E. E. Smith

“ And at that moment—such was the power of Luda’s mind and the precision of her telepathy—every nuance of thought became sharp and clear.
“I demand Darjeeb’s life!” Luda stormed. “Not because he is the enemy of all my race—that would not weigh with you—but because he has done what no one else, however base, has ever been so lost to shame as to do. In our city upon Lune he kindled an atomic flame which is killing us in multitudes. In case you do not know, such flames can never be extinguished.” ”

“ But right now you’d better forget chess and take a good, long gander at what that Vegian hell-cat is doing. She’s wilder than a Radelgian cateagle and hotter than a DeLameter. She’s gone just completely nuts.”
Tense, strained, taut as a violin-string in every visible muscle, Vesta stood at a wheel; gripping the ledge of the table so fiercely that enamel was flaking off the metal and plastic under her stiff, sharp nails. Jaws hard set and eyes almost invisible slits, she growled deep in her throat at every bet she put down. ”

“ 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!” ”

“ As soon as they could extract certain data from Luda’s mind, they could take Lune in short order. With Lune solidly theirs, they could bomb Dhil into submission in two years. The goal of many generations would have been reached. He, Darjeeb of Nhal, would have wealth, fame, and—best of all—power!
Gazing gloatingly at his captive with every eye he could bring to bear, Darjeeb strolled over to inspect again her chains and manacles. Let her radiate! No mentality in existence could break his blocks. Physically, however, she had to be watched. The irons were strong; but so was Luda. ”

“ Graves, I thought . . . Dr. Fairchild told us . . . we were going to tell him about. . . .”
“You’re going to tell nobody nothing. You saw too much and know too much, that’s all.”
“Oh, that’s it!” Ryder’s mind reeled as some part of the actual significance of what he had seen struck home. “But listen! Jackie didn’t see anything—she had her eyes shut all the time—and doesn’t know anything. You don’t want to have the murder of such a girl as she is on your mind, I know. Let her go and she’ll never say a word—we’ll both swear to it—or you could. . . .” ”

“ No one knows exactly what a vortex does to air. Or, rather, the composition of the effluent gases varies as frequently and as unpredictably as does the activity of the vortex. Thus, the atmosphere emitted from a vortex-crater may be corrosive, it may be poisonous, it may be merely different; but it is no longer the air which we human beings are used to breathing. This conversion and corruption of Earth’s atmosphere, if it could not be stopped, would end the possibility of life upon the planet’s surface long before the world itself could be consumed. ”

“ You and I are one, you know,” and Vesta’s voice went on:
“. . . and besides, the law is merciful. Its death is instant. Under my claws and teeth he will live for hours—for a full day, I hope.”
“But officer, can’t you do something?”
“Nothing. The law comes second. As she has said, it is her right and her privilege.”
“But it’s suicide, man—sheer suicide. You know that, don’t you?”
“Not necessarily. She will not be working alone. Whether she lives or dies, however, it is still her right and her privilege.”
Cloud switched to thought. “Nordquist, you can stop this if you want to. Do it.” ”

“ Maybe we can understand any kind of language now—maybe that’s one of the natural abilities of a Type Three-Six fusion. Who knows?”
In an instant they were receiving a short-wave broadcast at the Heaviside Layer of a distant planet. They could receive it, could de-louse it, could separate signal from carrier wave, could read the information; but they could not understand it.
“Well, that’s a relief,” Joan sighed. “I was getting more than half afraid that a Type Six mind would be omniscient.”
“If I’m a Six you needn’t worry; there’s altogether too much to know. Where do you want to go from here?” ”

“ Back to food—for the first time in the Vortex Blaster’s career he was really hungry.
Which buttons would he push for supper? Steak and Venerian mushrooms would be mighty good. So would fried ham and eggs, or high-pressured gameliope. . . .
An alarm bell jangled, rupturing the silence; a warm-blooded oxygen-breather’s distress call, pitifully weak, was coming in. It would have to be weak, Cloud reflected, as he tuned it in as sharply as he could; he was a good eighty five parsecs—at least an hour at maximum blast—away from the nearest charted traffic lane. It was getting stronger. ”

“ Until he’d met Joan, he’d supposed his mind ordinary enough. Since then, however . . . all those extra barrels. . . .
“Exactly. We are specialists of the mind, young man. We perceive your mind, not as it is, but as it should be and will be. It should have and will have a penetrance, a range, a flexibility of directive force, and, above all, a scope of heights and depths we have never encountered before. It is eminently clear that you, and, very probably, Three Janowick as well, have been developed each for some specific Purpose in the Great Scheme of Things.” ”

“ As to the vortex itself . . . it is difficult indeed to describe such a phenomenon. Practically all of its frightful radiation lies in those octaves of the spectrum which are invisible to the human eye. Suffice it to say, then, that it was a continuously active atomic reactor, with an effective surface temperature of approximately twenty five thousand degrees Kelvin, and let it go at that.
Neal Cloud, driving his flitter through that murky, radiation-riddled atmosphere, extrapolating his sigma curve by the sheer power of his mathematical-prodigy’s mind, sat appalled. ”

“ On the way, Joan asked: “Our little Vesta surprised you, Storm?”
“Didn’t she you? She had me gasping like a fish.”
“Not so much. I know them pretty well and I used to breed cats. Scent: hearing—they can hear forty thousand cycles: the fact that they mature both mentally and physically long before they do sexually: some of their utterly barbarous customs: it’s quite a shock to learn how—‘queer,’ shall I say?—some of the Vegian mores are to us of other worlds.” ”

“ 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?” ”

“ The suggestion that it would be smart to run honest games had been implanted in the zwilniks’ minds, not because of the cards, but because of the wheels; for a loaded, braked, and magnetized wheel is a very tough device to beat.
Joan, then, would read a deck of cards, and a Lensman or a Rigellian would watch her do it. Then the observing telepath would, all imperceptibly, insert hunches into the mind of a player. And what gambler has ever questioned his hunches, especially when they pay off time after time after time? ”

“ Let me go! I’m burning out!” Joan shrieked aloud. “My God, Storm, is there no limit at all to your ceiling?”
Cloud stopped; loosed her mind. “I’m sorry, chick, but I was just getting nicely organized. We’ve got a long ways to go yet, I’m afraid.”
“I’m sorry, too, Storm, sorrier than you’ll ever know, but I simply can’t take it. Three seconds more of that and I’d’ve gone stark, raving mad. And when we get to Cahuita I don’t know what I’ll do. I may blow up completely.”
“You may think so, but you won’t. You’re not the type. And we aren’t going to Cahuita—at least, not in the flesh. ”

“ Joan glanced up with a grin. “Just study the board, Master Thlasoval, and see for yourself who is doing what to whom. I’m just barely holding him: he’s had me on the defensive for the last forty moves. Attacking him is just like trying to beat in the side of a battleship with your bare fist. Do you see his strategy? Perhaps not, on such short notice.”
Joan was very willing to talk chess at length, because the fact that Fairchild’s Chickladorian manager was a chess Master was an essential part of the Patrol’s plan. ”

“ The fat man deflated, then came back up, gasping for air. “Man, you’re completely nuts! There’s only one on the planet, and it’s . . . or do you mean . . . but nobody ever touched one of those things off deliberately . . . can it be done?”
“Yes. It isn’t simple, but we of the College of Radiation know how—theoretically—the transformation can be made to occur. It has never been done because it has been impossible to extinguish the things; but now Neal Cloud is putting them out. The fact that the idea is new makes it all the better.” ”

“ Every vortex represents twins. Never singles or triplets, always twins. And the cycle is so long that the full span of our data isn’t enough to even validate a wild guess at it. Now, Joan, you baby expert, just what kind of an infant would be just comfortably warm and cosy in the middle of a loose atomic vortex? Feed that one to Margie, chum, and let’s see what she does with it. ”

“ Still unsatisfied, she scanned all neighboring solar systems, from Centralia to Salvador. Then, and only then, did she accept Medury’s almost unacceptable conclusion that these providential sparks were in fact accidental and were in fact, by some process as yet unknown to Cahuitan science, self-balancing and self-sustaining.
Medury and Litosa, woven into a fantastically intricate and complex sphere of ultra-microscopic filaments, flashed into the heart of the reactor, which thereupon went instantaneously and enthusiastically out of control. ”

“ It would take him much closer to the vortex than he wanted to be; in fact, it would take him almost to the crater’s rim.
But he stuck to the calculated course, and at the precisely correct instant he released his largest bomb and cut his dive. Then, in a continuation of the same motion, his hand slashed down through the beam of light whose cutting would activate the Bergenholm and make the vessel inertialess—safe from any form whatever of physical violence. For an instant nothing happened, and for that instant Cloud sat appalled. Neutralization of inertia took time! ”

“ Cloud exclaimed. “How could he?”
“Why, sure, boss.” Vesta, wide-eyed, gazed innocently at her captain. “The ape didn’t die, you know, and she wasn’t going to do it again, and he wasn’t a Vegian, so didn’t have any relatives or friends to go to the mat for him, and besides, anybody with one-tenth of one percent of a brain would know better than to keep on making passes at a frail after she warned him how bad he stunk. What else could he do, chief?”
“What else, indeed?” Cloud said, in English. “I live; and—occasionally—I learn. ”

“ Whatever used to be there is gone . . . but that doesn’t make sense, either . . . that planet has never been solid, Joan. . . .” Cloud got up and began to pace the floor. “Dammit, Joan, nothing can live on a planet like that.”
“Life as we know it, no.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Only that I am trying to keep an open mind. We simply haven’t enough data.”
“Do you think you and I have got jets enough to find data that the Patrol’s best experts missed?”
“I don’t know. All I am sure of, Doctor Neal Cloud, is this: If we don’t go, we’ll both wish we had, to the day we die.” ”

“ You aren’t even on the right road—your whole concept is wrong. There couldn’t be any thought, even of privacy, no conception of such a thing. Think a minute! From birth—from the very birth of the whole race—full and open meetings of minds must have been the norm of thought. That kind of thing is—must be—what Nadine is accustomed to at home.”
“Hm . . . I never thought . . . you go see her, Joan, and I’ll stay home.”
“What good would that do? Whatever you may be, my dear, I know darn well you’re not stupid.” ”

“ The flitter hung poised in air, motionless, upon softly hissing under-jets. Cloud knew to a fraction his height above the ground. He knew to a fraction his distance from the vortex. He knew the density of the atmosphere and the velocity and direction of the wind. Hence, since he could also read, closely enough, the momentary variations in the cyclonic storms within the crater, he could compute very easily the course and velocity necessary to land the bomb in the exact center of the vortex at any given instant of time. ”