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

'Two days. Say we meet you there Saturday morning?"
'I'll be there,' and again Neal Cloud and Babe, the big blue ox, hit the road; and as he rolled along the physicist mulled
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over in his mind the assignment to which he had set himself.
Like fire, only worse, atomic energy was a good servant, but a very bad master. Man had liberated it before he could really
control it. In fact, control was not yet, and probably never would be, perfect. True, all except a minute fraction of one
percent of the multitudes of small, tame, self-limiting vortices were perfect servants. But at long intervals, for some
unknown reasonтАФscience knew so little, fundamentally, of nuclear reactionsтАФone of them flared, nova-like, into a huge,
wild, self-sustaining monster. It ceased being a servant, then, and became a master.
Such flare-ups occurred very infrequently; the trouble was that the loose vortices were so utterly, so damnably permanent.
They never went out; and no data were ever obtained. Every living thing in the vicinity of a flare-up died; every instrument
and every other solid thing within a radius of hundreds of feet melted down into the reeking boiling slag of its crater.
Fortunately, the rate of growth was slowтАФas slow, almost, as it was persistent. But even so, unless something could be
done about loose vortices before too many years, the situation would become extremely serious. That was why the
Laboratory had been established in the first place.
Nothing much had been accomplished so far. Tractor beams would not hold. Nothing material was of any use. Pressors
worked after a fashionтАФvortices could be moved from one place to another. One or two, through sheer luck, had been
blown out by heavy charges of duodecaplylatomate. But duodec had taken many lives; and since it scattered a vortex as
often as it fed it, duodec had caused vastly 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 were still being tried. Some, such as the perennially appearing one of
installing a free drive and flinging the whole neighborhood off into space, were perhaps feasible from an engineering
standpoint. They were potentially so capable of making things worse, however, that they could not be used except as last-
ditch measures. In short, the control of loose atomic vortices was very much an unsolved problem.
2: Cloud Blasts a Vortex
Number One, the oldest and worst vortex on Tellus, had been pushed out into the badlands, and there, at eight o'clock of
the indicated morning, Cloud started to work on it.
The 'lookout shack' was in fact a fully-equipped nucleonics laboratory. Its staff was not largeтАФeight men worked in three
staggered eight-hour shiftsтАФbut the development of its instrumentation had required hundreds of man-years of intensive
research. Every factor of the vortex's activity was measured and recorded continuously, throughout every minute of every
day of every year; and all of these measurements were summed up, integrated, into the 'sigma' curve. This curve, which to
the layman's eye was only a senselessly zig-zagging line, told the expert everything he wanted to know.
Cloud glanced at the chart and scowled, for one jagged peak, less than half an hour old, almost touched the top line of the
paper.
'Bad, huh, Frank?'
'Bad, Storm, and getting worse. I wouldn't wonder if "Calamity" were rightтАФit certainly looks like she's getting ready to
blow her top.'
'No equation, I suppose,' Strong said. The Lensman ignored as completely as did the observer, if not as flippantly, the
distinct possibility that at any moment the obervatory and all that it contained might be resolved into their sub-atomic
components.
'None,' Cloud stated. He did not need to spend hours at a calculating machine; at one glance he knew, without knowing
how he knew, that no equation could fit that wildly-shifting sigma curve. 'But most of these recent cycles cut ordinate
seven fifty, so I'll take that for my value. That means nine point nine six zero kilograms of duodec for my basic, and nine
four six two and ten point three five eight as alternates. On the wire?'
'It went out as you said it,' the observer replied. 'They'll be here in five minutes."
'QX. I'll get dressed, then.'
The Lensman and one of the observers helped him into his cumbersome, heavily-padded armor; then all three men went
out to the flitter. A tiny speedster, really; a slim torpedo with the
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