Tom Swift and His Cosmotron Express (14 page)

"Nothin’," stated Bud in disgust, peering through his goggles.

"Let’s climb down to the floor. They must’ve left
some
trace of the tests."

They made their way down with difficulty; there were no steps, no pathway, only jagged rock. When they finally clumped down on the sand, Tom began to examine it closely, kneeling down. "Traces of oil, flyboy," he told his comrade. "And look at this wall."

"That’s a wall, all right."

"The rocks have been fused by intense heat." Tom took a small container from his pocket and scraped it over the rock to collect samples for analysis. "There’s a spatter of metal—metal globules. And I can tell they were in a state of incandescence, liquefied, maybe even vaporized! They must have positioned the metalloid-thrust engine right—" He broke off abruptly and knelt. When he rose he held something tiny in his hand. "Bud, I’m sure this is Neo-Aurium!"

"Wish we had a normal flashlight," grumbled the San Franciscan. "It’d look gold, but in the infra it’s just more black-on-green."

They suddenly shouted in surprise as a light beam—a normal one—flashed across them! They fell back, shielding their eyes. Their goggles were momentarily greened-out by the unexpected glare.

A man’s voice barked something in guttural tones, repeating it in what sounded like Chinese—then again in English, heavily accented. "
What you are doing here? Who you are? I shoot!
"

"You shoot, we shoot you," returned Bud suavely, pulling off his goggles, as did Tom next to him. "And there’s
two
of
us
."

The man was clearly visible in the backscatter from his lamp. Barechested, he had evidently swum in through the sea opening. He stood glistening among the low waves, water dripping from the lamp lashed to his left forearm, but not from the revolver in his right hand. Tom and Bud noticed a waterproof holster attached to his waist by a strap.

The man, who appeared European in the fragmented back-light, either leered or sneered—it was hard to see—in response to Bud’s threat. "Shoot me? Eh, with what? Those little things in your hands? Little blow-dryers, for tourists!"

"Well, sir, your hair
does
look a bit damp," said Tom, slightly shifting the barrel of his Enterprises i-gun to one side and thumbing the trigger-switch. Its electric pulse was invisible, but a spot on the sand in front of the man flashed blue-white sparks. "Now, how about dangling that revolver over the water and gently letting go? Barrel downward, please."

The man glared. Bud added, "Speaking of styling work, these gadgets would do a great job at turning your blond chest-hair black. In other words, yee-
ouch
!"

The man’s gun splashed into the water, and he stood facing them, sullen and defiant. "Ohh-kay. So you are what, Tom Swift and his friend?"

"Call me Scotty," said Bud.

"I do nothing for you."

"I’ll say!" Bud stated.

"What went on in here?" demanded Tom with little hope of an answer. "Is this where you built the metal-fuel engine for the
Viper Spirit
? Were you one of the ones who tested it? Can’t hurt you to boast a little, not now."

The man stared intently at the young inventor. "Boast? Yes, I deserve to boast, do I not? I am Dr. Stang, Mr. Swift. My role was small, but together the group of us—a miracle, miracle in metal! Such power!"

"And such heat," noted Tom.

"Heat, yes, poor Corder, two Chinese—nothing but smoke and black bones left. You see their skulls in the sand." He gestured, and Tom’s and Bud’s reflexes betrayed them. As their eyes shifted, the man who called himself Stang hurled himself backwards into the water, at the same time pitching his flashlamp at them with a powerful whip of the arm. It struck Bud on the cheek. He gasped in pain. "T-Tom,
don’t let him
—"

Too late. A few splashes in the dark, a shadow at the opening to the outside—and nothingness resumed.

"
Jetz
!" Bud sputtered in anger. "We
had
him, Skipper!"

"Past tense," replied the scientist-inventor laconically. "But he’ll alert his cronies. Let’s clear out. We found out what Thurston wanted us to."

The two ached and scraped their way back through the back-passage. In an hour they were asleep, whether they wanted to be or not. And that morning—hours later in what was already
that morning
—they were driven back to the little airfield by a nameless woman cabby who spoke little but was eloquent in looks of suspicion.

Finally, in some senses "the next day," Tom and Bud were back at Enterprises, reporting to a small crowd—Damon Swift, Phil Radnor, Andor Emda, Harlan Ames by speaker-phone, and John Thurston by videophone. "And we’ve just confirmed that the samples are indeed Neo-Aurium," Tom was concluding. "The leptoscope shows that the globules from the walls were completely decomposed by ultra-intense heat—and for Neo-Aurium, that would be a temp close to that of the surface of the sun!"

"Then there’s no doubt that our informants were correct," declared Thurston. "The engine must’ve been constructed by the team of Asian engineers in Sumatra who are known in unsavory circles as ‘for hire.’ Now we have a card to play in negotiating with the Sumatran security apparatus for further information. Nations don’t easily give up secrets that embarrass the people supposedly in control."

"So I’ve heard," Tom remarked dryly. "The man who confronted us, though, wasn’t Asian."

"I’ve met him and worked with him," stated Andy. "Reggnar Stang. He’s a Norwegian chemist recruited by the Sentimentalists to run the
Dyaune
fuel team during the redesign. Bright young guy. Athletic type—swimmer."

"I know the type," grinned Bud.

"But what was he doing there?" mused Mr. Swift. "The machinery was gone. There was no technical work to be done, surely."

"Well, I have a theory about that," Tom said. "If I’m right, we’ll get confirming news shortly."

And Tom
was
right. Within the hour an internet summary of the international news, nation by nation, was reporting the investigation of an explosion in Sumatra.

" ‘
A blast on a small islet off the western coast has drawn authorities to Koong-Na, near Bendautok. The grotto therein may have shielded terrorist activities
.’ " Tom grimly nodded Bud’s way. "Yes, I think
maybe
it did."

"So that’s why they sent a chemist," Bud snorted. "To set up and set
off
a bomb!"

"Probably bringing down the roof of the cave—and burying any evidence left behind. But we got there first!"

"People are gonna lose their heads over this."

"No," grinned Tom, "they’re running a special this month—
half
-off!"

It was now only days before the scheduled first space test of the completed Cosmotron Express, and those days blurred by at cosmotronic speed. It was Sunday when Bud piloted the Flying Lab southward, Fearing Island once again their destination. "This route’s losing its charm. Ever think of moving Swift Enterprises to Fearing?" Bud asked Tom jauntily.

"No. But I
have
thought of moving Shopton to New Mexico—or maybe Nestria!"

The passengers aboard the mammoth jetcraft included those who would be joining Tom and Bud on the brief spaceflight, including Bob Jeffers, veteran astro-pilot Hannah Morgensteiff, Hank Sterling, Arvid Hanson, the always-welcome Chow—and one other.

"Brand my rattlers, I shor cain’t make out why
he’s
goin’ along," grumped Chow in what passed, for him, as a lowered voice. "Andy’s not s’ bad as a
person
, I’ll say that much, an’ he’s right fine at poker..."

"But you still don’t trust him," finished Tom. "Even though he hasn’t been wearing the hat lately—not you either, pardner."

"Naw," replied Chow. "Don’t wanna blow my cover by havin’ him reckernize me as th’ feller in th’ truck. But jest
fergit
hats for a sec, boss. He keeps pokin’ around, lookin’ things over, askin’ trick questions—wanted to know about my chili sauce!—an he’s still a
Brungarian
, ya know."

"Yes—he still is."

"Don’t trust him no-how."

"I think you’ve got an itchy trigger-finger, Chow."

"Naw. An itchy trigger
brain
! My prairie instincts ’r on fire. Don’t jest blow me off, son."

Tom reached up and around to find and squeeze his friend’s shoulder. "I’m taking you seriously. I respect intuition—it’s how I invent. But for better or worse we need to have him on this test jaunt—and on the Grand Tour flight as well."

"Naw,
don’t
tell me
that
! Why?"

The young inventor shrugged. "It may be important to have him along in space, in case we run across some clue as to what’s going on up there—or even, hopefully, the Nestria capsule and the
Dyaune
. His familiarity with the Sentimentalists and their ship could help us in negotiation, if it came to that. And also, he’s a physicist. With Franzenberg still out, it’d be convenient to have him with us. We’re dealing with some heady physics with the spacedriver, pard."

"Wa-aal, guess I kin see that. But—"

"Chow... The government has asked us to include him. They know the
Fire Fury
business has some connection to the
Dyaune
disappearance, somehow, and they want Andy up there as part of his investigation assignment. Dad thinks we should cooperate. The
Starward
uses the antiproton power source I developed for my space solartron, and it was hard enough to get certification to fly it up through the atmosphere
at all
, even for this test flight. They could make things real difficult for us if we got on somebody’s bad side."

Chow raised his hands. "Okay, okay, I give up. Jest fer now, though."

"Keep your eye on Andy, Chow."

"Aaa, I’ll keep
three
eyes on ’im!"

Setting down on Fearing, the crew trooped over to the towering spherical form that utterly dwarfed the mighty
Challenger
, rings and all. "A flying skyscraper!" exulted Hannah. "This must be the biggest thing to ever leave the ground!"

"Five stories high through the center!" Bud chortled. "But according to genius boy here, it doesn’t weigh much more than a soap bubble!"

"My press agent here is exaggerating," was Tom’s smiling reply, "but it’s true that the Cosmotron Express weighs a lot less than you might expect. We’ve incorporated ingravitized osmium, produced by the G-force inverter, into its inner support structure. It’s the heaviest nonradioactive substance known—and its
upward
-falling version gives the
Starward
quite a lift."

An elevator capsule slid smoothly down from the upsweep of the main hull, and in a minute Tom was showing the astronauts about the ship like a proud tour guide. Most of them already knew the basics from training in Enterprises’ 3-D simulators. But seeing it in person seemed to have an extra impact.

"The mind reels," murmured Andy Emda.

"An’ if it’s a Texas reel, that’s a lot," added Chow.

"Look at this picture window!" exclaimed Hank Sterling. "I thought the ones on the
Chal
were big!" The sweeping, bowed viewport covered almost half of one side of the main sphere, giving a shared view to three deck levels.

"Now
that’s
a lotta glass!" joked Bob Jeffers.

"Not glass," corrected Tom proudly. "Metallumin. It’s just the outer transparent globe, covering a gap we cut in the inner opaque hull. If we’re going to tour the solar system, we’ll want an unimpeded view!"

"Hunh!" snorted Chow. "I’d call it a blame
stampeded
view, boss!"

"Er... not to be a party-pooper," Hannah spoke up. "But Tom, just how confident are you that we won’t be attacked on this test flight by—whatever it is?"

Tom gave her an understanding look, but there was less than a full freight of reassurance in his answering voice. "We can’t be sure we’ll be safe. We don’t really know what the phenomenon is, whether it’s a weapon or something natural, or even whether the two disappearances and the effect on the Space Kite had the same cause."

"Other words, we’re sittin’ ducks," huffed Chow, feeling for his absent hat.

"I won’t minimize the danger we’ll be in," the youth agreed. "But remember, so far it’s been smaller-sized vehicles that have been targeted. The Nestria capsule and the Space Kite are dinky little things, and even the
Dyaune
was—is!—only a mid-size. Nothing happened to the
Challenger
when we went around the moon, and the
Starward
is bigger still."

Arv Hanson noted, "And even with the Space Kite, I had the feeling our attacker was having a hard time getting a grip on us."

"Getting a firm grip could mean you
disappear
," muttered Bob.

"Yes. It could." Tom looked into the faces of his friends and colleagues. "It’s always been this way, hasn’t it? There’s always a
something
out there. I’ll tell you what I think. Where would science and mankind be without risk and—courage? Without daredevils and fools like us?

"But is it really much better for those left behind on the ground? Who knows when and where terrorists could strike? That’s why we call them
terrorists
! Buildings fall, and people still go to work, parents still drive their kids to school, and somehow or other the crazy human race goes on. Let me tell you something my great-grandfather Tom once said. ‘
Yes, we might fall. But at least we’ll fall forward.
’

"I don’t think I can ever express all the gratitude I feel for your courage—and for being risk-taking idiots helping us make sense of this idiotic world of ours."

"That’s the best compliment I’ve ever gotten," said Bud Barclay. And he was serious.

The control deck—the lowest deck with a window view—now became busy. "Guess we’re ready, Skipper," said Bud, co-piloting with his chum. "Are we ‘go’ for repelatron liftoff?"

Tom hesitated for the briefest moment. They were about to head up into space, a weird, lonely realm haunted by an unknown danger!

"
Let’s go,
" he said.