Tom Swift and His Cosmotron Express (2 page)

"Okay," said Vendiablo in his usual gruff voice, reading from scribbled notes. "A little after two, radar from our overlook satellite picked up a target crossing into U.S. territorial waters at Mach 3.5. It had a north-northwest heading but was on a curve; we can’t reliably backtrack to a point of origin. Imaging shows something flat and relatively small, practically breaking the waves. No surprise that Federal early-warning missed it, that small and close to the surface."

"Some sort of cruise missile?" Tom speculated.

"Not like any we’ve seen. We have no idea whether it was manned or remoted. The high-phase-diffraction radar captured an image, and the seabed sonar net picked up dozens of small objects falling toward the work dome. Before anyone could even pick up a microphone to warn you about them it was long gone, out of range."

"Maybe it took a dive into the ocean," suggested Bud excitedly.

"At better than three times the speed of sound? I don’t think Brungarian technology could handle something like that," was Tom’s response. "Still, they’ve obviously made some sort of breakthrough with this ‘flying fury’ of theirs. Let’s see a hardcopy of that image, Mace."

The image was surprising for how little it revealed. The mysterious superplane had the form of a featureless flat rectangle, very shallow, with only a trace of a tailfin and a low bulge at the middle that might be a cockpit. The image hinted that it had a slight wedge-shape in sideview. "Looks like it was designed to function as a stealth bomber," commented Hank.

"They got the
stealth
part right," gibed Bud. "The thing looks like a flying barn door. How big is it?"

"Small," Tom said, checking the radar data. "Not much bigger than one of our Pigeon Specials. No wings—the underhull must function as a lift-surface."

"An aero-surfboard!"

"But what really intrigues me," Tom continued, "is what makes it go. You can see something of an exhaust wake streaming out from the entire aft edge of the hull, but..."

"What?" asked Vendiablo tensely. He was almost always tense.

Hank continued Tom’s thought. "But it doesn’t have ordinary jet-trail characteristics. It’s more like a long, flat ribbon. Look—the heat shimmer goes on and on along its path for
miles
, bouncing light in all directions. And look here." The engineer pointed at the lower part of the captured image.

"Right," said Bud. "The water’s all frothy and stirred up. Must be
some
wake."

"It’s not just getting whipped up by the passage of the plane," Tom pronounced. "Steam! All the way back for miles, the sea water is
boiling
where the plane skimmed over it. Whatever’s coming out as exhaust is burning hotter than a rocket!"

"Not just a flying fury," said the young pilot. "A
fire
fury!"

"I’m in touch with D.C.—with Defense. Put in a call right away. Doing my job, you know," Vendiablo reported—defensively.

"Good," nodded the young inventor. He knew the security chief was personally very
in
secure.

"Remember, you didn’t ask us to extend the island security perimeter out to the worksite."

Tom ignored the comment and said: "Now I’m going back to the site in the aquatomic tracker."

"And on our way to the
SnooperSub
—note the word
our
!—you can amaze me by telling me why we’re using an underwater tracker to trail something that never even touched the water." Bud knew Tom’s invention, and the midget submersible that carried it, relied upon waterborne chemical traces to perform its tracking function.

Tom smiled. "I’ll tell you right now, flyboy—the level of suspense doesn’t need any further goosing. I’m going to use the tracker to check out a hunch of mine. I think that exhaust trail, the hot tail on the
Fire Fury
, left a load of particulates in the water underneath it."

"You mean fuel droplets?"

"Not the kind of fuel you mean. Metal!"

"
Metal fuel?
" repeated Hank Sterling in surprise.

"Let me save
that
explanation until I find out if my hunch has anything to it."

Tom and Bud jeeped to the submersibles pier and were soon out to sea in the compact, tadpole-shaped
SnooperSub
. "Much as I love ol’
Snoop
, she’s mighty pokey," Bud complained. "Aren’t you worried that the atom trail will have dispersed by the time we get there?"

"Not especially," Tom answered. "In this case I’m not concerned about tracking anything. I just want to use the apparatus to collect and study whatever might be floating around in the seawater near the surface."

As they neared the site Tom submerged, but the waters barely wet the top of the hull. The young inventor activated the aquatomic analysis system and studied the screen output intently. "Uranium?" asked Bud. "We already knew that."

"Metallic flakes, very minute," Tom pronounced. "Some hit the water in molten form and recrystallized. Aluminum, magnesium, sodium, chromium—typical seawater stuff, though in unusual concentrations. Probably due to the boiling. But also..." He looked away from the readout screen, thought in his eyes. "Amphoteric compounds."

"You’re itching to tell me what that means, Skipper."

Tom grinned. "It means the compound can act as both an acid and a nonacidic base. The metal element is classed as a metalloid."

"Important?"

"Unusual, and obviously connected to the
Fire Fury
’s means of propulsion. I’m detecting boron, germanium, tellurium, arsenic..."

"Does it support your theory, chum? Metal fuel? I mean—how do you push a jet along on metal fuel?"

"How? Very ingeniously." The youth again bent his spiky crewcut over the monitor panel. "And here’s something not just interesting but a little alarming. Some of those metallic flakes include
Neo-Aurium!
"

Though unsure why the find might be
alarming
, Bud gulped. Neo-Aurium—a substance related to gold mined only in one place on Earth: the Atlantic seafloor near the sunken ruins of Aurum City, thought to be remains of the fabled land of Atlantis! "Well—okay—I suppose it’d be a natural choice to make a high-tech multi-mach plane out of. Lightweight, friction resistant..."

"What we’re seeing didn’t peel off the fuselage, or get blasted off the thrust chamber walls," Tom declared. "It has the same conformation as the other flecks."

"So it’s being used as fuel?"

Tom shrugged. "Maybe ‘fuel’ isn’t exactly the right word, Bud. I remember reading—it’s been years—something about a proposed hypersonic aircraft that was to be propelled by igniting a sort’ve cloud of metallic dust in the air behind the fuselage to create a shockwave that would
shove
the vehicle forward. A tremendous amount of heat, a real blast, was evolved in the process."

"Did they ever build it?"

"As I recall, it was just speculative. There were real engineering problems. But some of the technology was used in those nonnuclear super-bombs called ‘bunker busters.’ A few of those babies can level a whole town!"

"Jetz!—What about the Neo-Aurium?"

"A mystery," stated the young inventor. "Of course it’s out on the market, though very expensive. It’s not especially hard to acquire. I’ve never studied the possibility that it might be used for this sort of purpose."

"Somebody beat you to it!"

"Apparently somebody Brungarian," mused Tom.

They subbed back to Fearing Island, Tom immersed deeply in thought. After conferring by Enterprises videophone with Federal authorities and his father in Shopton, he boarded the jet that had carried them south from New York the day previous—Tom, Bud, and Hank Sterling.

Over Pennsylvania, Hank remarked, "As a future-minded engineer, that
Fire Fury
engine fascinates me—but what about the incident itself? What are you supposed to have ‘stolen’ from these guys, Tom?"

"And I’ll toss in a pointed Barclay query," Bud said. "What’s with the weird delivery system? Brungarian writing on uranium slugs!—that’s the sort of thing they put in boys’ adventure books."

Tom chuckled. "Well, they try for plausibility in the ‘Tom Swift’ fictionalizations. Maybe they’ll come up with something a little easier to swallow.

"But as to the question... We have to identify what happened, or at least what was
supposed
to happen, as a consequence of the way they chose to do this. Why
this
way?"

"Any ideas?" asked Hank.

"Not a one!"

When they flashed across Lake Carlopa and set down on the Swift Enterprises airfield, the sun was riding low. Hank headed off to his family, and Tom asked Bud if he planned to join the Swifts for supper, as he often did.

"Mmm, not this time," replied the muscular youth. "I think I’ll work out some aching muscles at the gym, then negate it all with junk food."

"See you tomorrow, flyboy."

Tom drove the short distance home, turning over the events in his mind. What did the warning mean—and the accusation inside it?

The outcome is the reason...

He parked his electric two-seater next to his sister’s car, trying to leave his thoughtful frown behind. Some ideas were stirring, but they were unformed and speculative.
No sense dragging Mom and Dad and Sis into this nonsense,
he told himself. Not until after dinner!

Opening the front door, he found his father standing in the entranceway. "Hi, Dad," Tom said absently. "Any new developments since I phoned?"

"A few," Damon Swift responded quietly.

Tom didn’t like the frozen expression on his father’s face. "Like what, Dad? Is everything—"

Mr. Swift interrupted by giving a slight nod in the direction of the living room. Tom turned and saw his mother sitting silently, her hands folded, her face sober and tense.

"Mom?"

"Come in, dear. We have a, a
guest
who wants to meet you."

Tom entered the big living room, puzzled. Now he could see a man sitting comfortably in a big chair across from his mother. The man was massively built, casually dressed, and mostly flesh from the eyebrows up. He smiled at Tom pleasantly, but somehow showing an edge—the knife-edge hint of a threat.

"Do come in, Tom," he said softly in a throaty voice heavily accented. "Come in, you and your father, come and sit down. For it seems we must have a calm, quiet conversation."

Tom looked around the room, and ice shot through him. "Where’s Sandy?"

"Your sister is upstairs, in her room," said the man. "And she is not alone. And that, young friend,
that
is why our conversation will remain very calm and very, very quiet."

TOM’S eyes darted toward his father. Both faces were pale. "He assures us Sandy won’t be harmed," said Damon Swift.

Tom turned toward the man with fury. "Assurance from somebody we don’t even know!"

"Nor does Miss Swift have a prior acquaintance with Ury Vrysoff, who holds a gun on her as she lies back comfortably on her bed," he declared. "Yet she must trust this man, as you must trust me. Or pretend to, eh?—fake it, that is what Americans say. Fake it till you make it."

The man gestured roughly, and Tom sank down on the sofa with his father. "Who are you?"

"I opened the door to let Sandy in, and
he
was there behind her with his associate and a gun," murmured Mrs. Swift.

"Two guns," corrected the man. "And beside our armament, some nice ways to slip through your lovely home’s security system. A magnetic alarm field!—surely it would be more sensible to station a few armed guards here and there. Love of technology can blind one.

"My name? Today, this evening, it is Bielo Ikyoris—good enough. Ikyoris—call me that. And forgive, won’t you, any deficiencies in my English."

Tom stared at him. "You’re Brungarian, I take it."

Ikyoris chuckled. "Ah, do I wear it on my skin? Yes, Brungarian. Of course you make that guess because of the message you received, underwater delivery. ‘
When it must absolutely positively get there fast,
’ eh?"

"Which you are now following up on in person," stated Mr. Swift. "He hasn’t told us anything so far, Tom."

"Exposition should be given only as necessary, and only once," said Ikyoris mildly. "We have merely sat and waited, a little family of strangers."

Tom snapped up the initiative, almost interrupting the period at the end of Ikyoris’s sentence. "Then let’s not waste time. You and your crony are going to be off our property in
seven minutes!
And to save time I’ll tell you what I already know—what I figured out on my way home."

"Mm?" Ikyoris smiled. "Then proceed."

"You used uranium slugs as your notepaper to prove you could get ahold of contraband in quantities enough to waste. You dropped it on the underwater site to demonstrate how well you’re tracking the activities of Swift Enterprises, in real time. Obviously, you made the delivery by your super-jet to announce that you have it and are willing to risk using it—probably more an announcement to the U.S. government than to us."

"Correct," nodded Ikyoris. "And why did we communicate in Brungarian, not English?"

"That really puzzled me," Tom responded, "until just now. Because the message was urgent, and in a foreign language, we accessed a translation website, one of the few scan-in automatic systems that handle Brungarian. You wanted us to do that, for some reason."

"Yes, true," said Ikyoris. "Ah! You see, lad, your marvelous company is protected by antiviral software of the highest grade, some invented by you, some provided by the government, your frequent client and the owners of your rocket island. But when you reach out, when you carelessly connect to a prepared site in a rush—"

Ikyoris paused, and Mr. Swift filled the gap. "You’ve planted something in our cyber network."

"Indeed yes, a strange and clever thing, something that multiplies and spreads voraciously. But please, you needn’t become unduly alarmed. We know you will find it and neutralize it eventually. And in fact, you two Swifts, it does no harm. Nothing will blow up. No rockets will crash down on your heads."