Tom Swift and His Megascope Space Prober (14 page)

"And say now, I hear tell you a’ready caught sight of our little darling," noted Pike, not explaining just how he had "heard" this news.

"The Shadower at Swift Construction Company picked it up right away, circling slowly at 2200 feet," Tom confirmed. "After a few hours, it took off toward Enterprises, where we picked it up again—but it just blipped over, turning south. The detector on the southern outskirts of town registered it continuing on the same course."

"Mm-hmm. We thought she might pass over the Rynnauer Lab facility in Addison, but no—musta turned some. We’ll keep our eyes peeled, though—jest the fust day of the chase, after all." Pike signed off, promising to stay in close touch with Tom and Harlan Ames. "I know you folks have a stake in this y’self," he added.

That evening Bashalli was invited to join the Swifts at the dinner table in anticipation of a call from Bud over his Private Ear unit. The Venus launch now was mere days away.

At eight o’clock the PER unit beeped. "
Hey there, Shoptonians!
" Bud’s voice boomed from the speaker, crystal clear.

"So they actually allowed you a ten minute break from Space Academy?" teased Tom.

Bud chuckled. "Just a short breather before I go into solitary." The jaunty comment fell off at the end, and Tom saw tears come into Sandy’s blue eyes.

"So the schedule is finalized, then?" asked Tom’s father.

"Yes, sir. Sure is, as long as the weather holds up. They want to take advantage of Venus coming into inferior conjunction with the earth."

"Venus inferior?" Sandy giggled—weak and unconvincing though it was. "I thought she outrated all your other girl friends."

"Except for a certain blonde," Bud quipped. "And before genius boy pops out with an explanation, I only meant that Venus will soon pass between the earth and the sun. In other words, she’ll be at her closest point to earth and save us a few hundred thousand miles of space travel."

Sandy winked at Bashalli. "Do you suppose Bud and Tom would ever travel that far to see
us
?"

"We’d probably have to bait the invitation with some of your mother’s marvelous cooking," teased the Pakistani with a chiding look at Tom.

Her remark brought a chuckle from Mr. Swift. "You may have something there, Bashalli," he said. "Anne Longstreet always did know the way to a man’s heart!’’

Mrs. Swift, whose maiden name was Longstreet, blushed prettily as she said, "Bud, I so wish you were here to join us at the table."

"I—I do too, ma’am. Every twenty-four hours, at dinnertime there in Shopton, I’ll be thinking of you, all of you."

Bud’s voice choked off, and there was the kind of silent moment they had all been hoping to avoid. Tom revived the tone with some effort, turning it to a lively exchange of banter among Tom, Bud, and the two girls. As the conversation drew to a close, Bud remarked: "In my opinion, Astro-Dynamics’ equipment is inferior to Enterprises’ all down the line. We’re talkin’ a flashback to pre-repelatron days. Might as well bring a buggy whip along!"

Bud told Tom he had made many good friends among the engineers and technicians on the Venus project. "In fact, they’re all regular guys," Bud said. But a scowl was almost audible through the PER as he added, "Except Chippy Holbrook. No kidding—how I’m going to stand that guy all the way to Venus and back is beyond me!"

Tom tried to reassure his chum, and Bud’s good humor slowly returned. The youthful astronaut declared he was ready to "take on Chippy Holbrook."

"Thanks for the bon voyage party," Bud told his cross-continent listeners. "Even if I could only be there courtesy of quantum physics, it was swell."

Sandy’s voice trembled a bit as she said, "Come back soon—and safely!" The sentiment was echoed softly by the others.

Tom said: "Keep in touch with me, Bud, as often as you can. Just check your watch and try either the Enterprises cartridge or the one for the house here."

"Will do."

"And remember, flyboy—if you need any help, I’ll come a-runnin’!"

"Thanks, pal. And Tom? Don’t forget—after we make orbit, take your megascope and look through the porthole. I’ll be waving."

Contact was broken, and everyone knew this would be the young flier’s last chance to speak to them until the flight was underway.

"I can’t help being worried about him," said Tom’s mother. The girls readily agreed.

Bud’s conversation had left Tom strangely uneasy as well.
All those months in space with a guy like Holbrook!
he thought.

Somehow, he had the feeling that his best friend was headed for trouble on the flight to Venus.

Tom tried to shake the feeling the next morning as he continued to test the capabilities of his amazing space prober. He was eager to try out the megascope on some heavenly objects.

Switching on power to the equipment, Tom elevated the angle of the antenna, using positioning data from the computer to provide precise aim and distance. He was trying for a view of space outpost. The glittering sky wheel, stark white against the black of space, appeared on the screen in clearcut detail, bristling with its communications dishes, latticework telescope, and the reflecting mirrors used in solar battery production.

Like seeing it close up from one of our cargo rockets about to dock there
, Tom thought.

He scanned some of the other manmade satellites hurtling through the sky on their ceaseless orbits. Then Tom turned his space prober to much further range. He swept across Nestria, Earth’s tiny second moon, and brought his eyes to within a few yards of the whirling atmosphere-making machine that kept the Earth colony alive. "Running fine!" he told himself.

Moving the sensor point again, Tom studied the details of the moon’s surface, slowly creeping along as if he were an astronaut trudging on foot across the desolate plains.

Next, he tried for a view of Venus. "Not that I’m likely to see much." It took several minutes for the focused microwave beam to cross the void to Earth’s mysterious sister. Finally the viewpoint stabilized at a height of 100,000 miles above the planet’s incinerating surface. Tom tuned the video screen for sharper contrast.

He knew that the earth’s sister planet was covered by an opaque atmosphere which kept its surface completely hidden to casual space viewers with merely human eyes. Nevertheless, as Venus settled into focus on the screen, Tom could discern its bright patches and darker areas, and studied them with keen interest.

He zoomed closer and plunged into the sulphurous cloud bank. He halted the quantum lens slightly above ground level, manipulating it for a sideways view. The surface was fairly well illuminated despite the cloud cover, although Tom noted that static-charge phenomena in the atmosphere were causing some shifting distortions in the image. Rugged though it was, Venus looked earthlike in some ways—yet this was an environment hot enough to melt lead, with an atmospheric pressure as great as that on the bottom of the ocean!

"Wonder what kind of information Bud will bring back from his flight," Tom mused listlessly. Whatever was learned from the highly sensitive instruments crammed into the
Highroad
, he reflected, was sure to increase man’s scientific knowledge of Venus a thousandfold.

This thought gave Tom a fresh pang of frustration. If only Swift Enterprises had been given the Venus probe assignment! Instead of Chippy Holbrook, he himself would be Bud’s fellow astronaut on the daring space voyage.

"No use moping about it," Tom said to himself. "There’ll be other space shots—to Venus, Mars, and Jupiter, too! Maybe even a Venus landing one of these days, if we can figure out how to keep someone alive down there." It occurred to him to wonder why he was talking to himself.

Tom switched off the megascope, then left the observatory and went to his private laboratory adjacent to Enterprises’ cavernous underground hangar. He stood gazing at a bare countertop. He muttered, "Okay, what do I work on next?" The young inventor felt a strong need to keep his mind occupied.

The phone bleeped—an in-house call. "This is Tom."

"Ames here, Tom. That agent fellow Pike just contacted me on the PER."

"Is there news?"

"Absolutely, boss. It’s what we’ve been waiting for."

Tom gulped. "They’ve pinpointed the control base for the Eyeballer?"

"Looks like it," confirmed the security chief; "although
pinpointed
is a little optimistic. Apparently there have been quite a number of ‘pings’ on the various Shadower units over the last several hours. It looks like the drone is coming and going from one area. They’ve plotted the lines, and they intersect at, or near, New Orleans!"

"Then that’s where we’ll start looking," Tom declared excitedly. "And you know, it makes a kind of sense for Li Ching to set up a base in that area. There are still plenty of places where the hurricane left things in a chaotic state."

"Right. Good place to hide," agreed Ames. "And that makes it a great big headache, Tom. If the authorities go block to block, house to house, Li will get an early warning and clear out."

Tom grinned at his end of the line. "I know. But we’re not going to use ‘the authorities’. We’re going to pin down the Comrade-General with science—namely my megascope!"

TOM SWIFT and Harlan Ames stared tensely at the screen of the megascope as Tom deftly manipulated its ghostly vantage point. "We know he’s in there somewhere," muttered the young inventor.

The triangulation data from the various Shadower units had pointed to a section of Orleans County on the outskirts of New Orleans, an area of light industry and manufacturing that had suffered extensive hurricane damage and flooding. A fleet of nondescript vehicles, each equipped with a detector, had converged on the area during the several hours previous in hopes of cutting down the 25-square-mile target to something manageable.

The scheme had worked almost immediately. "The Eyeballer’s been coming and going from this little section—about four square miles," Tom noted to Ames.

"Warehouses and office buldings. Can’t they narrow it down further?"

"Not without prowling around in a grid pattern and alerting Li Ching. Remember, if he and his men clear out with the Eyeballer and control equipment― "

"Right. Game over." Ames studied the monitor view as it slowly rolled by, as if from the top of a low-flying helicopter. "What makes you think you’ll be able to locate the base yourself, Skipper?"

"Mostly instinct. But also—in a weird way, the Comrade-General and I think alike. I know the tech-specs of the drone, and it’s given me—
wait a sec!
" Tom swooped the quantum lens downward for a closer view and pointed excitedly at the screen. "There!"

Ames frowned. "That building?"

The screen showed a towering office building, narrow but very tall. As the megascope looked it over from top to bottom it became obvious that the building had been under construction even before nature’s assault. Many windows were just empty frames, and much of the upper reaches had yawning gaps in the walls, its skeleton of girders showing through.

Tom brought his Mighty Eye down to ground level and nosed about. "There’s an underground parking garage, probably mostly flooded. Li and his underlings could have connected to it from some nearby basement to come and go unseen."

"They’d hardly need to occupy an entire building," Harlan pointed out. "We’d have to go floor to floor. Or could your megascope—?"

Tom shook his head, eyes focused on the screen. "Nope. The structural metal, and solid stuff in general, scrambles the microwave tube too much and decoheres the particle field."

"Then, what? They’re not likely to turn on any lights for us."

Tom depressed a button to record precise positioning data from the megascope’s computer, then switched off the monitor. "We can’t just set up a Shadower vehicle near the building," he said, thinking aloud. "At such proximity to the control transmitter, the ‘shadow’ angles sideways and doesn’t touch the ground. And a circling aircraft would give away the game."

"The police or FBI—even the military—could storm the building from all sides. The Li group would be penned in."

"That’s for the authorities to decide," declared Tom; "which is
exactly
why I’m not going to alert them, not now. I’ve seen Li Ching from an arm’s-length away, Harlan. I’ve talked to him and looked in his eyes. He’s merciless and ready to fight like a tiger, even if his whole organization is wiped out in the end."

"They call him the snakeman."

"I don’t want more deaths hanging over me till my crewcut turns gray." His next words were grave. "You know and I know what has to be done. It’s going to take one person, just one, moving through that building undetected."

"Named Tom Swift."

"Are you going to try to talk me out of it?"

"Your Dad and Bud couldn’t. I won’t even try." The security chief gazed at his young boss with a complex expression on his lean face. "I don’t know what to say, Tom. To be frank, I thought seriously about making a few calls to alert the authorities before you could leave."

"You won’t, Harlan."

"No, I won’t. Young man, if a smart kid like you thinks this is the way to go... Well—you
have
been to the moon, after all."

Tom chuckled, relieved and grateful. "To both of ’em! Your trust—everyone’s trust—it means everything, Harlan."

The plan Tom worked out was shared only with those closest to him—and, hesitantly and reluctantly, with Asa Pike. Tom chose to take the resulting silence at the other end of the Private Ear Radio as Pike’s tacit concurrence.

Last of all, he tried to contact Bud. But there was no answer.
He’s tied up with last-minute tasks
, thought Tom.

Would Tom be able to keep his promise, to watch over the spacecraft on its journey?

Tom recorded a message to his best friend and left it in the security safe.

Late on a muggy Louisiana evening a motor home pulled up to an all-night diner three blocks from the unfinished, already-ruined Selland Building. "Thanks, Gary," said Tom Swift to the driver. "Rest of the way on foot."