Like fire, only worse, atomic energy was a good servant, but a very bad master. Man had liberated it before he could really control it. In fact, control was not yet, and probably never would be, perfect. True, all except a minute fraction of one percent of the multitudes of small, tame, self-limiting vortices were perfect servants. But at long intervals, for some unknown reason—science knew so little, fundamentally, of nuclear reactions—one of them flared, nova-like, into a huge, wild, self-sustaining monster. It ceased being a servant, then, and became a master. Such flare-ups occurred very infrequently; the trouble was that the loose vortices were so utterly, so damnably _permanent_. They never went out; and no data were ever obtained. Every living thing in the vicinity of a flare-up died; every instrument and every other solid thing within a radius of hundreds of feet melted down into the reeking, boiling slag of its crater. Fortunately, the rate of growth was slow—as slow, almost, as it was persistent. But even so, unless something could be done about loose vortices before too many years, the situation would become extremely serious. That was why the Laboratory had been established in the first place. Nothing much had been accomplished so far. Tractor beams would not hold. Nothing material was of any use. Pressors worked after a fashion—vortices _could_ be moved from one place to another. One or two, through sheer luck, had been blown out by heavy charges of duodecaplylatomate. But duodec had taken many lives; and since it scattered a vortex as often as it fed it, duodec had caused vastly more damage than it had cured. No end of fantastic schemes had been proposed, of course; of varying degrees of fantasy. Some of them sounded almost practical. Some of them had been tried; some were still being tried. Some, such as the perennially-appearing one of installing a free drive and flinging the whole neighborhood off into space, were perhaps feasible from an engineering standpoint. They were potentially so capable of making things worse, however, that they could not be used except as last-ditch measures. In short, the control of loose atomic vortices was very much an unsolved problem. _Chapter 2_ ▂▂▂▂▂▂CLOUD BLASTS A VORTEX NUMBER ONE, the oldest and worst vortex on Tellus, had been pushed out into the badlands, and there, at eight o’clock of the indicated morning, Cloud started to work on it.