eight o'clock
Some , such as the perennially-appearing one of building a huge hemispherical hull in the ground under and around the vortex , installing an inertialess drive , and shooting the whole neighborhood out into space , were perhaps feasible from an engineering standpoint . They were , however , potentially so capable of making things worse that they would not be tried save as last-ditch measures . In short , the control of loose vortices was very much an unsolved problem . * * * * * Number One vortex , the oldest and worst upon Tellus , had been pushed out into the Badlands ; and there , at eight o'clock on the tenth , Cloud started to work upon it . The `` lookout station , '' instead of being some such ramshackle structure as might have been deduced from the Lensman 's casual terminology , was in fact a fully-equipped observatory . Its staff was not large -- eight men worked in three staggered eight-hour shifts of two men each -- but the instruments ! To develop them had required hundreds of man-years of time and near-miracles of research , not the least of the problems having been that of developing shielded conductors capable of carrying truly through five-ply screens of force the converted impulses of the very radiations against which those screens were most effective .