d
take hold of them had never been designed. Nothing material was of any
use; it melted. Pressors worked, after a fashion: it was by the use of
these beams that they shoved the vortices around, off into the waste
places--unless it proved cheaper to allow the places where they had come
into being to remain waste places. A few, through sheer luck, had been
blown into self-limiting bits by duodec. Duodecaplylatomate, the most
powerful, the most frightfully detonant explosive ever invented upon all
the known planets of the First Galaxy. But duodec had taken an awful
toll of life. Also, since it usually scattered a vortex instead of
extinguishing it, duodec had actually caused far more damage than it had
cured.

No end of fantastic schemes had been proposed, of course; of varying
degrees of fantasy. Some of them sounded almost practical. Some of them
had been tried; some of them were still being tried. Some, such as the
perennially-appearing one of building a huge hemispherical hull in the
ground under and around the vortex, installing an inertialess drive, and
shooting the whole neighborhood out into space, were perhaps feasible
from an engineering standpoint. They were, however, potentially so
capable of making things worse that they would not be tried save as
last-ditch measures. In short, the control of loose vortices was very
much an unsolved problem.

* * * * *

Number One vortex, the oldest and worst upon Tellus, had been pushed out
into the Badlands; and there, at eight o'clock on the tenth, Cloud
started to work upon it.

The "lookout station," instead of being some such ramshackle structure
as might have been deduced from the Lensman's casual terminology, was in
fact a fully-equipped observatory. Its staff was not large--eight men
worked in three staggered eight-hour shifts of two men each--but the
instruments! To develop them had required hundreds of man-years of time
and near-miracles of research, not the least of the problems having been
that of developing shielded conductors capable of carrying truly through
five-ply screens of force the converted impulses of the very radiations
against which those screens were most effective. For the observatory,
and the one long approach to it as well, had to be screened heavily;
without such protection no life could exist there.

This problem and many others had been solved, however, and there the
instruments were. Every phase and factor