and swung open a door of thick metal; they stepped unquestioningly into the room in response to his gestured invitation. He did not, however, follow them. Instead, he swung shut the heavy slab, whose closing cut off completely the filing clerk's piercing scream of fear.

"Cut out that noise!" came raspingly from a speaker in the steel ceiling of the small room--a room which was very evidently not Doctor Fairchild's private laboratory. "It won't do you any good. You're sound-proofed. Talk all you please, but any more of that yelling and I'll have to put you out of your misery."

"But Mr. Graves, I thought--Dr. Fairchild told us--we were to report on that--" Ryder's words came confusedly from the maze of his surprise.

"You're to report on nothing. You saw too much and know too much, that's all."

"Oh, so _that's_ it." Ryder's mind reeled as some part of the actual significance of what he had seen struck home. "But listen, Graves. Jackie didn't see anything. She had her eyes shut all the time, and doesn't know anything. You don't want 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 that. Or you could--"

"Why? Just because she's got a face and a shape?" the fat man sneered. "There are thousands of women as good-looking as she is, but I've got only one life--" Graves broke off as Fairchild entered the office.

"Well, how about it? How bad is it?" the manager asked.

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

"Listen, Doctor Fairchild!" Ryder put in, desperately, "surely you don't have to murder Jackie here in cold blood. I was just suggesting to Graves that he could get a therapist--"

"Shut up," the scientist ordered coldly. "Our therapists are working on things that are really important. You two must die."

"But why?" Ryder protested wildly. He could not as yet perceive more than a small fraction of the whole. "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 unconscious form down to the cold steel floor.

"Can't you put her into a better place than this?" the man protested then.

"You'll find water and food, and that's enough." Graves laughed coarsely. "You won't live very long, so don't worry about conveniences. But keep still. If you want to know what is going to happen to you, listen--we have no objections to that--but one more word out of you and I cut the circuit. Go ahead, Fairchild, with what you were saying."

"There was a fault in the rock. Small, but big enough to let a little of the fine smoke seep through. He must have been a sniffer before to be able to smell the trace of the stuff that was drifting down the hill. All fixed now, though. I'm having the fault, and any others that may exist, cemented up solid. Death by snake bite will fix our records."

"Fair enough. Now, how about these two? There has been some talk of a honeymoon to Chickladoria, but that may have been a blind. Doubles? Disappearance? The vortex? What do you think?"

"Um--We've got to hold the risk at minimum." Fairchild pondered for minutes. "We can't disintegrate them, that's sure. We're trying to clear our books of too much of that stuff already. They've got to be found dead, and the quota for the vortex for this period is full. Therefore we'll have to keep them alive and out of sight--where they are is as good a place as any--for a week."

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

"Too chancey--dead tissues change too much. We weren't courting investigation then, but now we are--on the vortex, at least--so we have to keep our noses clean. How about this? They decided that they couldn't wait any longer and got married today. You, big-hearted philanthropist that you are, told them that they could take their two weeks vacation immediately and that you would square it with their department heads. They went on their honeymoon. Not to Chickladoria, of course--too long and too risky--but to a place where nobody knows them. We can fake the evidence on that easily enough. They come back in about a week, to get settled, and the vortex gets them. See any flaws in that set-up?"

"No, that looks perfect," Graves decided after due deliberation. "One week from tonight, at midnight, they go out. Hear that, Ryder?"

"Yes, you pot-bellied--"

The fat man snapped a switch.

Doggedly and skillfully though he tried, Ryder could open up no avenue of escape or of communication; Fairchild and Graves had seen efficiently to that. And Jacqueline, in the inevitability of impending death, steadied down to meet it. She was a woman. In minor crises she had hidden her face and had shrieked and had fainted; but in this ultimate one she drew from the depths of her woman's soul not only a power to overcome her own weaknesses, but also an extra something with which to sustain and to fortify Ryder in his black moments.

They were together. That fact, and the far more important one that they were to die together, robbed incarceration and death itself of sting.

* * * * *

At the Atomic Research Laboratory on Teelus a conference was taking place between Unattached Lensmen Philip Strong, the head of that laboratory, and Doctor Neal Cloud, ex-atomic-physicist, now "Storm" Cloud, the Vortex Blaster.

Cloud had become the Vortex Blaster because a fragment of a loose atomic vortex had wiped out his entire family--not by coincidence, but by sheer cosmic irony. For he, while protecting his home and his loved ones from lightning by means of a mathematically infallible network of lightning rods, had all unknowingly erected a super-powerful magnet for loose-flying vortices of atomic disintegration.

Nor were such vortices scarce. Every time an atomic powerplant went out of control, a loose atomic vortex resulted, and there was, at that time, no way of extinguishing them. It was theoretically possible to blow them out with duodec, but the charge of explosive had to match within very close limits the instantaneous value of the vortex's activity. Since that value varied rapidly and almost unpredictably, practically all such attempts resulted in the death of the operator and the creation of a dozen or more new centers of annihilation.

There was a possibility that Cloud, a mathematical prodigy able to compute instantaneously any mathematical problem, would be able to succeed where so many others had failed; but as long as he had Jo and the three kids, as long as he had the normal love of life, that possibility had never occurred to him.

When he lost them, however, he no longer had the slightest interest in living. Unwilling to kill himself, he decided to try to blow out the oldest and worst vortex upon Tellus. Against the orders of his chief and the pleadings of his friends he tried it. He succeeded.

He had been burned; he had been broken, but he carried no scars. The Phillips treatment for the replacement of lost or damaged members of the human body had taken care of that. His face looked youthful; his hard-schooled, resiliently responsive body was in startlingly fine condition for that of a man of forty.

The Phillips treatment could not, however, fill a dully aching void within him. It could not eradicate from mind and soul the absence of and the overpowering longing for his deceased wife and children--particularly his wife, Jo the lovely, Jo the beloved, Jo his all in all for eighteen fleeting and intensely happy years.

He no longer wore that psychic trauma visibly; it no longer came obtrusively between him and those with whom he worked, but it was and always would be there. He had by this time blown out so many vortices and had developed such an effective technique that he no longer had any hope that any vortex could ever kill him--but there were other forms of death. He still would not actually court it; but more and more certainly, as the days dragged on, he came to know that not by one single millimeter would he dodge anyone or anything bringing the dread messenger his way.

"Where do you want me to go next, Chief?" the Vortex Blaster asked. "Spica or Rigel or Corvina? Those three are the worst, I'd say."

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

"Dekanore III?" Cloud glanced curiously at the older man. "Didn't know they were having any trouble. Only got one, haven't they?"

"Two now--they just had a new one. It's that new one I'm talking about. It's acting funny--damned funny."

Cloud went through the data in brow-furrowing concentration, then charted some of it and frowned.

"I get it. 'Damned funny' is right," he agreed. "The toxicity is too steady, but at the same time the composition of the effluvium seems to be too varied. Inconsistent, apparently--but since there's no real attempt at a gamma analysis and very little actual mathematical data, it could be; they're so utterly unpredictable. Inexperienced observers, I take it, with chemical and medical bias?"

"Very much so, from our angle."

"Well, I'll say this much--I never saw a gamma chart that would fit this stuff, and I can't even imagine what the sigma curve would look like. Boss, I'd like to run a full test on that baby before it goes orthodox."

"My thought exactly. And we have a valid excuse for giving it priority, too. It happens to be killing more people than all three of those bad ones combined."

"I can fix that toxicity, I think, with exciters; and I'll throw a solid cordon around it, if I have to, to keep the fools from getting themselves burned to death. However, I won't blow it out until I find out why it's acting so--if it is. Clear the ether, Chief, I'm practically there!"

* * * * *

It did not take long to load Cloud's apparatus-packed flitter into a liner, Dekanore-bound. But that trip was not uneventful. Half-way there an alarm rang out and the dread word "Pirates!" resounded throughout the ship.

Consternation reigned, for organized piracy had vanished with the fall of the Council of Boskone. Treasure ships were either warships themselves or were escorted by warships. But this vessel was no treasure ship; she was only a passenger liner.

She had had little enough warning--her alert Communications Officer had sent out only a part of his first distress call when the blanketing interference closed down. The pirate--a first-class super-dreadnought--flashed up, and a heavy visual beam drove in.

"Go inert," came the tense command. "We are coming aboard."

"Are you crazy?" The liner's captain was surprised and disgusted, rather than alarmed. "If not, you've got the wrong ship. Everything we have aboard, including the ransom--if any--you can get for our passengers, wouldn't pay your expenses."

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

"I know damned well that I'm not!"

"We'll take the package you _haven't_ got, then!" The pirate snapped. "Go inert and open up, or I'll inert you with a needle-beam and open you up, compartment by compartment--like this." A narrow beam lashed out and expired. "That was through one of your cargo holds, just to show you that I mean business. The next one will be through your control room."

Resistance being out of the question, the liner went inert, and while the intrinsic velocities of the two vessels were being matched, the attacker issued further instructions.

"All officers are to be in the control room, all passengers in the main saloon. Everybody unarmed. Any person wearing arms or slow in obeying orders will be blasted."

Lines were rigged and space-suited men crossed the intervening void.

One squad went to the control room. Its leader, seeing that the Communications Officer was still trying to drive a call through the blanket, beamed him down without a word, then fused the entire communications panel. The captain and four or five other officers, maddened by this cold-blooded butchery, went for their guns and were butchered in turn.

A larger group--helmets thrown back for unimpeded vision, hands bared for instantaneous and accurate use of weapons--invaded the main saloon. Most of them went on through to perform previously assigned tasks, only a half dozen posting themselves to guard the passengers. One of these guards, a hook-nosed individual wearing consciously an aura of authority and dominance, spoke.

"Just take it easy, folks, and nobody will get hurt. If any of you have guns, don't go for them. That's a specialty that--" One of his DeLameters flamed briefly. Cloud's right arm vanished almost to the shoulder. The man behind him--what was left of him--dropped.

"Take it easy, I said," he went calmly on. "You can tie that arm up, fella, if you want to. It was in line with that guy who was trying in his slow way to pull a gun. You nurse over there, take him to the sick-bay and let them fix up his wing. If anybody stops you tell them 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. They were very near the point of panic, but in view of what had happened no one dared to make the first move. The leniency displayed toward the wounded man also had a soothing effect.

In a few minutes the looting parties returned to the saloon.

"Did you get it, Six?"

"We got it. It was in the mail, like you said."

"The safe?"

"Sure. Wasn't much in it, but not bad, at that."

"QX. Control room! All done--let's go!"

The pirates backed away, their vessel disappeared, and its passengers rushed for their staterooms.

Then: "Doctor Cloud--Chief Pilot calling Doctor Cloud," the speaker announced.

"Cloud speaking."

"Report to the control room, please."

"Oh, excuse me--I didn't know that you were wounded," the officer apologized as he saw the Blaster's bandaged stump. "You had better go to bed."

"Doing nothing would only make it worse. Can I be of any help?"

"Do you know anything about communicators?"

"A little."

"Good. All our communications officers were killed and the sets--even those in the lifeboats--blasted. 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," Cloud grinned wryly. "It so happens that I'm left-handed. Give me a couple of technicians and we'll see what we can do."

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

"We picked up the partial call you got off," the young commander said briskly. "With that and the 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 a clearance signal by the merchantman's commanding officer. "You aren't hurt much. Don't need to call a repair-ship for you, do I?"

"No."

"QX." A quick investigation ensued.

"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?" the rescuer asked.

"Not unless you can lend us a communications officer or two."

"Sorry, but we're short-handed there ourselves. Can give you anybody else you need though, I think."

"Nothing else, thanks."

"Sign this clearance then, please, and I'll get on that fellow's tail. I'll send a copy of the report to your owners' head office. Clear ether!"

The visitor shot away and the liner, after repairs had been made, resumed its course toward Dekanore, with Cloud and a couple of electrical technicians as communications officers.

* * * * *

The Vortex Blaster was met effusively at the dock by Manager Graves himself. The fat man was overwhelmingly sorry that Cloud had lost his 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 had a Phillips treatment already, he scarcely showed 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 specialist the best rooms and the best valet they had and that 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, however, and went to the dock to see about storing 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 damage! When he had found out just what that beam had done to his little ship he swore viciously and sought out the liner's Chief Pilot.

"Why didn't you tell me that that damned pirate holed us?" he demanded hotly.

"Why didn't you ask?" the officer replied, honestly surprised. "I don't suppose that it occurred to anybody--I know it didn't to 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 everything if he had so 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 those in the liner's control room; a couple of easily-patched holes in the hull were not worth mentioning. From their standpoint the only real damage was done to the communicators, and Cloud himself had set them to rights. No, this delay was his own fault as much as anybody else's.

"You won't lose anything, though," the pilot said helpfully. "It's all covered by insurance, you know."

"It's not the money I'm yapping about--it's time. Those instruments and generators can't be duplicated anywhere except on Tellus, and even there it's all special-order stuff--oh, damn!"