itions
of atmospheric potential and of ground-magnetic stress his perfectly
designed lightning-rod system would become a super-powerful magnet for
flying vortices of atomic disintegration.

And now Neal Cloud, atomic physicist, sat at his desk in a strained,
dull apathy. His face was a yellowish-gray white, his tendoned hands
gripped rigidly the arms of his chair. His eyes, hard and lifeless,
stared unseeingly past the small, three-dimensional block portrait of
all that had made life worth living.

For his guardian against lightning had been a vortex-magnet at the
moment when a luckless wight had attempted to abate the nuisance of a
"loose" atomic vortex. That wight died, of course--they almost always
do--and the vortex, instead of being destroyed, was simply broken up
into an indefinite number of widely-scattered new vortices. And one of
these bits of furious, uncontrolled energy, resembling more nearly a
handful of material rived from a sun than anything else with which
ordinary man is familiar, darted toward and crashed downward to earth
through Neal Cloud's new house.

That home did not burn; it simply exploded. Nothing of it, in it, or
around it stood a chance, for in a fractional second of time the place
where it had been was a crater of seething, boiling lava--a crater which
filled the atmosphere to a height of miles with poisonous vapors; which
flooded all circumambient space with lethal radiations.

Cosmically, the whole thing was infinitesimal. Ever since man learned
how to liberate intra-atomic energy, the vortices of disintegration had
been breaking out of control. Such accidents had been happening, were
happening, and would continue indefinitely to happen. More than one
world, perhaps, had been or would be consumed to the last gram by such
loose atomic vortices. What of that? Of what real importance are a few
grains of sand to an ocean beach five thousand miles long, a hundred
miles wide, and ten miles deep?

And even to that individual grain of sand called "Earth"--or, in modern
parlance, "Sol Three," or "Tellus of Sol", or simply "Tellus"--the
affair was of negligible importance. One man had died; but, in dying, he
had added one more page to the thick bulk of negative results already on
file. That Mrs. Cloud and her children had perished was merely
unfortunate. The vortex itself was not yet a real threat to Tellus. It
was a "new" one, and thus it would be a long time before it would become
other tha