"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. You can go ahead, of course. 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 had 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 simultaneously an idea hit him like a blow from a fist.
He thought. Really thought, now; cogently, intensely, clearly. If he could do it ... could actually blow out the atomic flame of an atomic vortex ... not exactly revenge, but.... By Klono's brazen bowels, it would work—it'd have to work—he'd make it work! And grimly, quietly, but alive in every fiber now, he drove back toward the city practically as fast as he had come away.
If the Lensman was surprised at Cloud's sudden reappearance in the laboratory he did not show it. Nor did he offer any comment as his erstwhile first assistant went to various lockers and cupboards, assembling meters, coils, tubes, armor, and other paraphernalia and apparatus.
"Guess that's all I'll need, Chief," Cloud remarked, finally. "Here's a blank check. If some of this stuff shouldn't happen to be in usable condition when I get done with it, fill it out to suit, will you?"
"No," and the Lensman tore up the check just as he had torn up the resignation. "If you want the stuff for legitimate purposes, you're on Patrol business and it is the Patrol's risk. If, on the other hand, you think that you're going to try to snuff a vortex, the stuff stays here. That's final, Storm."
"You're right—and wrong, Phil," Cloud stated, not at all sheepishly. "I'm going to blow out Number One vortex with duodec, yes—but I'm really going to blow it out, not merely make a stab at it as an excuse for suicide, as you think."