Tom Swift and the Visitor From Planet X (3 page)

"Impossible!"

"Right. And by continuing to talk with them, someday
we’ll
learn how to do the impossible!"

Tom and his father waited in their shared office for a response, but by midmorning nothing had been received. After Mr. Swift had left to take care of some pressing responsibilities, Tom’s anxious wait was interrupted by Munford Trent, their secretary and receptionist. "Gerrold Funtz is outside asking to speak with you."

Tom’s brow creased. "Who’s Gerrold Funtz?"

"The Enterprises greensman."

"Uh—"

"Head landscape architect, gardener, and glorified lawnboy. Can you see him? He’s making a pest of himself."

"Sure, Trent."

Funtz was a fiftyish man, his skin dark and sun-wrinkled. He wore khaki workclothes smeared with dirt and stained green by grass. The workclothes appeared stiff enough to be able to walk by themselves. "Thanks for your time, Mr. Swift. Just got a question for you. Little bitty question."

"About our landscaping?" asked Tom politely.

"About my job! If you and your father plan to let me go, I think I have a right to be told about it right to my face."

The young inventor was baffled. "What do you mean? Has Personnel told you—"

"Aaa,
forget
Personnel!" the man snapped. "It’s Minerva Tavrish, I know it! She’s been on my back since she became chief of plant operations last year. What’s that old bag been saying about me? Whatever it is, she’s just spittin’ teeth!"

Tom spent a moment collecting his thoughts. "Please stay calm, Mr. Funtz. I really have no idea what you’re referring to."

"Then maybe you haven’t looked out your window this morning." Funtz strode over to the wall-spanning picture window and beckoned for Tom to join him. "I come in to do my job, and I find
that!
If I’m still the lawn decor go-to guy around here—well, you shoulda asked me to sign off on it first, right? Don’t that sound sort of reasonable, Mr. Swift?"

Tom looked, then looked again, unbelieving. Viewed from a multistory height, the broad, well-tended green lawn separating the administration building from its neighbor was criss-crossed with strange markings in a lighter color—curves and bands that hadn’t been there the day previous!

"Good grief, Mr. Funtz, is this some kind of practical joke?"

Funtz snorted in disgust. "Whatever it is, I wouldn’t call it professional lawn decoration. How’m I supposed to deal with that kind of a mess?"

But Tom couldn’t tear his eyes from the sight below. "Mr. Funtz, that
mess—
it’s the space symbols used by the extraterrestrials—the people from Planet X!"

HARLAN Ames didn’t approach the lawn defacement as a possible prank. His face was wooden, his voice sober and thoughtful. "Of course the first thing I did was check the recordings from the security videocams," he stated. "There are two covering this lawn area, continuously. One with a close focus, one wide and further off. At three AM, both failed at the exact same moment—blanked out for the rest of the night. I had an e-mail about it waiting for me when I came in, but I assumed it was just a mechanical problem of some kind. Obviously I should have investigated immediately."

The lean, hard-edged chief of Enterprises security knelt down next to Tom as they examined the bizarre phenomenon in the pale midday sun. Each of the starkly-etched bands was about a foot wide, the edges sharp and even, the lines and curves perfectly formed. Ames ran a palm across one of the markings. "As you can see, the grass hasn’t been cut or flattened out. It’s been discolored."

"I had the chem team do an analysis first thing," Tom said. "We’ve looked at the blades under the microscope, and used the Swift Spectroscope as well." He shot the older man a sheepish look. "Sorry not to have called you immediately, Harlan. I got a little impatient—I wanted answers."

"So do I," declared Ames. "What did your analysis turn up?"

"Nothing that explains anything. No trace of unusual chemicals. No poisons or acids."

"Couldn’t extreme heat have done this, Tom? Something like a focused laser or microwave setup?"

The young inventor gave a shake of his head. "There’s no charring, no carbonization. The grass is desiccated, depleted of all water content—yet there was no evolution of steam inside the blades. It’s as if the individual cellulose fibers were
degraded
by some external phenomenon."

"Some kind of structural deterioration, you mean? The cell materials got scrambled?"

"No." Tom struggled to find the right words. "Not so much scrambled as—well, fused together. Segments of the cell walls have physically merged with the neighboring walls, and the chlorophyll strings have ‘unwound’. That’s why the grass has lost its color. The closest thing I can compare it to is anomalous
aging."

"All right. I see," Ames said. "Except—I don’t see! Do you know of anything that could cause such aging?"

Tom shrugged, but it was a shrug that bespoke not only mystification but dread. "Possibly, but I don’t like to think of the implications.
Neutron bombardment!"

"Like the so-called neutron bomb. Is that what you’re saying, boss?"

The youth did not respond to the question, which Ames took as reluctant confirmation of a possibility too terrible to think about. After a moment of staring at the figures, Tom broke the silence. "And I’m also reminded of something really far out, something I read about. You’ve heard of the famous ‘Shroud of Turin,’ the holy image, centuries old, formed on a piece of cloth by some unknown process? Under the microscope the affected cloth fibers show the same effect!"

The former Secret Service agent surprised Tom by smiling. "Well, religious miracles are a little out of my line. But if these markings are space symbols, then obviously the extraterrestrials must be behind it."

"If so," Tom responded, "it’s sure a peculiar way to deliver a message, even for the X-ians. We can’t rule it out, though. They don’t think the way we do."

Noting the questioning looks from employees as they filed past the yellow tape border that Security had set up to keep the curious off the grass, Tom motioned for Harlan Ames to walk with him back into the administration building. Asked Ames: "Have you been able to translate the symbols, Tom?"

"Unfortunately no," replied the young inventor. "You see, the symbols express basic concepts, and the spatial arrangement of the symbols one to another—the overall form—modifies the concepts and links them into a complete thought, like a sentence in our kind of writing. But
this
set of symbols is incomplete, as if the process creating it was interrupted midway through. So it’s as if you were trying to read a written sentence missing four words out of every five!"

"Then all we can do for now is try to dope out what happened to our videocams at three AM this morning," pronounced Ames. "They’ve been removed, and Hanson is studying them." Arvid Hanson was not only the Swifts’ chief modelmaker and prototype constructor, but a trained and gifted technician and design engineer.

As noon approached, Tom joined Bud Barclay for lunch in the dinette adjoining one of Tom’s labs. The athletic, dark-haired pilot, who was Tom’s age, demanded every detail of the dire, thrilling, mysterious happenings of the 24 hours preceding. "Let’s see now—a big quake in Thessaly, a visitor from Planet X looking for a body, and a new bunch of those brain-breaking space symbols inscribed on a lawn by invisible alien gremlins." Bud smiled at his pal. "In other words, business as usual in the life of Swift Enterprises and its big-headed head genius."

"A lot to take in, flyboy," Tom acknowledged. "See what happens when you fly away for days at a time?"

Bud laughed. "Right. But I didn’t have much choice down there but to hang around and watch
jai alai
and those TV
telenovélas
—which aren’t too bad, actually. Must be even better if you speak Spanish! Professor Castillez had to haggle with the higher-ups before he got official permission to lend out the carvings." Connected to the Mexican government and the University of Mexico, Castillez had participated in Tom’s recent work in Yucatan, where he had used his retroscope camera to investigate ancient Mayan carvings and artifacts. Castillez had subsequently asked Enterprises to perform further tests on some of the objects that University archaeologists had uncovered after the departure of the Enterprises team. Bud had jetted to Mexico City to convey the priceless objects back to Shopton.

A vocal foghorn blast now heralded the arrival of Chow Winkler bearing a soup-and-sandwich lunch. "Wa-aal, if this don’t beat all! Swift an’ Barclay t’gether again!" The round ex-Texan, a close and colorful friend to both youths, set down his tray on the dinette table. "So t’ honor the grand o’casion, I whipped up some special stew fer ya."

"Rattlesnake again?" Bud teased.

"Gila monster! –Naw, jest funnin’ ya, buddy boy. Sauteed turnip an’ seasoned carrot." The cook, some thirty years older and a couple feet wider than his young friends, ladled out his latest creation.

Tom sipped. "Tastes great! Spicy."

"Uh huh." Chow paused, looking querulously back and forth between Tom and Bud. "Now say, what’s th’ matter with you two boys?"

"What do you mean?" asked Tom.

"Brand my spectrum! You don’t think this new shirt o’ mine is worth a few jokes?" Chow pretended to look hurt, eyes crinkled affectionately. His western-style shirts were always XXL festivals of eye-popping coloration. The current edition somehow married black and pink to turquoise splotches that revealed themselves, on close inspection, to be the bleached skulls of unfortunate steers.

Bud winked at Tom and pretended to feel in his shirt pocket. "Had my next quip written down on a slip of paper—must be in my other shirt. But I’ll work on it, wrangler man!"

Chow sat down at the table, chatting with Tom and Bud as the boys lunched. "Heard about that there earthquake," commented the former ranch cook. "But they say there’s shakin’ goin’ on all the time, some place ’r other in the world."

Bud asked Tom if there were a known earth fault in the Thessaly area. "No, and that’s what’s strange about it," Tom responded. "When Dad and I were first testing out our lithosonde device, we surveyed this whole area for hundreds of miles around—including straight down. No class-three lateral fractures anywhere."

"Well," Bud said, "I guess this stuff can’t always be predicted."

Tom nodded. "True, not yet."

"That there Pakker-stan earthquake shor was a terrible thing," Chow put in. "An’ then there ’as the big wave in th’ Injin Ocean that drowned all them folks."

"At least those were definitely
natural
events," said Tom in a thoughtful voice.

Bud lowered his disappearing sandwich to look at his pal with raised eyebrows. "What are you hinting, genius boy? You think the Wickliffe quake wasn’t a real quake?"

"It was a quake, pal. The question is, what caused it? Even setting aside the absence of a known fault, and the way the temblor seemed to be narrowly focused in one little area—there’s another odd thing that’s been on my mind."

"Odder than Chow’s new shirt?"

The cook snorted. "There ya go! Now I kin rest easy."

Tom chuckled. "It’s just this," he continued. "There was quite a lot of glass breakage—the skylights in the assembly building, a whole wall of windows in another building, even the car windshields in the parking lot."

Bud shrugged. "So?"

"So where was the glass?"

"Whatcha mean by that, boss?" demanded Chow with widening eyes.

Tom rubbed his chin. "I noticed that the shards of glass from the skylights weren’t on the floor
under
the skylights, but piled up against one of the walls. The window glass ended up about a hundred feet away from the base of the building, and the auto glass was all at the edge of the parking lot, almost all the way to the road."

"Yeah. Hmm." Bud looked puzzled. "You think somebody was carting it away or something?"

"C’mon, Bud, how could they do that without being seen?" Tom retorted. "We were only knocked out for a few minutes."

"That’s right as prairie rain," noted Chow excitedly. "So who did it, son? More o’ them grass-gremlins?"

The young inventor shook his head, his eyes bright with the thrill of a mystery. "Not a
who,
pard—a
what!
Some kind of invisible force or energy pushed the fragments sideways as they fell, and maybe even combined with the earth tremor to cause the breakage in the first place. And you know what I think, guys? I think that same ‘something’ also blanked out the cameras and inscribed the markings on the lawn!"

His mind racing, Bud half stood. "So whatever it is is bad for glass—and grass too!"

"Ye-aah," gulped Chow Winkler. "An’ if it kin do all that, it cain’t be s’ good fer us
people,
no-how-neither!"

The long day ended without any answer from deep space. However, Arvid Hanson was able to provide Tom and Ames with a report on the malfunctioning videocams. "Best I can tell, something entered through the lens and washed out the photoreceptor array—overloaded it and burned it out, basically. Which is pretty simple, I guess. But if you want to know just
what
it was, I have no idea. Some sort of radiant energy, but without heat."

"Thanks, Arv." Tom was appreciative but left the conclave troubled by the lack of progress.

After work, Tom drove into Shopton to visit Bashalli at The Glass Cat coffee house, which was owned by her older brother. Tom enjoyed it as a social call, but had another motive as well. "I guess we didn’t really explain to you that our ‘special visitor’ should be kept a secret for now—until he’s on his way back home. We’re keeping the authorities posted, of course, but—"

"But there are the usual spies and bad people everywhere, as always," Bashalli concluded. "This I have already considered, and in consequence I have curbed my tongue." She nodded teasingly at a man nibbling a croissant on the other side of the room, beyond the range of their low voices. "Does he not look suspicious, Thomas? Perhaps he has an eavesdropping device concealed in his paper coffee cup!"