twelve seconds?"

"Fully." Cloud's face grew somber. "But I will be in full control. I
won't be afraid of anything that can happen--_anything_. And," he went
on, under his breath, "that's the hell of it."

"QX," the Lensman admitted finally, "you can go. There are a lot of
things you haven't mentioned, but you'll probably be able to work them
out as you go along. I think I'll go out and work with the boys in the
lookout station while you're doing your stuff. When are you figuring on
starting?"

"How long will it take to get the flitter ready?"

"A couple of days. Say we meet you there Saturday morning?"

"Saturday the tenth, at eight o'clock. I'll be there."

* * * * *

And again Neal Cloud and Babe, the big blue ox, hit the road. And as he
rolled the physicist mulled over in his mind the assignment to which he
had set himself.

Like fire, only worse, intra-atomic energy was a good servant, but a
terrible master. Man had liberated it before he could really control it.
In fact, control was not yet, and perhaps never would be, perfect. Up to
a certain size and activity, yes. They, the millions upon millions of
self-limiting ones, were the servants. They could be handled, fenced in,
controlled; indeed, if they were not kept under an exciting bombardment
and very carefully fed, they would go out. But at long intervals, for
some one of a dozen reasons--science knew _so_ little, fundamentally, of
the true inwardness of the intra-atomic reactions--one of these small,
tame, self-limiting vortices flared, nova-like, into a large, wild,
self-sustaining one. It ceased being a servant then, and became a
master. Such flare-ups occurred, perhaps, only once or twice in a
century on Earth; the trouble was that they were so utterly, damnably
_permanent_. They never went out. And no data were ever secured: for
every living thing in the vicinity of a flare-up died; every instrument
and every other solid thing within a radius of a hundred feet melted
down into the reeking, boiling slag of its crater.

Fortunately, the rate of growth was slow--as slow, almost, as it was
persistent--otherwise Civilization would scarcely have had a planet
left. And unless something could be done about loose vortices before
too many years, the consequences would be really serious. That was why
his laboratory had been established in the first place.

Nothing much had been accomplished so far. The tractor beam that woul