their feeding heads, held immovably in place by two huge arms apiece. One hand sufficed to operate the controls, leaving two hands free to whatever else might prove in order.

"Let us out!"

The lock opened, the Dhilian warriors sprang out and splashed away to meet the foot-soldiers who were already advancing into the lagoon.

Cloud watched pure carnage for a few minutes. He hoped—yes, there they were! The loyalists, seeing that their cause was not lost after all, had hastily armed themselves and were coming into the fray. There would be no tanks—the navy would see to that.

The Blaster broke out his flitter then, set it down near the vortex, and made his observations. Everything was normal. The sigma curve was the spectacularly unpredictable thing which he had come to expect. He selected three bombs from the cruiser's vast store, loaded them into the tubes, and lofted. He set his screens, adjusted his goggles, and waited, while far above him and wide around him his guardian Dhilian war-vessels toured watchfully, their drumming blasts a reassuring thunder.

He waited, eyeing the sigma curve as it flowed backward from the tracing pen, until finally he could get a satisfactory ten-second prediction. That is, he knew that ten seconds thence, the activity of the vortex would match, closely enough, one of his bombs. He shot his flitter forward, solving instantaneously the problems of velocity and trajectory. At exactly the correct instant he released the bomb. He swung his little bomber aside, went inertialess....

The bomb sped truly. Into that awful crater, through that fantastic hell of heat and of lethal radiation and of noxious gas. It struck the vortex itself, dead center. It penetrated just deeply enough. The extremely refractory casing of neocarballoy, so carefully computed as to thickness, held just long enough. The carefully-weighed charge of duodec exploded, its energy and that of the vortex combining in a detonation whose like no inhabitant of that solar system had even dimly imagined.

The gases and the pall of smoke and pulverized tufa blew aside; the frightful waves of fluid lava quieted down. The vortex was out and would remain out. The Vortex Blaster went back to his cruiser and stored his flitter away.

"Oh, you did it—thanks! I didn't believe, really, that you—that anybody—could do it!" Luda was almost hysterical in her joyous relief.

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