Tom Swift and His Giant Robot (9 page)

Then Slim Davis cried out,
"Radar blip! Two o’clock!"
The jet banked sharply, and the engines up-throttled. "I’ll try to shake it."

The miles fled beneath the transonic craft, which had switched to a northerly heading. Tom craned his neck, looking over Slim’s shoulder at the radarscope instrument panel. "Good gosh, it’s closing fast, like a—"

The rest of his words were blown away by a sharp jolt that rattled the plane from nose to tail!

"Loss of lift on the left wing," grated Slim, fighting to remain calm. "Trying to compensate, but I’m not—
whoa!"

The jetcraft bucked a second time! Tom, who was on his feet, was almost dashed against the cockpit wall. Bud swung around in his seat and flung out his arms toward his friend, trying to yank him back.

Tom steadied himself, but gasped out: "Slim!"

Thrown violently against his safety restraints, the pilot’s helmeted head was lolling down on his chest!

"He’s out!" Bud cried. "We’re going down!" He frantically took over the controls and tried to smooth the jet’s sudden descent, but he was only partially successful. The ground was rushing up at them through the cockpit viewpane. "Tom, you’ve got to strap yourself in!"

Tom managed to wedge himself into a relatively protected position behind the seats. "Don’t worry!" he called out.

An instant later the jet was bouncing and rumbling across the barren desert floor, raising a huge plume of dust and dirt on all sides. The landing gear, partially extended, was ripped away and sent tumbling over the windswept wilderness.

Finally, with a last groan of metal, the battered cargo jet skidded to a stop, the tip of one wing jammed deeply into the hardpacked earth. Then all was silent.

Minutes passed. Then the cockpit door was kicked open. Tom jumped down and staggered out into the morning sunlight, still obscured by the dusty haze of their landing. Bud followed him.

"How’re you doing?" Bud asked, noting scratches and bruises on Tom’s face and neck.

Tom leaned up against the torn fuselage. "I’m okay. But Slim—I don’t like the way he looks."

"I never did," said Bud. "Sorry—bad time for humor. Slim was pretty well strapped in. What do you think could be wrong?"

Tom coughed, trying to catch his breath. "I—I saw blood—from the corner of his mouth. I’m afraid he might be hemorhaging internally. Bud, Slim could be—!"

"Then we’ll get him help," said Bud firmly. The young pilot swung himself back up into the cockpit. After a few moments he called down, "Radio’s dead. So’s the emergency signal beacon. But they’ll be out looking for us, and we’re easy to spot from the air."

"They won’t come looking for us right away," Tom pointed out, "and we were flying low, so we wouldn’t have been tracked on the Citadel’s air radar. Plus Slim took the jet dozens of miles off course. It may be a couple hours, and I’m not sure Slim
has
a couple hours!"

"Then what should we do, Skipper?"

Feeling stronger, Tom looked off into the distance. There was no sign of habitation anywhere. He slowly turned his gaze—and paused. "Bud! Are those railroad tracks?"

Bud shaded his eyes and whooped. "They sure are!" He jumped down and trotted off toward the tracks, which passed within one hundred yards of the crashed jet. Minutes later, he returned.

"What did you see?" asked Tom.

"Looks like they haven’t been used for a while," Bud replied in a discouraged voice. "Not in bad shape, but pretty rusty. Bet they were used for ore shipments from one of the mines they closed down a few years back."

"Probably," Tom agreed. He thought for a few moments, then asked Bud to boost him up into the plane again. Inside he examined Slim carefully, then took a quick inventory of the forward compartment. Tom then worked his way back toward the cargo hold.

"The door’s jammed," he called down to Bud shortly. "I was able to force it open an inch or two, but no more. As far as I can tell, Sermek’s crate is undamaged. But the hull around the loading hatchway is pushed in pretty badly. It’ll take special machinery to get into the hold."

"I wish Sermek’s controller weren’t in the cargo hold with him," Bud remarked as Tom rejoined him. "We could use his mighty muscles. Hey, maybe he could carry Slim all the way to the nearest town!"

Tom ignored Bud’s comment. "Slim looks worse—his heartbeat is irregular. I’d risk moving him if we had any place to move him to."

Bud gazed idly at the twin gray rails. Then an idea seized him. "Tom!
How about a little train travel!"

The young inventor frowned. "Got a locomotive in your pocket?"

"Nope," said Bud. "But the jet has a handtruck cargo-carrier with nice big tires and adjustable axels!"

Tom perked up. "Sure—we could adjust the width of the axels so the tires would ride low on the inner edges of the rails. And now,
genius boy,
how do you plan to make it go? Or is it all downhill from here on?"

"Doesn’t have to be," Bud laughed. He rapped on the jet’s fuselage. "We have all the
go-
power we need right here!"

Tom looked more than slightly skeptical. "So, what, mount one of the jet engines on the handtruck?"

"Why not? I know these babies, Tom. Swift Construction makes them modularly—it’s a selling point! We don’t need the outer cowling and main manifold; we could lift out the innards of engine two, and use an empty storage drum as a low-pressure fuel tank. The ground has already siphoned off the heat."

"And… we do have the reserve avionics batteries," Tom mused. His eyes began to gleam. "With anybody else it would be half a day of work. But with the team of Swift and Barclay—!"

It took forty minutes; plus time to lower the unconscious Slim Davis—still strapped securely to his detachable seat—onto the platform. And then another ten minutes to lug the bulky contraption over to the rails and get it situated properly between them.

The
Ghostland Express,
as the boys had named it, was simply a flat platform on wheels, with a handrail at the rear. To this handrail they had strapped the mass of feedpipes and fuel-pump apparatus they had extracted from the jet engines, attached to one of the small drums, which they had filled with jet fuel. A flared coupling would serve them as a makeshift thrust-deflector.

"Ready, pal?" Tom asked as they took their places. "You’ll have to hold tight to these strap-ends, like a commuter on a packed subway."

Bud gulped. "I… guess so. Tom—what if this thing just, sort of—
blows up?"

Wearing insulated gloves, Tom picked up the two wire leads from the batteries. "Well, then we’ll get there
all the faster!"
He pressed the leads together, and there was a shower of sparks—and an explosive roar.

Ten seconds later the
Ghostland Express,
sputtering, creaking, and wobbling, but not faltering, was zooming along the metal rails!

"MAN O MAN!" Bud managed to choke out. "Slim’s lucky to be unconscious!"

In actual fact, the makeshift transport wasn’t traveling very fast at all. But it shimmied and vibrated and rocked like a ship at sea, and the jet thruster—only a wan shadow of its normal self—growled and bellowed like an elephant in mating season, leaving behind a curdled trail of thick black smoke.

"You won’t have to take much more of this," Tom shouted over the cacophony of wind and machinery. "The fuel’s almost half-gone already! I’m afraid the
Ghostland Express
isn’t the most efficient way to travel."

At first the tracks were almost completely level. But a few minutes in, the boys found they were mounting a shallow incline as they neared a low ridge between some hills—and steadily slowing.

I just hope we’ve got enough oomph to make it over that ridge,
Bud thought desperately.

As they neared the summit, the vehicle had slowed considerably, and the engine was already showing the first signs of fuel starvation.

"I’d tell you to open up the throttle, Tom," cried Bud. "But there isn’t any!"

Suddenly they were over the high point, and Tom and Bud shouted with glee and relief. The buildings of a small crossroads settlement lay directly ahead, about two miles distant. Even as the engine suddenly sputtered out, they were picking up speed on the downhill slope. Soon they were gliding along parallel to a two-lane highway, waving at the occasional curious driver.

Stopping was easy. Tom braced a length of metal against the rear handrail and angled it down to the earth next to the tracks. It dug into the dirt, and in seconds the short but heroic career of the
Ghostland Express
had come to an end.

Two hours later, Tom, sunburned and bandaged, sat with Bud inside his living quarters at the Citadel, regaling his father and sister, and Bashalli Prandit, with his survival story. "The state highway patrol called an ambulance, which carted Slim off to the nearest major hospital, which is in Roswell. I hear he’s doing fine, and a complete recovery is expected."

"But only because you boys acted with such ingenuity," observed Damon Swift. "We had barely begun the aerial search when the patrolmen put you through to us."

"Tom—Bud—we were all
very
frightened," said Bash in a quavering voice. "We could not imagine what had become of you."

"Oh, we could
imagine,
all right!" Sandy broke in. "We thought you’d all been gobbled up by crows!"

"As usual, it’s not quite clear that what happened had anything to do with ‘Oi-Pah’," said Tom. "There was no apparition this time. And the other times, the whatever-it-was did no harm."

Bud gave a skeptical snort. "Skipper, we were attacked just where you thought we’d be—as we got near Purple Mesa!"

"True," said Tom. Then he grinned. "On the other hand, we
have
been wrong
occasionally
when we jumped to conclusions with both feet!"

"Both state and federal law enforcement swarmed over the mesa when we alerted them that your jet was overdue," Mr. Swift pointed out. "They turned up nothing—just what was left from Professor Hermosillo’s archeological dig, and nothing more recent. It’s fairly inaccessible, you know. Oh, and incidentally," the elder Swift continued, "our Washington contacts say they see no difficulty in giving Hermosillo the go-ahead, based upon our comments."

"I’m glad for his sake," Tom responded.

After a hero-sized lunch prepared by a much-relieved Chow Winkler, Tom puttered about in his laboratory, anxiously awaiting the news that Sermek had been retrieved from the wrecked plane by a crew from the Citadel. But the news that eventuated was startling.

"The robot is gone!"
said the crew foreman over his mobile cellphone.

"Gone!" exclaimed Tom in angry dismay. "But how—?"

"When we pulled up next to the jet we could see right away that the outer cargo hatch had been mechanically forced open," he replied. "The crate is gone too, as well as the relotrol unit and control panel."

"Were there fresh tire tracks in the dirt?"

"We looked for that. But no, not a sign. I could almost believe—"

Tom interrupted him brusquely.
"Don’t say it!
They must have landed in a chopper and flown off again, probably hugging the ground."

Tom immediately reported the theft to Sam Valdrosa, and then to his father, who shared his dismay. "Tom, will this outrage set back your timeline?"

"Not much," replied the young inventor. "I won’t allow it to! I’ll just make Ator the primary test subject. Thank goodness we flew him in on the
Sky Queen."

A fleeting thought crossed Tom’s mind—had it been unwise to bring Sandy and Bashalli out to the Citadel as if it were a vacation resort? He would have been doubly concerned had a known that, while he was dealing with these matters, the two girls had been conspiring with Bud Barclay to take a trip out to Purple Mesa.

"I don’t know how I get into these things," Bud protested in mock despair. "The two Swifts’ll skin me alive!"

"Nonsense!" declared Bashalli. "This is just your male protective hormones kicking in. I have had enough of
that
from my relatives!"

"You heard Daddy say the whole place had been picked-over just a few hours ago," Sandy noted. "We just want to look around a little and collect a few rocks."

In the end Bud promised the girls that he would help them explore Purple Mesa for the rest of the afternoon. After lunch he had the
Skeeter,
Tom’s compact jet-thrust helicopter, rolled out of the hangar-hold of the
Sky Queen
and on to the airfield. Bud Barclay was well-known as Tom’s close friend and personal pilot, and no questions were asked.

"Just log this as a sight-seeing trip around the desert," Bud radioed the Citadel control tower.
Well, that’s pretty true,
he said to himself, feeling guilty.

Bud helped Tom’s sister and Bashalli aboard while the ground crew checked the fuel supply. Through the
Skeeter’s
wide windows, the crew could see Sandy loading her camera. Bash, her sketching pad under her arm, waved happily in anticipation of the day’s fun.

Bud climbed into the pilot’s seat. The scythe-like jet-tipped rotor blades began to rotate, slowly at first, then with tremendous speed. The jetrocopter rose slowly through the cloud it had stirred up, making a gay picture as it sailed off with the sightseers.

Soon the plucky little craft was riding the canyon updrafts. Under Bud’s skillful handling, the chopper covered many miles of scenic eroded rock, hovered directly in front of grotesque pink cliffs, and whirled around jagged, fiery-orange stone formations. He windmilled the craft under a natural limestone arch while Sandy snapped pictures and Bashalli drew quick sketches for later elaboration in oils.

Turning north they passed over Indian pueblo dwellings. The adobe skyscrapers, heaped atop one another, rose like rock-tiered tables out of the loam. Through binoculars Sandy could plainly see the bright-colored blankets that the Indians used for doors.

After passing over a stretch of rolling land dotted with sagebrush, Purple Mesa rose up ahead like a solid fortress in the lighter-colored landscape.