Tom Swift and His Megascope Space Prober (5 page)

"Sounds good to me!" grinned the young engineer. "I’ve read a little about what they call ‘quantum cryptography’. But look, Tom, I’ve always understood that using the quantum principle for basic communications was just plain impossible. Someone give you permission to break the laws of physics?"

"Not break them. But just maybe there’s a way to outsmart them!"

Before Tom could elaborate, a big gravelly bellow filled the room with: "
Food’s up an’ waitin’, folks! First course on the table!
"

The bellower, Chow Winkler, master of the dinner, was an old and colorful friend of the Swifts. As executive chef, he was a fixture at Swift Enterprises. In his simple and straightforward way the former chuck wagon cook from Texas had saved the day—and the bacon—more than once while traveling with his beloved young "pardners" Tom and Bud.

The Swifts, Barclays, and Sterlings, joined by Bashalli Prandit and her brother and sister-in-law, sat at the head table of honor. There was a place there for Chow as well, but the excitable cook spent most of his time up on his pudgy bowlegs dealing with dinner, and keeping a wary eye on his assistant Boris. "Cain’t trust that fancy-pants Russian t’do things right proper," he grumbled to Tom.

During the dinner Hank showed a video of the sights he and his family had seen, and Tom took the microphone to briefly describe Bud’s planned voyage and the scientific accomplishments it aimed at. When he mentioned the
Highroad
spacecraft and its builder, there was a low muttering throughout the room.

There was a break between the end of the main course and Chow’s elaborate dessert. Dancing filled the time. The younger crowd danced to a vibrant altMuze group Tom had brought in from the local high school. The older guests were more strongly motivated by a rock band, the antique sounds of a quarter century past.

"Listen to that
noise
!" Sandy murmured to Bashalli. "What
is
it with that generation?"

"All a matter of when one grows up, Sandra," Bash commented. "But it is surely hard to take, having to watch all that jerking and wiggling by our elders—it seems to me rather indecent."

Chow, standing nearby, overheard. "Wa-aal now, that there bangin’ and strummin’ ain’t so bad, and it sure gives your folks some exercize. But
I
sure couldn’t jump around like that."

"What ever happened to the foxtrot?" asked Bud.

After dessert, applause for Chow and Boris, and more dancing, the four friends were about to leave when the Inn’s visitors concierge handed Tom a folded note with his name scribbled on the outside. He opened it and read:

Your helicopter will crash on return flight!

The warning note was unsigned. Without betraying his reaction, Tom folded the paper again, stuffed it into his pocket, and turned to Bud.

"Let’s go wash up, flyboy, before we start home. Excuse us, girls?"

"Yes," Sandy answered. "We young ladies prefer associating with washed-up men."

Bud had guessed instantly that something was up. In the washroom Tom took out the note and showed it to him. Bud’s face flamed with anger as he read the message. "Those jerkfaces!" he cried. "They must have hid somewhere in the woods watching the Inn and seen us come down on the field."

Tom gave a grim nod. "I doubt they tried to defeat the alarm system and plant a bomb aboard. More than likely they’re in position to use the freeze-beam on the chopper as we take off."

"The handheld one, you suppose?"

"Maybe. But they could have the long-range model, the one they used on the jet, positioned somewhere on higher ground."

"Yeah, to zap us as we gain altitude. Skipper, I don’t know who sent this, but after what happened to your car I wouldn’t take a chance!"

Tom did not underrate the danger, but pointed out, "It doesn’t make any sense to plan on downing us—but warn us beforehand. This note may have been written by some crank and might have no connection with that road ambush or the attack on the jet."

"Could be," conceded Bud. "Tell you one thing, though. I’m looking forward to visiting Venus. But I’d really prefer doing it alive!"

The two scouted up Harlan Ames, who had attended the event with his daughter Dodie. "What does the event manager say? The fellow who brought you the note?"

"He said he found the note on the front counter by the entrance after he’d stepped away for a few minutes," explained Tom. "As you see, it had my name on it. No one saw who put it there."

"It could have been one of the employees of the Inn," the security chief speculated, "possibly someone planted in the work staff to spy on you during the event. I’ll investigate, run fingerprints and so on. But meanwhile, boss, what do you plan to do? Hitch a ride back?"

Tom smiled with determination. "Why not try to draw them out? Don’t worry, Harlan. Bud and I have dreamed up one of our daring plans!"

Presently Tom and Bud strolled over to the Inn’s airfield with Mrs. and Mrs. Barclay and Bud’s sister and brother. Tom appeared—to any watcher—to be showing them the
Skeeter
, walking completely around it very slowly, trying to glance casually at the underside of the fuselage, as Bud hung back at the copilot’s hatch.

"Okay," said Tom in tones that were
just
loud enough. "no burn marks. Hop in, flyboy."

As the Barclay family backed away, Tom and Bud vaulted into their seats. It took all of three seconds to start the overhead blades whirling, a few more to catapult the
Skeeter
upward and forward with a quick burst of jet power. In a split instant they had hurtled across the airstrip and into the groove of the Inn’s access road, keeping low beneath the treetops as they paralleled the road from an altitude of a mere two yards.

"Looks like we’ve got it wired, genius boy!" exulted Bud. "They can’t see the chopper for the trees!"

"It was a risk," Tom admitted, "but a calculated one. If they’d planned to use their big beamer—it would almost
have
to be fairly big, I’d think, to have hit our jet miles high—they’d position it on higher elevation a mile or two off. And at that angle the pines will block it until we get close to the lake."

"Okay. But why couldn’t they just pick us off over the lake?"

"They
could
—but they
didn’t
when we flew over on the way. There could be some sort of clue in the fact that they haven’t used the long-range model in, or near, Shopton. Maybe the device produces some sort of signal burst as it discharges, something that bright boys like us could detect."

"Maybe," agreed Bud. "But there’s a good way for them to eliminate that problem—dump the bright boys in Lake Carlopa!"

After a brief but tense air-hop the
Skeeter
landed back at Enterprises without incident, and Tom called the cell number of Markham Wesberg, a plant employee. He had agreed to drive Sandy and Bashalli back to the Swift residence in his van, which the girls had entered in a concealed way. "Everybody safe at home," he reported. "Wow, chief—thanks for making me a part of your adventure!"

Bud sat in Tom’s lab, regarding his chum with a grave expression as the young scientist-inventor clicked the telephone off "What have you gotten yourself tangled up in this time, Tom? Not that I’m worried that you won’t be able to handle it, but—you know."

"I know," said Tom, giving Bud’s shoulder a squeeze, thinking:
But—you wish you were going to be here to see how I do it.

Bud spent the night at the Swifts’, rising at dawn to meet his chartered jet at the Shopton Airport. Though excited at the prospect ahead, the young pilot seemed subdued at parting from Tom and the familiar surroundings of Swift Enterprises. Tom, too, was keenly aware of a pang of sadness. After sharing so many adventures on their daring space voyages, he would not be with his pal on this new cruise into the unknown.

"Let me know what you find under that cloud cover up on Venus, rocket boy," Tom said, trying to sound cheerful—and not choke up.

"Oh, I will. Telling the whole story’ll give me something to look forward to. And as a matter of fact― " Bud’s face brightened. "By the time I’m done with training, I’ll bet you’ll have that new radio gizmo up and running! Give me one of the units and we can talk from one end of space to the other!"

"I promise, Bud. When you lift off, you’ll have one of my parallelophones in your space locker."

Bud winced comically. "
What
-o-phone? Man, let’s just call it a Private Ear Radio, okay?"

"Okay." The word hurt Tom as he said it.

Bud glanced at his wristwatch, a gift from his best pal. "Time to get goin’." He paused at the door, then said quietly: "It won’t be half so much fun without you along, Skipper... genius boy." Giving Tom a playful but half-hearted poke in the ribs, Bud strode off abruptly.

Deep in thought, Tom breakfasted quietly, then hopped into his car, newly repaired, and drove to his private laboratory at Enterprises. He was baffled and angry at the attempts to injure him. Who was behind the bizarre high-tech attacks? And why?

The Swifts and their revolutionary scientific inventions had often been targets for scheming criminals and subversive agents. Recently, with Bud at his side, Tom had fought for his life against deadly enemies while on a difficult engineering mission in the Middle East. In outer space and under the sea, and everyplace in between, the young scientist-inventor had faced heavy odds in his restless urge for new achievements. And the dangers were never to him alone.

Heaving a sigh, Tom gave up trying to solve the puzzle for the present and strode into his lab. "Too much to do to spend time worrying," he muttered restlessly, settling down at his workbench in front of his design computer and circuitry emulator. "If we’re to have any rest from these guys, it may depend on getting the communicator done—the ‘Private Ear Radio’."

Tom was hours deep in work when he was interrupted by a call from George Dilling, the plant’s chief of communications. "I just took a call from Congressman Van Arkyn, Tom."

"Right, the head of the subcommittee that deals with Enterprises. What did he want?"

"He asks you to go down to the teleconference room—something big." Dilling added: "Just you, no one else in the room. He made that very clear. He’ll link through from D.C. in about fifteen."

Mystified, Tom hurried to the company’s advanced communications setup, which projected video images of the conferees as if they were all seated together around a table.

An image swam into focus in the darkness across from the young prodigy. "Hello, Tom," said Van Arkyn, an avuncular type in his later 60’s.

Tom nodded politely. "Hello, Congressman." He turned his gaze to the second figure in the circle of light, seated next to the congressman—and his eyebrows flew up in astonishment!

"ASA PIKE!" Tom exclaimed. "You’re the last person I expected to see!"

When Tom had been preparing for his first trip into space, an unknown enemy had endangered his plans. Following a lead, he and Bud had traveled to a coastal town where they recruited a local man, Asa Pike, to assist them. Yet later events suggested that Pike was much more than what he seemed, and in the end he had vanished without a trace—leaving a broad hint that he was an agent of a deep-cover U.S. security agency which called itself "Collections".

The sun-craggy older man returned a smile. "What’s that, son? Asa Pike? Never heard of th’ feller. Friend o’ yours?"

Tom grinned. "He turned out to be a very
good
friend!"

"Well then, good f’ him."

Tom used the signature phrase of the Collections group. "Are our tax dollars still at work?"

Pike’s eyes twinkled. "Always are, don’t ye think?"

"Let’s not worry about introductions," stated Congressman Van Arkyn. "Something of grave import has come up, Tom, and this gentleman is in the best position to tell you about it."

Tom nodded, waiting. "Say there, young man, I hear you’ve been havin’ a speck of trouble lately," said the man Tom persisted in calling Asa Pike. "Problems with your car? Jet plane, too?"

"I’m not surprised that you folks know about it," was Tom’s reply. "Can you tell me who’s behind it?"

"Who?
Enemies
, I’d say. A gang o’ scrowlywogs who have a nice business stealing blueprints and th’ like, and puttin’ them up t’auction, so t’ speak."

"Such as my translimator plans?"

"Plucked ’em right out of your laser beam."

"But how could they manage such a thing?" Tom demanded incredulously.

"Same way they been keepin’ an eye on you, Tom," Pike replied. "And
that
happens t’be why we’re speakin’ here right now."

"They stole a completed prototype from the Defense Department," interjected Van Arkyn. "It’s something vital to national security, and at large in the world it’s extremely dangerous."

"A weapon of some kind?" Tom asked, thinking of the ray device.

But Asa Pike should his head. "Nope, young feller. Not in the way you’re a-thinkin’. It’s a flying remote-control spy drone, t’ put it plain. They call it—your gov’mint likes nicknames too, y’know!—the Eyeballer." He held up a piece of paper before the camera lens. "Here’s a rough sketch, fer you and anybody else who might be cuttin’ in on us."

The object in the picture was shaped something like a starfish, with a disklike center. "This sketch shows it top view. Can’t show you the side, because they
ain’t
no side, Tom. It’s about as thin as a playin’ card! Stealth sort o’ thing, they call it. Hard to pick up on radar."

"I understand," Tom said. "Like the stealth bomber. How big is it?"

Pike grinned. "Oh, let’s see now. About this big, I’d say." He held up a hand, fingers spread.

"Good grief!" gasped the young inventor. "The miniaturization must be― "

"You can see why the Pentagon is most anxious to have it back in our possession," declared the congressman. "The prototype itself, the plans and any copies of them, and the perpetrators."

"Of course!" said Tom. "Who are the suspects?"

"Not so sure," said Pike. "Not so sure as we’d care to tell you what we’re thinking, that is."