The Vortex Blaster by E. E. Smith . Short Sci Fi audiobook

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 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.

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 III, 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 than a local menace.

And well before that could happen, before even the oldest of Tellus' 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 Tellus, the point of origin and the very center of galactic civilization, should cease to exist.

But 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.