TOMMIE LEFT, accompanied mentally by Nadine, and reached the judge’s antechamber; with Vesta taping in Middle-Plateau Tomingan everything that occurred. The approach was difficult, and Tommie’s temper grew shorter and shorter.

“Get out of my way!” she bellowed finally at the sergeant-at-arms barring her way to the judicial Presence, in a voice that rattled the windows and was audible above four blocks of city traffic. “Or shoot, if you want to get yourself and this building and half of Mingia blown clear up into the stratosphere! Jump! Before I take that blaster and shove it so far down your throat it’ll hit day-before-yesterday’s breakfast!”

The guard did not have quite enough nerve to shoot, and Tommie almost wrenched the door of the judge’s inner office off its hinges as she went in.

“What’s this, pray? Get out! Sergeant-at. . . .”

“Shut up, Rose Trellis of the Enchanting Vistas of Exotic Blooms—you’re listening, not talking. Here’s two tapes of what Number One and his misbegotten scum have been doing. Play ’em! And then do something about ’em! And listen, you lying, double-crossing, back-biting slime-lizard!” Tommie’s prettily-made-up face was in shocking contrast to the venemous fury in Tommie’s eyes as she leaned over the judge’s massive desk until nose was a scant ten inches from nose. “If that atomic blast goes off tonight you and your whole Srizonified crew will wish to all your devils you’d never been born!”

Whirling around, Tommie strode out; nor did anyone attempt to stop her. No one knew what would happen if they did; and no one cared to find out.

Judge Trellis did not play the tapes. In panic fashion she called the District Attorney, who promptly made it a three-way with Number One. The three talked busily for minutes, then met in person, together with several lesser lights, in a heavily-guarded room. This conference, the subject matter of which was so obvious as to require no detailing here, went on for a long time.

So long, in fact, that Tommie and the newspaper man got back to Cloud’s hotel room while Vesta was still taping a word-by-word report of the proceedings. Tommie was subdued, almost apologetic.

“I know you told me not to blow up, Captain Cloud, but they made me so mad I couldn’t help it.”

“In this case just as well you did; maybe better. You scared her into calling a meeting, and they’ve spilled every bean in the pot. We’ve got exactly what we wanted—enough to stop that gang right in its tracks. Now, as soon as the girls get the last of it, we’ll let your editor in on it.”

It was soon over, and Cloud, after a quick run-down of the situation and a play-back of parts of the tapes for the newshawk’s benefit, concluded:—

“So, over the long pull, the issue isn’t—can’t be—in doubt. Public opinion will be aroused. There are honest judges, there are a lot of honest cops. At the next election this corrupt regime will be thrown out of office. However, that election is a year away, the present powers-that-be are all in the syndicate, and we must do something today to stop the destruction scheduled for tonight. Little Flower-and-so-on tells me that you’re a crusading type, fighting a losing battle against this mob—that they’ve got you just about whipped—so I thought you would be interested in taking a slug at ’em by getting out an extra—strong enough to stir up enough public sentiment so they wouldn’t dare go ahead. Would you like to do that?”

“Would I?” The newsman grinned wolfishly. “I’ll get out the extra, yes; but I’ll do a lot more than that. I’ll print a hundred thousand dodgers and drop ’em from copters. I’ll have blimps dragging streamers all over the sky. I’ll buy time on every radio and tri-di station in town—have the juiciest bits of these tapes broadcast, every hour on the hour. Mister, I’ll tear this town wide open before sundown tonight!”

He left, breathing fire and sulphurous smoke, and Cloud made motions to attract the Manarkan’s attention.

“Nadine? These Tomingans take things big, don’t they? All to the good, with one exception—will any repercussions—flarebacks—hit you? Those characters are tough, and will be desperate, and I wouldn’t want to put you in line with a blaster.”

“No . . . almost certainly not,” Nadine replied, after a minute of thought. “They are looking for a telepath with a voice, which they won’t find on Tominga. They know Manarkans well—many of us live here permanently—and I’m quite sure that none of the gang would suspect such an unheard-of thing as Vesta and I have been doing. They are not imaginative, and such a thing never happened before—not here, at least.”

“No? Why not? What’s strange about it?”

“The whole situation is new—unique. This is probably the first time in history that these exact circumstances—especially in regard to personnel—have come together. Consider, please, the ingredients: a real and bitter grievance, victims willing and anxious to take drastic action, a sympathetic telepath who is also an expert in shorthand, a master linguist, and, above all, a director or programmer—you—both able and willing to fit the parts together so that they work.”

“Um . . . m . . . m. Never thought of it in that way. Could be, I guess. Well, all we can do now is wait and see what happens.”

They waited, and saw. The crusading editor did everything he had promised. The extra hit the streets, its headlines screaming “CORRUPTION!” in the biggest type possible to use. The taped conversations, with names, amounts, times, and places, were printed in full. The accompanying editorial should have been written with sulphuric acid on asbestos paper. The leaflets, gaily littering the city, were even more vitriolic. Every hour, on the hour, speakers gave out what sound-trucks were blaring continuously—irrefutable proof that the city of Mingia was being run by a corrupt, rotten, vicious machine.

Mingia’s citizens responded, but not quite as enthusiastically as the Blaster, from his limited acquaintance with the breed, had expected. There was some organizing, some demonstrating; but there was also quite a lot of “So what? If they don’t, some other gang of politicians will.”

Cloud, however, when he went to his rooms after supper, was well pleased with what he had seen. They couldn’t blast 53, not after the events of the afternoon. The Chickladorians and Vesta and Nadine, when they came in, agreed with him. The situation was under control. They were tired, they said. It had been a long, hard day, and they were going to hit the sack. They left.

Cloud intended to stay awake until midnight, just to see what would happen, but he didn’t. He was tired, too, and within a couple of minutes after he relaxed, alone, he was sound asleep in his chair.

Thus he did not hear the vicious thunder-clap of the atomic explosion at midnight; did not see the reflected brilliance of its glare. Nor did he hear the hurrying footsteps in the hotel’s corridors. What woke him up was the concussion that jarred the whole neighborhood when a half-ton bomb demolished the building which had been Number One’s headquarters.

Cloud jumped up, then, and ran out into the hall and along it to Vesta’s room. He pounded. No answer. The door was unlocked. He opened it. Vesta was not there!

Nadine was gone, too. So were the Chickladorians.

He rushed up to the lobby, only to encounter again the difficulty that had stopped him short before. He could not make himself understood! He didn’t know three words of Upper Plateau, and nobody he could find knew even one word of English, Spanish, Spaceal, or any other language at his command.

He took an elevator down to the street level and flagged a cruising cab. He handed the driver the largest Tomingan bill he had; then, pointing straight ahead and making furious pushing motions, he made it plain that he knew where he wanted to go, and wanted to get there in a hurry. The hacker, stimulated by more cash than he had seen for a week, drove wherever Cloud pointed; and broke—or at least bent—most of Mingia’s speed-laws in his eagerness to oblige.

Cloud’s destination, of course, was the spaceport; but when he got to the Vortex Blaster I, Jim wasn’t there any more. None of his crew was aboard, either. The lifeboats were all in place, but the flitter was gone. So were both suits of armor—and the semi-portables—and the spare DeLameters—and both needles—even his space-hatchet!

He went up to the control room and glanced over the board. Everything was on zero except one meter, which was grazing the red. All four semis and both needles were running wide open—pulling every watt they could possibly draw!

Angry as he was, Cloud did not think of cutting the circuit. If he had thought of it he wouldn’t have done it. He didn’t know exactly what his officers were doing, of course, but he could do a shrewd job of guessing. If he had known what they were up to he wouldn’t have permitted it, but it was too late to do anything about it now. With those terrific weapons in operation they might get back alive—without them, they certainly would not. What a land-office business those semis were doing!

They were.

Tommie and her brother, wearing Cloud’s two suits of armor, were each carrying a semi-portable; wielding it, if not as easily as an Earthly gunner wields a sub-machine-gun, much more effectively. They were burning down a thick steel door. Well behind them, the third semi was bathing the whole front of the building in a blinding glare of radiance. In back, the fourth was doing the same to the rear wall. On the sides, the two needle-beams were darting from window to window, burning to a crisp any gangster gunner daring to show his head to aim.

For the Tomingans had not been nearly as optimistic as had Cloud, and they had made complete preparation for reprisal in case Number One should make good his threat. The Manarkan had been willing to cooperate. Thlaskin, ditto. Vesta had been quiveringly eager. Maluleme had gone along. They had not mutinied—they simply did not tell Cloud a thing about what they were going to do.

Number One had not been in his headquarters, of course, when that thousand-pound bomb let go. He thought himself safe—but he wasn’t. Nadine the telepath knew exactly where he was and exactly what he was doing. Vesta the linguist poured the information along, via the flitter’s broadcaster, to the receivers of hundreds of ground-cars and copters far below. Thlaskin the Master Pilot kept the flitter close enough to the fleeing Number One so that Nadine could read him—fully, she thought—but far enough away to avoid detection. Thus, wherever he went, Number One was pursued relentlessly, and his merciless pursuers closed in faster and faster.

Number One’s flight, however, was not aimless. He knew that a snooper was on him, and had enough power of mind to shield a few highly important thoughts. He wasn’t really THE Big Shot. He had called Yellow Castle, though, and they had told him that he could come in in one hour—the army would be ready. But did he have an hour, or not?

He did; just barely. The saps were snapping at his heels when he switched to a jet job and took off in a screaming straight line for the Castle.

Vesta wanted to ram him to drop a lifeboat on him, to wreck him in any way possible; but Thlaskin refused. Captain Cloud would be mad enough at what they’d done already—any such rough stuff as that would be altogether too damn much! And, since the rebels’ jets were still on the ground, Number One had reached sanctuary unharmed.

Yellow Castle, however, was not as impregnable as the gangsters had supposed. They had armor, true, but it was not at all like Cloud’s. They had weapons, true, but nothing even faintly resembling the frightful semi-portable projectors of the Galactic Patrol—nothing even remotely approaching the Patrol’s beam-fed needle beams.

Thus the Tomingans, Tommie and Jim, stood in armor of proof scarcely an arm’s length from Yellow Castle’s heavy steel door and burned it down into a brooklet of molten metal. Then on in; blasting down everything that resisted and, finally, everything that moved. Nor did any gangster escape. Those who managed to avoid the armored pair were blasted by one of the other semis or speared by one of the needles.

Yellow Castle, already furiously ablaze, was left to burn. Jim, after giving instructions as to how his lieutenants were to dispose of such small fry as might be left alive in the city proper, helped his sister load the Blaster’s weapons and armor into a ground-car. They drove out into the middle of a great open field. The flitter landed; Cloud’s borrowed equipment was hauled aboard. Tommie and Jim followed it.

“If you were really smart, I think you’d flit right now,” Vesta said to Tommie. “Captain Cloud isn’t going to like this a little bit.”

“I know it. I’m not smart. This was worth anything he cares to do about it. Besides, I want to thank him myself and tell him good-bye in person.”

The flitter took off and returned to her mother-ship. Tommie and Thlaskin put her away, then the peculiarly assorted six went up to the control room and faced the quietly seething Tellurian.

Not boldly—only Tommie and Nadine were really at ease. Jim was defiant. Thlaskin was nervous and apprehensive; Maluleme was just plain scared. So was Vesta—her tail drooped to the floor; she seemed to have shrunk to four-fifths her normal size; her usual free-swinging, buoyant gait had changed almost to a slink.

Cloud stared at Nadine—chill, stern, aloof; an up-to-date Joan of Arc or a veritable destroying angel—nodded at her to synchronize with his mind. She did so, and her mind bore out everything implied by her attitude and expression. She was outraged to her innermost fiber by the conditions she had just helped to correct.

“You were the prime operator in this thing,” he thought, flatly. “With your knowledge of law and your supposed respect for it, how could you take it into your own hands? Become part of a law-breaking mob?”

“It was necessary. Law in Mingia was shackled—completely inoperative. We freed it.”

“By murder?”

“It was not murder. The lives of all who were killed were already forfeit. The corrupt judges, officials, and police officers will be dealt with by Mingian law, now again operative. Of all your crew, only Tommie could by any chance have been taken or recognized. If our coup had failed, she and Jim would have been shot without trial. Since we succeeded, however, Tommie was not recognized, being in your armor, and Jim is now Mingia’s hero. He is also the new Commissioner of Police. Hence, aside from breaking local laws—which, as I have explained, do not count—we are guilty only of unauthorized use of Patrol equipment.”

“Huh? How about interfering in planetary affairs, the worst in the book? And revealing Stage Ten stuff to a Stage Eight planet?”

“You are wrong on both counts,” Nadine informed him. “We were on shore leave—that fact is in the log. We volunteered, purely as individuals, for one day of service in the Underground. This procedure, while of course forbidden to armed personnel of the Patrol, is perfectly legal to its civilian employees. A special ruling would have to be made to cover this particular incident, and no ex post facto penalties could be imposed.”

“That’s quibbling if I ever heard any, but you’re probably right—legally—at that. But how do you wiggle out of the ‘revealing’ charge?”

“In the specific meaning of the word, as defined by the highest courts, nothing was revealed. Weapons and armor were seen, of course; but they have been seen on Tominga before. Nothing new was learned; hence there was no revealment. And as for Jim’s leaving the ship against your orders, you had no right to issue such orders in the first place.”

Still seething, but on a considerably lower level, Cloud pondered. It wasn’t murder—nobody would or could call it that. “Extermination” would be more like it—or “justifiable germicide.” She was probably right on the rest of it, too. Even though he was, by virtue of being the captain of the Vortex Blaster I, an officer of the Patrol—strictly speaking a commander, not a captain—there wasn’t a thing in the world he could do about it.

Nadine had been keeping Vesta posted; and the latter, recovering miraculously her wonted spirit and with tail again aloft, was passing the good news along to the others.

“Don’t get too cocky, sister!” Tommie advised her sharply. “Not yet, anyway.”

“Huh?” Vesta’s tail dropped to half-mast. “Why not?”

“You just said she pleaded guilty for all of us to unauthorized use of Patrol equipment. For what we really did that’s certainly a featherweight plea—if I ever get into a real jam I certainly want her for my lawyer—but he can make it plenty tough for us if he wants to.”

“I got a question to ask, boss,” Thlaskin put in, before Cloud said anything. “You got a license to be sore as hell, no argument about that, but I ask you—are you sore mostly because we took the stuff or because we didn’t let you in on it? We couldn’t do that, boss, and you know why.”

Cloud did know why. The pilot had put his finger right on the sore spot, and the Blaster was honest enough to admit it.

“That’s it, I guess.” He grinned wryly.

Tommie, who had been whispering to Vesta, asked: “You got back here while we were still sucking juice, didn’t you?”

“Yes, and as Nadine will undoubtedly point out if I don’t, that fact makes me an accomplice for not pulling the switches on you. So, already being an accessory during and after the fact, I may as well go the route. If any of us gets hauled up, we all do.”

“No fear of that,” Tommie assured him. “One thing Tomingans are good at is keeping their mouths shut. Maluleme and Vesta will spill everything they know, and brag about it, sooner or later,” the Vegian did not relish translating this passage, but she did so, and accurately, nevertheless, “but that won’t do any harm. It’s you that’s in the driver’s seat. You could’ve nailed us all to the cross if you liked, and I for one didn’t expect to get off easy. Thanks. I’ll remember this. So will everybody else who knows. You’re washing me out, of course?”

“Not unless you want to stay here on Tominga. You’re a good engineer, and I can’t picture this as happening again, can you?”

“Hardly. I like this better than stationary work. Thanks again, chief. My brother wants to thank you, too.”

After the sincerely grateful and appreciative Tomingan had gone, Cloud said:

“Vesta and Maluleme—if Tommie was right about you two having to talk, make a note of this. Don’t do it as long as you’re members of this crew. If you do, I’ll fire you the second I find out about it. Now everybody—as far as I’m concerned none of this ever happened. We came here to blow out vortices and that’s all we did. We’ll go back to the hotel, get a few hours sleep, and. . . .”

The long-range communicator, silent for weeks, came suddenly to life in English.

“Calling space-ship Vortex Blaster One, Commander Neal Cloud. Acknowledge, please. Calling space-ship Vortex Blaster One. . . .”

“Space-ship Vortex Blaster One acknowledging.” The detector-coupled projector had swung into exact alignment. “Commander Cloud speaking.”

“Space-ship YB216P9, of First Continent, Tominga, relaying message from Philip Strong of Tellus. Will you accept message?”

“Will accept message. Ready.”

“Begin message. Report in person as soon as convenient. Answer expected. End message. Signed Philip Strong. Repeat, please. We will relay reply.”

Cloud repeated. Then: “Reply. To Philip Strong, Vortex Control Laboratory, Tellus. Begin message. Remess. Will leave Manarka fourteenth Sol for Tellus. End of message. Signed Neal Cloud. Repeat, please.”

That done, he turned to his crew. “Now we’ll have to go to work!”

With Vesta to translate, two days sufficed to rid Tominga of her loose atomic vortices; and no one so much as suspected that the Patrol ship or any of its crew had had anything to do with the upheaval in Mingia.

The trip to Manarka, a two-day flit, was uneventful. So was the extinguishment of Manarka’s vortices.

When the job was done, Nadine’s mind and Cloud’s met briefly. No direct reference was made to the unpleasantness on Tominga, nor to their somewhat variant ideas concerning it. Nadine wanted to stay on. She liked the job and she liked Cloud. He was somewhat impractical and visionary, a bit too idealistic in his outlook at times; but a strong and able man and a top-bracket commander, nevertheless.

And the Manarkan, in Cloud’s mind, was not only a top-bracket medico, but also a very handy hand to have around.

On the fourteenth of Sol, then, the good ship Vortex Blaster I took off for Tellus, with Cloud wondering more than a little as to what was in the wind. He wasn’t the type to be unduly perturbed about being called up on the carpet per se; but Phil didn’t go in for mystery much—he explained things . . . He couldn’t possibly know anything about that Mingian business so soon . . . and he was going to tell him all about it anyway. . . .

There was plenty of Laboratory business that shouldn’t be relayed all over space, and this was undoubtedly some of it. Whatever it was, it’d have to keep until he got to Tellus, anyway, so he’d forget it until then.

But he didn’t.

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.”

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, en route to the planet of the pink humanoids, Cloud was studying a scratch-chart of the First Galaxy. He had been working on the thing for weeks; had placed several hundred crossed circles, each representing a loose atomic vortex. He was scrawling weird-looking symbols and drawing freehand connecting lines when Joan came swishing into the “office.”

“Good morning, Effendi of Esoterica!” she greeted him gaily. “How’s the massive intellect? Firing on all forty barrels, I hope and trust?”

“Missing on all forty is more like it. Ideas are avoiding me in droves.” He looked her over amiably, in what he hoped she would think was a casual way.

He’d found himself doing quite a lot of that, lately . . . but she was such a swell egg! Why hadn’t she ever married? What a waste that was! Face a bit on the strong side for vapid calendar-girl prettiness, but. . . .

“But kind of attractive, at that, in her own gruesome way, eh?” she finished the thought for him.

“Huh?” Cloud gulped, and, for the first time in years, blushed scarlet; flushed to the tips of his ears.

“I’m sorry, Storm, believe me. I don’t think I was supposed to tell you—in fact, I know very well I wasn’t—but I’ve simply got to. It isn’t fair not to; besides, I’ve thought all along that Lensman Strong was wrong—that we’d go faster and farther if you knew than if you didn’t.”

“Oh—that’s what Phil was holding out on me back there? I thought there was something fishy, but couldn’t spot it.”

“I was sure you did. So was Phil. You told me what the Tomingans call telepaths—snoopers? I like that word; it’s so beautifully appropriate. Well, I’m snooping all the time. Not only while we’re working, as you thought, but all the time, especially when you’re relaxed and . . . and off-guard, so to speak. I’ve been doing it ever since I first met you.”

Cloud blushed again. “So you knew exactly what I was thinking just then? You gave me a remarkably poor play-back.”

“The portrait was much too flattering. But we’ll skip that. Part of my job is to make a telepath out of you, so that you can show me with your mind—it can’t be done in words or symbols—what it is that makes a mathematical prodigy tick.”

“How are you figuring on going about it?”

“I don’t know—yet.”

“Phil tried, and so did a couple of Gray Lensmen, and I wasn’t holding back a thing . . . oh, he emphasized that you’re a self-made telepath. A different angle of approach? How did you operate on yourself?”

“I don’t know that, either; but I hope to find out through you. I read, and studied, and tried, and all of a sudden—bang!—there it was. But words are useless; I’m coming into your mind. Now watch me closely, concentrate: really concentrate, as hard as you possibly can. Ready? It goes like this . . . did you get it?”

“No. I couldn’t follow the details—it seemed like an instantaneous transition. Didn’t you have more to begin with than I’ve got?”

“I don’t think so . . . pretty sure I didn’t. I could receive—I think it’s impossible for anyone to become a telepath who can’t—but I couldn’t send a lick. My psi rating was a flat zero zero zero. Now try it again. Take a good, solid grip on a thought and throw it at me.”

“QX. I’ll try.” Cloud’s forehead furrowed, his muscles tensed in effort. “Since you already know I’ve been wondering why you never married—why? Standards too high?”

“You might call it that.” It was the woman’s turn to blush, but her thought was clear and steady. Cloud was working with her better than he had ever worked with either Luda or Nadine. “Since the days of my teen-age crushes on tri-di idols I simply haven’t been able to develop any interest in a man who didn’t have as much of a brain as I have, and the only such I met were either already married or didn’t have anything except a brain—which wouldn’t do, either, of course.”

“Of course not.” Cloud felt something stirring inside him that he thought completely dead, and tried, in near-panic fashion, to kill it again. He changed the subject abruptly. “No luck—I’m not getting through to you at all. We’d better start all over, at the bottom. What’s the first thing I’ve got to do to learn to be a snooper?”

“You must learn how to concentrate—intensively and in a very special way. You’re very good at ordinary concentration—especially mathematical stuff—now; but this kind is different—so much so as to be a difference in kind, not merely of degree.”

“Check. Point one, a new kind of concentration. Next?”

“No next. That’s all. When you get so you can concentrate correctly—I’ll coach you mind to mind on that, of course—we’ll concentrate together, first on one gateway, then another. Something will click into place, and there you’ll be.”

“I hope. But suppose it doesn’t? Can’t it be worked out? You’re on record as saying that the mind is simply a machine.”

“No, it can’t. The mind is a machine; just as much a machine as one of your automatic pilots or one of my computers. The troubles are that it is almost infinitely more complex and that we do not understand its basic principles—the fundamental laws upon which it operates. We may never understand them . . . the mind may very well be so tied in with the life-principle—or soul; call it whatever you please—as to be knowable only to God.”

“I’m glad you said that, Joan. I’m not formally religious, I suppose, but I do believe in a First Cause.”

“One must, who knows as much about the Macrocosmic All as you do. But it’s too early in the morning for very much of that sort of thing. What are you doing to that chart besides doodling all over it?”

“Those aren’t doodles, woman!” he protested. “They’re equations. In shorthand.”

“Equations, I apologize. Doctor Cloud, elucidate.”

“Doctor Janowick, I can’t. This is where you came in. I had just pursued an elusive wisp of thought into what turned out to be a cul de sac. I whammed my head against a solid concrete wall.” His light mood vanished as he went on:

“In spite of what everybody has always believed, I’ve proved that loose atomic vortices are not accidental. They’re deliberate, every one of them, and. . . .”

“Yes, I heard you tell Phil so,” she interrupted. “I wanted to start screaming about your hypothesis then, and it’s taken superhuman self-control to keep me from screaming about it ever since. That kind of math, though, of course is ’way over my head. . . . For a long time I expected Phil to call up and blast you to a cinder, but he didn’t . . . you may be—must be, I suppose—right.”

“I am right,” Cloud said, quietly. “Unless all the mathematics I know is basically, fundamentally fallacious, they’ve got to be deliberate; they simply can’t be accidental. On the other hand, except for a few we know about which don’t change the general picture in the least, I can’t see any more than you can how they can possibly be deliberate, either.”

“Are you trying to set up a paradox?”

“No. It’s already set up. I’m trying to knock it down.” Cloud’s thought died away; his mind became a mathematical wilderness of such complexity that the woman, able mathematician that she was and scan as she would, was lost in seconds.

He finally shrugged himself out of it. “Another blind alley,” he reported, sourly.

“With sufficient knowledge, any possible so-called paradox can be resolved,” Joan mused, her mind harking back to the, to her, starkly unbelievable hypothesis Cloud had stated so baldly. “But I simply can’t believe it, Storm!”

“I can’t, either, hardly. However, it’s easier for me to believe that than that all our basics are false. So that makes it another part of our job to find out what, or who, or why.”

“Ouch! With a job of that magnitude on your mind, I’ll make myself scarce. When you come up for air sometime give me a call on the squawk-box and we’ll study concentration. ’Bye.” She turned, started for the door.

“Wait a minute, Joan—why not start the ground-work now?”

“That’s a thought—why not? But get away from that big table.” She placed two chairs and they sat down knee to knee; almost eye to eye. “Now, Storm, come in. Really come in, this time; the first time you didn’t really even half try.”

“I did so!” he protested. “I tried then and I’m trying now. Just how do I go about it?”

“I can’t tell you that, Storm; nobody can tell you that.” She was thinking now, not talking. “There are no words, no symbology, even in the provinces of thought. And I can’t do it for you: you must do it yourself. But if you can’t—and you really can’t be expected to, so soon—I’ll come into your mind and try to show you what I mean.”

She did so. There was a moment of fitting; of snuggling . . . there was a warmly intimate contact, much warmer and much more intimate than anything telepathic that either had ever experienced before; but it was not what they were after. Joan tried a different approach.

“Well, if that won’t work, let’s try this. Just imagine, Storm, that every cell of my brain—no, let’s keep it on the immaterial level; every individual ultimate element of my mind—is a lock, but you can see exactly what the key must be like. You must make every corresponding unit of your mind into the appropriate key. . . . No? We’ll try again. Imagine that each element of my mind is half of a jigsaw puzzle—make yours fill out each picture. . . .”

“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 work-table, 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 this 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 mien 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, 225°—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.”