Tom Swift and His Cosmotron Express (11 page)

"
Yes, a nice hypothesis. But who is to say we are not pursuing it with equal vigor? We can—I love this expression—walk and chew gum at the same time.

"
It doesn’t concern you, my boy. Think only of what we want. And where you are
."

Tom did not respond.

"
Now please, Tom, don’t sulk. It’s not like you. Did our uninvited stay at your home upset you so much?
"

"What more can I say?" growled the young inventor. "Holding me captive in the middle of this slick floor gets you nothing. It’s ridiculous."

"
Oh, I surely agree. But no more ridiculous than much of what one reads in those juvenile fictionalizations of yours, hacked out by some anonymous committee in what is evidently a darkened room.

"
Here are the terms of your captivity. Quite simple. Look.
" The blackness was lifted, very slightly and grudgingly, by a tiny red light, a distant speck. "
That light is next to a door. The door is unlocked. Pass through it and you are free to go. No one will hinder you—in fact my colleagues and I will be long gone, far away.
"

"I doubt it’s all that ‘simple’," declared the young inventor dryly.

"
I’m being absolutely truthful. Indeed, I’d be happier to see you go than to stay. But I would be happiest of all if your dejected, tortured soul were to cry out the beginnings of a deal leading to the release of Professor Volj and the
Dyaune
—or, if not that, some definite proof of their fate. We remain willing to give your people the hyperjet, to us something of a white elephant, to you a dangerous sort of thing that you wish to examine and—contain.

"
Admittedly, you are in desperate straits, Tom Swift. I can’t imagine, offhand, how you will manage to reach that light. The laws of momentum and inertia are gathered against you. You will go hungry, grow weak as your own young body betrays and disgraces you. We will discover, in several senses, what you are made of.
"

"You can’t really believe that our Enterprises technology won’t find me!" Tom shouted.

"
I am not paid to believe. I would point out, as a footnote, that this technology of yours was unable to find your special friend Bud when he recently went missing...

"
Bud, Sandy, your parents, the many treasured and fragile people in your brief life—if we could take you, surely we could take them. You can’t freight them all into outer space. How do you think they’d fare in a situation like this? Something to contemplate.

"
And now I leave you to exercise your ingenuity. If you need me, just scream.
"

There was no mocking laughter, just the silence of a flipped switch. Tom preferred to think of it as the silence of absence, true or not.

He had managed, with great trembling effort and many failures, to shift his center of gravity, planting it over his feet. With a few slips he was finally able to work himself upright.

He stood dead center in darkness, the tiny red speck gazing at him like an eye. By holding his hand up to his face, steadying it against his nose and looking between his fingers, he determined that the light was drifting sideways—his body was engaged in an ever-so-slow rotation, a trace of angular momentum left over from his deposit on the floor.
Couldn’t
have been something I
did
, he told himself bitterly. Without traction, nothing he could do would affect his state of motion. He was like an astronaut in free fall, floating in space.

He kept his hand to his face, gently swaying his upper body from side to side. The position of the light between his fingers made no detectable change as he did so. No parallax effect—which told him that the light, and the door, were a fair distance, perhaps hundreds of feet.

Hundreds of feet of something slicker than the slickest ice.

He thought of Sandy, of Bashalli and all the rest. What would it do to them if it were one of
them
who was trapped, helpless? What would they do? "Right. What would
Tom Swift
do?" he muttered aloud, trying to sharpen his thoughts.

What Tom Swift did was think.

He took some coins from his pocket—they seemed to have left him with everything but his cellphone and his wristwatch—and threw them upward as hard as he could. They struck a ceiling and clattered down around him. In the faint light he could see some of them, perfectly retaining their motions, gliding away in all directions. But now he knew a bit more of the vertical lay of the land. The huge chamber had a ceiling that was about 20 feet above his head. No possibility of jumping high and grabbing ahold of something, a light fixture, an air-conditioning duct.

In fact, merely jumping would be difficult. He could only flex his knees and dart up to their limit like a jack-in-the-box. He could hardly propel his fingertips beyond the reach of his upstretched hand.

He experimented for a time trying to gouge the edge of his shoe heel against the surface, to somehow shove or pull himself along, to give him at least a drib of motion. Nothing resulted but a new ache in the muscles of his legs. He could find no resistance to react against.

What he needed was... "
Thrust
," he murmured. "Reaction thrust. The laws of momentum can be
used
."

He again considered his shoes. He crouched down, then sat down with a painful plop, letting his feet splay out from under him. He pulled off his shoes and pulled out the two pair of laces, then re-tied the shoes together as a bundle on the end of the longish cord the laces made for him.
Okay
, he said inwardly.
Let’s start up the engine.
He didn’t care if he were being watched. No doubt his captors had placed bets.

He began to swing the shoe-bundle like a pendulum from his extended arm, then raised the arc of the swing as he slowly lifted his arm above him, clamping his other arm into place as a support, making a
V
like a crane boom.

He began to gently twirl the bundle around him, at about the level of his head. As the rate increased, centrifugal force lifted the arc of the bundle away from him.

He noted, the observant scientist, that as the bundle described a wide circle, he own seated body made a smaller one in reaction. In fact, both were circling not the center of Tom’s body, but a displaced point somewhere between, apportioned to their relative masses. He had converted the muscle power that was spinning the bundle into angular momentum that both shared, the bundle of shoes and the bundle of flesh known as Tom Swift.

The whirl of the strange apparatus became faster, faster. The shoelace line was taut. Tom’s arm muscles were bulging. His wrists hurt. The shoelace line gouged into the edge of his hand, scraping back and forth. And he was getting dizzy.

Then, with a carefully timed final snap, as if cracking a whip, he released the line. The bundle soared away into darkness. And Tom knew, more than saw or felt, that he was sliding in the opposite direction—toward the light.

Very,
very
slowly.

He was still rotating, and feeling sick from it. Considering his extremities, his course across the floor was curlicue, a flattened spiral of sorts. The red light was like a little comet seemingly in orbit about him. He traveled not by moments but by minutes, the slowest of slides.

He became certain, though, by inches, that the distance between him and the light was steadily decreasing. He had timed the release of his thrust bundle, his
fuel
, perfectly. Action, reaction, equal and
opposite
. His path was dead-on.

Before he expected it, it suddenly seemed to him that the light was rising. The angle of his view was from below; the light loomed up as he approached—as he approached
near
!

He thought he could make out the wall plate the light was set in—and the side of his unshod right foot stubbed against an obstruction. It was like a low curb, and seemed to have a slight give.
A cushioned bumper
, he thought happily.
I’ve reached the edge!

And then, suddenly, he was scrambling with desperate energy. He had struck the bumper like the world’s laziest billiard ball—and caromed off it.
He was rebounding away!

He clenched his stomach muscles and stretched out his arms, swinging them downwards, trying to fall over flat. The tips of his fingers touched the rubber. He desperately clawed down with his fingernails. They scratched along a few inches. Then they held. The slide was over.

As if doing a horizontal chinup, Tom pulled himself across the curb and onto a walkway than ran along the edge of the surface. He regained his breath and his dizziness ebbed. At last he was able to stumble toward his friend the light, and the big door in the wall, next to it as promised.

As he felt for the door handle, the back of his hand brushed against something barely seen. He knew it by feel. They had left his wristwatch dangling from the handle.

Nice gesture
, he thought dryly. He slipped it on his aching wrist and felt somewhat comforted.

He stumbled through the unlocked door, through a small room lit by, incredibly, an EXIT sign, and through another door.

The breath of night hit him. The stars were still bright all around.

He saw distant lights. And silhouetted against those lights were running figures, charging him with guns drawn and leveled!

"WE call it the Rink," said Pete Langley. His voice was thick and uneven, disheveled to match his hair. "We use it for certain kinds of propulsion tests. Also, it’s a prototype—Old Man Wickliffe thought it could be patented and marketed, kind of an ice-skating rink without ice or skates. You just shalom around—no, that’s not the word—on your regular street shoes. Even tennis shoes."

"Uh-huh," muttered Tom, in a chair and feeling his bruises. "Cruising along at ant velocity I had plenty of time to get to know that surface. I tried to figure out what it was made of. Defractized Durastress? Under an Inertite coating?"

The third figure in the Wickliffe Laboratories office stirred to life under her own tousled mop of hair. "Durastress—a Tom Swift Enterprises patent, I do believe," said Amelia Foger, attorney. "Off-limits to us, of course. So we came up with ZeroTrac. Many obvious uses."

Tom smiled. "Who invented it?" he asked mischievously.

And Amy smiled back, in the steely manner of a serpent of the law. "Let’s not discuss proprietary secrets right now, Tom."

"Of course," nodded the young inventor. "Sorry to have awakened you—you
two
," he added dryly.

There was a fourth voice in the well-appointed office. "I’ll tell you what surprises me," said Harlan Ames. "Someone decides to kidnap Tom. Where do they take him? Here! A big research and construction facility that is
supposed
to meet Federal contractee security standards.

"Tom is carried onto the property, somehow—no alarms. He’s stowed in this ‘rink’ of yours—no one notices. In fact, it isn’t until he actually frees
himself
and comes stumbling out that a troop of overweight guards manages to take interest."

"Not fair, Ames," snapped Langley.

"It almost sounds as if you’ve decided to join the case
against
Peter," noted Amy icily. "Against
America’s Other Young Inventor
—who happens to be paying you to clear him."

"Maybe it’s slipped your mind, Ames, how recent it’s been since Dr. Wickliffe died," Langley continued. "New management, trying to hold it together. And there
was
the little matter of the Thessaly
earthquake
and all the damage—"

"All right," interjected Tom. "What matters now is this—was this the work of outsiders, or the same disloyal person, or persons, who passed along the
Viper Spirit
designs? Someone with access, maybe an employee?"

Amy Foger’s eyes sparked with something sharply undefined. "Someone with access—
top
access. Why, you
know
, that ‘someone’ could be
me
!"

Tom and Ames exchanged glances, as if asking the other,
Did
you
tell her?

She saw, the confirmation she had expected. "My goodness, I’m right!" she exclaimed sarcastically. "I’m a suspect. But of course, I’m a
Foger
. Something genetic."

"Are you ever going to let go of that baggage?" asked Tom. "We’ve
never
held you responsible for what Andy Foger did all those decades ago."

"I see. Heredity is thought to apply only to the Swift family."

"Let’s not waste time!" commanded Ames with the force of a quiet sledgehammer. "I
presume
you two can verify one another’s location during the crucial time period. We don’t need to explore that option right now—reasonable nor not. The sun’s coming up and we’re no closer to a solution."

"You said you went over the area before coming here to the office," Langley declared. "What did you
detect
? Whoever these guys are, they got onto the Wicko grounds somehow."

"The voice over the speaker was someone I encountered before," stated Tom with a troubled frown. He involuntarily exchanged another glance with Ames. How much should he say? Where would his words end up? Whose ear? "We... think it’s an agent of the Brungarian dissident faction, stationed in America."

"What can you tell us about him?" inquired Amy Foger. And Tom noted very pointedly whom it was that was inquiring.

"Not much at all," replied the youth. "But he and his cronies have threatened me and my family."

"We only know what we’re told," Ames said carefully. "It’s clearly connected to the penetration of U.S. airspace by the hyperjet. I’m sure the Feds have told you the same things they’ve told us. The
official
Feds—and the others."

Amy smiled in the direction of her
signoth
. "Bend over, Peter. This is called
smoke-blowing
. Enterprises knows more than it cares to tell little old us."

Harlan Ames stood abruptly. "I suggest we all find beds to sleep in for whatever time remains until breakfast. I’ll drive Tom home, then head back here to continue my investigation. I still have a job to do for you, Langley.