"Um--" This was a distinctly disquieting thought, in view of the impossibility of concealing anything from a Gray Lensman who was really on the prowl. "That might not be so good. What would you advise, then?" "Shut down Two Seventeen--and preferably the whole hush-hush end--until we can get our records absolutely honest and our death rates down to the old-time ten-year average," the scientist insisted. "In that way only can we make ourselves really safe." "Shut down? The way they're pushing us for production?" Graves sneered. "You talk like a fool. The chief would toss us both down the chute and put somebody in here that _would_ really produce." "Oh, I don't mean without permission. Talk him into it. It's best for him, as well as everybody else, over the long pull." "He couldn't see it. I can't either, really," grunted the manager. "If we can't dope out something better than that, things have got to go on as is." "I suspected so--but you asked me. The next best thing is to use some new form of death, openly explainable, to clean up our books." "Wonderful!" Graves snorted contemptuously. "What can we possibly add to what we are using right along?" "A loose atomic vortex." "Whoooosh!" The fat man deflated in an exclamation of profound surprise, then came back up for air, gasping. "Man, you're nuts. There's only one on the planet, and it's--or do you mean--but nobody ever touched one of those things off deliberately! Can it be done?" "Yes. It isn't simple, but we Fellows of the College of Radiation know how--theoretically--the transformation can be made to occur. The fact that it is a new idea makes it all the better. It has never been done because it has been impossible to extinguish the things. But now 'Storm' Cloud is putting them out." "I see. Neat, very neat." Graves' agile and cunning brain was going over the possibilities. "Certain of our employees, I take it, will be upon a picnic in the upper end of the valley when this unfortunate occurrence is to take place?" "Exactly--and enough mythical ones to straighten out our bookkeeping. Then, later, we can dispose of suspects as they appear. Vortices are absolutely unpredictable, you know. People we don't like can die of radiation or of any one or a mixture of various toxic gases and vapors and the vortex will take the blame." "And later, when it gets dangerous, Storm Cloud can blow it out for us," Graves gloated. "But we'll not want him for a long, long time!" "No, but we'll report it and ask for him the hour it happens--" Fairchild silenced the manager's expostulations. "Use your head, Graves! Anybody who has a vortex go out of control wants it killed as soon as possible. But here's the joker--Cloud has enough Class A prime urgent demands on file right now to keep him busy for the next ten or fifteen years. Therefore we won't be able to get him--see?" "I see. This is nice, Fairchild, very, very nice. But the head office had better keep an eye on Cloud, just the same."