Tom Swift and His Megascope Space Prober (9 page)

Long before it was completed, the two Swifts had exchanged meaningful glances. The writing was a single inscription, a Chinese character modified to suggest a snake arched to strike.

It was a signature. And it was familiar to both of them, dreadfully so.

"He’s back," Tom stated grimly. "Comrade-General Li Ching—the snakeman!"

"WE managed to pull some partial fingerprints," said Phil Radnor, Harlan Ames’s stocky second in command. "Not enough to trace. But we can tell it’s a woman—
two
women. One is rather on the tall side."

Radnor sat across from Tom at Tom’s desk in the Swifts’ shared office. Mr. Swift sat nearby.

"Easy to reconstruct what must have happened," Tom remarked. "One woman wrote the warning, then handed it to the other to look at."

"Probably," agreed Radnor. "We did tease out another bit of info. Maybe it’ll be useful when we run the national databases. The one woman, Big Bertha, had some bad scarring on her fingers."

"Acid burns?" inquired Mr. Swift.

Before Radnor could respond, inspiration struck. Tom exclaimed: "Freeze burns—
frostbite
!"

"That’s what it looks like. Looks like she got a little free with that gun she ambushed you with."

"Maybe. We do know one thing," the young inventor declared. "The freeze-beamer was used by the Eyeballer drone in attacking the jet. So this Women With Issues ‘girl group’ is tied directly to the theft of the drone."

"And also to Li Ching, evidently," added Damon Swift.

The Swifts had now encountered Comrade-General Li Ching, a turncoat from the army of China who had fled his country, several times under deadly circumstances. The man was a cunning and powerful enemy who seemed to specialize in technical and scientific theft, working through a vast international network of criminal accomplices.

"And Li has a spacecraft," Tom mused, "the
Fanshen
."

Mr. Swift instantly grasped the implication of his son’s words. "You’re suggesting he’s behind the space phenomenon you observed the other day."

"It may have been a weapon, Dad. Perhaps it misfired when he tried it against us. And Li’s energy-canceling material could account for the space radar’s problem in getting a focus."

"Then again, you may have barged in on a test series he was running, without his knowing you were there," Radnor pointed out. "Remember, the Space Kite is also coated with Li’s anti-detection sheathing. You wouldn’t show up clearly on
his
radar."

"No. Unless... unless he picked up our
own
outgoing radar pulses..." The young inventor spoke slowly and reflectively. His restless mind had delivered up an unexpected thought!

The security man excused himself, promising the Swifts that he and Ames would keep the Swifts closely apprised of developments. Radnor chuckled a bit ruefully as he left. "I wonder just how many times Harl and I have said that to you two!"

Tom looked at his father, something percolating in his mind. "Dad, there may be a way to ‘see’ and track the Eyeballer after all!"

"Such as?"

"Whoever’s controlling it remotely is obviously doing so by some kind of signal, presumably a radio signal modulated in a way to make it
virtually
undetectable. The drone specs describe such a system, though Li Ching would surely have modified it to prevent our guys from regaining control."

"All right, son. But in that case what can be done?"

Tom rapped his knuckles on his desktop. "Even if we can’t pick up the signal
as a signal
—that is, as something we can monitor and decipher—we can
still
pick it up as a raw flux of energy beaming down from the
Fanshen
, or from wherever the control post may be. See what I mean? From any significant distance, even a very focused beam would have spread widely, spilling over on all sides of our little drone. In effect, we could detect the drone’s
energy shadow!
"

"Absolutely!" cried Damon Swift with excitement. "And so: Tom Swift—
to work!
"

As was Tom’s custom, he kept his mind sharp by working on two projects at once, continuing to develop the megascope as he refined his "shadow-tracker" concept. Under the stimulus of necessity, progress on both seemed to come rapidly.

Two afternoons later Tom was just checking the final circuits of a megascope component when Bud Barclay walked into the laboratory with a big grin.

"Hi, Skipper!"

Tom started up in surprise. "Hi, you old rocket hotshot!" he exclaimed warmly. "I didn’t expect to see you again so soon!"

"They’re letting me play hooky while they check out the telemetry equipment," Bud said. "Just half a day this time, but I thought I’d amaze and amuse you by turning up without warning again." Looking away from his friend, Bud added softly that this would be his last opportunity to visit Shopton before the blast-off of the Astrodyne booster and the
Highroad
crew capsule.

He quickly changed the subject. "What gives with your space prober?"

"Hungry for a Tom Swiftian explanation? I’ve been mapping out how to get the exact range on whatever I’m looking at," Tom reported.

"Okay, give me a fill-in," Bud begged. As always, he was keen to follow the progress of his friend’s latest invention.

"It has to do with transporting the quantum-particle matrix from the megascope console to the sensor point in space." Tom began to explain the wave-terminal technique he had developed, but Bud found the problem in wave mechanics hard to grasp from words alone. So Tom went to the presentation board on the lab wall and picked up an electronic stylus. "You know what microwaves look like, right?"

"I’ve never actually
seen
any. But I
think
they’re like water waves that fly."

"Something like this." Tom made a series of parallel marks on the board, one after the other in a row. "But what I’ve come up with are microwaves that propagate like
this
." He drew a corkscrew shape. "In other words, waves that
spiral
along, as if on the surface of a tube with parallel sides. They don’t attenuate—that is, get weaker with distance—and they don’t fan out."

Bud transmitted something on his own to his friend: a look that was humorously grave. "And you actually made this cosmic corkscrew work?"

The scientist-inventor nodded. "Yep, at least on a small scale across a lab table. The equations were incredibly complex, but I consulted one of the world’s experts on things-quantum, a professor at the University of Stockholm whom Dad has worked with. I also went to Dr. Kupp and― "

"
Dr. Kupp?
He’s
part of the explanation? Whoa, I think I’m due back in Florida!" Dr. Omicron Kupp was Enterprises’ resident expert in the fields of nuclear chemistry and applied mathematics. His style of speaking was detailed, precise, abstruse, and customarily indecipherable.

Tom broke out laughing. "You should have been there, Bud!—the
language!
"

"He got upset, did he?"

"He used words like
displacement of simultaneity, light cones, timelike intervals, state-vector integration, zero-energy configuration space...
"

"I’m sure a genius boy like Tom Swift could follow it!"

The blond youth shrugged. "I could make it out, but only somewhat. You know, chum, I’m not a theoretical physicist or an engineer like Hank Sterling. I’m not even a scientist, not really. Just like great-grandfather Tom, I’m a
tinkerer
. I sort of imagine how things might be put together to solve a problem—then I leave the theory, and most of the math, to guys like Omicron Kupp."

"At least he helped you."

"Yes. First, though, he told me quantum communication was impossible, utterly and absolutely
impossible
. And that was
after
I’d shown him the impossible in operation—the Private Ear Radio!"

"In other words, the old boy knew that it worked in practice, but wasn’t so sure it worked in theory!" The two friends shared a laugh at the expense of the remarkable Dr. Kupp. "Well, go on, Tom. So you found a way to make innocent microwaves twist themselves into a spiral."

Tom continued, drawing a diagram. "The key was to use paired spectron-field beams to create ‘kinks’ in the spacewaves that the fields are made of. Electromagnetic waves—and that’s what microwaves are—travel through space in straight lines. But as you remember, the spectron spacewaves are― "

"You called ’em
space knots
."

"Right, ‘bends’ or ‘twists’ in space itself. Give space a curve and my conveyor belt of microwaves just follows along, just as waves along a river will follow the bend of the river to and fro."

"You’ll have to get the beam to stop, though, if you want to set up a constant viewing point out in space," Bud pointed out.

"I can do that by setting the linear fields at an angle, so they cross at precisely the place I want to establish the sensor-node—our ‘lens,’ so to speak. The spacewaves go flat at that point, and the entrained microwaves reflect into one another and self-cancel. The particle matrix is caught there at the center, which is stable."

"Good for it. It’s all a little tough to follow, Tom. I feel like I’m already halfway to Venus—without my rocket!"

"I’ll ask Chow to explain it to you in simple language," Tom teased. "Incidentally, I call the whole transmission system an ‘anti-inverse-square-wave generator’, since it counteracts the inverse-square rule of how waves spread out and weaken as they travel. So—go on, I can hardly
wait
for you to give it a nickname."

Bud smiled blandly. "No, not this time. I’ll leave it alone. I like to watch you say it!" The young athlete blinked. "I get it, though—but boy, imagine on-the-spot television, anywhere in the universe!"

"Let’s not get
too
ambitious," Tom cautioned with a grin. "But I’ll be expecting to see you wave at me through the porthole on the
Highroad
!"

Late that night, just before retiring to bed, Tom took a call from the editor of the
Shopton Evening Bulletin
, Dan Perkins. "Sorry to bother you so late, Tom. But I was putting our morning edition to bed and I wondered if you cared to give a juicy quote about that new high-tech communicator they’ve come up with in Sweden. Sounds right up the old Swift alley."

"Sorry, Dan. I don’t know anything about it."

"Oh really?
Well
then." Perkins sounded characteristically smug. "You’ll find the story in Shopton’s own daily independent source of all the news that fits, the
Bulletin
. Here’s the release. ‘SoderMambreekt Technologies of Uppsala, Sweden, has arranged for its engineers to present to the world media a revolutionary new type of radio communicator. It utilizes an advanced approach, linking sender and receiver by a quantum-resolution principle that most theoreticians have long deemed impossible. With this method there is no gap in time during the transmission and no loss of signal energy, without regard to actual distance in space. "
It is as if space itself has been eliminated
," stated Executive Officer Janss Mambreekt.’ And so on. Mighty
neato-keen
. Comment?"

"Not at this time," said Tom brusquely. "Maybe tomorrow, Dan."

As he hung up, his thoughts were angry, bitter—and alarmed. Whether or not the Eyeballer had been driven away from the vicinity of Enterprises, his enemies had once again struck a deep blow. This time they had stolen another secret Tom had been certain was securely protected. His Private Ear Radio!

"THIS is a bit of a sentimental moment for me, Tom," mused Damon Swift, head tilted far back. "Our observatory here at the plant first held the immediate successor to your great-grandfather’s giant telescope, you know, built by his own hands. And this one, with its laser-interferometric refrangistor system—this was my own baby. We used it to take the measure of Little Luna, and with it I watched you race to the moon in the
Challenger
. Until now it was the most powerful ground-based optical telescope in the world!"

"It’ll have its own place of honor, on display next to its ancestors," said Tom. "And someday I imagine Generation Four—my megascope—will have to make way for Generation Five. When it does, I plan to be standing right here watching—with you, Dad."

Father and son stood watching as cranes lowered Mr. Swift’s optical telescope to the floor of the great, circular Enterprises observatory building preparatory to raising into position the huge transmitting antenna for Tom’s megascope space prober. The revolutionary Mighty Eye was near enough to completion that Tom could commence full-scale tests.

Still gazing up, Mr. Swift now spoke to Tom in a whisper. "I know you’re feeling more than one emotion right now. Tonight could be the night."

The young inventor gave a brisk nod. "We’ve certainly tried hard enough to spread the word."

After the discovery of the apparent theft of the Private Ear Radio specifications from Swift Enterprises, Tom had evolved a cunning plan to entrap the phantom, or at least to discover how he—or she—was working with the current master of the stolen Eyeballer.

As the PER units themselves were protected from minute inspection by various self-destruct components built into their delicate circuitry, it seemed most likely to all concerned that the thief had somehow momentarily acquired the datachip upon which Tom had inscribed the PER’s specifications and blueprints. The physical chip itself was still in Tom’s possession; therefore it seemed the intruder had defeated the security-safe’s DNA-coded lock mechanism and taken out the chip just long enough to copy it, then returning it. It remained an absolute mystery how such a thing could be done right under the nose of the plant’s security radar system, and despite a locking mechanism that only Tom Swift’s unique DNA pattern could deactivate.

Tom’s plan involved spreading hints through the Enterprises website journal and the
Shopton Evening Bulletin
that Tom was experimenting with a "long-range detection instrument" of radical design, a device capable of examining distant celestial bodies with unparalleled clarity. In the notices Tom had indicated that a preliminary test model was to be mounted that day in the observatory, and that he fully trusted Swift Enterprises’ "proven security monitoring system" to protect the blueprints and other materials he would be keeping at hand next to the new device. He took care to mention that the instrument used a "new technology first developed in connection with communications experiments".