Tom Swift and His 3-D Telejector (3 page)

"Oh?"

"My farewell to your counterpart was rather—less than warm."

Upon the death of its founder, Wickliffe Laboratories of Thessaly had passed into the hands of a brilliant scientist-technician with a national reputation. Peter Langley was a few spare years older than Tom Swift, but the media liked to call him "America’s
other
young inventor," and had encouraged what some thought was a spirit of rivalry between the two. Tom was well aware that Langley had been displeased by the loss of a key employee to nearby Shopton.

Hank Sterling broke into the conversation. "Looks like we’re doing well on the reconstruction of the Mighty Eye, Tom," he called down from the antenna work platform up above. "We could be up and running by tomorrow."

"I imagine the Green Orb will still be out there," Tom laughed. "But as for me, I think I’ll break for lunch and check things out over in the office. I should think about getting back to work on the telejector."

In the office in the administration building he shared with his father, Tom sorted through the various messages handed him by Trent, their secretary. One name caught his eye immediately.
Well, whattaya know!
he thought.
We were just talking about you, Pete!

Tom called the number on the note, which he recognized as Pete Langley’s private line. The CEO-scientist himself answered the buzz.

"Hi, Pete. This is Tom Swift returning your call."

"Tom." There was a moment of cool hesitation—a chill in the air—and then a silence that felt oddly prolonged. "Got a busy afternoon going?"

"Well—er― "

"Too busy to drop by a competitor?"

Tom decided business diplomacy was the better part of valor. "I can break away. Do I get a clue as to what’s up?"

Again, silence. Langley ignored the question. "Would three o’clock work? My office?"

"Fine."

Tom puzzled over the matter in the air, flying to Thessaly in one of Enterprises’ Pigeon Special mini-planes. But puzzlement came to nothing by the time Tom found himself setting down on the Wickliffe Labs airfield.

In the management office building Tom approached Langley’s receptionist. "Would you tell him I’m here, Sue?"

"Oh, I didn’t realize― "

"Pete’s expecting me."

The young woman disappeared into the office behind her, returning in a moment to wave Tom in.

Pete Langley, thinly handsome and dark-haired, stood next to his desk with hand extended. "Hi, Swiftola."

They shook hands and sat down facing one another. There was a moment of silence—and then a few more.

"Pete, is something wrong?" asked the blond young inventor.

"That’s what I was about to ask you," replied the black-haired young inventor.

"Excuse me?"

Langley shrugged. "You dropped by unannounced. Some problem?"

"I—I don’t get it," Tom responded in surprise. "When you called me to come over― "

"
I
called
you
? Come on, guy."

It became evident that the call Tom’s office had received had not originated with Pete Langley! "Don’t know the first thing about it. And you say you called back—and spoke to me? Weird city. I’ve been here all day. No incoming on my private number. Sure you punched the keys right?"

Tom pulled the crumpled note from his pocket and read the number off. Langley snorted. "There’s the prob, bob. I don’t use that number anymore. Wick still owns it, but it doesn’t link to anything right now."

Tom could see that his counterpart, who also had deep-set blue eyes, was as baffled as he was. "This is embarrassing, Pete," said Tom. "But I can’t understand how it could have happened. It
was
this number I called, and I recognized your voice."

"Yeah, well, voice-mimicry technology is cutting-edge these days. No news to you—you folks have your televoc system. Which we plan to make obsolete as soon as we can." Langley laughed, and Tom joined in pleasantly. "Let’s back-burner it, Swiftorini."

"I’m just sorry to interrupt your day. I’m sure you’re as busy as I am."

"Busier. But as a matter of fact, I was thinking about giving you a call. We need to do a little out-hashing, Tom."

"Excuse me?"

"To clear the air. About you-know-himsey."

Tom got the idea. "Dr. Grimsey."

"Shoot me, but I don’t like the idea of you and your Dad raiding our staff."

The youth reddened. "Is that really what you think, Pete? Enterprises doesn’t use unethical methods, any more than you do. The man approached us out of the blue. It was completely unexpected."

"No inducements, hmm. No playing up the usual damages that these scientific egos like to collect? ‘Oh, those mean guys at Wickliffe!’ The guy’s a prima donna, Tomsky-omsky."

Tom stood abruptly. "I’d rather not discuss our employees behind their backs, Pete."

Langley also rose to his feet. "Oooh, don’t go away mad, budnik. I’d like you to say-hey to one of our own new hires."

The executive stepped out of the office for a minute as Tom waited, fuming. Whatever was going on at Wickliffe Labs—he didn’t like it!

The door swung open. Peter Langley entered with a smirk on his face. The smirk was followed by an attractive young woman in shark-sharp business attire.

She threw Tom a bland, somehow challenging smile. "Hello, Tom. Long time. Well, maybe not
so
long. Surprised to see me?"

Tom’s youthful face bore a frown of steel.

"Very!"

IT WAS obvious that Pete Langley was enjoying greatly his supposed rival’s discomfiture. "Amelia’s one of the nation’s top attorneys in high-tech matters," he remarked. "Commercial patents—you know. Given our expansion goals here at Wickie, she’s a perfect fit."

"Call me a nice piece," added the woman in question, "of the puzzle."

Amelia Foger, Esq., had briefly worked in the Swift Enterprises legal office. She had resigned in anger, certain that the Swifts were prejudiced against her because of her great-uncle Andy Foger, who had made himself a persistent problem for the first Tom Swift, Tom’s great-grandfather.

"I didn’t realize you were working for Pete, Amy," Tom said.

"As shown by your red, white, and blue face, Tom."

"Say now, don’t take it personal, kiddoo," smarmed Langley. "I mean—
she
approached
us
."

"I won’t interrupt your confab, boys," Amelia said. "But Tom, Pete wanted me to mention one little thing to an old friend. I won’t call it advice. I don’t give free advice. Unprofessional.

"Our mutual friend Dr. Grimsey worked here for quite a few years on some—well, let’s call them projects of significance. Computer-like he may be, but we can’t
quite
delete his memory. I know you’ll bear in mind the need to tread carefully in dealing with possible proprietary information of value to this company. We’re obligated to protect our interests."

"If you or Pete have any such concerns, Amy," Tom snapped, "I’m sure you still have Willis Rodellin’s number in our legal department."

"Hmm. I
might
. Somewhere."

Langley accompanied his counterpart’s eloquent
stalk
out to the airfield and the Pigeon Special. "I love these little miniplanes your Construction affiliate cranks out," he remarked. He added: "But you know, I was thinking... I have a little free advice for you, even if Amy doesn’t."

Tom looked at him levelly. "What?"

"Check out the plane carefully before you take off. See, look at it this way—you got an elaborately staged bogus call that brought you here to Wickliffe in a plane. So why? I have this slogan:
the consequence is the cause
. Maybe the call was to get you here in order to plant a bomb or something in your plane. Happens to people like us—right? Think of that?"

"Yes."

"What do you think of my slogan?"

"As of now, nothing."

After a thorough look-over, Tom flew the plane back to Enterprises, fuming. He talked to himself—and was glad there were only a few clouds to catch his words.

Narrating the story to his father, he concluded with, "So Amy Foger is involved in all this!"

Damon Swift nodded, a certain kind of faint smile on his face. "Yes, ‘involved’ may be the word exactly. She and Pete may be seeing one another on a personal basis. Pete Langley is unmarried, and Amelia wouldn’t care anyway, I’d wager. Miss Foger strikes me as rather ambitious."

Tom plunked himself down behind his desk. "I’m mainly interested in the business of the fake call. Dad, whoever I reached has obviously set up some gimmick to intercept and divert calls—either at our end or at Pete’s end."

"Yet it may not be the work of an enemy, son. Pete Langley is a driven young man with big responsibilities and the same sort of big, powerful imagination as yours. In situations like that, minds like that can develop—problems."

"You think he’s having a breakdown of some kind?"

"Nothing that dramatic, necessarily. But it’s clear you’ve been on his mind. He was thinking of calling you over, wasn’t he? Perhaps he did place, and answer, those calls himself, using the dead line."

"And blocked out the memory of doing so." Tom shrugged. "Maybe. Sometimes when I get into some problem, I guess I do lose touch with things around me. So I’m told."

His father chuckled affectionately. "We’re all blessed with a wonderful auxiliary mechanism in our skulls called our
brain
. It’s more than willing to take things over when necessary, when the
mind
decides to step out for a while."

Tom discussed the matter with Harlan Ames in the plant security office next door, then called Willis Rodellin to keep him on top of things. Finally, restless, he drove over to the observatory to see what progress had been made by Hank and Dr. Grimsey in repairing the megascope.

Hank was all smiles. "Boss, Edmund here is a Godsend! Believe it or not, we’re ready for some serious testing."

Delighted, Tom exclaimed, "Great! Dr. Grimsey, I can’t thank you enough."

"Oh pshaw!" the older man grinned. "Let’s take a look around the solar system, shall we?"

They actuated the Mighty Eye and made the antenna’s aiming motors hum. In moments they were looking down on Fearing Island, the Enterprises space-launch facility off the coast of Georgia, with Tom’s huge repelatron-powered spaceship
Challenger
looming like a fantastic gyroscope over its launch pad. Next came a view of the glittering, elegantly rotating space outpost; and then, kinking and curving the invisible microwave helix-tube that upheld the viewpoint terminus, the three took a look at the far side of the moon.

"Electrifying!" murmured Grimsey. "This, Tom boy, is what one might call a scientific miracle—a mondo major turn-on!" The man was
that
old.

"No reason not to make up for lost time," Tom said. He adjusted the megascope system to send the imaging point toward the Green Orb, which was now considerably closer to the Earth, although still above the plane of the ecliptic.

As the beam readjusted at light-speed, Tom asked his companions if they had determined what had caused the space prober’s disastrous burnout. "If you mean the ultimate, original cause, Skipper, we haven’t doped that out. Best guess is that the circuit supercooling system failed at some unidentified weak spot."

"But we’ve checked that element quite thoroughly now," Dr. Grimsey assured Tom. "Thank goodness your translimator machine provides a ready source of liquid helium." This invention of Tom’s made modifications in the molecular state constants of gases and liquids, easily converting gaseous helium to its supercold liquid form.

The megascope console signaled that the beam terminus had established a position near the Green Orb. "Of course,
near
in this case means a distance of a few thousand miles. Let’s get a good look, then swoop in." Tom worked the dials of the console as the greenish disk appeared in the center of the screen.

Again it struck Tom how eerie and half-real the Green Orb seemed to the eye. Its pale green hue was again extraordinarily faint and gloomy, its curving edges strangely elusive.

"No sign of that turbulence effect you mentioned," Hank remarked.

"Let’s see if we can get inside the ‘green curtain’," Tom said with excited determination. He caused the viewpoint to move forward quickly, and the disk swelled up with a jump to fill the screen.

Suddenly, instantly, the image wavered and sparkled. "Good night, I guess you spoke too soon, Hank," Tom groaned.
The Orb was again lighting up before their eyes!
From this closer point of view, it was clear that whatever the body of the Orb was made of, it was in a state of agitation.

They watched in bemused silence for several minutes, not advancing the imaging point any further. "I’m no astronomer," noted Grimsey, squinting at the screen, "but I’ve surely never run across a planetary sight like that. The gaseous envelope seems to be
granular
, composed of little clouds or motes." The small, glowing elements seemed to be swirling about wildly.

Tom nodded at the monitor screen. "The effect must be magneto-hydro-dynamic in nature—clumps of cold plasma, which can form itself into twisted strands." He indicated a bank of waggling meters on the control panel. "The megascope is fighting to hold off decoherence in the quantum matrix at the beam terminal. And yet," he went on in a mystified tone, "the space station reported no emissions in any part of the spectrum, nothing that could cause decoherence."

Suddenly the high-definition viewscreen flared a brilliant neon-green—and went black.

"Oh no," Tom moaned. "It’s happened again—complete system failure!"

Hank and Dr. Grimsey keenly scrutinized the meter readouts. "The limiters and contra-surgers contained it this time," Hank reported, "but it’s the same thing as before. Some kind of powerful energy pulse flooding through the transmitter rings and shorting out the anti-inverse-square-wave generator."

"A mind-blower of a name!" Grimsey commented. "The megascope is completely knocked dead, I’m afraid. Shall we commence repair?"

Tom shook his head. "Don’t worry about it now. We need to get at the source. I’m sure we’re all thinking the same thing as to the cause of this."