"E. E. Doc Smith - Lensman 7 - Masters Of The Vortex" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith E. E. Doc)

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MASTERS OF THE VORTEX

Contents

1 Catastrophe 9
2 Cloud Blasts a Vortex 17
3 Cloud Loses an Arm 26
4 Storm' Cloud on Deka 36
5 The Boneheads 49
6 Driving Jets are Weapons 56
7 The Blaster Acquires a Crew 71
8 Vesta the Vegian 79
9 Trouble on Tominga 91
10 Janowick 101
11 Joan the Telepath 107
12 Vesta Practices Spaceal 118
13 Games Within Games 124
14 Vesta the Gambler 139
15 Joan and Her Brains 148
16 Vegian Justice 159
17 The Call 172
18 Cahuita 184


1: Catastrophe
Safety devices that do not protect.
'Unsinkable' ships that, before the days of Bergenholm and of atomic and cosmic energy, sank into the waters of
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 it against accident external shorts; but, inadequately grounded, it may attract and upon occasion
has attracted the stupendous force of lightning. Then, steel armor exploding into incandescence inside walls and
ceilings, that house'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, with copper-silver cables the size of a big man's forefinger; for Neal Cloud,
Doctor of Nucleonics, knew his lightning and was taking no chances whatever with the safety of his wife and
children.
He did not know, did not even suspect, that under certain conditions of atmospheric potential and of ground-
magnetic stress his perfectly-designed and perfectly installed system would become a super-powerful attractor for
flying vortices -of atomic disintegration.
So now Neal Cloud, nucleonicist, 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 lighting had been a vortex-magnet at the moment when some luckless wight had tried to
abate the nuisance of a 'loose' atomic vortex. That wight dies, of courseтАФ they almost always didтАФand the vortex,
instead of being destroyed, was simply broken up into a number of widely-scattered new vortices. And one of those
bits of furious, uncontrolled energy, resembling a handful of substance torn from the depths of a sun, darted toward