Explore "The Vortex Blaster Makes War" by E.E. Smith on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Doctor Neal Cloud had once been a normal human being, gregarious and neighborly. He had been concerned as little with death as is the normal human being. Death was an abstraction. It was inevitable, of course, but it could not actually touch him or affect him personally, except at some unspecified, unconsidered and remote future time.
For twenty uneventful years he worked in the Atomic Research Laboratory of the Galactic Patrol, seeking a way to extinguish the "loose" atomic vortices resulting from the breaking out of control of atomic power plants. At home he had had wife Jo and their three kids -- and what Jo had meant to him can be described adequately only in mathematical, not emotional terms. They had formed practically a closed system.