The Vortex Blaster

by Edward E Smith

  “Haven’t any idea. How much?”

  “One million seven hundred sixty two thousand eight hundred and ten credits! Yow-wow-yow!”

  “Whew!” Cloud whistled in amazement. “And you’re figuring on giving it all back to ’em tomorrow?”

  “I… I haven’t quite decided.” Vesta sobered instantly. “What do you think, chief?”

  “Not being a gambler, I don’t have hunches very often, but I’ve got one now. In fact, I know one thing for certain damn sure. There isn’t one chance in seven thousand million of anything like this ever happening to you again. You’ll lose your shirt—that is, if you had a shirt to lose,” he added hastily.

  “You know, I think you’re right? I thought so myself, and you’re the second smart man to tell me the same thing.”

  “Who was the first one?”

  “That man at the club, Althagar, his name was. So, with three hunches on the same play, I’d be a fool not to play it that way. Besides, I’ll never get another wallop like that…my uncle’s been wanting me to be linguist in his bank, and with a million and three-quarters of my own I could buy half his bank and be a linguist and a cashier both. Then I couldn’t ever gamble again.”

  “Huh? Why not?”

  “Because Vegians, especially young Vegians, like me, haven’t got any sense when it comes to gambling,” Vesta explained, gravely. “They can’t tell the difference between their own money and the bank’s. So everybody who amounts to anything in a bank makes a no-gambling declaration and if one ever slips the insurance company boots him out on his ear and he takes a blaster and burns his head off…”

  Cloud flashed a thought at Joan. “Is this another of your strictly Vegian customs?”

  “Not mine; I never heard of it before,” she flashed back. “Very much in character, though, and it explains why Vegian bankers are regarded as being very much the upper crust.”

  “…so I am going to buy half of that bank. Thanks, chief, for helping me make up my mind. Good night, you two lovely people; I’m going to bed. I’m just about bushed.” Vesta, tail high and with a completely new dignity in her bearing, strode away.

  “Me, too, Storm; on both counts,” Joan thought at Cloud. “You ought to hit the hammock, too, instead of working half the night yet.”

  “Maybe so, but I want to know how things came out, and besides they may want some quick figuring done. Good night, little chum.” His parting thought, while commonplace enough in phraseology, was in fact sheer caress; and Joan’s mind, warmly intimate, accepted it as such and returned it in kind.

  Cloud left the ship and rode a scooter across the field to a very ordinary-looking freighter. In that vessel’s control room, however, there were three Lensmen and five Rigellians, all clustered around a tank-chart of a considerable fraction of the First Galaxy.

  “Hi, Cloud!” Nordquist greeted him with a Lensed thought and introduced him to the others. “All our thanks for a really beautiful job of work. We’ll thank Miss Janowick tomorrow, when she’ll have a better perspective. Want to look?”

  “I certainly do. Thanks.” Cloud joined the group at the chart and Nordquist poured knowledge into his mind.

  Thlasoval, the boss of Chickladoria, had been under full mental surveillance every minute of every day. The scheme had worked perfectly. As the club closed, Thlasoval had sent the expected message; not by ordinary communications channels, of course, but via long-distance beamer. It was beamed three ways; to Tominga, Vegia, and Palmer III. That proved that Fairchild wasn’t on Chickladoria; if he had been, Thlasoval would have used a broadcaster, not a beamer.

  Shows had been staged simultaneously on all four of Fairchild’s planets, and only on Vegia had the planetary manager’s message been broadcast. Fairchild was on Vegia, and he wouldn’t leave it; a screen had been thrown around the planet that a microbe couldn’t squirm through and it wouldn’t be relaxed until Fairchild was caught.

  “Simultaneous shows?” Cloud interrupted the flow of information. “On four planets? He won’t connect the Vortex Blaster with it, at all, then.”

  “We think he will,” the Lensman thought, narrowing down. “We’re dealing with a very shrewd operator. We hope he does, anyway, because a snooper put on you or any one of your key people would be manna from heaven for us.”

  “But how could he suspect us?” Cloud demanded. “We couldn’t have been on four planets at once.”

  “You will have been on three of them, though; and I can tell you now that routing was not exactly coincidence.”

  “Oh…and I wasn’t informed?”

  “No. Top Brass didn’t want to disturb you too much, especially since we hoped to catch him before things got this far along. But you’re in it now, clear to the neck. You and your people will be under surveillance every second, from here on in, and you’ll be covered as no chief of state was ever covered in all history.”

  Chapter XV

  JOAN AND HER BRAINS

  THE TRIP FROM Chickladoria to Vegia, while fairly long, was uneventful.

  Joan spent her working hours, of course, at her regular job of rebuilding the giant computer. Cloud spent his at the galactic chart or in the control room staring into a tank; classifying, analyzing, building up and knocking down hypotheses and theories, wringing every possible drop of knowledge from all the data he could collect.

  In their “spare” time, of which each had quite a great deal, they worked together at their telepathy; to such good purpose that, when so working, verbal communication between them became rarer and rarer. And, alone or in a crowd, within sight of each other or not, in any place or at any time, asleep or awake, each had only to think at the other and they were instantly in full mental rapport.

  And oftener and oftener there came those instantaneously-fleeting touches of something infinitely more than mere telepathy; that fusion of minds which was so ultimately intimate that neither of the two could have said whether he longed for or dreaded its full coming the more. In fact, for several days before reaching Vegia, each knew that they could bring about that full fusion any time they chose to do so; but both shied away from its consummation, each as violently as the other.

  Thus the trip did not seem nearly as long as it actually was.

  The first order of business on Vegia, of course, was the extinguishment of its five loose atomic vortices—for which reason this was to be pretty much a planetary holiday, although that is of little concern here.

  As the Vortex Blaster II began settling into position, the two scientists took their places. Cloud was apparently his usual self-controlled self, but Joan was white and strained—almost shaking. He sent her a steadying thought, but her block was up, solid.

  “Don’t take it so hard, Joanie,” he said, soberly. “Margie’ll take ’em, I hope—but even if she doesn’t, there’s a dozen things not tried yet.”

  “That’s just the trouble—there aren’t! We put just about everything we had into Lulu; Margie is only a few milliseconds better. Perhaps there are a dozen things not tried yet, but I haven’t the faintest, foggiest smidgeon of an idea of what any of them could be. Margie is the last word, Storm—the best analogue computer it is possible to build with today’s knowledge.”

  “And I haven’t been a lick of help. I wish I could be, Joan.”

  “I don’t see how you can be… Oh, excuse me, Storm, I didn’t mean that half the way it sounds. Do you want to check the circuitry? I’ll send for the prints.”

  “No, I couldn’t even carry your water-bottle on that part of the job. I’ve got just a sort of a dim, half-baked idea that there’s a possibility that maybe I haven’t been giving you and your brains a square deal. By studying the graphs of the next three or four tests maybe I can find out whether…”

  “Lieutenant-Commander Janowick, we are in position,” a crisp voice came from the speaker. “You may take over when ready, madam.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Joan flipped a switch and Margie took control of the ship and its armament—subject on
ly to Cloud’s overriding right to fire at will.

  “Just a minute, Storm,” Joan said then. “Unfinished business. Whether what?”

  “Whether there’s anything I can do—or fail to do—that might help; but I’ve got to have a lot more data.”

  Cloud turned to his chart, Joan to hers; and nothing happened until Cloud blew out the vortex himself.

  The same lack of something happened in the case of the next vortex, and also the next. Then, as the instruments began working in earnest on the fourth, Cloud reviewed in his mind the figures of the three previous trials. On the first vortex, a big toughie, Margie had been two hundred fifty milliseconds short. On the second, a fairly small one, she had come up to seventy-five. On Number Three, middle-sized, the lag had been one twenty-five. That made sense. Lag was proportional to activity and it was just too bad for Margie. And just too damn bad for Joanie—the poor kid was just about to blow her stack…

  But wait a minute! What’s this? This number four’s a little bit of a new one, about as small as they ever come. Margie ought to be taking it, if she’s ever going to take anything…but she isn’t! She’s running damn near three hundred mils behind! Why? Oh—amplitudes—frequencies—extreme instability… Lag isn’t proportional only to activity, then, but jointly to activity and to instability.

  That gives us a chance—but what in all nine of Palain’s purple hells is that machine doing with that data?

  He started to climb out of his bucket seat to go around to talk to Joan right then, but changed his mind at his first move. Even if Margie could handle this little one it wouldn’t be a real test, and it’d be a crying shame to give Joan a success here and then kick her in the teeth with a flat failure next time. No, the next one, the only one left and Vegia’s worst, would be the one. If Margie could handle that, she could snuff anything the galaxy had to offer.

  Hence Cloud extinguished this one, too, himself. The Vortex Blaster II darted to its last Vegian objective and lined itself up for business. Joan put Margie to work as usual; but Storm, for the first time, did not take his own place. Instead, he came around and stood behind Joan’s chair.

  “How’re we doing, little chum?” he asked.

  “Rotten!” Joan’s block was still up; her voice was choked with tears. “She’s come so close half a dozen times today—why—why can’t I get that last fraction of a second?”

  “Maybe you can.” As though it were the most natural thing in the world—which in fact it was—Cloud put his left arm around her shoulders and exerted a gentle pressure. “Bars down, chum—we can think a lot clearer than we can talk.”

  “That’s better,” as her guard went down. “Your differential ’scope looks like it’s set at about one centimeter to the second. Can you give it enough vertical gain to make it about five?”

  “Yes. Ten if you like, but the trace would keep jumping the screen on the down-swings.”

  “I wouldn’t care about that—closest approach is all I want Give it full gain.”

  “QX, but why?” Joan demanded, as she made the requested adjustment. “Did you find out something I can’t dig deep enough in your mind to pry loose?”

  “Don’t know yet whether I did or not—I can tell you in a couple of minutes,” and Cloud concentrated his full attention upon the chart and its adjacent oscilloscope screen.

  One pen of the chart was drawing a thin, wildly-wavering red line. A few seconds behind it a second pen was tracing the red line in black; tracing it so exactly that not the tiniest touch of red was to be seen anywhere along the black. And on the screen of the differential oscilloscope the fine green saw-tooth wave-form of the electronic trace, which gave continuously the instantaneous value of the brain’s shortage in time, flickered insanely and apparently reasonlessly up and down; occasionally falling clear off the bottom of the screen. If that needle-pointed trace should touch the zero line, however briefly, Margie the Brain would act; but it was not coming within one full centimeter of touching.

  “The feeling that these failures have been partly, or even mostly, my fault is growing on me,” Cloud thought, tightening his arm a little: and Joan, if anything, yielded to the pressure instead of fighting away from it. “Maybe I haven’t been waiting long enough to give your brains the leeway they need. To check: I’ve been assuming all along that they work in pretty much the same way I do; that they handle all the data, out to the limit of validity of the equations, but aren’t fast enough to work out a three-point-six-second prediction.

  “But if I’m reading those curves right Margie simply isn’t working that way. She doesn’t seem to be extrapolating anything more than three and a half seconds ahead—’way short of the reliability limit—and sometimes a lot less than that. She isn’t accepting data far enough ahead. She acts as though she can gulp down just so much information without choking on it—so much and no more.”

  “Exactly. An over-simplification, of course, since it isn’t the kind of choking that giving her a bigger throat would cure, but very well put.” Joan’s right hand crept across her body, rested on Cloud’s wrist, and helped him squeeze, while her face turned more directly toward the face so close to hers. “That’s inherent in the design of all really fast machines…and we simply don’t know any way of getting away from it… Why? What has that to do with the case?”

  “A lot—I hope. When I was working in a flitter I had to wait up to half an hour sometimes, for the sigma curve to stabilize enough so that the equations would hold valid for a ten-second prediction…”

  “Stabilize? How? I’ve never seen a sigma curve flatten out. Or does ‘stabilize’ have a special meaning for you vortex experts?”

  “Could be. It’s what happens when a sigma becomes a little more regular than usual, so that a simpler equation will give a longer valid prediction.”

  “I see; and a difference in wave-form that would be imperceptible to me might mean a lot to you.”

  “Right. It just occurred to me that a similar line of reasoning may hold for this seemingly entirely different set of conditions. The less unstable the curve, the less complicated the equations and the smaller the volume of actual data…”

  “Oh!” Joan’s thought soared high. “So Margie may work yet, if we wait a while?”

  “Check. Browning can’t take the ship away from you, can he?”

  “No. Nobody can do anything until the job is done or I punch that red ‘stop’ button there. D’you suppose she can do it? Storm? How long can we wait?”

  “Half an hour. I’d say. No, to settle the point definitely, let’s wait until I can get a full ten-second prediction and see what Margie’s doing about the situation then.”

  “Wonderful! But in that case, it might be a good idea for you to be looking at the chart, don’t you think?” she asked, pointedly. His eyes, at the moment, were looking directly into hers, from a distance of approximately twelve inches.

  “I’ll look at it later, but right now I’m…”

  The ship quivered under the terrific, the unmistakable trip-hammer blow of propellant heptadetonite. Unobserved by either of the two scientists most concerned, the sigma curve had, momentarily, become a trifle less irregular. The point of the sawtooth wave had touched the zero line. Margie had acted. The visiplate, from which the heavily-filtered glare of the vortex had blazed so long, went suddenly black.

  “She did it, Storm!” Joan’s thought was a mental shriek of pure joy. “She really worked!”

  Whether, when the ship went free, Joan pulled Storm down to her merely to anchor him, or for some other reason; whether Cloud grabbed her merely in lieu of a safety-line or not; which of the two was first to put arms around the other; these are moot points impossible of decision at this date. The fact is, however, that the two scientists held a remarkably unscientific pose for a good two minutes before Joan thought that she ought to object a little, just on general principles. Even then, she did not object with her mind; instead she put up her block and used her voice.

  “Bu
t, after all. Storm,” she began, only to be silenced as beloved women have been silenced throughout the ages. She cut her screen then, and her mind, tender and unafraid, reached out to his.

  “This might be the perfect time, dear, to merge our minds? I’ve been scared to death of it all along, but no more…let’s?”

  “Uh-uh,” he demurred. “I’m still afraid of it. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and doing some drilling, and the more I play with it the more scared I get. It’s dangerous. It’s like playing with duodec. I’ve just about decided that we’d better let it drop.”

  “Afraid? For yourself, or for me? Don’t try to lie with your mind, Storm; you can’t do it. You’re afraid only for me, and you needn’t be. I’ve been thinking, too, and digging deep, and I know I’m ready.” She looked up at him then, her quick, bright, impish grin very much in evidence. “Let’s go.”

  “QX, Joanie, and thanks. I’ve been wanting this more than I ever wanted anything before in my life. But not holding hands, this time. Heart to heart and cheek to cheek.”

  “Check—the closer the better.”

  They embraced, and again mind flowed into mind; this time with no thought of withholding or reserve on either side. Smoothly, effortlessly, the two essential beings merged, each fitting its tiniest, remotest members into the deepest, ordinarily most inaccessible recesses of the other; fusing as quickly and as delicately and as thoroughly as two drops of water coalescing into one.

  In that supremely intimate fusion, that ultimate union of line and plane and cellule, each mind was revealed completely to the other; a revealment which no outsider should expect to share.

  Finally, after neither ever knew how long, they released each other and each put up, automatically, a solid block.

  “I don’t know about you, Storm,’ Joan said then, “but I’ve had just about all I can take. I’m going to bed and sleep for one solid week.”