Hey, everyone. Welcome to Figure Fantasy. So while we're taking a break from Rimuru and Millim, and perhaps most of us are looking forward to the next banners, to the next event, probably looking forward to the next collab already. So by the way, I actually posted on my community post a survey for the next collab. So it's from the developers, they sent it to us. I'm just posting it there so that many could answer the survey. So it's a survey for the next collab. They want to get your opinions on what you want. So let's just push that aside and let's go back to Let's Red. So Let's Red, we're going to have a review of what has improved really in this faction. Do they still have needs and also the incoming reinforcements right after the recent banner. Okay, so we're starting off with clearly the defender which is Megan. So Megan, superstar defender, nothing you could ask for top two defender if I may say or probably top one. Then you have your vanguards, you have Rimuru of course. Again, I mentioned his name recently added. I think he's the top vanguard now. I don't think the others would compete. You have the other vanguards like Yuna and Suzumi. So Suzumi, we're going to be using her in your summon team. So her value actually has really risen recently. Summon team is really good in PVP again as I may add. So under militarist again, another collab that was first released which is Mikko. So most of you guys are happy. You can still get her in the store by the way for a copy. So she's one of the best or the best militarist in Let's Red or probably the game. Not really the game. She has, she I think can compete with Zerola in that aspect in terms of damage but she has her advantages. Zerola has hers but she's the top militarist in Let's Red. The others would be Ri of course. Ri, sad to say she's not being used anymore. She lacks something in her kit. Something, it has to be reworked. And the other one would be Ophelia of course which let's not talk about her anymore. Okay, under specialist you have Xanthakane. Xantha won one of the first banners that we had before. Still very good as a specialist, very good damage as a specialist. If you built her well, she is going to really, really, really hurt your enemies. And the other one of course is Harriet. I've found a lot of utility in Harriet because of blind, because of the summons. Really like her, very versatile especially for bosses. So we go to the helpers. So as for the helpers we have here, Aoi, kind of getting more usage as you level her up. She's more consistent if you get more copies of her. Then the last one and the helper would be Sakura which is one of the underrated, I think figures in the game, terms of silence, healing, a little bit of healing by the way. She's not really a healer per se but a sub-healer. So what is new in Let's Reds we have four. You have Megan. What I mean if there is somebody new is from launch. The additional figures that were given to them through Banner. So we have Megan, we have Rimuru, we have Miko, and we have Xanth here. So those are your new figures for Let's Red. Definitely they were given a lot of reinforcement. And for Brand Allies, the ones that I think work best with Let's Red, you have here of course Milim because you need to pair her with, you not really need, but you can pair her with Rimuru. You also have Zuki Liang of course. Then you have Irens, Embers, and the other one that I think would be useful for Let's Red would be, here's Chao Chao. So that is it. So if also if you want to have two debuffers, you could add Ayakina there. If most of you guys I think have I at a higher level because she was literally I think given to us for free. So basically those are your ally reinforcements to your current Let's Red team. Okay, what are the advantages so far for Let's Red? So they are well reinforced. They're kind of at par already with Tenma. Tenma used to be the you know the powerhouse in terms of figures. They had the best ones. The other teams didn't have that much you know that that much oomph in their lineup. But now you can count on Let's Red. You can really build a lot of team for them. So well reinforced, summon team. They can also do away from summon and create an all-around team. The only thing that they need by the way. Okay, just want to point this out is going to be a healer. So that is it because when sometimes when you build a Let's Red team you have to bar from you know from Tenma. You have to bar Zephyr and sometimes you can't you know you can't bring a good you can't take advantage of the boss. But I think that's okay. But definitely I would want to see in the future a healer with the Let's Red what they call this Let's Red brand. I think the only healer here aside from you know if you bring in Zephyr the only healer here would be Sakura which Sakura only heals a little bit. Not that much. She doesn't focus on that by the way. And that's it. I won't discuss the supers here. Eventually you will be you know you won't be using them especially if they can't go above 160. The game right now is is competing at level 220 for those who are advanced and kind of just reinforcing the other aspects of the buffs once you go to level 220. But again there is not a single dedicated healer for Let's Red. So that is it more or less for Let's Red. I think that they're well balanced right now except for the healer part. So in terms of their incoming reinforcements. So you have obviously Raphael released actually in Taiwan slash Chinese server. She's going to be your specialist. I'm not really sure if she has healing. I just want to keep it as a surprise. So that is Raphael. The next one would be Yolanda. Yolanda is going to be SS tier. So she's a militarist. She will compliment Miku at the back. So again a nice addition. By the way Raphael is going to be kind of a tier. So not really I think the one that we are looking for. We're really looking for a healer. And the other one the last one is Yui Sakai. She is a vanguard. I think the last one that came out for Let's Red. So those are the three. It hasn't answered our need for a healer for Let's Red. But again we could just borrow from the other factions or brands. But it would be good that they have their own. Again brand bonuses. I love those. And hopefully we could have a future healer for this brand. So anyway guys thank you very much for staying this far. And if you have not subscribed yet please do because this helps my channel a lot. And I hope I have helped you with this faction or brand review for Let's Red. Thank you guys. Take care. Stay safe. This is The Warden and I'm out of here.


Welcome to the next episode of make it mini which is a series that reimagined trending recipes using lecressé's mini cacuzzi. Next up we've turned the classic no-need Dutch oven bread into the viral heirloom tomato and mayo sandwich. This version uses a homemade basil mayo, heirloom tomatoes, and is so delicious on the fresh baked mini roll.  Definitely give this a try before summer ends. Enjoy!


Today, in World Literature, we examine European poetry. Bert Kimmelman, author of the Poetics of Authorship in the Later Middle Ages, The Emergence of the Modern Literary Persona, concentrates on Great Britain's W. H. Auden and Ireland's William Butler Yates and Seamus Haney. Professor Kimmelman asks us to look at the ways these poets merge the political and the personal point of view. While W. H. Auden's poems The Unknown Citizen and Musee de Beau Arts certainly function as aesthetic icons, they also were reflections of a writer who had lived during the Great Depression and the rise of fascism. Marianne Moore called Auden's poetry circumspectly audacious. He seeks out the universal in a particular, as we will see. While the many poems in our anthology of literature, composed by Europeans, exhibit a variety of style, tone and specific subject matter, almost all of them at least distantly reflect the great turmoil of the 20th century, the paroxysms of war, international, civil or both, and frequent genocidal activities that have formed some of the more important waystations of modern European history. Thus, many of these poems inevitably have a political agenda. The poetry of the British Isles is no exception. It reflects concerns about nationalism, politics, civil war, and strife. Towering over the English language poetry of all modern countries, the United States included, is the work of William Butler Yates. We will examine his poem, Easter, 1916, and note in it the ways in which he blends the public and political with the private and the personal. We will then discuss two other poems from our anthology, both by poets who were deeply influenced by Yates, W. H. Auden and Seamus Heaney. In the case of Heaney, we note that Auden was also an important precursor. The three together, representing successive generations, disclose a development in the poetry of the British Isles in which the political aspect of life becomes ever more merged with the personal point of view. Let us first begin with Yates' poem about the aftermath of the famous Irish rebellion against the English in 1916. Easter, 1916, I have met them at close of day, coming with vivid faces from counter or desk among gray eighteenth-century houses. I have passed with a knot of the head, or polite meaningless words, or have lingered awhile and said polite meaningless words, and thought before I had done of a mocking tale or a jib to please a companion around the fire at the club, being certain that they and I, but lived where motley is worn, all changed utterly, a terrible beauty is born.  His voice more sweet than hers when young and beautiful she rode to Harrier's. This man had kept the school and rode our winged horse. This other, his helper and friend, was coming into his force. He might have one fame in the end, so sensitive his nature seemed, so daring and sweet his thought. This other man I had dreamed a drunken, vain glorious lout. He had done most bitter wrong to some who are near my heart. Yet I number him in the song. He too has resigned his part in the casual comedy. He too has been changed in his turn, transformed utterly, a terrible beauty is born. Hearts with one purpose alone through summer and winter seem enchanted to a stone to trouble the living stream. The horse that comes from the road, the rider, the birds that range from cloud to tumbling cloud, minute by minute they change. A shadow of cloud on the stream changes minute by minute. A horse hoof slides on the brim and a horse plashes within it. The long legs more hence dive and hence to more cocks call. And by minute they live the stones in the midst of all. Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. Oh, when may it suffice?  What is it but nightfall? No, no, not night, but death. Is it needless death after all? For England may keep faith for all that is done and said, we know their dream. Enough to know they dreamed and are dead. And what if excess of love bewildered them till they died? I write it out in verse Macdonough and McBride and Connolly and Paris, now and in time to be wherever green is worn or changed, changed utterly, a terrible beauty is born. Here the sacred is a magical element of hope, but in relation to Ireland's renewal alone, the poem's refrain, A Terrible Beauty is Born, names the fusion of the appalling and the moving, shared by tragedy, the sublime and the sacred. Something has entered and transformed Irish nationalism, something with a self-perpetuating life, the terrible beauty is born, not was born. And out of a sacrifice has come new life and a new intimacy and continuity, Irish to Irish. After 1916 is the earliest of a group of Yeats' poems commenting on the change in Ireland swept by revolution. The poem sets up a careful antithesis between the polite meaningless words which constitute the casual comedy of pre-revolutionary Ireland, the Ireland where Motley had been born, had been worn, I'm sorry, and the tragic, terrible beauty that is born of the Easter rising. The Yeats has the historical personages he catalogues in the second stanza, resign their parts in the casual comedy, reject the roles called for by their, as it were, script, and become independent, beautiful figures, terrible and violent in their freedom. The narrator's task in Easter 1916 is straightforward. He wants to come to terms intellectually with the deaths by execution of leaders of the Irish volunteers of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. And to do so he apparently must satisfy himself that the executions have lasting, perhaps transcendent significance. He does this by supplanting the vocabulary of purposeless mortal catastrophe with oracular rhetoric. He must grapple in vain with the recalcitrant facts of these mass executions and futile effort as he tries to formulate a conciliatory sense of history. And so he seeks to accomplish a compensatory, perhaps even redemptive, orientation toward public slaughter and futility of collective effort. The heart in the last stanza no longer enchanted has been sacrificed. Death is both metaphor and fact. The men are not sleeping. This is not night but death. And in what is the stuff of tragedy, it is a death which, though perhaps needless, is certainly brought on by a heroic dream, a dream founded on excess love like all the greatest tragic motives. Changed by not changing, dying uselessly, bewildered by love, Ireland's unexpected heroes create the ironic, terrible beauty of tragedy in an otherwise meaningless time. What we find in Yeats' poem is a historical account but also a mythologizing of events in order to elevate them, to show their importance, and to memorialize them. In accomplishing these ends, Yeats is able to blend didactic political concerns and purely aesthetic concerns. This effort to blend the two poles of language and thought is furthered by Auden. Here is his poem, Musée des Beaux-Arts, about suffering they were never wrong, the old masters. But while they understood its human position, how it takes place while someone else's eating or opening a window or just walking dully along, how, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting for the miraculous birth, there always must be children who did not specially want it to happen, skating on a pond at the edge of the wood. They never forgot that even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot where the dogs go on with their doggie life and the torturer's horse scratches his innocent behind on a tree. In Bruegel's Icarus, for instance, how everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster, the plowmen may have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, but for him it was not an important failure. The sun shone as it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green water. And the expensive delicate ship that must have seen something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. Musée des Beaux-Arts was published in the spring of 1939. In the poem, Auden uses a flag colloquial style to make social comment. The poem's plot parallels the willful ignorance of German hostility and aggression on the part of English and American citizenry in the years leading up to World War II. Others endure pain or misery, but suffering is a personal condition. It can be refused or disguised, but not falsified, since the self-deception would then become part of the suffering. Bruegel's painting, The Fall of Icarus, like the other paintings alluded to in the poem, The Numbering at Bethlehem and the Massacre of the Innocence, quietly points out that events of the greatest pathos and importance occur in settings that seem to be out at the edge of history, ordinary places where we pursue our normal, unobservant lives. The language is deliberately unpoetic on the whole, and the tone varies between deadpan irony and simply expressed awareness. Musée des Beaux-Arts is a reflection upon the unspectacular way in which human suffering occurs in, so to speak, a corner of the picture, while the rest of life continues, oblivious of it. One mirrors the effect of life, disinterestedly and trivially pursuing its random course in the trailing line while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along. He says that the old master has painted the miraculous birth or the dreadful martyrdom fully aware that nearby, quote, the torturer's horse scratches its innocent behind on a tree, end quote. In the second half of the poem, Auden describes Bruegel's Icarus in which the large solid peasant plowman fills most of the picture and a tiny figure in the distance is the falling Icarus. One critic has interpreted this painting as Bruegel's manifesto of Northern realism's superiority to classical mythologizing, but Auden's point is that ordinary life, plowing, the sailing ship on the sunlit sea into which Icarus is falling to his death. Ordinary life ignores the disaster, the important failure, the something amazing. As well we might observe that to Auden, the poetic imagination that seeks out grandeur and sublimity could scarcely be bothered with those insignificant figures lost in the background or in the crowd. Yet Auden sees them, yet Auden sees in them an example of Christianity's great and enduring transformation of classical rhetoric, its inversion principle that the most important subjects require the highest style. One might say that Auden's philosophical comment about life is not itself startlingly original or profound and the relaxed conversational tone, for example, where the dogs go on with their doggie life, that this tone is casual to the point of being blasé as though the observer is merely a tired journalist doing a routine job. However, this effect is deliberate and it is calculated to shock. The poem's informal irregular lines make none of the demands for action and attention that marked Auden's earlier poems, his harangues on the urgency of the times. Yet beneath the apparent surface disorder, a deeper pattern of connectedness gradually makes it so felt. The unassertive rhymes easily overlooked on a first reading hold the poem together. They affirm with Bruegel that suffering is no less crucial because it happens somewhere else or when we are too busy to notice. Whether or not we are aware of it, our connection with other's suffering is inescapably real. The normal expectation of a lyric poem, such as a sonnet for instance, is that its first portion in the sonnet it would be the octave, is that its first portion will usually present a particular scene or event rendered with a pleasing vividness and accuracy. And this would be followed by a second portion in which what came before is meditated upon, regarded from a new or newly considered perspective. Yet Auden reverses this sequence in his poem. He begins with a generalization about a lot of varied paintings, none of them really up for inspection, quote, about suffering they were never wrong, the old masters. How well they understood its human position, how it takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along. In its brisk survey of quotidian life, the poem, in the midst of which astonishing events take place, such as the miraculous birth and the dreadful martyrdom, adopts in its opening section a calm and distant language that is meant to be slightly disruptive as it portrays the common human indifference to the reverent, passionate waiting of the agent to say nothing of the nativity itself and bestows bland attention on the innocent dogs and the horse that belongs to the torturer. The second part begins with the line in Bruegel's Icarus, for instance. That phrase, for instance, particularizes and exemplifies the generalities that began the poem and augments the already impromptu tone of voice. The most interesting equation is between ploughman, ship, and sun. The blank neutrality of nature, quote, the sun shone as it had to on the white legs. The blank neutrality of nature is offered as an exact equivalent to human indifference. The total effect is then not to challenge this world of separated goals and involvements, but rather to ratify it in a shrewdly anti-heroic wisdom as, quote, the way life is. History, like the suffering of Moussé de Beaux-Arts, is at once the most intense and most peripheral social fact, but this disjunction of the normal and extraordinary is not to be especially regretted. Auden became a spokesperson for English society, adopting in this culture a role in many ways similar to the function fulfilled by Yates in Ireland. Myth in Yates is not easily disengaged from history, and neither are easily separable from the present. Auden lived through the suffering of an epic and was applauded for many years as its representative voice. Yet the irony around which the first stanza of Moussé de Beaux-Arts revolves, the incongruous uneven relationship between major human catastrophe and the casual detail of routine life. This ironic contrast points to a difficulty in representativeness that is central to much of his social poetry. The suffering is intensely real, and so is his, quote, unquote, untidy spot which provides it with a context, yet the link between them can only be contingent and external, focusing on maladjustment rather than on connection. It is not difficult to trace the roots of this perception in the particular social condition out of which Auden wrote, the condition of a society undergoing a disturbance so profound that it required a real effort of attention and analysis to relate it at all significantly to the stubbornly persisting fabric of daily life. Auden was a great influence on Seamus Heaney, just as Yates, an Irishman, deeply inflected the English poetry of Auden's time. Yates' work also played a tremendous role in the development of Heaney, so that we see the flow of the English tradition bending back toward Ireland in our own era. Heaney's work is intensely political, but politics for him has become deeply embedded in dailiness, more so than in Auden, well below the surface of discourse as we see in the poem entitled Digging, where one of the things being unearthed is the Irish English fierce embrace. In Digging as well, Heaney will locate the poetic tradition metaphorically in the soil, and he aligns it with his own personal lineage. Here is his poem, Digging, between my finger and my thumb the squat pen rests snug as a gun. Under my window a clean rasping sound when the spade sinks into the gravelly ground. My father Digging. I looked down till his straining rump among the flower beds bends low, comes up twenty years away stooping in rhythm through potato drills where he was digging. The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft against the inside knee was levered firmly. He rooted out to all tops, buried the bright edge deep to scatter new potatoes that we picked, loving their cool hardness in our hands. By God, the old man could handle his spade, just like his old man. My grandfather cut more turf in a day than any other man on toner's bog. Once I carried him milk in a bottle, corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up to drink it, then fell to right away, nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods over his shoulder, going down and down for the good turf. Digging. The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge through living roots awaken in my head, but I have no spade to follow men like them. Between my finger and my thumb, the squat pen rests, I'll dig with it. What we may observe right off in this poem is its inescapably palpable material language and how its tangibility completes a progression begun in the eights and extended through Auden. Also worth noting at this juncture is that this poem has survived at the head of Heaney's volume of selected poems, just as it begins his first full-length collection titled Death of a Naturalist, published in 1966. The poem's privileged place argues for it being read as his ars poetica. Heaney is primarily an explorer. He charts his ground and excavates and re-inscribes tradition. Creating the speaker in the poem, a writer, creates an analogy between his own work with a pen and the work of his father and grandfather with a spade. The poem begins as a recollection of events from a moment of leisure. There are the speaker's thoughts of his father and grandfather as farmers, men of the soil. The frame of the poem is the speaker sitting at his desk, pen snuggles a gun in his hand. The second stands initiates a sequence that lends itself to contrasting interpretations. The speaker hears the sound of his father digging in the garden below, the son looking down upon his father. The father bends low to thrust his spade into the earth and, quote, comes up 20 years away, stooping in rhythm through potato drills, end quote. The father 20 years away could be the speaker remembering a past event that parallels or echoes the present, or the father could be digging in an archaeological sense to a time far away, each spadeful apparently bringing him closer to the past to his origins. Even so, the title of the poem is in the form of a non-finite verbal which has voice and tense inflection. The word digging appears three times in the poem. The first in the present, my father digging. The second in the past 20 years away recalled in a memory, he was digging. The third in reference to the grandfather, even further in the past, but in reference to a present moment, the single word sentence, digging. The fact that the father has some kind of rhythm implies the naturalness of his actions, although it could be the speaker's perception of the father being in harmony with nature, a trait the speaker feels he does not share. Similarly, the speaker's grandfather spent his days going down and down for the good turf, digging as if the depth of the soil holds a special secret. The second to last stands as significant because it could be either a moment of continuation or a moment of rupture in tradition. The cold smell of potato mold, the squelching slap of soggy peat, the current cuts of an edge through living roots awaken in my head. The smells and sounds of digging as well as the cuts of the spade in the turf awaken in the speaker's head. Memories are thereby awakened in the speaker's mind. Also, the act of digging turf is the act of excavating the speaker's personal heritage, even his mythic historical heritage. The words squelch and slap resonate not only experiences on the farm, but political and social repression. The words smell and cuts evoke not only images of cutting turf but of battles fought and lives lost through a history of violence. The act of digging bonds generations but severs those connections too, those living roots. Indeed, digging is a form of violence as the image of the gun implies. David Lloyd suggests that Heaney's search into the past is designed to retrieve a lost origin, a moment of isomorphism between individual and native soil, between past and present, between writer and source. But more than this, the act of digging into the turf, like excavating the peat bogs of Jutland and Ireland Heaney will write of in later poems, is not merely commemorated but performed in the poem. For the poem is itself a form of digging. Furthermore, digging is no mere analogy. Rather, it represents a process of writing that recurs throughout Heaney's poetry. The act of writing, like that of digging, is a consistently present moment. That, while inhabited by echoes of the past, truncates and re-inscribes those echoes. Tradition, like the self, is a collection of discursive surfaces, written by and in language, and open to its free play. The power of a poetic voice to ascribe mythic immortality upon those who at one time seem so ordinary is evident in the final lines of Yeats' poem, Easter 1916. Literature can seem to act as a means of transcendence and consequently can forge a cultural conscience steeped in a mythic heroism that is elevated above the divisiveness of political unrest. According to Richard Kearney, Thomas MacDonald, whom Yeats memorializes in his poem, described the recurring aspiration for national renewal as the supreme slong of victory on the dying lips of martyrs. MacDonald's words articulated the overall mythos of the 1916 rising, which gained common currency in the popular imagination. Yet, such mythic visions of sectarian and political violence can so dominate a culture that they assure the perpetuation of the violence that gave rise to mythic visions in the first place. In other words, the joint forces of politics and aesthetics may result in politics with the power of the poetic and a poetic whose aesthetic practices cannot escape a pre-determined political premise. Heaney, rather than elevating the attention he cannot resolve, to an extra worldly level, as Yeats did, burrows into a realm of adivisms. This practice was anticipated by Auden. The very best political poetry, as we see in Yeats, Auden and Heaney, strives to put forward the everyday flesh and blood world. Only through the images of such a world can the meaning of politics fully emerge. At the close of his lecture, Professor Kimelman reveals one of the many aspects of the significance of literature. He tells us that poets put forth the everyday flesh and blood world in the midst of political turmoil. Thus, we may infer, poets give us a version of history that we might not otherwise have. While we may know, for instance, the facts of the Easter Rebellion that British soldiers and Irish rebels battled in the streets of Dublin for nearly a week, beginning on April 24th, 1916, that the Irish were defeated and their leaders executed, that the British-backed government failed in 1918, and the British were forced to accept an Irish free state on December 6th, 1921, there is no historical account that captures the dramatic conflict of the struggle in Yeats' lines. A terrible beauty is born. Yeats held Ireland as the source of his poetic imagery, his imaginative life. A collection of his essays, The Skeletal Twilight, displayed in prose his passion for Irish nationalism. Two, Haney articulates his Irish nationalism, his palm digging expresses through allusion a national identity and response against English cultural imperialism between my finger and my thumb, the squat pen rests, I'll dig with it, he writes, suggesting that his role as a writer will allow him to solidify his role as an Irish citizen.


Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States, accompanied by Dr. Amos Jordan. It is always a pleasure to welcome the President of the United States to a program of the Center for Strategic and International Studies of Georgetown University. But it's a particular pleasure today when the occasion is the future of U.S. security in the context of national leadership. No president since World War II has made such an enormous contribution to the strengthening of American defenses as our current leader. Of course, the instruments of national defense would be meaningless in the absence of leadership. Fortunately, this crucial, elusive aspect of American national life is one in which our current leader excels. I hardly need to remind this audience that when he first took the oath of office, the institution of the presidency was a low ebb. Indeed, the counsel to the former incumbent had suggested that the only way to restore the presidency's powers was through constitutional revision. I think few, if any, would make that argument today. So at this particular National Leadership Forum, it is peculiarly appropriate as well as a very great honor for us to welcome now to the podium the President of the United States, Ronald Reagan. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much and good evening. It's an honor to speak to you today before the members and guests of the Georgetown University Center for Strategic and International Studies, an institution whose work so directly affects the security of our nation. I want to commend your founders, Admiral Arlie Burke and Ambassador David Abshire, and your President and Chief Executive Officer, Joe Jordan, for all they've done to make this institution so worthy of respect. Permit me to commend as well those of you today who are present from the private sector in supporting CSIS, you do yourselves, and your nation a great service. Greetings to Bud McFarland, Jim Schlesinger, and Zebik Brzezinski, men who demonstrate that in its essentials our foreign policy can indeed remain bipartisan. By the way, Bud, thanks for the invitation. And of course, warm regards to your honoree, Ann Armstrong. Counselor to two presidents, Ambassador to Great Britain, Chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, no one has set a higher standard of service to our nation. Ann, congratulations my friend. This evening I would like to speak briefly on a matter of central importance to the security of our nation and hemisphere, but a matter above all of central importance to the cause of human liberty. I refer to aid for the democratic resistance forces of Nicaragua. I know that each of you is a foreign policy expert, and that you've studied this issue each of you in detail, and I value that. But in the complex of politics, in the midst of all the twistings and turnings, one can sometimes discern a moment of impending decision, a moment to reduce the issue at hand to the plain facts and submit, if you will, the closing argument. With your permission, I would like to submit that argument this evening before you and the nation. After the nearly seven years during which the Nicaraguan communists have held power, there can no longer be any legitimate doubt about the nature of their regime. There is a brave man in Nicaragua, a man who courageously opposed the Samosa dictatorship. Listen for a moment to that man, to the words of Cardinal Obando Ibravo, Archbishop of Nicaragua. As they recently appeared in the Washington Post. To consider the Sandinista regime democratic as Cardinal Obando Ibravo asserts is to ignore the mass exodus of the mosquito Indians who on numerous occasions fled in the thousands. It is also to ignore the departure of tens of thousands of Nicaraguan men and women of every age, profession, economic status, and political persuasion. It is to ignore that many of those who are leaders or participants in the counter-revolution were once leaders or members of the Sandinista front or were ministers in the Sandinista government. It is to ignore the lack of any justification for the most terrible violation of freedom of the press and of speech in the history of our country. It is to ignore the progressive and suffocating restriction of public liberties under the cover of an interminable national emergency law and the continual violation of human rights. It is to ignore the expulsion of priests and the mass exodus of young people eligible for military service. None of this is true of a government that has the sympathy and general support of the people. Well I might add that not long after Cardinal Obando Ibravo wrote that statement for the Washington Post, the Sandinista regime cut off electricity to his office. Just one more act of harassment among many scores of such acts visited Abaim. Yet despite the brutal and totalitarian nature of the Sandinista regime, the struggle for freedom inside Nicaragua continues. By the thousands, men and women have moved into the countryside and taken up arms. Indeed today these democratic resistance forces number some 20,000. Four times the number of troops the Sandinistas had in the field when they themselves seized power. In full knowledge the members of the resistance have chosen to separate themselves from their families and homes, to live in conditions of immense hardship, often with scant water and food, and to expose themselves to the dangers of battle. They fight to liberate their country from a regime that is loyal only to communist powers. They fight for freedom. Just as the men and women of the resistance have decided what they must do, so too have Gorbachev, Castro, Arafat, and Gaddafi. Soviet military advisors in Nicaragua number in the hundreds. The Sandinistas possess at least six Soviet built hind attack helicopters, helicopters that represent and affect flying tanks. Cuban troops swarm the streets of Managua by the scores, and the PLO has established an embassy there. Links between the Sandinistas, the PLO, the Libyans, and others are extensive. And let no one forget the photograph of Libya's Gaddafi and the Sandinistas' Ortego. In that photo there they stand their fists clenched in a salute of solidarity. The communists have made their decision. The resistance has made its decision. And now we must make ours. The choice is stark. The choice is unavoidable. We can help our neighbors in their struggle for freedom, or by doing nothing we can abandon them to a communist dictatorship. Over three months ago, I submitted to the Congress a plan to provide the resistance forces of Nicaragua with $100 million in urgently needed support. More than two months ago the Senate approved the plan. Now at last a new vote in the House is scheduled to take place. I want the House, I want the country to know how much is riding on this decision. If the House chooses to deny to the Nicaraguan resistance the help it needs and deserves. This will in effect grant permission to the Sandinistas to ignore any negotiated settlement and pursue a military victory instead. The final outcome is only too predictable. Backed by a steady supply of arms from the Soviets and Cubans, the Sandinistas will be able to pin down the freedom fighters, surround them and in time crush them. Whatever is left of free institutions in Nicaragua will be utterly destroyed and upon the ruins of Nicaragua's best yearnings and aspirations upon the mutilated hopes of her people, a second Cuba, indeed a second Libya, will have been ruthlessly built. We can be certain that tens of thousands of Nicaraguan refugees will seek to inundate our southern states. More than a quarter of a million Nicaraguans, nearly 10% of the entire population have already fled the country. But none of this need take place. If the House votes to give the Nicaraguan resistance the support we've proposed, democracy in that nation can be given a chance. Again and again the freedom fighters have proven their commitment to just this hope. Last month they took steps to broaden their political base and increase their support among the Nicaraguan people. With adequate training and supplies they could mobilize the oppressed people of their country and win untold new recruits if only the House votes yes. Our goal is not and repeat not a military solution. Instead we seek to help the freedom fighters achieve only the leverage they need to bring the communists to the table and negotiate a political and democratic solution. Three times the resistance has already offered to put down its arms and go to the table. Three times the communists have said no. The Catholic Church in Nicaragua supports an internal reconciliation aimed at achieving democracy. The communists have rejected this plan. The Contadora nations have backed a negotiated peace based again upon internal reconciliation and democracy. The Sandinistas have refused to grant these proposals serious consideration. The communists are intransigent because they believe they can afford to be. Each day the military situation in Nicaragua twists another dangerous degree in favor of the communists. In the months since we made our initial request for assistance Soviet supplied weapons in Nicaragua have mounted. Censorship and other human rights violations have increased and human suffering has grown. And now those who oppose aid must ask searching and painful questions. Can we bear responsibility for such anguish? Can we permit ourselves to acquiesce in the Sandinista tactic of delay, delay, delay? Again I must repeat there is hope. Just ten years ago less than one third of the people of Latin America lived in democracies. Today that figure is 90%. Many had written off El Salvador. Others claim there was no hope in Honduras and Guatemala. Today those nations have their freedom. And today democracy in Latin America constitutes a swelling and life-giving tide. It can still flood its powerful cleansing way into Nicaragua. The communist wall against it is high but not yet too high if only the House takes action. And I appeal here to Democrats and Republicans alike the issue is human freedom and it towers above all partisan concerns. What it comes down to in the end is the matter of witness of choosing whether to believe those whom we know to be providing us with accurate reports about Nicaragua or to listen instead to the whispering voices within our own minds that say there is no trouble there. Not because this is the truth but because we don't want to be convenience by the need to risk action. Once again that good man Cardinal Obando Ibravo that foe of tyranny whether Samosas or the Sandinistas has put the case before us. He writes to the editor of the Washington Post your message asking me for an article arrived on Sunday just as I finished celebrating Mass. During the Mass I read the pastoral letter that the bishops of Nicaragua had written for Holy Week. The pulpit was now our only means of disseminating information because the letter was totally censored and pulled from the pages of the newspaper La Prensa the only private newspaper in the country. The Cardinal goes on to relate that church offices had been appropriated by government order that a church printing press had been confiscated by the state security police that the government had shut down Radio Catalica the only Catholic radio station and that even the Sunday bulletin with the prayers and texts for the day had been confiscated. It was at this point the Cardinal writes when the church was gagged and bound that your quest, your request I should say arrived the reading for the day pricked my conscience the Sanhedrin sent for Peter and John intending to force them into silence but Peter and John said to them in reply is it right in God's eyes for us to obey you rather than God? Judge for yourselves we cannot possibly give up speaking of things we have seen and heard. Those were the Archbishop's words my friends let us give heed to those in Nicaragua who like Cardinal Obando Ibravo and so many others speak to us of the things they've seen and heard and let us pray God move to help them. Thank you and God bless you.


The Vortex Blaster by E. E. Doc Smith This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Reading by Greg Marguerite The Vortex Blaster by E. E. Doc Smith Introducing Storm Cloud, who through tragedy is destined to become the most noted figure in the galaxy, the Vortex Blaster. Safety Devices That Do Not Protect The unsinkable ships that, before the days of Bergenholm and of atomic and cosmic energy, sank into the waters of Earth. More particularly, safety devices which, while protecting against one agent of destruction, attract magnet like another and worse, such as the armored cable within the walls of a wooden house. It protects the electrical conductors within against accidental external shorts, but inadequately grounded as it must of necessity be. It may attract, and upon occasion has attracted, the stupendous force of lightning. Then fused, volatilized, flaming incandescent through the length, breadth and height of the dwelling, that dwelling's existence thereafter is to be measured in minutes. Specifically, four lightning rods. The lightning rods protecting the chromium glass and plastic home of Neil Cloud. Those rods were adequately grounded, grounded with copper-silver cables, the bigness of a strongman's arm. For Neil Cloud, atomic physicist, knew his lightning, and he was taking no chances whatever with the safety of his lovely wife and their three wonderful kids. He did not know, he did not even suspect, that under certain conditions 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, Neil Cloud, atomic physicist, sat at his desk in a strained dull apathy. His face was a yellowish-gray white, his tendon hands gripped rigidly the arms of his chair. His eyes, hard and lifeless, stared unseemly past the small three-dimensional block portrait of all that had made life worth living.  That white 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, ribbed from a sun than anything else with which ordinary man is familiar, darted toward and crashed downward to Earth through Neil 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. Eventually 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 III, or Telus of Sol, or simply Telus, 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 Telus. It was a new one, and thus it would be a long time before it would become other than a local menace. And well before that can happen, before even the oldest of Telus's loose vortices had eaten away much of her mass or poisoned much of her atmosphere, her scientists would have solved the problem. It was unthinkable that Telus, the point of origin and the very center of galactic civilization, should cease to exist. To Neil Cloud the accident was the ultimate catastrophe. His personal universe had crashed in ruins. What was left was not worth picking up. He and Joe had been married for almost twenty years, and the bonds between them had grown stronger, deeper, truer, with every passing day. And the kids—it couldn't have happened. Fate couldn't do this to him. But it had. It could. Gone. Gone. Gone. To Neil Cloud, atomic physicist, sitting there at his desk in torn, despairing abstraction with black maggots of thought gnawing holes in his brain, the catastrophe was doubly galling because of its cruel irony. For he was second from the top in the atomic research laboratory. His life's work had been a search for a means of extinguishment of exactly such loose vortices as had destroyed his all. His eyes focused vaguely upon the portrait—clear, honest gray eyes, lines of character and of humor, sweetly curved lips, ready to smile or to kiss. He wrenched his eyes away and scribbled briefly upon a sheet of paper. Then, getting up stiffly, he took the portrait and moved woodenly across the room to a furnace. As though enshrining it, he placed the plastic block upon a refractory between the electrodes and threw a switch. After the flaming arc had done its work, he turned and handed the paper to a tall man dressed in plain gray leather who had been watching him with quiet understanding eyes.  As of now, Phil, if it's QX with you—the gray lensman took the document, glanced at it, and slowly meticulously tore it into sixteen equal pieces—uh-uh, storm, he denied gently—not a resignation, leave of absence, yes, indefinite, but not a resignation. Why? It was scarcely a question. Cloud's voice was level, uninflected. I won't be worth the paper I'd waste. Now, no, the lensman conceded, but the future's another matter. I haven't said anything so far because to anyone who knew you and Joe as I knew you it was abundantly clear that nothing could be said. Two hands gripped and held. For the future, though, four words were uttered long ago that have never been improved upon. This, too, shall pass. You think so? I don't think so, Storm. I know so. I've been around a long time.  You've got a place in the world, and you'll be back. A thought struck the lensman, and he went on in an altered tone. You wouldn't, but—of course you wouldn't. You couldn't. I don't think so. No, I won't. That never was any kind of a solution to any problem. Nor was it. Until that moment suicide had not entered Cloud's mind, and he rejected it instantly. His kind of man did not take the easy way out. After a brief farewell, Cloud made his way to an elevator and was whisked down to the garage, into his big blue D. Kudinsky-16 special and away. Through traffic so heavy that front, rear, and side-bumpers almost touched, he drove with his wanted-cool skill, even though consciously he did not know that the other cars were there. He slowed, turned, stopped, gave her the youth—all in correct response to flashing signals in all shapes and colors, purely automatically. Consciously he did not know where he was going, nor care. If he thought at all, his numbed brain was simply trying to run away from its own bitter imaging, which, if he had thought at all, he would have known to be a hopeless task. But he did not think. He simply acted—dumbly, miserably. His eyes saw, optically, his body reacted mechanically. His thinking brain was completely in abeyance. Into a one-way skyway he rocketed, along it over the suburbs and into the transcontinental superhighway. Edging inward, lane after lane, he reached the unlimited way. Unlimited that is, except for being limited to cars of not less than seven hundred horsepower in perfect mechanical condition, driven by registered tested drivers at speeds not less than one hundred and twenty-five miles an hour, flashed his registry number at the control station, and shoved his right foot down to the floor. Now everyone knows that an ordinary D. Kharinsky sporter will do a hundred and forty honestly measured miles in one honestly measured hour. But very few ordinary drivers have ever found out how fast one of those brutal, big, souped-up sixteens can wheel. They simply haven't got what it takes to open one up. Storm Cloud found out that day. He held that two-and-a-half-ton juggernaut on the road wide open for two solid hours, but it didn't help. Drive as he would, he could not outrun that which rode with him, beside him, and within him, and behind him. For Joe was there. Joe and the kids, but mostly Joe. It was Joe's car as much as it was his. Babe, the big blue ox, was Joe's pet name for it, because, like Paul Bunyan's fabulous beast, it was pretty nearly six feet between the eyes. Everything they had ever had was that way. She was in the seat beside him. Every dear, every sweet, every luscious, lovely memory of her was there, and behind him, just out of the eye corner visibility, were the three kids. And a whole lifetime of this loomed ahead, a vista of emptiness more vacuous far than the emptiest reaches of intergalactic space. Damn nation! He couldn't stand much more of—high over the road way far ahead a brilliant octagon flared red. That meant stop in any language. Cloud eased up his accelerator, eased down his mighty brakes. He pulled up at the control station, and a trimly uniformed officer made a gesture. Sorry, sir, the policeman said, but you'll have to detour here. There's a loose atomic vortex beside the road up ahead. Oh! It's Dr. Cloud! Recognition flashed into the guard's eyes. I didn't recognize you at first. You can go ahead, of course. It'll be two or three miles before you have to put on your armor. You'll know when better than many one can tell you. They didn't tell us they were going to send for you. It's just a little new one, and the dope we got was that they were going to shove it off into the canyon with pressure. They didn't send for me, Cloud tried to smile. I'm just driving around. Haven't my armor along even, so I guess I might as well go back. He turned the special around.  There might be a hundred of them scattered over a radius of two hundred miles. Sisters of the one that had murdered his family.  Into his mind there leapt a picture, wire-sharp of Number 11 as he had last seen it, and simultaneously an idea hit him like a blow from a fist. He thought. Really thought. Now, cogently, intensely, clearly, if he could do it, could actually blow out the atomic flame of an atomic vortex, not exactly revenge, but by Clonzo's brazen bows it would work. It'd have to work. He'd make it work. And grimly, quietly, but alive in every fiber now he drove back toward the city, practically as fast as he had come away. If the Lensman was surprised at Cloud's sudden reappearance in the laboratory, he did not show it. Nor did he offer any comment as his erstwhile first assistant went to various lockers and cupboards, assembling meters, coils, tubes, armor, and other paraphernalia and apparatus. Guess that's all I'll need, chief, Cloud remarked finally. Here's a blank check. If some of this stuff should happen to be in usable condition when I get done with it, fill it out to suit, will you? No.  If you want the stuff for legitimate purposes, you're on patrol business, and it's the patrol's risk. If on the other hand you think that you're going to try to snuff a vortex, the stuff stays here. That's final storm. You're right and wrong, Phil, Cloud stated, not at all sheepishly. I'm going to blow out number one vortex with duodeck, yes. But I'm really going to blow it out, not merely make a stab at it as an excuse for suicide as you think. How? The big Lensman's query was skepticism incarnate. It can't be done except by an almost impossibly fortuitous accident.  I know it. I didn't have the solution myself until a few hours ago. It hit me all at once. Funny, I never thought of it before. It's been right in sight all the time. That's the way with most problems, the chief admitted. Plain enough after you see the key equation. Well, I'm perfectly willing to be convinced, but I warn you that I'll take a lot of convincing. And someone else will do the work, not you. When I get done, you'll see why I'll pretty nearly have to do it myself. But to convince you exactly what is the not. Variability, snapped the older man. To be effective, the charge of explosive at the moment of impact must match within very close limits the activity of the vortex itself.  Too large a charge simply rekindles the original vortex, still larger, in its original crater. And the activity that must be matched varies so tremendously in magnitude, maxima, and minima, and the cycle is so erratic, ranging from seconds to hours without discoverable rhyme or reason that all attempts to do so at any predetermined instant have failed completely. Why, even Kinnison and Cardinge and the Conference of Scientists couldn't solve it any more than they could work out a tractor beam that could be used as a tow line on one. Not exactly, Cloud demurred. They found that it could be forecast for a few seconds at least, length of time directly proportional to the length of the cycling question, by an extension of the calculus of warped surfaces. Humpf, the lensman snorted. So what? What good is a ten-second forecast when it takes a calculating machine an hour to solve the equations? Oh, he broke off staring. Oh, he repeated slowly.  But there are other things. I'll say there are plenty of them. I'd thought of the calculator angle before, of course, but there was a worse thing than variability to contend with. What, the lensman demanded. Fear, Cloud replied crisply. At the thought of a hand-to-hand battle with a vortex my brain froze solid. Fear, the sheer stark natural human fear of death that robs a man of the fine edge of control and brings on the very death that he is trying so hard to avoid. That's what had me stopped. Right, you may be right, the lensman pondered his fingers drumming quietly upon his desk, and you are not afraid of death now, even subconsciously, but tell me, Storm, please, that you won't invite it. I will not invite it, sir, now that I've got a job to do, but that's as far as I'll go promising. I won't make any superhuman effort to avoid it. I'll take all due precautions for the sake of the job, but if it gets me, what the hell? The quicker it does, the better the sooner I'll be with Joe. You believe that? Implicitly. The vortices are as good as gone, then. They haven't got any more chance than Boscon has of licking the patrol. I'm afraid so, almost glumly. The only way for it to get me is for me to make a mistake, and I don't feel any coming on. But what's your angle? The lensman asked interest lighting his eyes. You can't use the customary attack. Your time will be too short. Like this, and taking down a sheet of drafting paper clouds sketched rapidly. This is the crater here, with the vortex at the bottom there. From the observer's instruments, or from a shielded setup of my own, I get my data on mass emission, maxima, minima, and so on. Then I have them make me three duo-deck bombs, one on the mark of the activity I'm figuring on shooting at, and one each 5% over and under that figure, cased in neocarbaloi of exactly the computed thickness to last until it gets to the center of the vortex. Then I take off in a flying suit, armored and shielded, say about here.  Too many instruments for a suit to say nothing of bombs, and you'll need more screen than a suit can deliver. We can adapt a flitter for bomb throwing easily enough. QX, that would be better, of course. In that case, I set my flitter into a projectile trajectory like this, whose objective is the center of the vortex there. See, 10 seconds or so away, at about this point, I take my instantaneous readings, solve the equations at that particular warped surface for some certain zero time. But suppose that the cycle won't give you a 10-second solution. Then I'll swing around and try again until a long cycle does show up. QX, it will sometime. Sure, then having everything set for zero time and assuming that the activity is somewhere near my postulated value. Assume that it isn't. It probably won't be, the chief grunted. My accelerator decelerate. Solving new equations all the while? Sure, don't interrupt so. Until at zero time, the activity extrapolated to zero time matches one of my bombs.  You hope the lensman was frankly dubious, and there you are right in the middle of that explosion with two duo-deck bombs outside your armor or just inside your flitter. Oh no, I've shot them away several seconds ago so that they explode somewhere else, nowhere near me. I hope, but do you realize just how busy a man you're going to be during those 10 or 12 seconds? Fully, clouds face grew somber, but I will be in full control. I won't be afraid of anything that can happen, anything. And he went on under his breath. That's the hell of it. QX, the lensman admitted finally, you can go. There are a lot of things you haven't mentioned, but you'll probably be able to work them out as you go along. I think I'll go out and work with the boys in the lookout station while you're doing your stuff. When are you figuring on starting? How long will it take to get the flitter ready? A couple of days, say we meet you there Saturday morning, Saturday the 10th at eight o'clock. I'll be there. And again, Neil Cloud and Babe the big blue ox hit the road. And as he rolled the physicist mulled over in his mind the assignment to which he had set himself. Like fire, only worse, intra-atomic energy was a good servant, but a terrible master. Man had liberated it before he could really control it. In fact, control was not yet, and perhaps never would be perfect. Up to a certain size in activity, yes, they, the millions upon millions of self-limiting ones were the servants. They could be handled fenced in controlled. Indeed, if they were not kept under an exciting bombardment and very carefully fed, they would go out. But at long intervals, for some one of a dozen reasons, science knew so little fundamentally of the true inwardness of the intra-atomic reactions. One of these small, tame, self-limiting vortices flared nova-like into a large, wild, self-sustaining one. It ceased being a servant then, and became a master. Such flare-ups occurred perhaps only once or twice in a century on earth. The trouble was that they were so utterly damnably permanent, that they never went out, and no data were ever secured for every living thing in the vicinity of a flare-up died. Every instrument and every other solid thing within a radius of 100 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. Otherwise, civilization would scarcely have had a planet left, and unless something could be done about loose vortices before too many years, the consequences would be really serious. That's why his laboratory had been established in the first place. Nothing much had been accomplished so far. The tractor beam that would take hold of them had never been designed. Nothing material was of any use. It melted. Pressors worked after a fashion. It was by the use of these beams that they shoved the vortices around, off into the waste places, unless it proved cheaper to allow the places where they had come into being to remain waste places. A few, through sheer luck, had been blown into self-limiting bits by Duodec. Duodec applied latimate, the most powerful, the most frighteningly detonant explosive ever invented upon all the known planets of the first galaxy. But Duodec had taken an awful toll of life. Also, since it usually scattered of vortex instead of extinguishing it, Duodec had actually caused far 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 of them were still being tried. Some, such as the perennially-appearing one of building a huge hemispherical hull in the ground under and around the vortex, installing an inertialist 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 Telus, had been pushed out into the Badlands. And there, at eight o'clock on the 10th, 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 that converted impulses of the very radiations against which those screens were most effective. For the observatory and the one long approach to it as well had been screened heavily. Without such protection, no life could exist there. This problem and many others had been solved, however, and there the instruments were. Every phase and factor of the vortex's existence and activity were measured and recorded continuously throughout every minute of every day of every year. And all of those records were summed up, integrated into the SIGBA curve. This curve, while only an incredibly insenselessly torturous line to the layman's eye, was a veritable mine of information to the initiate. Cloud glanced along the SIGMA curve of the previous 48 hours and scowled. For one jagged peak, scarcely an hour old, actually punched through the top line of the chart. Bad, huh, Frank? He grunted. Plenty bad, Storm, and getting worse, the observer assented. I wouldn't wonder if Carlawicz were right after all. If she ain't getting ready to blow her top, I'm a Zabrisky and Fontima's maiden aunt. No periodicity, no equation, of course. It was a statement, not a question. The lensman ignored as completely as did the observer, if not as flippantly, the distinct possibility that at any moment the observatory and all that it contained might be resolved into their component atoms. None whatever came flatly from Cloud. He did not need to spend hours at a calculating machine. At one glance, he knew, without knowing how he knew that no equation could be made to fit even the weighted average locus of that wildly shifting sigma curve. But most of the cycles cut this ordinate here, 751. So I'll take that for my value. That means 9.906 kilograms of duodeck basic charge with one 5% over and one 5% under that for alternates. Neocarbaloi casing, 53 millimeters on the basic, others in proportion. On the wire? It went out as you said it, the observer reported. They'll have them here in 15 minutes. QX, I'll get dressed then. The lensman and the observer helped him into his cumbersome heavily padded armor. They checked his instruments, making sure that the protective devices of the suit were functioning at full efficiency. Then all three went out to the flitter. A tiny speedster, really a torpedo bearing the stubby wings and the ludicrous tail surfaces. The multifarious driving, breaking, side, top and under jets so characteristic of the tricky, cranky, but ultra maneuverable breed. But this one had something that the ordinary speedster or flitter did not carry. Spaced around the needle beak, there yawned the open muzzles of a triplex bomb thrower. More checking, the lensman and the armored cloud both knew that every one of the dozens of instruments upon the flitter's special board was right to the hair. Nevertheless, each one was compared with the master instrument of the observatory. The bombs arrived and were loaded in and cloud with a casually waved salute stepped into the tiny operating compartment.  The heavy toggles drove home. A cushioned form closed in upon the pilot, leaving only his arms and lower legs free. Then, making sure that his two companions had ducked for cover, cloud shot his flitter into the air and toward the seething inferno which was loose atomic vortex number one. For it was seething, no fooling, and it was an inferno. The crater was a ragged jagged hull a full mile from lip to lip and perhaps a quarter of that in depth. It was not, however, a perfect cone for the floor being largely incandescently molten was practically level except for a depression at the center where the actual vortex lay. The walls of the pit were steeply unstable irregular, varying in pitch and shape with the hardness and refractoriness of the strata composing them. Now a section would glare into an unbearably blinding white puffing away in sparkling vapor. Again, cooled by an inrushing blast of air, it would subside into an angry scarlet, its surface crawling in a sluggish flow of lava. Occasionally, a part of the wall might even go black into pockmarked scoriae or into brilliant planes of obsidian. For always, somewhere, there was an enormous volume of air pouring into that crater. It rushed in as ordinary air. It came out, however, in a ragingly uprushing pillar as something else. No one knew or knows yet, for that matter, exactly what a loose vortex does to the molecules and atoms of air. In fact, due to the extreme variability already referred to, it probably does not do the same thing for more than an instant at a time. That there is little actual combustion is certain. That is, except for the forced combination of nitrogen, argon, xenon, and krypton with oxygen. There is, however, consumption, plenty of consumption. And what that incredibly intense bombardment impinges up is altered, profoundly and obscurely altered, so that the atmosphere emitted from the crater is quite definitely no longer air as we know it. It may be corrosive, it may be poisonous in one or another of a hundred fashions. It may be merely new and different, but it is no longer the air which we human beings are used to breathing. And it is this fact rather than the destruction of the planet itself which would end the possibility of life upon Earth's surface. It is difficult indeed to describe the appearance of a loose atomic vortex to those who have never seen one. And fortunately, most people never have. And practically all of its frightful radiation lies in those octaves of the spectrum which are invisible to the human eye. Suffice it to say, then, that it had an average effective surface temperature of about 15,000 degrees absolute, two and one half times as hot as the sun of Telus, and that it was radiating every frequency possible to that incomprehensible temperature. And let it go with that. And Neil Cloud, scurrying in his flitter through that murky radiation-riddled atmosphere, setting up equations from the readings of his various meters and gauges and solving those equations almost instantaneously in his mathematical prodigy's mind, sat appalled. For the activity level was, and even in its lowest dips, remained far above the level he had selected. His skin began to prickle and to burn.  He knew what those symptoms meant. Even the flitter's powerful screens were not stopping all the radiation. Even his suit screens and his special goggles were not stopping what leaked through. But he wouldn't quit yet. The activity might probably would take a nosedive any instant. If it did, he'd have to be ready. On the other hand, it might blow up at any instant too. There were two schools of mathematical thought upon that point. One held that the vortex without any essential change in its physical condition or nature would keep on growing bigger, indefinitely, until, uniting with the other vortices of the planet, it had converted the entire mass of the world into energy. The second school of which the forementioned Carlowitz was the loudest voice, taught that at a certain stage of development, the internal energy of the vortex would become so great that generation-radiation equilibrium could not be maintained. This would, of course, result in an explosion, the nature and consequences of which this Carlowitz was want to dwell upon in ghoulish mathematical glee. Neither school, however, could prove its point, or rather each school proved its point by means of unimpeachable mathematics, and each hated and derided the other loudly and heatedly. And now cloud, as he studied through his almost opaque defenses that indescribably ravening fireball that has surriently rapacious monstrosity which might very well have come from the deepest pit of the hottest hell of mythology, felt strongly inclined to agree with Carlowitz. It didn't seem possible that anything could get any worse than that without exploding. And such an explosion, he felt sure, would certainly blow everything for miles around into the smithereest kind of smithereens. The activity of the vortex stayed high, way too high. The tiny control room of the flitter grew hotter and hotter.  He touched a communicator stud and spoke, Phil, better get me three more bombs, like these, except up around. I don't check you. If you do that, it's apt to drop to a minimum and stay there, the lensman reminded him. It's completely unpredictable, you know. It may be at that, so I'll have to forget the 5% margin and hit it on the nose or not at all. Order me up two more, then. One at half of what I've got here, the other double it. And he reeled off the figures for the charge and the casing of the explosive. You might break out a jar of burn dressing, too. Some fairly hot stuff is leaking through. We'll do that. Come down fast. Cloud landed. He stripped to the skin and the observer smeared his every square inch of epidermis with the thick, gooey stuff that was not only a highly efficient screen against radiation, but also a sovereign remedy for new radiation burns. He exchanged his goggles for a thicker, darker, heavier pair. The two bombs arrived and were substituted for two of the original load. I thought of something while I was up there, Cloud informed the observers then. 20 kilograms of duo deck is nobody's firecracker, but it may be the least of what's going to go off. Have you got any idea of what's going to become of the energy inside that vortex when I blow it out? Can't say that I have, the lensman frowned and thought. No data. Neither have I, but I'd say you better go back to the new station, the one you were going to move to if it kept getting worse. But the instruments, the lensman was thinking not of the instruments themselves, which were valueless in comparison with life, but of the records those instruments would make, those records were priceless. I'll have everything on the tapes in the Flitter, Cloud reminded. But suppose that the Flitter stops one too, or doesn't stop it rather, in that case your back station won't be there either, so it won't make any difference. How mistaken Cloud was. QX, the chief decided, we'll leave when you do, just in case. Again in the air, Cloud found that the activity, while still high, was not too high, but that it was fluctuating too rapidly. He could not get even five seconds of trustworthy prediction to say nothing of 10, so he waited as close as he dared remain to that horrible center of disintegration. The Flitter hung poised in air, motionless upon softly hissing under jets. Cloud knew to a fraction his height above the ground. He knew to a fraction his distance from the vortex. He knew with equal certainty the density of the atmosphere and the exact velocity and direction of the wind. Hence, since he could also read closely enough the momentary variations in the cyclonic storms within the crater, he could compute very easily the course and velocity necessary to land the bomb in the exact center of the vortex at any given instant in time. The hard part, the thing that no one had as yet succeeded in doing was to predict for a time far enough ahead to be of any use a useably close approximation to the vortex's quantitative activity. For, as has been said, he had to overblast, rather than under. If he could not hit it on the nose, to underblast would scatter it all over the state. Therefore, Cloud concentrated upon the dials and gauges before him, concentrated with every fiber of his being and every cell of his brain. Suddenly, almost imperceptibly, the Sigma curve gave signs of flattening out. In an instant, Cloud's mind pounced. Simultaneous equations, nine of them, involving nine unknowns, and integration in four dimensions. No matter, Cloud did not solve them laboriously. One factor at a time. Without knowing how he had arrived at it, he knew the answer. Just as the Pozinian or the Rhygelian is able to perceive every separate component particle of an opaque three-dimensional solid, but without being able to explain to anyone how his sense of perception works. It just is. That's all. Anyway, by virtue of whatever sense or ability it is which makes a mathematical prodigy what he is, Cloud knew that in exactly eight and three-tenth seconds from that observed instant, the activity of the vortex would be slightly, but not too far, under the coefficient of his heaviest bomb. Another flick of his mental trigger, and he knew the exact velocity he would require. His hands swept over the studs, his right foot tramped down hard upon the firing lever. And even as the quivering flitter shot forward under eight tellurian gravities of acceleration, he knew to the thousandth of a second how long he would have to hold that acceleration to attain that velocity. While not really long in seconds, it was much too long for comfort. It took him much closer to the vortex than he wanted to be. In fact, it took him right out over the crater itself. But he stuck to the calculated course, and at the precisely correct instant, he cut his drive and released his largest bomb. Then, so rapidly that it was one blur of speed, he again kicked on his eight Gs of drive and started to whirl around as only a speedster or a flitter can whirl. Practically unconscious from the terrific resultant of the linear and angular accelerations, he ejected the two smaller bombs. He did not care particularly where they lit, just so they didn't light in the crater or near the observatory, and he had already made certain of that. Then without waiting even to finish the whirl or to straighten her out in level flight, clouds still flying hand darted towards the switch whose closing would energize the bergenholm and make the flitter inertialis. Too late.  Cloud had moved fast too. Trained mine and trained body had been working at top speed and in perfect coordination. There just simply hadn't been enough time. If he could have got what he wanted ten full seconds or even nine, he could have made it. But, in spite of what happened, Cloud defended his action then and thereafter.  Another tenth of a second and his bomb wouldn't have fitted. He didn't have the 5% leeway he wanted, remember, and no, he couldn't wait for another match either. His screens were leaking like sieves and if he had waited for another chance they would have picked him up and tried to a greasy cinder in his own lard. The bomb sped truly and struck the target in direct central impact exactly as scheduled. It penetrated perfectly. The neocarbaloi casing lasted just long enough. That frightful charge of duodeck exploded if not exactly at the center of the vortex at least near enough to the center to do the work. In other words, Cloud's figuring had been close, very close, but the time had been altogether too short. The flitter was not even out of the crater when the bomb went off, and not only the bomb. For Cloud's vague forebodings were materialized and more, the staggeringly immense energy of the vortex merged with that of the detonating duodeck to form an utterly incomprehensible whole. In part, the hellish flood of boiling lava in that devil's cauldron was beaten downward into a bowl by the sheer stupendous force of the blow. In part it was hurled abroad in masses, in gouts and streamers, and the raging wind of the explosion's front ceased the fragments and tore and worried them into bits, hurling them still faster along their paths of violence. And air, so densely compressed as to be to all intents and purposes a solid, smote the walls of the crater, smote them so that they crumbled, crushed outward through the hard-packed ground, broke up into jaggedly irregular blocks which hurtled screamingly away through the atmosphere. Also, the concussion wave or the explosion front or flying fragments or something struck the two loose bombs so that they too exploded and added their contribution to the already stupendous concentration of force. They were not close enough to the flitter to wreck it of themselves, but they were close enough so that they didn't do her or her pilot a bit of good. The first terrific wave buffeted the flyer while Cloud's right hand was in the air, shooting across the panel to turn on the burg. The impact jerked the arm downward and sideways, both bones of the forearm snapping as it struck the ledge. The second one, an instant later, broke his left leg. Then the debris began to arrive. Chunks of solid or semi-multin' rocks slammed against the hull, knocking off wings and control surfaces. Gobs of viscous slag slapped it liquidy, freezing into and clogging up jets and orifices. The little ship was hurtled hither and yawn. In the grip of forces she could no more resist than can the floating leaf resist the waters of a cataract. And Cloud's brain was as addled as an egg by the viscous concussions which were hitting him from so many different directions and so nearly all at once.  By sheer force of will and nerve, he forced his left hand across the gyrating key-bank to the burg and home switch. He snapped it and in the instant of its closing, a vast calm piece descended blanket-like. For fortunately, the burg still worked. The flitter and all her contents and apper-tenances were inertial-less. Nothing material could buffet her or hurt her now. She would waft effortlessly away from a feather's latest possible touch. Cloud wanted to faint then, but he didn't. Quite. Instead, foggily, he tried to look back at the crater. Nine-tenths of his visi-plates were out of commission, but he finally got a view. Good! It was out. He wasn't surprised. He had been quite confident that it would be. It wasn't scattered around, either. It couldn't be, for his only possibility of smearing the shot was on the upper side, not the lower. His next effort was to locate the secondary observatory where he had to land, and in that, too, he was successful. He had enough intelligence left to realize that, with practically all of his jets clogged and his wings and tail shot off, he couldn't land his vessel inert. Therefore he would have to land her free. And by dint of light and extremely unorthodox use of what jets he had left in usable shape, he did land her free. Almost within the limits of the observatory's field, and having landed, he inerted her. But as has been intimated, his brain was not working so well. He had held his ship inertialist quite a few seconds longer than he thought, and he did not even think of the buffeting she had taken. As a result of these things, however, her intrinsic velocity did not match anywhere near exactly that of the ground upon which she lay. Just when Cloud cut his bergenholm, restoring thereby to the flitter the absolute velocity and inertia she had had before going free, there resulted a distinctly anti-climatic crash. There was a last terrific bump as the motionless vessel collided with the equally motionless ground, and storm Cloud, vortex blaster, went out like the proverbial light. Help came, of course, and on the double. The pilot was unconscious, and the flitter's door could not be opened from the outside, but those were not insuperable obstacles. A plate, already loose, was sheared away. The pilot was carefully lifted out of his prison and rushed to base hospital in the meat-can, already in attendance. And later, in a private office of that hospital, the gray-clad chief of the Atomic Research Laboratory sat and waited, but not patiently. How is he, Lacey, he demanded, as the Surgeon General entered the room? He's going to live, isn't he? Oh, yes, Phil, definitely yes, Lacey replied briskly. He has a good skeleton, very good indeed. The burns are superficial, and will yield quite readily to treatment. The deeper delayed effects of the radiation to which he was exposed can be neutralized entirely effectively. Thus he will not need even a Philips treatment for the replacement of damaged parts, except possibly for a few torn muscles and so on. But he was smashed up pretty badly, wasn't he? I know that he had a broken arm and a broken leg, at least. Full fractures only, entirely negligible. Lacey waved aside with an airy gesture such small ills as broken bones. He'll be out in a few weeks. How soon can I see him, the Lensman physicist asked? There are some important things to take up with him, and I've got a personal message for him that I must give him as soon as possible. Lacey pursed his lips. Then— You may see him now, he decided. He is conscious and strong enough. Not too long, though, Phil—fifteen minutes at most. Two acts in thanks, and a nurse led the visiting Lensman to Cloud's bedside. Hi, stoop! He boomed cheerfully. Stoop being short for stupendous.  Hi, Chief. Glad to see somebody. Sit down. You're the most wanted man in the galaxy, the visitor informed the invalid, not accepting even Kimball Kinnison. Look at this spool of tape, and it's only the first one. I brought it along for you to read at your leisure. As soon as any planet finds out that we've got a sure enough vortex blower outer—an expert who can really call his shots—and the news travels mighty fast.  Serious Four got in first by a whisker, it seems, but Aldebaron II was so close a second that it was a photo finish. And all the channels have been jammed ever since. Canopus, Vega, Rigel, Spica—they all want you, everybody from Al-Sikand to Vandimar and back. We told them right off that we would not receive personal delegations. We had to almost throw a couple of pink-haired Chickaladorians out bodily to make them believe that we meant it. And that the age and condition of the vortex involved, not priority of requisition, would govern. QX? Absolutely, Cloud agreed. That's the only way it could be, I should think. So forget about this psychic trauma. No, I don't mean that. The Lensman corrected himself hastily. You know what I mean. Your will to live is the most important factor in any man's recovery, and too many worlds need you too badly to have you quit now. Not? I suppose so. Cloud acquiesced, but somberly. I'll get out of here in short order, and I'll keep on pecking away until one of those vortices finishes what this one started. You'll die of old age, then, son. The Lensman assured him. We got full data. All the information we need. We know exactly what to do to your screens. This time nothing will come through except light, and only as much of that as you feel like admitting. You can wait as close to a vortex as you please for as long as you please until you get exactly the activity and time interval that you want. You will be just as comfortable and just as safe as though you were home in bed. Sure of that? Absolutely, or at least as sure as we can be of anything that hasn't happened yet. But I see that your guardian angel here is eyeing her clock somewhat pointedly, so I'd better be doing a flit before they toss me down a shaft. Clear ether, Storm. Clear ether, Chief. And that is how Storm Cloud, atomic physicist, became the most narrowly specialized specialist in all the annals of science. How he became Storm Cloud, vortex blaster. The galaxy's only vortex blaster. End of The Vortex Blaster by E. E. Doc Smith.