"Check."
Hagen felt a bit miffed, but he knew that he should not be hurt. This was his first alarm, his first job in the Guardians. Halligan had every reason to prefer a more seasoned man to a raw recruit when his life depended upon it.
Then, automatically, Hagen felt better. He was, at least, appointed to help the clean-up squad. They would patrol this space at random, watching for a trace of flaming vortex. If none appeared for two hours, they would watch for a total of six to be certain before going home. Minute vortexes, space warped into a complete circle with a flow of radiant energy coursing around in them, might maintain for some time invisibly, feeding and growing by their contact with the discrete atoms of interstellar space, attracted by the monstrous force of gravity centered on the vortex. If left unswamped, they might grow into a real menace to navigation.
But the barriers would blanket space, and the swampers would be ready to wipe out any vortex broken against the plane of force. Then, their job done, they could go home for a well-earned rest.
Hagen watched the squadron re-form, watched waiting rescue craft collect from the distant flights, then watched them disappear, heading back the way they all had come. He felt a bit of panic; he felt alone in the depths of interstellar space in a unique spacecraft that was sixty percent accumulator, fifteen percent driver, and fifteen percent swamper-beam. The other zero-percent was put there for his comfort and protection. He was one hundred and sixty pounds of analog computer, employed to serve a monstrosity of spacecraft built for a single purpose. He was there only because no man could cram enough binary circuits and analog differentials to equal one thousandth of the human brain into one hundred and sixty pounds and a few cubic feet.
But Steve Hagen was a Guardian!
Steve's return with the clean-up squad was made without mishap. It had been lonely work, for the half-dozen vortex-fighters swept the skies singly, roaming back and forth along the millions of miles across which the explosion had taken place. Sometimes they dropped into the realm below the speed of light to wipe out a bit of wispy cloud that looked as though it might be trouble brewing in the more firm structure of universal space. But mostly they raced back and forth at speeds that multiplied the velocity of light by many times. Nothing they saw reacted with their damping beams; nothing splashed against the nullifying bombs—and then, these, too, had to be destroyed lest they start a counter-vortex of their own.
Steve had been too busy during the mop-up operations to pay attention to his own feelings. On the way home he had taken time to think, and then came that first recoiling in abject fear. Utter emptiness, absolute nothing, sheer black space closed down upon him with an inherent fear as strong as the inherent fear of falling. Man had a million of years of evolution on earth, with a constant of one gravity pulling him down onto something that his senses told him was flat, hard substantial, and everlasting. Of all that man could count upon, the earth was the one thing that he could consider unchanging.