BACK ON TELLUS, Cloud took a fast copter to the Vortex Control Laboratory, still wondering what it was all about.
“Go right in, Dr. Cloud,” Strong’s secretary told him, even before he stopped at her desk. “He’s been gnawing his nails ever since you landed.”
Cloud went in. The Lensman was not alone; a woman who had been seated beside the desk was now standing, studying him eagerly.
“Hi, Phil,” the Blaster said. “Why all the haste, and why so cryptic? I’ve been wondering if you found where I hid the body—and which body it was.”
“Hi, Storm. Nothing like that!” Strong laughed. “Doctor Janowick, Doctor Cloud—or rather, Joan, this is Storm. You know all about him that anybody does.”
They shook hands, Cloud wondering all the more, and as he wondered he studied the woman, just as she was studying him.
Janowick? Janowick! He’d never heard of any female Janowick, so she couldn’t be anybody much in nucleonics. Not exactly fat, but definitely on the plump side. About a hundred and thirty-five pounds, he guessed; and about five feet two. About his own age—no, a bit younger, thirty-some, probably. Brown hair, with a few white ones showing; wide-spaced gray eyes—slightly myopic, by the looks of her pixeyish, you-be-damned spectacles. Smart and keen—all in all, a prime number.
“This is why I pulled you in, Storm,” the Lensman went on. “As you know, we’ve been combing all Civilization, trying to find somebody—anybody—with enough of the right qualities. She’s it. Head of the Department of Semantics at the Galactic Institute for Advanced Study. Doctor of Semantics, Ph.D. in cybernetics, D.Sc. in symbolic logic, and so on for half the alphabet. She is also a very good self-made telepath, and the only self-made perceiver I ever heard of. She’s very good at that, too—she can outrange a Rigellian. And besides all that, she’s a Past Grand Master at chess.”
“Past Grand Master? Oh, I see—I don’t suppose it would be quite de rigueur for a top-bracket telepath to win all the Grand Masters’ championships. Also, in view of the perception business, I imagine all this is more than somewhat hush-hush?”
“Very much so. A few Lensmen and now you are all who are in on it. It’ll have to stay top secret until we find out whether an ordinary mind can be developed into one like yours, or whether her brain, like yours, is something out of the ordinary.”
“Yes, it’d be very bad to have billions of people screaming for a treatment that can’t be given.”
“Check. But to get back to Joan. She’s done some almost unbelievable work and we think she’ll do. You know what we’re after, of course.”
“All I’m afraid of is that you haven’t looked far enough,” the woman said, shaking her head dubiously. “You know, though, what an appalling job it was bound to be. I’ll do whatever I can.”
She did not state the problem, either. They all knew, too well, what it was. As matters then stood, the life of one man—Neal Cloud—was all that stood between Civilization and loose atomic vortices; and it was starkly unthinkable that the Galactic Patrol would leave, for a second longer than was absolutely necessary, that situation unremedied.
“I see.” Cloud broke the short silence. “Assuming that you haven’t been sitting still doing nothing while I’ve been gone, brief me.”
“Smart boy!” Strong applauded. “The first thing Joan did was to figure out that a nine-second prediction was out of the question for any computer, digital or analogue, possible to build with today’s knowledge. Asked us what we could do to cut the time and how far we could cut it. With your little bombing flitter you have to have about nine seconds because you have to build up your speed to the required initial velocity of the bomb. That could be done away with, of course, by firing the bomb out of a Q-gun or something. . . .”
“But you’d have to have a special ship, much bigger than a flitter!” Cloud protested. “And special guns . . . and the special pointers for those guns—or for the ship, if the guns were fixed-aligned—would be veree unsimple, believe me!”
“How right you are, Buster! Other things, too, that you haven’t thought of yet, such as automatic compensation for air conditions and so on. Very much worth while, however, and all done—we’ve had a lot of people on this project. But to cut this short, the necessary ship turned out to be a scout cruiser; the minimum safe distance—assuming worst possible conditions and heaviest possible screening—is thirty two hundred meters. . . .”
“Wait a minute!” Cloud broke in. “I’ve worked closer than that!”
“You got badly burned once, too, remember; and, according to the medics, you’ve been taking some damage since. You won’t from here on. But to resume; since the muzzle velocity we can use is limited, by the danger of prematuring on impact, to nine hundred sixteen meters per second, the time from circuit-closing to detonation is something over three and a half seconds—how much over depending on atmospheric conditions. That’s absolutely the best we can do, so we gave Joan a minimum of three point six seconds of prediction to shoot at with her mechanical brains. She isn’t quite there yet, but she’s far enough along so that she has to work with you, on actual blasting, the rest of the way.”
“Why?” Cloud argued. “If she stayed on the high side there’d be no danger of scattering; only of intensification, which wouldn’t do any harm out in the badlands.”
“Too chancy.” The Lensman swept Cloud’s argument aside with a wave of his hand. “So the quicker you get moved into your new ship, the Vortex Blaster Two, and get your practicing done, the sooner the two of you can be on your way to Chickladoria. Flit!”
“Just as you say, chief. Here’s my report in full. Some of the stuff will jar you to the teeth; particularly Fairchild and the fact that every blow-up that has ever happened has been deliberate, not accidental.”
“Huh? Deliberate! Have you blown your stack completely, Storm?”
“Uh-uh; but the proof is too long and involved to go into offhand. You’ll have to get it from the tapes and it’ll take you at least a week to check my math. Besides, you told us to flit. So come on, Joan—clear ether, Phil!”
The Blaster and his new assistant left the laboratory; and in the copter, en route to the field, Cloud wondered momentarily what it was about the Lensman’s explanation that had not rung quite true. The first sight of his new vessel’s control room, however, banished the unformed thought from his mind before it had taken any real root.
* * * * *
The transformed scout cruiser Vortex Blaster II hung poised and motionless over the badlands. The optical systems and beam-antennae and receptors of dozens of instruments, many of which were only months old, were focused sharply upon the loose atomic vortex a scant two miles distant.
A few of these instruments reported only to a small and comparatively simple integrator which, after classifying and combining the incoming signals, put out as end-product the thin, black, violently-fluctuating line which was the sigma curve. Some others reported only to a massive mechanism, too heavy for any smaller vessel to carry, upon whose electronic complexities there is no need to dwell. Most of the information-gathering instruments, however, reported to both integrator and computer.
Not strapped down into a shock-absorber, but sitting easily in an ordinary pilot’s bucket, quietly but supremely intent, “Storm” Cloud concentrated upon his sigma curve; practically oblivious to everything else. Without knowing how he did it he was solving continuously the simultaneous differential equations of the calculus of warped surfaces; extrapolating the sigma curve to an ever-moving instant of time three and nine-tenths seconds—the flight-time of the bombs plus his own reaction time—ahead of the frantic pen-point of the chart.
In his flitter, where he had required a nine- or ten-second prediction, he had always seized the first acceptable match that appeared. Now, however, needing only to extrapolate to less than four seconds, his technique was entirely different. He was now matching, from instant to instant, the predicted value of the curve against one or another of the twelve bombs lying in the firing chambers of heavy guns whose muzzles ringed the cruiser’s needle-sharp nose.
And, as he had been doing ever since beginning to work with Joan and her mechanical brains, he was passing up match after match, waiting to see whether or not the current brain could deliver the goods. There had been a long succession of them—Alice, Betty, Candace, Deirdre, and so on. This one was Lulu, and it didn’t look as though she was any good, either. He waited a while longer, however; then fined down his figures and got ready to blast.
The flight-time of the bomb, under present atmospheric conditions, would be three point five nine eight seconds, plus or minus point zero zero one. His reaction time was point zero eight nine. . . .
“Storm!” Joan broke in sharply, “Can you hold up a minute.”
“Sure.”
“That reaction time. I never spotted that before. Why didn’t I?”
“I don’t know. Never thought of it. Lumped it in, you know. Separated it now, I suppose, because I’m working so slowly, to give Lulu more of a chance. Why?”
“Because I’ve got to know all the odd things about you, and that isn’t merely odd; it’s superhuman.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Chickladorians average about point zero eight, and Vegians are still faster, about point zero seven. I checked up on that because they always test me three times when I renew my driver’s license and always pull a wise crack about me having a lot of cat blood in me. S’pose I could have?”
“Um . . . m . . . m. Probably not . . . I don’t know for sure, but I don’t believe that a Tellurian-Vegian cross would be possible; and even if possible, such a hybrid couldn’t very well be fertile. But the more I find out about you, my friend, the more convinced I become that you’re either a mutant or else have some ancestors who were most decidedly not Tellurians. But excuse this interruption, please—go ahead.”
Cloud went. The flight time of the bomb, under present atmospheric conditions, would be three point five nine two seconds, plus or minus point zero zero two. His reaction time was point zero eight nine. In three point six eight one seconds the activity of the vortex would match bomb number eleven to within one-tenth of one percent.
His left hand flashed out, number eleven firing stud snapped down. The vessel shuddered as though struck by a trip-hammer as the precisely-weighed charge of propellant heptadetonite went off. The bomb sped truly, in both space and time. There was a detonation that jarred the planet to its core, a flare of light many times brighter than the sun at noon, a shock-wave that wrought havoc for miles.
But the scout cruiser and her occupants were unharmed. Completely inertialess, invulnerable, the vessel rode effortlessly away.
Neal Cloud glanced into his plate; turned his head.
“Out,” he said, seemingly unnecessarily. “How’d Lulu work, Joan?”
“Better, but not good enough. She was on track all the way, but three point three was the best she could get . . . and I was sure we had it licked this time . . . oh, damn!” The voice broke, ending almost in a wail.
“Steady, Joan!” Cloud was surprised at his companion’s funk. “Only three tenths of a second to get yet, is all.”
“Only three tenths—what d’you mean, only?” the woman snapped. “Don’t you know that those three tenths of a second are just about in the same class as the three thousandths of a degree just above zero absolute?”
“Sure I do, but I know you, too. You’re really blasting, little chum. Both Jane and Katy, you remember, were just as apt to be off track as on. You’ll get it, Joan. As Vesta says, ‘Tail high sister!’ ”
“Thanks, Storm. I needed that. You see, to keep her on track we had to put in more internal memory banks and that slowed her down . . . we’ll have to dream up some way of getting the information out of those banks faster. . . .”
“Can you tinker her—what’ll the next version be? Margie?—up en route, or do you want to keep this ship near Sol while you work on it? Phil tells me I’ve got to flit for Chickladoria—and chop-chop, like quick.”
“Oh . . . Thlaskin and Maluleme have been crying in his beer, too, as well as yours?”
“I guess so, but that wasn’t it. It’s next on the list, an urgent—they’ve been screaming bloody murder for months. So, with or without a brain, I’ve got to blast off.”
“Start blasting as soon as you like, just as we are,” she decided instantly. “Much more important, at this stage, to work with you than to have Earth’s resources close by. Besides, I think everything we’re apt to need is already aboard—machine shop, electronics labs, materials, and experts.”
“QX.” He gave orders. Then:
“As for me, I’m going to hit the sack. I’m just about pooped.”
“I don’t wonder. That kind of stuff takes a lot of doing. ’Night, Storm.”