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    The Vortex Blaster
    The Vortex Blaster
    The Vortex Blaster
    Ebook54 pages39 minutes

    The Vortex Blaster

    By E. E. (Edward Elmer) Smith

    ()

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateNov 27, 2013
    The Vortex Blaster

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      Book preview

      The Vortex Blaster - E. E. (Edward Elmer) Smith

      The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Vortex Blaster, by Edward Elmer Smith

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

      almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

      re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

      with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

      Title: The Vortex Blaster

      Author: Edward Elmer Smith

      Release Date: September 16, 2007 [EBook #22629]

      Language: English

      *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE VORTEX BLASTER ***

      Produced by Greg Weeks, V. L. Simpson and the Online

      Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

      Comet, July 1941

      The Lensman and the observer helped Storm into his heavily padded armor. Their movements were automatic—the ointment, the devices—

      INTRODUCING Storm Cloud, who, through tragedy, is destined to become the most noted figure in the galaxy—THE

      Vortex Blaster

      (Complete in this issue!)

      by

      E. E. SMITH, Ph.D.

      Author of The Skylark, Skylark Three, "The Skylark
      of Valeron," the Lensman stories, etc.

      Safety devices that do not protect.

      The unsinkable ships that, before the days of Bergenholm and of atomic and cosmic energy, sank into the waters of the earth.

      More particularly, safety devices which, while protecting against one agent of destruction, attract magnet-like another and worse. Such as the armored cable within the walls of a wooden house. It protects the electrical conductors within against accidental external shorts; but, inadequately grounded as it must of necessity be, it may attract and upon occasion has attracted the stupendous force of lightning. Then, fused, volatilized, flaming incandescent throughout the length, breadth, and height of a dwelling, that dwelling's existence thereafter is to be measured in minutes.

      Specifically, four lightning rods. The lightning rods protecting the chromium, glass, and plastic home of Neal Cloud. Those rods were adequately grounded, grounded with copper-silver cables the bigness of a strong man's arm; for Neal Cloud, atomic physicist, knew his lightning and he was taking no chances whatever with the safety of his lovely wife and their three wonderful kids.

      He did not know, he did not even suspect, that under certain conditions of atmospheric potential and of ground-magnetic stress his perfectly designed lightning-rod system would become a super-powerful magnet for flying vortices of atomic disintegration.

      And now Neal Cloud, atomic physicist, sat at his desk in a strained, dull apathy. His face was a yellowish-gray white, his tendoned hands gripped rigidly the arms of his chair. His eyes, hard and lifeless, stared unseeingly past the small, three-dimensional block portrait of all that had made life worth living.

      For his guardian against lightning had been a vortex-magnet at the moment when a luckless wight had attempted to abate the nuisance of a loose atomic vortex. That wight died, of course—they almost always do—and the vortex, instead of being destroyed, was simply broken up into an indefinite number of widely-scattered new vortices. And one of these bits of furious, uncontrolled energy, resembling more nearly a handful of material rived from a sun than anything else with which ordinary man is familiar, darted toward and crashed downward to earth through Neal Cloud's new house.

      That home did not burn; it simply exploded. Nothing

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