"Smith, E E 'Doc' - Lensman 07 - Vortex Blaster" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith E. E. Doc)

'Why not?' It was scarely a question; Cloud's voice was level, uninfiected. 'I wouldn't be worth the paper I'd waste.'
'Now, no; but the future's another matter. I haven't said anything so far, because I knew you and Jo. Nothing could be said.' Two hands gripped and held. 'For the future, though, four words that were spoken long ago have never been improved upon. "This, too, shall pass".'
'You think so?'
'I know so, Storm. I've been round a long time. You're too good a man to go down out of control. You've got a place in the world and a job to do. You'll be back–' a thought struck the Lensman and he went on, in a strangely altered tone: 'But you wouldn't–of course you wouldn't–you couldn't.'
'I don't think so. No.' Suicide, tempting although it might be, was not the answer. 'Good-bye, Phil.'
'Not good-bye, Storm. Au revoir.'
'Maybe.' Cloud left the laboratory and took an elevator down to the garage. Into his big blue DeKhotinsky Special and away.
Through traffic so heavy that front-, rear-, and side-bumpers almost touched he drove with his wonted cool skill; even though he did not know, consciously, that the other cars were there. He slowed, turned, stopped, 'shoveled on the coal', all correctly–and all purely automatically.
He did not know where he was going, nor care. His numbed brain was simply trying to run away from its own bitter imaginings–which, if he had thought at all, he would have known hopeless of accomplishment. But he did not think. He simply acted; dumbly, miserably.
Into a one-way skyway he rocketed; along it over the suburbs and into the trans-continental super-highway. Edging inward, lane after lane, he reached the 'unlimited' way–unlimited, that is, except for being limited to cars of not less than seven hundred horsepower, in perfect mechanical condition, driven by registered, tested drivers at not less than one hundred twenty five miles per hour–flashed his number at the control station, and shoved his right foot down to the floor.
Everyone knows that an ordinary DeKhotinsky Spotter will do a hundred and forty honestly-measured miles in one honestly-timed hour; but very few drivers have ever found out how fast one of those brutal big souped-up Specials can wheel. Most people simply haven't got what it takes to open one up.
'Storm' Cloud found out that day. He held that six-thousand-pound Juggernaut onto the road, wide open, for mile after mile after mile. But it didn't help. Drive as he would, he could not out-run that which rode with him. Beside him and within him and behind him; for Jo was there.
Jo and the kids, but mostly Jo. It was Jo's car as much as it was his. 'Babe, the big blue ox,' was her pet name for it; because, like Paul Bunyan's fabulous beast, it was pretty nearly six feet between the eyes.
Jo was in the seat beside him. Every dear, every sweet, every luscious, lovely memory of her was there... and behind him, just beyond eye-corner visibility, were the three kids. And a whole lifetime of this loomed ahead–a vista of emptiness more vacuous by far than the emptiest reaches of inter-galactic space. Damnation! he couldn't stand much more of...
High over the roadway, far ahead, a brilliant octagon flared red. That meant 'STOP' in any language. Cloud eased up on the accelerator; eased down on the brake-pedal; took his place in the line of almost-stalled traffic. There was a barrier and a trimly-uniformed policeman.
'Sorry, sir,' the officer said, with a sweeping, turning gesture, but you'll have to detour over to Twenty. There's a loose atomic vortex beside the road up ahead... Oh, it's you, Doctor Cloud! You can go ahead, of course. Couple of miles yet before you'll need your armor. They didn't tell us they were sending for you. It's just a little new one, and the dope we got was that they were going to shove it over into the badlands with pressors.'
'They didn't send for me.' Cloud tried to smile. 'I'm just driving around. No armor, even, so I might as well go back.'
He turned the Special around. A loose vortex–new. There might be three or four of them, scattered over that many counties. Sisters of the one that had murdered his family–spawn of that damned Number Eleven that that bungling nitwit had tried to blow out... Into his mind there leaped a picture, wire-sharp, of Number Eleven as he had last seen it, and simultaneously an idea hit him like the blow of a fist.
He thought. Really thought, now; intensely and clearly. If he could do it–could actually blow out the atomic flame of an atomic vortex... not exactly revenge, but... it would work... it would have to work–he'd make it work! And grimly, quietly, but alive now in every fiber, he drove back to the city almost as fast as he had come away.
If Philip Strong was surprised at Cloud's sudden reappearance in the laboratory he did not show it. Nor did he offer any comment as his erstwhile assistant went to various lockers and cupboards, assembling coils, tubes, armor, and other paraphernalia.
'Guess that's all I'll need, chief,' Cloud remarked, finally. 'Here's a blank check. If some of this stuff shouldn't happen to be in usable condition when I get done with it, fill it out to suit, will you?'
'No.' The Lensman tore up the check just as he had torn up the resignation. 'If you want the stuff for legitimate purposes, you're on Patrol business and it's the Patrol's risk. But if you're thinking of trying to snuff a vortex, the stuff stays here. That's out, Storm.'
'But I'm going to really snuff 'em, starting with Number One and taking 'em in order. No suicide.'
'Huh?' Skepticism incarnate. 'It can't be done, except by an almost impossibly fortuitous accident, which is why you yourself have always been as opposed to such attempts as the rest of us. The charge of explosive must match, within very narrow limits, the activity of the vortex itself at the instant of detonation; and that activity varies so greatly and so unpredictably that all attempts at accurate extrapolation have failed. Even the Conference of Scientists couldn't develop a usable formula, any more than they could work out a tractor that could be used as a tow-line on one.'
'Wait a minute!' Cloud protested. 'They found that it could be forecast, for a length of time proportional to the length of the cycle in question, by an extension of the calculus of warped surfaces.'
'Humph! I said a usable formula!' the Lensman snorted. What good is a ten-second forecast when it takes a GOMEAC twice that long to solve... Oh!' he broke off, staring. -
'Oh,' he repeated, slowly. 'I forgot for a minute that you were born with a super-GOMEAC in your head. But there are other things.'
'There were. Now there are none.'
'No?'
'NO. I couldn't take such chances before, and I'd've tied myself up into knots if I did. Now nothing can throw me. I can compute all the elements of a sigma curve in nothing flat. A ten-second prediction gives me ten seconds of action. That's plenty.'
'I see.' Strong pondered, his fingers drumming softly upon his desk. Lensmen did not ordinarily use their Lenses on their Lensless friends, but this was no ordinary occasion. 'You aren't afraid of death any more. But you won't invite it? And do you mind if I Lens you on that?'
'Come in. I'll not invite it, but that's as far as I'll go in promising. I won't make any superhuman effort to avoid it. I'll take all due precautions, for the sake of the job, but if one gets me, what the hell?'
'QX.' The Lensman withdrew from Cloud's mind. 'Not too good, but good enough. What's your plan? You won't have time for the usual method of attack.'
'Like this.' Cloud found a sheet of drafting paper and sketched rapidly. 'There's the crater, with the vortex at the bottom–there. From the sigma curve I estimate the most probable value of the activity I'll have to shoot at. Then I select three duodec bombs from the hundred or so I'll have made up in advance–one on the mark, one each five percent over and under the mark. The bombs, of course, will be cased in neocarballoy thick enough for penetration. Then I take off in a shielded armored flying suit, say about here...'
'If you take off at all, you and your suit will be inside a flitter,' the Lensman interrupted. 'Too many instruments for a suit, to say nothing of bombs, and you'll need heavier screen than a suit can put out. We can adapt a flitter for bomb-throwing easily enough.'
'That'd be better, of course. QX, I set my flitter into a projectile trajectory toward the center of disturbance. Twelve seconds away, at about this point here, I take my instantaneous readings, solve the equations of that particular warped surface for some definite zero time....'
'But s'pose the cycle won't give you a ten-second solution?'
'Then I'll swing around and try again until a long-enough cycle does show up.'
'QX. It will, sometime.'
'Sure. Then, having everything set for zero time, and assuming that the activity is somewhere near my assumed value...'
'Assume it isn't–it probably won't be.'
'I accelerate or decelerate..."
'Solving new equations–differential equations at that–all the while?'
'Certainly. Don't interrupt so. I stick around until the sigma curve, extrapolated to zero time, matches one of my bombs. I build up the right velocity, cut that bomb loose, shoot myself off in a sharp curve, and Z-W-E-E-T–POWIE! She's out.' With an expressive, sweeping gesture.
'You hope.' Strong was frankly dubious. 'And there you are, right in the middle of the damndest explosion you ever saw.'
'Oh, no. I've gone free in the meantime, so nothing can touch me.'
'I hope! But do you realize just how busy you are going to be during those ten or twelve seconds?'
'Yes.' Cloud's face grew somber. 'But I'll be in full control. I won't be afraid of anything that can happen–of anything that can happen. From my standpoint, that's the hell of it.'
'QX,' The Lensman decided, 'You can go. We'll iron out the kinks as we go.'
'We?'