“QX.” The Lensman withdrew from Cloud’s mind. “Not too good, but good enough. What’s your plan? You won’t have time for the usual method of attack.”
“Like this.” Cloud found a sheet of drafting paper and sketched rapidly. “There’s the crater, with the vortex at the bottom—there. From the sigma curve I estimate the most probable value of the activity I’ll have to shoot at. Then I select three duodec bombs from the hundred or so I’ll have made up in advance—one on the mark, one each five percent over and under the mark. The bombs, of course, will be cased in neocarballoy thick enough for penetration. Then I take off in a shielded armored flying suit, say about here. . . .”
“If you take off at all, you and your suit will be inside a flitter,” the Lensman interrupted. “Too many instruments for a suit, to say nothing of bombs, and you’ll need heavier screen than a suit can put out. We can adapt a flitter for bomb-throwing easily enough.”
“That’d be better, of course. QX, I set my flitter into a projectile trajectory toward the center of disturbance. Twelve seconds away, at about this point here, I take my instantaneous readings, solve the equations of that particular warped surface for some definite zero time. . . .”
“But s’pose the cycle won’t give you a ten-second solution?”
“Then I’ll swing around and try again until a long-enough cycle does show up.”
“QX. It will, sometime.”
“Sure. Then, having everything set for zero time, and assuming that the activity is somewhere near my assumed value. . . .”
“Assume it isn’t—it probably won’t be.”
“I accelerate or decelerate. . . .”