Tom Swift and the Mystery Comet (9 page)

Three faces looked blank, but Hank Sterling’s was furrowed with disbelief. "I don’t follow you, boss. The spin coefficients are a basic physical property of matter. They’re not something that could suddenly
go bad.
"

"Right—it’s impossible," Tom nodded. "But for about half a minute along the way, the impossible happened. Just as it happened before, on the space outpost and in the hydrodome!"

The brief flash-pulse had affected the
Sky Queen
’s radiocom as well as the in-ship intercom, but she was equipped with a Private Ear Radio linked to the Swift Enterprises control tower. As Tom piloted the plane back to Enterprises he received some dismaying news. "What a break!" he groaned. "The plane and lightning flash were seen from the ground, and George Dilling just received a call from the mayor of Greenwichville. We blacked out the town!"

"Tough toenails, eh?" remarked Lett Monica in a joshing tone. "Just like in the opening chapter of the
Atomic Earth Blaster
story. And there was something similar in
Space Solartron
."

"Enterprises is getting a real reputation among the public utilities companies," Arv Hanson chuckled.

Tom frowned at the Brungarian space trainee. "Lett, could you do me a favor?"

"Sure, Skipper."

"Please—
don’t
mention those books again."

Arriving at Enterprises, Tom sought out his father. "We’ve smoothed things over a bit—the public’s usually with you, son. I hear you’re something of a hero! We assured the mayor and the state people that we’ll handle immediate repairs and compensate all damages. Fortunately, Greenwichville is a small town."

The young inventor groaned. "Boy, this just isn't my day! At least there’s one bright spot, if anybody’s counting—the telesampler seemed to work fine on that first sample we took."

Harlan Ames, whose office was next door, joined them presently. "I heard what happened. I suppose I should do my duty and ask—was there anything suspicious about the incident?"

"Scientifically suspicious," Tom replied. "But not humanly suspicious." But then his face darkened as Ames and his father waited for more. "Of course, I’m making an assumption—that this freakish physical phenomenon we’ve been dealing with is coming from nature, not man."

"Exactly why I asked," stated Ames. "If intelligent beings—the kind Dr. Sarcophagus thinks are mythical—can do things like move asteroids around and produce artificial earthquakes, we can’t eliminate something planned and deliberate."

"With what purpose?" asked Mr. Swift.

Tom answered. "The space friends don’t seem to need what
we
call a purpose, at least none that we can understand here on Earth. The possibility’s been in the back of my mind, Dad, Harlan. We may want to send them an inquiry over the magnifying antenna."

"I’ll begin composing one," promised Tom’s father.

"What’s in
my
restless mind," Ames went on, "is the fact that the Brungarians, the Sentimentalists faction, have previously established some kind of working relationship with the space friends’ superiors on Planet X, wherever in space that might be. And by a nervy coincidence, we now have a visitor from Brungaria here at the plant—and up in the
Sky Queen
with you."

"I don’t know..." shrugged the scientist-inventor. "He comes across as a boy-next-door type, real eager to please us and learn the ropes. Which is just a twinge of intuition—means
nothing
, I guess. I just don’t like the idea of making any foreign visitor an automatic ‘usual suspect.’ Do we really have to start off mistrusting
everyone
?"

"We do in
my
business," retorted Ames dryly. "Especially when you tell me the intriguing fact that this Monica kid somehow beat Bud Barclay down to the compartment and dragged you out. As if he knew in advance what was going to happen, one might say. Hmm?"

"I guess that’s true," Tom acknowledged. "Hank told me he jumped up
instantly
when the intercoms started squawking. So by the cold hard logic of scientific evidence, he
has
to be classified as a suspect. Right?"

Tom stood and left the room, telling the older men that he wanted to examine the remains of the telesampler. "Damon, is something wrong?" asked Harlan Ames quietly. "Tom sounds one-off lately."

Mr. Swift nodded. "I’ve noticed it. So have his mother and Sandy. But he doesn’t choose to talk, and I don’t choose to probe." He smiled. "Inasmuch as it would be a complete waste of effort!"

Ames chuckled. "It’s a miracle we manage to survive our offspring." A widower, the security chief had a daughter of about Tom’s age.

Next morning Bud looked up his pal in the young inventor’s big lab-workshop, which opened onto the Flying Lab’s gigantic underground hangar. "I’ve got our energetic Brungarian doing a workout routine in the zero-G chamber," he chuckled. "Now he has a reason to be bouncing off the walls! So what’s up in here? Busy? Is the no-quip lamp on?"

Tom grinned. "Never! Just hashing out plans for the Comet Tarski probe flight."

"I figured you’d be down here trying to unscramble what’s left of your poor space-scooper."

"Arv Hanson and Linda are working up a new prototype from my plans, in their shop. I came up with a beam-conductivity limiter last night—somewhere between nodding and dreaming."

"Nothing stops a Swift, least of all his eyelids," Bud joked. "But it looks like you
are
working on something, genius boy." He gestured across the room to a well-littered workbench. On top a long shiny cylinder, like a rod, was mounted on a swivel base. The end nearest the base bristled with the customary tangle of wires. "It looks like some kind of gun."

"You’re not far from right," replied Tom. "C’mere, let me show you something."

Tom led his friend to the thick, shielded observation window that looked in on the lab’s test chamber. Inside, a series of objects, all in line, had been clamped to a frame. One was a diamond-shaped polyhedron, like two pyramids joined together at their square bases, turned into a horizontal orientation. It seemed to be "aimed" at a metal plate several feet distant. A baseball sized chunk of white material was suspended on the further side of the plate.

"Watch," Tom said as he manipulated the control panel on the wall next to the viewpane.

Bud watched. There was no change inside the test chamber. "Er—has it happened yet?"

"Not
quite
yet." Tom’s finger stabbed a button.

The white chunk suddenly cracked in two and fell to pieces in an explosive burst of white powder!

"Ohh-
kay
," said Bud. "A new explosive? Tom-swiftamite, maybe?"

"Please, I’m too
peace-loving
for that! Says so right in the books." As Tom spoke, Bud caught a trace of something in his chum’s voice that made him uneasy. "What I’m doing," Tom went on, "is developing a new kind of ultra-long-range laser that works in the high X-ray part of the spectrum—an X-raser."

"Looks like
this
kind of X-raying might not be so good for the patient’s health."

"It’s not recommended for medical use," Tom chuckled. "It’s going to be a key part of the final ‘space’ version of my telesampler. It’ll work in tandem with the microwave ‘capture’ beam, which will still be used to convey the sampled particles back to the receiver. I’m calling the combined emission unit a transmitron." Launching into a
well-Bud
explanation, Tom reminded his friend that the original microwave pulse-beam had only a limited ability to penetrate solid matter.

"Just enough to do damage," Bud commented wryly.

"X-rays, of course, have superior penetrating power, and as the frequency is much higher, so is the energy level—the
bang
for your
buck
." Tom explained that the beam from the X-raser, propagating over millions of miles with virtually zero dispersion, would not only penetrate the surface of whatever it struck down to a precise depth, but would replace the ionizing microwave hotspot used in the earlier version. The terminus of the X-raser beam would free the solid particles to be sampled, and would simultaneously liberate sufficient energy to produce the thin ion-plasma that the reflected capture beam would carry back to the telesampler. "In theory the X-raser could probe down dozens of feet, even hundreds in some cases. We could find out what’s inside Io, or what’s underneath the frozen seas of Triton!"

"I’ve been wondering about that," Bud nodded dryly. "And I’d
guess
it might have some uses in comet-probing."

"Absolutely," grinned Tom excitedly. "From our long-range studies it’s not clear whether the comet’s core has a surface that the
Challenger
could safely set down on. By using the transmitron model of the telesampler, we could start taking deep samples days before the ship reaches Tarski."

"Okay, now I get what the test setup is," Bud declared with a nod toward the chamber. "The pyramid deal is the X-raser itself, that hunk of whatever was the test target, and the metal plate shows how the beam can pass through solid objects."

"Right, flyboy. And you’d have to hold the magtritanium plate up to the light to see the hole the beam made as it burned through. It’s as thin as a human hair!"

"Mine or Chow Winkler’s?" inquired Bud jokingly.

Bud’s joke didn’t have a chance to elicit laughter. Tom’s pocket cellphone buzzed. The youth plucked it up and answered.

"This is Security, Tom," came the voice of Phil Radnor. "We just got an excited call from George Dilling. We’ve got an over-the-top situation brewing out in front of the plant."

"Over-the-top?" Tom repeated.

"You’ll agree when I tell you. It seems somebody’s out in front of the main gate threatening to block it with a picket line! Can you guess who it is? That little old skeptical inquirer himself. Dr. Sarcophagus!"

"GOOD GOSH, Doctor!—that is,
Mister
Sarkiewski― "

"Oh, just call me The Amazing Randy."

"Just how far do you plan to go to publicize your point of view,
Mister
Sarkiewski?" snapped Tom Swift.

He and Bud had raced to the main gate of Swift Enterprises, joining Harlan Ames and several of his security patrollers. On the other side of the gate bars stood the beefy figure of Dr. Sarcophagus, clad in white shirt and sportcoat, both somewhat wrinkled and threadbare. As was the man himself, Bud noted.

Casually marching back and forth, as a clogged stream of cars waited and honked on the access road behind, the celebrity skeptic bore a placard that read:

TAKE THE SARCOPHAGUS CHALLENGE,
TOM SWIFT!
SET THE TRUTH FREE!

The young inventor noted that the media had been alerted to the confrontation well in advance. A throng of overexcited cameras and caffeinated reporters jostled one another, blocking the gate even more effectively than Sarcophagus could do himself.

"I’ve called the Shopton Police," stated Harlan Ames with cold calm. "I’d say you have about four minutes to stand aside. This is private property."

"Sure of that?" taunted the man. "
I’d
say about, oh, 73.6 percent of this entire operation has been funded by the public. You’ve received a nice treasure chest of government grants, regulatory exemptions, generous zoning concessions, discounted utilities, special tax breaks. And you know, Harlan, your efficient plant security setup—basically a combination corporate police force and private army—couldn’t exist if the government leaders who are pledged to work for something called
The People
weren’t inclined to look the other way.

"And of course there’s the Swift public image, which, as they say, ‘makes the impossible possible.’ Can’t have a public image without the indulgence of the public, eh? Seems to
me
, friend,
The People
are the real owners of this fabulous factory. Lucky for you they’ve been hoodwinked into refraining from exercising their right of oversight."

Tom knew Bud was boiling like a nuclear furnace, and he also knew that escalating the surreal situation would only make matters worse, however much the watchful media might appreciate it. "Don’t feed the cameras, flyboy," Tom whispered. He turned to Sarkiewski, whose slow march forced Tom to walk along opposite him. "All right... Doctor. Is there something specific we can do for you? What’s this ‘challenge’ I’m supposed to accept for the good of science and humanity and The Truth?"

The man smiled condescendingly. "You forgot my Arbitron ratings. I’m just a publicity seeker, hmm? Gadfly? Crank? Irritant?"

"Just how am I supposed to
set the truth free?
" Tom demanded quietly. "
What
truth?"

"Ah, the truth! What is it, where is it? But I hear The Truth is Out There!—
way
out, in the case of Swift Enterprises and your mystery guests from the aptly named Planet X!"

"All right, sir. You don’t have to talk to me," grated Tom. "And I don’t have to stand here talking to
you
, either." He stepped back and started to turn away.

Dr. Sarcophagus suddenly turned serious. "Okay, Tom. Just listen for a moment. I take pride in not being a hypocrite. If I’m going to talk about scientific protocol and hard evidence, I have to put up or shut up. With me there? I’m asking you to embed me in the daily operations of your organization, just for a while—weeks; I
do
have a life, after all. Take me along on your comet trip, your deep-sea spectaculars, whatnot and whither. Let me nose around a little, chat with your employees. When you get one of your mystical ‘space symbol’ revelations, let me sit there as you translate it. Admittedly, these phone calls from the ET’s could be easily faked."

"That’s absolute—"

"Keep cool. You could be the victim of the hoax yourself, used by the big boys to pass along their ‘
dis
information.’ After all—you haven’t actually seen these mysterious X-ians. Hmph!—
‘X
’. I’ve gotten so I don’t even like to see it in equations!

"Anyway, there’s the challenge. Give the world a reason for confidence that these metaphysical events aren’t just hype papering over some military project too embarrassing for politicians to make visible."