Tom Swift and His Megascope Space Prober (6 page)

"Are you saying this device has something to do with the attacks on me?"

"Purt sure on that one," Asa Pike confirmed. "See now, one thing about the Eyeballer is how fast she moves—about Mach Four! Gets there from cruise speed in jest a handful of seconds. So one day, let’s say, they have it flying up over Swift Enterprises, watching who’s coming and going, eyeing—fer example—Tom Swift’s little bronze car as it goes a-toolin’ down the road. Mighty nice if you want t’ set up an ambush.

"Or mebbe you keep an eye on the communication antennas and that laser do-jiggy up on the roof, waitin’ to see when she fires up. Always have t’ send out a few test pulses before y’start in with the message, am I right? Which gives the Eyeballer plenty o’ time to zip on into line, catch the ray, then send it on agin almost b’fore you know it."

"The perfect spy machine," pronounced Tom. "They must have had it trail the jet the other day, all the way to Washington."

"Say!—must have at that. So, they do what they can t’spy on where you go for your meeting, and then when you leave they fly it out underneath you and shoot that freezer thingy o’ theirs—stolen from th’ Germans, if you want t’know—right up your belly."

"Then they don’t have a tight-focus long range model after all," Tom muttered. "They just get up close with a miniature model, hand held or mounted on the Eyeballer. But why wouldn’t they have used the drone yesterday to attack the jetrocopter? The trees wouldn’t have blocked something like that."

Pike winked conspiratorially. "Now
that
, son, is what I’d call a very good question. Almost makes ye wonder if somethin’ else was a-goin’ on with that note you got."

"Do you know the answer?"

"Nope. Lots else, as you kin see. Not that’n, though."

Van Arkyn said, "The Eyeballer is coated with that antidetection sheathing you Swifts came up with, and has holograph emulators—like little TV screens, they say—all over its surface, causing it to blend in with the background like a chameleon. We built it, but haven’t a clue as to how to detect it out in the field. We’re hoping you can solve it, Tom."

Thinking of the size and importance of the challenge, Tom let out a deep breath. "I’ll try, but I’ll need to know more of the details—how it’s propelled, its power source, and so on."

"When you return to your office, you’ll find that a special courier has deposited blueprints in your safe," the congressman stated.

"Stand t’reason these gabbers have listened t’ everything we’ve jest said," noted Pike calmly. "No matter—they’d be plain idjits not to guess from the get-go that we’d come to Tom Swift with this. Good chance they’ll pull the Eyeballer away from your factory now, fer safety. But I’m a-guessin’ that won’t stop ye, not likely. Hmm?"

"Good to see you again, Asa."

The man grinned as Congressman Van Arkyn moved to switch off the teleconference camera. "Good t’see
you
again, boy. For th’
fust
time, o’ course."

Tom returned to his office and found the blueprints, unlabeled, in his code-locked safe. "Trent, did anyone enter the office in the last hour?"

"Not a one, Tom," replied Munford Trent, the two Swifts’ secretary. "And I’ve been here all day."

Tom chuckled to himself in near disbelief.
Good night, those blueprints might have been in the safe for days!
"I don’t know why we bother with an alarm system around here," he muttered, hastily adding: "Don’t worry, Trent. You’re not at fault."

To limber up his mind for the new problem, the young inventor decided to resume work on the old one—the Private Ear Radio.

Tom was soon covering sheet after sheet of paper with diagrams and lengthy computations. "Quantum-level signaling!" he said to himself. "Seems like Mother Nature doesn’t want us humans to figure out how to do it. But maybe she’ll reward me if I play it clever."

Satisfied at last that he was on the right track, Tom plunged into the job of electronic construction, anxious to begin testing his new approach. A tangled assembly of nano-scaled microcomponents and wiring gradually took shape on his workbench. He switched on the crude device and began to note down the readings on several monitor instruments, making various changes to the power and output characteristics as he went along.

A bellowing foghorn voice suddenly shattered the young inventor’s concentration. "Tom! Great gravy, I know yuh’re in there!"

"Come on in, Chow. I unlocked the door."

He looked up as a roly-poly figure came clomping into the laboratory with a clatter of high-heeled cowboy boots. As usual, Chow was sporting a gaudy shirt, with a ten-gallon hat perched atop his bald dome. Oddly, his leathery sun-bronzed face looked pale.

"What in thunderation’s goin’ on around here?" Chow gasped. "Flyin’ soup, talkin’ pots an’ pans—
that
I kin take, boss. But now I got fireworks poppin’ in my galley!"

With his mind still on his work, Tom stared at the quivering cowpoke. "
Fireworks
! Chow, what are you talking about?"

Chow grabbed him by the arm. "Boss, you git yer blame blue-stripe T-shirt on over t’ the galley and see for yourself!" the cook begged. "Brand my space spinach, it’s plumb spooky! Either the galley’s got itself a ghost, or that buddy o’ yours is playin’ some kind o’ joke on us all the way from Cape Car-
neeval
!"

Tom and Chow ran down the corridor to the private kitchen that adjoined the ex-Texan’s apartment. At the cook’s request, he had been installed near Tom’s main lab-workshop so he could "whomp up" special meals for his young boss whenever Tom was hard at work on a new invention—which often meant many an overlooked mealtime.

In the doorway of the kitchen the young inventor halted in amazement. Tiny explosions of hissing vapor were popping out across the whole length of the room, each one making a noisy report like a small firecracker! The ghostly stuff seemed to be materializing out of nowhere!

"Good night! You weren’t kidding, pardner!" Tom gasped. "Spectral fireworks!"

"SPECTER-AL? Like ghosts? You mean spooks
is
causin’ it?" Chow gulped, turning paler than ever. "Don’t b’lieve in ghosts, m’self. But I sure don’t like ’em!"

"Well, I don’t really mean
that
, exactly—but it certainly does look spooky." Tom shook his head in total bafflement.

The "fireworks" were dancing not only in midair, but also along the top of the range, the cabinets, and tile wall surfaces. Tom noticed that the vapor explosions appeared to be spaced equal distances apart in long rows that curved across the room. As an explanation suddenly occurred to him, the young inventor burst into laughter.

"Brand my rocket docker! What’s so all-fired funny?" Chow demanded, suspicious that Tom might have been playing a joke on him after all.

"Relax, oldtimer," Tom said. "I think I know what’s causing it. Just wait here a second."

The chef looked none too comfortable at the prospect of being left alone with such ghostly goings-on going on. But he waited obediently with bulging eyes while Tom dashed back to his laboratory. When the young inventor returned a few moments later, the fireworks had vanished!

Chow looked relieved but mystified. "What in tarnation did you do, Tom?"

"Just switched off my dual spacewave oscillators. I was using them to see how the wave-chain affected the obverse-state matrix in my parallelophone."

Chow gave his friend a sour frown. "Well now!
That
sure explains it, don’t it!"

With a laugh Tom explained that the spacewaves—oscillations in the fabric of spacetime that were the basis of his repelatron and several other inventions—were being generated at two separate sources. "The waves from either antenna aren’t tuned to affect us, but it seems that at such a low frequency intense focused heat is produced at the nodal points where the two chains cross, which I didn’t expect. This causes the water vapor in the air—and of course there’s quite a lot here in the kitchen—to turn to steam and pop-off like a firecracker."

"That so?" Chow mopped his forehead with his huge red bandanna. "Jest plain ol’ steam, eh? Sure glad to hear it, son! But now, what was that other thing you said? Something about a telly-phone?"

"Bud calls it a Private Ear Radio," responded Tom. "It uses quantum-entangled correlations to― " He stopped himself. "Sorry Chow. Quantum stuff is hard for
anyone
to grasp. I guess my explanation wouldn’t be very interesting to you." But then a new expression crossed Tom’s face. "Though actually... if you wouldn’t mind too much, pardner, I—I’d sort’ve like trying to spell it out to you."

Chow suddenly understood. "Why sure, sure! You go right ahead, son. I’ll jest sit myself down on this stool."

"Thanks. All right, then." Tom drew his thoughts together. Hadn’t he been looking for new challenges? Explaining quantum physics to Chow Winkler would be his greatest challenge yet! "The quantum level of matter involves what matter does at its smallest scale, the scale of the subatomic particles that atoms are made of. At that level, ordinary rules that we take for granted, commonsense sorts of things, don’t always apply. Which really isn’t surprising. After all, the ordinary rules come from what we see around us, and― "

"And ya cain’t see them atoms an’ suchlike."

"Right. Now... you know how a coin has two sides, heads or tails."

"Sure do. Seen a few of ’em."

"And if you saw a penny lying on a table heads-up, you wouldn’t have to turn it over to tell what’s on the other side."

Chow nodded thoughtfully. "N’body’s that stupid. If’n it’s heads on top, it’s gotta be tails on the bottom."

"Yes. And that’s an example of how two things—a ‘head’ face and a ‘tail’ face—can be tangled up with one another, so to speak. Turn one face upwards, and the other one
has
to turn downwards."

"Yup. Ya might call it two sides o’ the same coin."

The young inventor smiled. "Well, there are things at the quantum level that act the same way. If a certain process emits two particles and sends them flying off in different directions, there might be only two possible states each one of them can be in—‘heads or tails’—and between the two there can only be one of each."

Chow snapped a pair of pudgy fingers. "I get what yer drivin’ at. If you catch one of them particools and it’s one way, you know th’ other one has t’be the other way!"

"Pardner, that’s it exactly!" Tom congratulated him. "But now we get to the weird part—in fact they even call it
quantum weirdness
sometimes."

"All ears, son. Cain’t be as weird as thet spooky steam."

"Don’t be too sure! Because what many experiments have shown, over about a century, is that
while
the two particles are moving along their separate ways,
each
one exists in
both
states at the same time! They call it
superposition
, alternate possibilities coexisting. As if you had a coin that was
both
heads-and-tails on one side
and
both heads-and-tails on the other."

"Coin like that wouldn’t be much use if’n ya flipped it to decide somethin’."

"But actually it
would
work out after all, Chow. Because if you ‘flipped’ the ‘coin’ and looked at it—which in the case of the particles means interacting with them in some way that shows which of the two states one or the other particle is in—you’d always see
either
‘heads’ or ‘tails’. Never both."

The cook nodded. "So it’s like this, boss. It’s like a coin rollin’ on its edge. While it’s rollin’ along, it hasn’t made up its mind whether t’be up on one side or t’other. It’s both. But when you flick it over, then you get jest a head or jest a tail fer sure."

"Okay, but the weirdest thing is this: when you interact with Particle A where
you
are, in a way that could tell you which one of the two states it’s in, Particle B takes on the other state instantly—
even if it happens to be a billion miles away!
"

"Now son," said Chow with a look that was polite but slightly condescending, "what’s so blame strange about
that
?"

Tom was brought up short by Chow’s comment! "You don’t think it violates common sense for something happening
here
to cause a change in something instantly, no matter how far away it is? I mean—it could be in another
galaxy
!"

Chow gave his head a shake. "Wa-aal now, Tom, yew jest think on it. Ain’t you sayin’ these two little bits are jest two sides of the same thing, like the two sides of a coin? And one thing is one thing. If you push on a pencil, you don’t have t’wait a while afore the end of it starts in writin’. Does it right away, whole thing at once."

"But—there are two distinct particles― "

"Uh-huh, sure, jest like they’s two sides to a penny, diff’rent from each other. Son, the only thing special is that the two sides is put in diff’rent places out in space. Pee-culiar, sure enough, but that don’t make ’em
really
two things. Still jest two sides o’
one
thing. Stands t’ reason thet if you make the one yer flippin’ with yer hand fall heads down, the other one’ll turn tails up at the same time. If that there’s been botherin’ you, Tom, ole Chow says to jest relax."

Pleased but thoroughly amazed, Tom put a hand on his friend’s wide and sloping shoulder and gave it a squeeze of sheer admiration. "Charles Ollaho Winkler, you just resolved the major metaphysical debate of modern science!"

Chow shrugged. "Thet’s right nice, but it sure wudden
much
of a dee-bate. But now what’s all this got to do with a phone?"

"The rest of it’s the easy part," replied the young inventor with a chuckle. "Basically, the device creates two sets of these paired counterpart particles, or ‘counterparticles’, holding each bunch of ‘halves’ suspended in separate cartridges—think of them as tanks, or particle-reservoirs. You then plug the cartridges into two communicator units. When you speak into one, the sound patterns of your voice are ‘translated’ into variations in a sort of scanning beam, which interacts with some of the particles in the cartridge in a way that causes them to collapse into one or the other of their possible states. And when that happens, the corresponding particles in the
other
cartridge instantly take on the same overall pattern, duplicating the shape of the original sound pattern."