"Oh, no. I've shot them away several seconds ago, so that they explode somewhere else, nowhere near me."
"I hope. But do you realize just how busy a man you are going to be during those ten or twelve seconds?"
"Fully." Cloud's face grew somber. "But I will be in full control. I won't be afraid of anything that can happen—anything. And," he went on, under his breath, "that's the hell of it."
"QX," the Lensman admitted finally, "you can go. There are a lot of things you haven't mentioned, but you'll probably be able to work them out as you go along. I think I'll go out and work with the boys in the lookout station while you're doing your stuff. When are you figuring on starting?"
"How long will it take to get the flitter ready?"
"A couple of days. Say we meet you there Saturday morning?"
"Saturday the tenth, at eight o'clock. I'll be there."
And again Neal Cloud and Babe, the big blue ox, hit the road. And as he rolled the physicist mulled over in his mind the assignment to which he had set himself.
Like fire, only worse, intra-atomic energy was a good servant, but a terrible master. Man had liberated it before he could really control it. In fact, control was not yet, and perhaps never would be, perfect. Up to a certain size and activity, yes. They, the millions upon millions of self-limiting ones, were the servants. They could be handled, fenced in, controlled; indeed, if they were not kept under an exciting bombardment and very carefully fed, they would go out. But at long intervals, for some one of a dozen reasons—science knew so little, fundamentally, of the true inwardness of the intra-atomic reactions—one of these small, tame, self-limiting vortices flared, nova-like, into a large, wild, self-sustaining one. It ceased being a servant then, and became a master. Such flare-ups occurred, perhaps, only once or twice in a century on Earth; the trouble was that they were so utterly, damnably permanent. They never went out. And no data were ever secured: for every living thing in the vicinity of a flare-up died; every instrument and every other solid thing within a radius of a hundred feet melted down into the reeking, boiling slag of its crater.