"Too chancey--dead tissues change too much. We weren't courting investigation then, but now we are--on the vortex, at least--so we have to keep our noses clean. How about this? They decided that they couldn't wait any longer and got married today. You, big-hearted philanthropist that you are, told them that they could take their two weeks vacation immediately and that you would square it with their department heads. They went on their honeymoon. Not to Chickladoria, of course--too long and too risky--but to a place where nobody knows them. We can fake the evidence on that easily enough. They come back in about a week, to get settled, and the vortex gets them. See any flaws in that set-up?" "No, that looks perfect," Graves decided after due deliberation. "One week from tonight, at midnight, they go out. Hear that, Ryder?" "Yes, you pot-bellied--" The fat man snapped a switch. Doggedly and skillfully though he tried, Ryder could open up no avenue of escape or of communication; Fairchild and Graves had seen efficiently to that. And Jacqueline, in the inevitability of impending death, steadied down to meet it. She was a woman. In minor crises she had hidden her face and had shrieked and had fainted; but in this ultimate one she drew from the depths of her woman's soul not only a power to overcome her own weaknesses, but also an extra something with which to sustain and to fortify Ryder in his black moments. They were together. That fact, and the far more important one that they were to die together, robbed incarceration and death itself of sting. * * * * * At the Atomic Research Laboratory on Teelus a conference was taking place between Unattached Lensmen Philip Strong, the head of that laboratory, and Doctor Neal Cloud, ex-atomic-physicist, now "Storm" Cloud, the Vortex Blaster. Cloud had become the Vortex Blaster because a fragment of a loose atomic vortex had wiped out his entire family--not by coincidence, but by sheer cosmic irony. For he, while protecting his home and his loved ones from lightning by means of a mathematically infallible network of lightning rods, had all unknowingly erected a super-powerful magnet for loose-flying vortices of atomic disintegration. Nor were such vortices scarce. Every time an atomic powerplant went out of control, a loose atomic vortex resulted, and there was, at that time, no way of extinguishing them. It was theoretically possible to blow them out with duodec, but the charge of explosive had to match within very close limits the instantaneous value of the vortex's activity. Since that value varied rapidly and almost unpredictably, practically all such attempts resulted in the death of the operator and the creation of a dozen or more new centers of annihilation.