Explore "Masters of the Vortex" by E.E. Smith on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
NUMBER ONE, the oldest and worst vortex on Tellus, had been pushed out into the badlands, and there, at eight o'clock of the indicated morning, Cloud started to work on it.
The "lookout shack" was in fact a fully-equipped nucleonics laboratory. Its staff was not large-eight men worked in three staggered eight-hour shifts-but the development of its instrumentation had required hundreds of man-years of intensive research. Every factor of the vortex's activity was measured and recorded continuously, throughout every minute of every day of every year; and all of these measurements were summed up, integrated, into the "sigma" curve. This curve, which to the layman's eye was only a senselessly zig-zagging line, told the expert everything he wanted to know.