The Vortex Blaster

by Edward E Smith

  “I can’t. Don’t you know, Joan, how many thousands of millions of…”

  “What of it?” she flared. “You do things fully as complex every time you blast a vortex… Oh, that’s it! Treat it as though it were a problem in n-dimensional differential equations, but don’t let your subconscious do it alone—get right down there and work with it—do that and you’ll have it all!” She seized his hands, squeezed them hard, and spoke aloud, the better to drive home the intensity of her convictions. “Buckle down, Storm, and dig…you can do it, I know you can do it. I know you can…dig in, big fellow…you don’t have to pay too much attention to detail; get a chain started, like a zipper, and it’ll finish itself…dig, Storm, DIG!”

  Storm dug. His jaw-muscles tightened into lumps. Sweat beaded his face and trickled down his chest under his shirt. And suddenly something happened. Not very much of anything, but something. Something more than mere contact, but not a penetration—more like a fusion—a fusion which, however instead of spreading rapidly to completion, as Joan had said it would, existed for the merest perceptible instant of time in an almost infinitesimal area and then vanished as instantaneously as it had come. But there was no doubt whatever that he had read, for an instant, a tiny portion of Joan’s mind; there was no chance whatever that she had sent him that thought—in fact, she had been thinking at herself, not at him. And as he perceived the tenor of that thought he let go all his mental holds; tried frantically to bury the stolen thought so deeply that Joan would never, never find out what it had been…

  No, not bury it, either. Flesh, rock, metal—any material substance was perfectly transparent to thought. What wasn’t? A thought-screen. He didn’t have one, of course, but he knew the formula, and if he thought about that formula hard enough it might create interference enough. The catch would be whether he could talk at the same time…he probably could, if the subject matter didn’t require concentration.

  Joan, of course, knew instantly when Cloud pulled his mind away from hers; and, not waiting to ask why in words, drove in a probe to find out. Much to her surprise, however, her beam of mental force was stopped cold; she could not touch Cloud’s mind at all!

  “A block!” she exclaimed, unbelievingly. “A real dilly, too—as hard and tight as a D7M29Z screen! What did you do, anyway, Storm, and how? I didn’t feel you get in!”

  He did not reply immediately. He was too busy; for, besides holding the screen-thought, he was also analyzing and studying the thought he had stolen from Joan: separating it out and arranging it into meaningful English words. It was amazing, how many words could be contained in one flashing, fleeting burst of thought.

  “Joanie, my not-so-bright old friend,” she had been thinking, “you’ve simply got to cut out this silly damn foolishness and act your age. You must not fall in love with him; there’d be nothing in it for either of you. You are thirty-four years old and he has had his Jo.”

  “Storm!” she snapped. “Answer me! Or did…” Her tone changed remarkably: “…did something…happen to you?”

  “No, Joanie.” He shook his head and wrenched his attention back to reality. “But first, is whatever I’m doing really a mind-block, and is it really holding?”

  “Yes—to both—curse it! And ‘Joanie’, eh? You did get in. How did it go?”

  “Not so good. Barely a touch. It didn’t spread after we got it started. Just one flash and it went out.”

  “Hm…m…m. That’s funny… Not the way it worked with me at all. However, I don’t see that it makes any difference whether you get it by drips and driblets or all at once, just so you get the full ability eventually. What was it you picked up the first time, Storm?”

  “That’s one thing you’ll never know, if I have to hold this block forever.”

  “Oh.” Joan blushed, vividly. “I know what it was, then, I think. But don’t you see…?”

  “No, I don’t see,” Cloud interrupted. “All I see is that it’s worse than being a Peeping Tom in a girls’ dormitory. I don’t like it. I don’t like any part of it.”

  “You wouldn’t, of course—at first. Nevertheless, Storm, you and I have got to work together, whether either of us likes what happens or not. So let’s get at it. Bring it out and look at it—let’s see if it’s so bad, really. It was just that I was afraid maybe I was going to fall in love with you and get burned to a crisp around the edges, wasn’t it?”

  “That was part of it. You were wrong in two things, though. No matter how much I loved Jo—and I really did love her, you know…”

  “I know, Storm.” Her voice was very gentle. “Everybody knows you did. Not only did—you still do.”

  “Yes. So much so that I thought I’d never be able to talk about her without going off the deep end. But I can, now. I’m beginning to think that perhaps Phil Strong was right. Perhaps a man can love twice in his life, in exactly the same way.”

  The woman caught her breath and started to say something, then changed her mind. The man went on:

  “The second point in error is that a woman at age thirty-four is not necessarily a doddering wreck with one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel.”

  “Oh… I’m so glad. Storm!” she breathed; then changed mood with an almost audible snap. “There! It’s done and your guard is down. It wasn’t too bad, was it?”

  “Not a bit.” Cloud was surprised at how easily the thing had been ironed out. “You’re a prime number, Joanie—a slick, smooth operator. As smooth as five feet and two inches of tan velvet.”

  “Uh-uh. Not me, so much; it’s just that we’re a very nicely-matched pair. But I think we’d better lay off a while before trying it again, don’t you?”

  “Check. Let our minds—mine, anyway—get over the jitters and collywobbles.”

  “Mine, too, brother; and I’ve got a sort of feeling that what that mind of yours is going to develop into, little by little, is something slightly different from ordinary telepathy. But in the meantime, you’d better get back to work.”

  “I don’t know whether I can work up much enthusiasm for work right now or not.”

  “Sure you can, if you try. What were you doing to that chart when I came in? What have you got there, anyway?”

  “Come on over and I’ll show you.” They bent over the worktable, heads almost touching. “The pink area is the explored part of the First Galaxy. The marks represent all the loose vortices I know of. I’ve been applying all the criteria I can think of to give me some kind of a toe-hold, but up to the present moment I’m completely baffled.”

  “Have you tried chronology yet? Peeling ’em off in layers—by centuries, say?”

  “Not exactly, although I did run a correlation against time. Mostly been studying ’em either singly or en masse up to now. Might be worth a fling, though. Why? Got a hunch?”

  “No. And no particular reason; just groping for more detailed data. Before you can solve any problem, you know, you must know exactly what the problem is—must be able to state it clearly. You can’t do that yet, can you?”

  “You know I can’t. I’ve got some colored pins here somewhere…here they are. Read me the dates and I’ll stick colors accordingly.”

  They soon ran out of colors; then continued with numbered-head thumb-tacks.

  The job finished, they stood back and examined the results.

  “See anything, Joan?”

  “I see something, but before I mention it, give me a quick briefing on what you know already.”

  Cloud thought for a minute. “Well, the distribution in space is not random, but there is no significant correlation with location, age, size, power, load-factor, or actual number of power-plants. Nor with nature, condition, or age of the civilization of any planet. Nor with anything else I’ve been able to dream up.

  “They aren’t random in time, either; but there again there’s no correlation with the age of the power-plant affected, the age-status of atomic power of any particular planet, or any other thing except one—there is
an extremely high correlation—practically unity—with time itself.”

  “I thought so.” Joan nodded. “That was what I noticed. The older, the fewer.”

  “Exactly. But with your new classification, Joan, I think I see something else.” Cloud’s mathematical-prodigy’s mind pounced.

  “And how! Until very recently, Joan, the data will plot exactly on the ideal-growth-of-population curve.”

  “Oh, they breed, some way or other. Nice—that gives us a…”

  “You said that, woman, I didn’t. I stated a fact; if you wish to extrapolate it, that’s your privilege—but it’s also your responsibility.”

  “Huh! Don’t go pedantic on me. Haven’t you got any guesses?”

  “Except for this recent jump, which we can probably ascribe to Fairchild and explosives, nary a guess. I can’t see any possible point of application.”

  “Neither can I. But if that’s the only positive correlation you can find, and it’s just about unity, it must mean something.”

  “Check. It’s got to mean something. All we have to do is find out what… I think maybe I see something else.” Bending over, he sighted across the chart from various angles. “Too many pins. Let’s clear a belt through here.” They did so. “Will you read ’em to me in order, beginning with the oldest?”

  “At your service, sir. Sol.”

  Cloud stuck a pin in Sol.

  “Galien—Salvador—DuPont—Eastman—Mercator—Centralia Tressilia—Chickladoria—Crevenia—DeSilva—Wynor—Aldebaran…”

  “Hold it! Don’t want Aldebaran—can’t use it. Take a look at this!” For the first time Cloud’s voice showed excitement.

  She looked, and saw a gently curving line of pins running three-quarters of the way across the chart. “Why—that’s a smooth curve—looks as though it could be the arc of a circle—clear across all explored space!” she exclaimed.

  Cloud’s mind pounced again. “It is a circle—pretty close, that is, according to these rough figures. Will you read me the exact coordinates—spatial—from the book?”

  She did so, and through Cloud’s mind there raced the appropriate equations of solid analytic geometry.

  “Even closer. Now let’s apply a final refinement. From their proper motions we can put each star back to where it was at the vortex date. It’ll take a little time, but it may be worth it.”

  It was. Cloud’s mein was solemn as he announced his final figures. “Those twelve suns all lay on the surface of a sphere. Radius, 53,327 parsecs, with a probable error of one point three zero parsecs—which, since the average density of the stars along that line is about point zero four five per cubic parsec, makes it as perfect a spherical surface as it is physically possible for it to be. The center of that sphere is almost exactly on the ecliptic; its coordinates are: Theta, 255°—12’—31.2647”; distance, 107.2259.”

  “Good heavens! It’s that exact? And that far outside the Rim? That spoils my original idea of radiation from a center. But all of the twelve oldest vortices are on that surface, and none of them are anywhere else!”

  “So they are. Which gets us where, lady?”

  “Nowhere that I can see, with a stupendous velocity.”

  “You and me both. Another thing, why that particular time-space relationship in the first twelve? I can accept Tellus being first, because we had atomics first, but that logic doesn’t follow through. Instead, the time order goes from Sol through Galien and so on to Eastman—to the very edge of unexplored territory along that arc—then, jumping back to the other side of Sol, goes straight on to the edge of Civilization in the opposite direction. Can you play that on any one of your brains, from Alice to Margie?”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “I don’t, either. That relationship certainly means something, too, but I’m damned if I can make any sense out of it. And what sense is there in a spherical surface that big? And why so ungodly accurate? Alphacent, there, is less than one parsec outside the surface, but it didn’t have a blow-up for over seven hundred years. How come? Anybody or anything capable of traveling that far could certainly travel half a parsec farther if he wanted to. And look at the time involved—over a thousand years! Assuming some purpose, what could it be? Human operations, or any other kind I know anything about, simply are not geared up to that kind of scope, either in space or in time. None of it makes any kind of sense.”

  “So you consider it purely fortuitous that this surface is as truly spherical as the texture of the medium will permit?” she asked, loftily.

  “No, I don’t, and you know I don’t—and don’t misquote me, woman! It’s too fantastically accurate to be accidental. And that ties right in with the previous paradox—that vortices can’t possibly be either accidental or deliberate.”

  “From a semantic viewpoint, your phraseology is deplorable. The term ‘paradox’ is inadmissible—meaningless. We simply haven’t enough data. I simply can’t believe, Storm, that those horrible things were set off on purpose.”

  “Deplorable phraseology or not, I’ve got enough data to put the probability out beyond the nine-sigma point—the same probability as that an automatic screw-machine running six-thirty-two brass hex nuts would accidentally turn out a thirty-six-inch jet-ring made of pure titanite, diamond-ground, finished, and fitted. We’re getting nowhere faster and faster—with an acceleration of about 12 G’s instead of any simple velocity.”

  He fell silent; remained silent so long that the woman spoke. “Well…what do you think we’d better do next?”

  “All I can think of is to find out what’s out there at the center of that sphere…and then to see if we can find any other leads in this mess on the chart. I’ll call Phil.”

  Chapter XII

  VESTA PRACTICES SPACEAL

  THE CONNECTION was made and he brought Lensman Strong up to date, concluding; “So will you please get hold of Planetography with a crash priority on anything they know about that point?”

  “I’ll do that, Storm. I’ll call you back.”

  Since Lensmen are potent beings, the call came soon.

  “There’s one sun there,” Strong reported, “but it doesn’t amount to much. A red dwarf—it may or may not be a single. Unexplored. Astronomical data only.”

  “How close did I come to it?”

  “Allowing for proper motion, you speared it. Less than two hundredths of a parsec off. And there’s nothing else within twelve parsecs—stars are mighty thin out beyond the Rim, you know.”

  “I know. That nails it, Phil. They don’t know, of course, whether it has any planets or not?”

  “No… I see what you mean…shall I get a special on it for you?”

  “I wish you would. It’d be worth while, I think.”

  “So do I. I’ll call Haynes and ask him to rush a ship out there to get us a fine-tooth on it.”

  “Thanks, Phil.”

  “And there was something else… Oh yes, your friend Fairchild. Narcotics wants him, badly.”

  “I’m not surprised. Alive? That might take some doing.”

  “Or dead. No difference, as long as they have his head for positive identification,” and at Cloud’s surprised expression Strong went on: “They don’t want him planting any more Trenconian broadleaf, is all, which he’ll keep on doing as long as he’s alive and loose.”

  “I see. Wish I’d known sooner; we probably could have caught him on Tominga.”

  “I doubt it. They’ve been checking back on him, and he’s a very, very sharp operator. He makes long flits, fast…in peculiar directions. But if you stumble across him again, grab him or blast…”

  “Just a minute, chief. You mean to say the Patrol can’t find him?”

  “Just that. He’s in with a big, strong mob; probably heads it. They’ve been looking for him ever since you found out that he wasn’t killed on Deka.”

  “I’m… I’m speechless. But Graves…but Graves was dead, of course…didn’t anybody know Fairchild’s personal pattern?”

>   “That’s exactly it; nobody that they could get hold of knows his real pattern at all. All we’ve got that we can depend on are his retinals. That shows the kind of operator he is. So if you get a chance, blast him, but leave at least one eye whole and bring it in, in deep-freeze. Nothing else at the moment, is there?”

  “Not that I know of. Clear ether, Phil!”

  “Clear ether, Storm!”

  The plate went black and Cloud turned soberly to Joan.

  “Well, that clears Fairchild up, but doesn’t help with the real mystery. So, unless we can dig some more dope out of this stuff on the chart, we can’t do much until we get that finetooth.”

  Joan left the room, and Cloud, after racking his brain for an hour, got up, shook himself, and went down the corridor to his “private” office—which had long since ceased to be private, as far as his friends were concerned—where he found Vesta and Thlaskin talking busily in spaceal. Or, rather, the Vegian was talking; the pilot was listening attentively.

  “…think I’m built, you ought to’ve seen this tomato.” Vesta was narrating blithely. “What I mean, she’s a dish!” She went into a wrigglesome rhythm which, starting at the neck, flowed smoothly down her splendidly-modeled body to the ankles. “Stacked? She’s stacked like Gilroy’s Tower, Buster—an honest-to-god DISH, believe me, and raring to go. We were on one of those long-week-end jaunts around the system—you know, one of those deals where things are pretty apt to get just a hair off the green at times…”

  “But hey!” Thlaskin protested. “You said yourself a while back you wasn’t old enough for that kind of monkey-business!”

  “Oh, I wasn’t,” Vesta agreed, candidly enough. “I still ain’t. I just went along for the ride.”

  “And your folks let you?” Thlaskin was shocked.

  “Natch.” Vesta was surprised. “Why not? If a tomato don’t learn the facts of life while she’s young how’s she going to decide what’s good for her when she grows up?”

  “With or without a license, I got to butt into this,” Cloud announced, also in spaceal; seating himself on a couch and crossing his legs. He, too, was shocked; but he was also intensely curious. “Did you decide, Vesta?”