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refractory between the electrodes and threw a switch. After the flaming arc
bad done its work be turned and handed
the paper to a tall man, dressed in plain grey leather" who had been watching
him with quiet, understanding eyes.
Significant enough to the initiated of the importance of this laboratory is
the fact that it was headed by an
Unattached Lensman.
"As of now, Phil, if it's QX with you."
The Grey Lensman took the document, glanced at it, and slowly, meticulously"
tore it into sixteen equal pieces.
"Uh, uh, Storm," he denied, gently. "Not a resignation. Leave of absence"
yes-indefinite-but not a resignation."
"Why?" It was scarcely a question; Cloud's voice was level, uninflected. "I
won't be worth the paper I'd waste." "Now,
no," the Lensman conceded, "but the future's another matter. I haven't said
anything so far, because to anyone who
knew you and Jo as I knew you it was abundantly clear that nothing could be
said." Two hands gripped and held. "For
the future, though, four words were uttered long ago, that have never been
improved upon. `This, too, shall pass.'"
"You think so?"
"I don't think so, Storm-I know so. I've been around a long time. You are too
good a man, and the world has too
much use for you, for you to go down permanently out of control. You've got a
place in the world, and you'll be
back-" A thought struck the Lensman, and he went on in an altered tone. "You
wouldn't-but of course you wouldn't
-you couldn't."
"I don't think so. No I won't-that never was any kind of a solution to any
problem."
Nor was it. Until that moment, suicide had not entered Cloud's mind, and he
rejected it instantly. His kind of man
did not take the easy way out.
After a brief farewell Cloud made his way to an elevator and was whisked down
to the garage. Into his big blue
DeKhotinsky Sixteen Special and away.
Through traffic so heavy that front-, rear-, and side bumpers almost touched
he drove with his wonted cool skill;
even though, consciously, he did not know that the other cars were there. He
slowed, turned, stopped, "gave her the
oof," all in correct response to flashing signals in all shapes and
colors-purely automatically. Consciously" he did
not know where he was going, nor care. If he thought at all, his numbed brain
was simply trying to run away from its
own bitter imaging-which, if he had thought at all" he would have known to be
a hopeless task. But he did not think;
he simply acted, dumbly, miserably. His eyes saw, optically; his body,
reacted, mechanically; his thinking brain was
completely in abeyance.
Into a one-way skyway he rocketed" along it over the suburbs and into the
transcontinental super-highway. Edging
inward, lane after lane, he reached the "unlimited" way -unlimited, that is"
except for being limited to cars of not
less than seven hundred horsepower; in perfect mechanical condition, driven by
registered, tested drivers at speeds
not less than one hundred and twenty-five miles an hour flashed his registry
number at the control station, and
shoved his right foot down to the floor.
Now everyone knows that an ordinary DeKhotinsky Sporter will do a hundred and
forty honestly-measured miles in
one honestly measured hour; but very few ordinary drivers have ever found out
how fast one of those, brutal big
souped-up Sixteens can wheel. They simply haven't got what it takes to open
one up.
"Storm" Cloud found out that day. He held that two and-a-half-ton Juggernaut
on the road, wide open, for two solid
hours. But it didn't help. Drive as he would, he could not outrun that which
rode with him. Beside him and within
him and behind him. For Jo was there. Jo and the kids, but mostly Jo. It was
Jo's car as much as it was his. "Babe,
the big blue ox," was Joe's pet name for it; because, like Paul Bunyan's
fabulous beast, it was pretty nearly six feet
between the eyes. Everything they had ever had was that way. She was in the
seat beside him. Every dear, every
sweet, every luscious, lovely memory of her was there ... and behind him, just
out of eye-corner visibility, were the
three kids. And a whole lifetime of this loomed ahead-a vista of emptiness
more vacuous far than the emptiest
reaches of intergalactic space. Damnation! He couldn't stand much more of High
over the roadway" far ahead, a
brilliant octagon flared red. That meant "STOP!" in any language. Cloud eased
up his accelerator, eased down his
mighty brakes. He pulled up at the control station and a trimly-uniformed
officer made a gesture.
"Sorry, sir," the policeman said" "but you'll have to detour here. There's a
loose atomic vortex beside the road up
ahead
"Oh! It's Dr. Cloud!" Recognition flashed into the guard's eyes. "I didn't
recognize you at first. It'll be two or three
miles before you'll have to put on your armor; you'll know when better than
anyone can tell you. They didn't tell us
they were going to send for you. It's just a little new one, and the dope we
got was that they were going to shove it
off into the canyon with pressure."
"They didn't send for me." Cloud tried to smile. "I'm just driving
around-haven't my armor along" even. So I guess I
might as well go back."
He turned the Special around. A loose vortex-new. There might be a hundred of
them, scattered over a radius of
two hundred miles. Sisters of the one that bad murdered his family-the hellish
spawn of that accursed Number
Eleven vortex that that damnably incompetent bungling ass had tried to blow
up. . . . Into his mind there leaped a
picture, wire sharp, of Number Eleven as he had last seen it, and
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