The vortex which transformed the Mississippi into a whirling chaos of brutal, maiming force carried by screaming walls of wind and water was not, despite what the science-boyos back East wrote in the Herald Tribune the following week, caused by a collision of high and low pressure regions in the atmosphere. Not exactly.

In fact, it had more to do with a tracer beam -- a thin correlation of quantum particles used to cross time-space boundaries and detect events in distant times and places. The Founder had come up with the idea, and one of the brilliant Gooding brothers had figured out how to make it work. Ira Johnston had tooled up the prototype and tweaked it until you could tune it to any probability intersection in the known or any other universe, and the finished instrument had been carefully mounted in the control banks of the Adorable Dora from which the Founder planned and executed the fate of universes as a sort of hobby.

It wasn't the Founder's fault, of course. It was the twins, those damn attitudinous redhead teenage girl-women who had been "helping" him in the matter of the gambler and the time-crisis being precipitated by the Heron gang. They had left a happy ending in place, with the Albert Hansell comfortably docked in New Orleans, and the gambler and the beautiful brujita enjouying café au lait and some beignets and dreaming about a plan to go to California. But in the celebration of success, one of them had failed to turn off the tracer beam, and had left it anchored to a clump of high-probability quanta regions in the vicinity of the riverwalk through the heart of New Orleans. So when the Founder ordered the twins to set a displacement channel up to move them to the Sirian sector about two centuries ahead, the tracer beam was still attached, and in the way of matwerial particles everywhere, it seriously objected to having its fundamental equations toyed with. Like a hawser still looped to a bollard astern, it transferred an astronomical amount of force to the region to which it had been anchore3d when the Dora started translating.

That's what started it. Next thing anyone knew, there were three twisters fighting over the little scrap of merchandise the white folks called New Orleans, and the river had been bent out of its bed and plugged straight into the sky. There was blackness moving into the vacuum of probability up and down the French Quarter, and a few law offices, hardware stores and bordellos had contributed their roofs and beams and wondpows and a good niumber of their clientele to the mess that was torquing its way upward in the spew of river-water and quantum explosions. A couple of horses, too. The waterfront was a whirling, catastrophic blend of broken pieces and vanished parts, until the quantum trace-links overloaded and blew out.

At that point a lot of parts of things came showering down, the blackness disappeared, the winds dropped from 200 knots to a normal five or six, a lot of river water lashed down and settled on the town, and the Albert Hansell had disappeared completely, leaving just a fe tattered ends of mooring lines and a shattered gangplank to mark where she had been.