Tom Swift and His Diving Seacopter (4 page)

"In fact, Mr. Mayor, we really shouldn’t be calling it a
rocket,"
Tom pointed out soothingly. "It’s a vehicle of some kind, but if it’s like the meteor-missile that came to us last year, it doesn’t work on an external combustion principle at all."

"Is that supposed to be reassuring? Do you expect me to stand by and do nothing when the lives of thousands of people are at stake?" the mayor stormed. "Explosive or not, that
thing
could cause great havoc in a town like Shopton!"

Tom glanced at his father, uncertain whether or not to reveal the secret details of the Swifts’ recent communication with their space friends.

Mr. Swift took the cue. "I’ll speak frankly, Mayor," he said. "We
have
received a message from the space scientists concerning their sending us a sample of life-forms. Like the others, this message came in a mathematical symbol code, which we previously compiled into a space dictionary on computer. That dictionary has been destroyed, apparently after having been copied without our permission."

Mayor Clyde gasped. "You mean the perpetrator is the person who called me?"

"That’s quite probable," Tom spoke up. "The latest message was recorded in the most recent of the computer files—it was the one concerning the rocket."

"Our security division has been working on the incident, along with various government authorities," Mr. Swift added. "Tom, call Ames and find out if he has any news, won’t you?"

Going to the phone alcove, the boy dialed Harlan Ames’ private number, only to learn that there was nothing new to report. Tom informed Ames of the anonymous phone call to the mayor.

A worried frown creased Tom’s forehead as he hung up. There was as yet no real proof of any involvement by Munson Wickliffe. Could the theft have been an inside job by someone working at the plant—perhaps an employee? And if so, what was the motive?

Returning to the living room, he reported Ames’ failure so far to solve the mystery. From Mr. Swift’s expression it was plain that he shared Tom’s concern. Nevertheless both father and son tried to reassure Mayor Clyde. The official, however, could not be calmed. He begged them to send a message to their space friends, calling off the rocket plans.

"Very well," Mr. Swift agreed. "We’ll try to contact them later tonight, when Mars is over the horizon."

Tom was amazed and dismayed by this sudden decision. As the Mayor left, he turned to his father, trying not to sound accusing.

"Dad, did you really mean that about contacting our space friends? This is our chance to learn something about life on other planets, something scientists have dreamed of for centuries! We can’t throw it away!"

"Don’t worry, Tom," Mr. Swift replied. "Our message will simply ask the space people to hold off landing the rocket for a while. That will give us time to work out more of the code and to calm down the Mayor and any others who have heard the news."

Tom grinned sheepishly. "I should have known you wouldn’t back down."

Mrs. Swift and Sandy had listened in alarm to the mayor’s remarks. Now Sandy burst out, "If someone’s trying to make trouble, he may do something treacherous! Please be careful, Dad. And you too, Tom!"

"How about me?" demanded Bud.

"You be careful too," said Anne Swift. "And that goes for you boys as well," she added, looking at Braun and Teller, who nodded vigorously.

"We’ll be on our guard, my dear," Mr. Swift promised. "Tom, we’d better get busy on that message right away!"

Apologizing for ending the evening so abruptly, they sped to the plant with Tom at the wheel of his sports car. Darkness had fallen, but the grounds of Swift Enterprises were illuminated by powerful floodlights.

Hours later they were ready to transmit the brief message they had composed. But as they neared the room that housed the imaging oscilloscope equipment that was connected to the magnifying antenna, the employee who had been monitoring the device during the night shift ran into the hallway to meet them. "Tom! Mr. Swift! A message is just coming through!"

They dashed into the oscilloscope room. Not content to wait for the replay of the recorded message, Tom’s father began jotting down the symbols appearing on the screen. For several moments the unusual pictographs continued to march across the oscilloscope. Then the monitor went blank.

"Does any of it look familiar, Dad? Can you translate it?" Tom asked breathlessly.

"Not yet, son." Mr. Swift thumbed through his notebook and wrote down several words, then glanced up with a worried frown. "Decoding this series will involve some hard work, especially without the space dictionary. See if you can remember any of these symbols."

Between them, Tom and his father struggled with the message for over an hour, covering sheet after sheet in their computations. Finally they worked out the meaning:

EXPLODING MISSILE WILL SIGNIFY THAT LIFE VESSEL ARRIVAL IS IMMANENT

The two inventors faced each other tensely. Neither of them dared to voice the disturbing thought that raced into their minds. What if the missile exploded in the middle of Shopton!

Before the Swifts could speak, the phone jangled. The operator reported that he was relaying an outside call. Tom gulped when the operator disclosed that the call was from Mayor Clyde!

Clyde’s voice crackled over the receiver. "I just got word about that exploding missile! Confound it, Tom Swift, you and your father promised you’d stop the infernal thing from being shot at us!"

"What!"
Tom cried unbelievingly, putting the phone on speaker mode. "How in the world did—"

"Don’t ask questions!" Mayor Clyde exploded. "You said you’d call off this dangerous business. Now my secret informant calls me at home to tell me about this exploding missile nonsense!"

"Bill, it takes time to put our message together in the symbol code," Damon Swift protested. "We were about to—"

"Never mind making excuses. Damon, you’re the CEO over there, and I’m holding you responsible for this catastrophe in the making. I’m telling you as Mayor,
do something before Shopton is wiped out!"

An emphatic click told them the Mayor had hung up.

"Whoever has the space dictionary files knows how to use them, Tom." Mr. Swift’s face was anxious. "And they’ve used the technical data to tune in on the space messages themselves." The words were hardly out of his mouth when the phone rang again. "What’s wrong now? More trouble?"

This time the caller was Dan Perkins, editor of the
Shopton Evening Bulletin.
He informed Tom’s father in icy tones—yet with a certain journalistic glee—that he had been told by a "privileged source" that the Swifts were going too far in their efforts to communicate with the alien scientists. "It’s only fair to tell you that I’m preparing an editorial saying that if you allow that missile to explode in Shopton, it’ll be criminal negligence at best—and at worst, murder!"

When Damon Swift lowered the phone receiver, deeply shaken, Tom said softly, "Dad, what can we do?"

Mr. Swift began to pace about the room with clenched fists. "We must amend our message to say that an explosive missile is out of the question. It never occurred to me that these scientists wouldn’t realize—"

"Listen!" cried Tom. A strange whistling sound seemed to be coming from somewhere outside.

An instant later a blinding flash turned night to day, followed by a terrific and frightening roar!

The force of the explosion, in the sky over Swift Enterprises, shook the buildings like the impact of a giant’s hammer. In the room where Tom and his father stood, books and small objects were tumbled to the floor. Two of the windowpanes cracked and caved in. Tom dashed to one of the windows followed by Mr. Swift. The sky above was illuminated by a strange phosphorescence, with a cloud of fine fragments raining down on the experimental station.

"The missile must have exploded just above," said the elder scientist. "Thank goodness it was above and not among us!"

"I’m sure our space friends planned it that way," Tom replied, racing from the room.

Outdoors pandemonium held sway as guards and night employees swarmed around the grounds. But as dawn broke hours later it was clear that the space visitor had caused no injury and done no major damage. Quick calls to Shopton, cautiously worded, indicated that the townfolk had not noticed the blast, which was highly localized.

"Well, at least we can honestly tell Perkins and Mayor Clyde that they no longer have anything to fear from the explosive missile!" Mr. Swift commented wryly to Tom.

They caught a few hours of needed sleep on cots in their shared office, and breakfasted at the plant commissary. Mr. Swift composed a reassuring notice which was circulated among the work force. As Mars was still over the horizon, they were able to transmit a revised message to their space friends urging them to temporarily postpone the arrival of the rocket, and warning them that unauthorized persons might attempt to interfere with the project by sending false or misleading information.

As the morning passed and Mars descended behind the western horizon, Tom and his father were disturbed at the lack of a confirming response to their transmission.

"They’ve had plenty of time to compose a message back to us," Damon Swift commented.

Tom’s response was worrisome. "Dad, they may never have received it. If Wickliffe or some other technically savvy person has possession of the space dictionary data, they know enough to jam our outgoing signals." Mr. Swift conceded the truth of this possibility.

As he often did when a problem proved insoluble, Tom withdrew to his personal laboratory-workshop, where he turned his mind to some remaining technical issues concerning his seacopter design. As noon approached, Bud dropped by.

"George and Ham are great guys," Bud observed. "Do you think they have the real low-down on that soggy sea-city?"

"They’re on to
something,
flyboy." Tom flipped open a large, detailed chart of the floor of the eastern mid-Atlantic. He pointed to a spot on the chart north of the Madeira Islands and slightly east of the Horseshoe Seamounts. "Notice this formation of underwater peaks?"

"Sure. What about them?"

"They could he more than just the upjuttings of a mountainside."

"Meaning what?" asked Bud, fascinated by the hint of mystery in Tom’s voice.

"I believe that they may be part of a great ceremonial grounds with pyramids, buried in lava-rock and sea silt. They seem too pointed and narrow, and too regularly arranged, to be natural. This is where I think George Braun and Ham Teller ought to start their search."

Bud bounced out of his chair excitedly. "Tom, on our next test of the seacopter, why don’t we go there and take a look?"

Tom had to grin at his friend’s enthusiasm. Bud was always ready for action!

"Slow down, boy! There’s a lot of work to do yet before the seacopter will be ready for a distance cruise. We haven’t even tested it with the pieces all put together."

"Well, make it soon. I can hardly wait to start for the lost city!"

"Which reminds me," added Tom, "I have another project under way that I haven’t told you about!"

"WHAT’S THE deal?" Bud Barclay demanded. "Show me—before I read about it in the
Bulletin!"

"Sure thing, Bud. It’s in the photographic department. Let’s drive over now."

Hopping into a nanocar, the boys drove to one of the multistory laboratory buildings. Stepping onto a ridewalk they were smoothly carried down the main corridor of the quarter-mile-long plant wing by a silent conveyor belt. They stepped off near the entrance to the photographic laboratory.

Inside, experimental work on all kinds of cameras was taking place. Tom led Bud to a device which looked like a supersized television camera gimbal-mounted on a metal support column. It bristled with knobs and dials, and had what appeared to be a TV screen at the rear of the housing.

"Quite a toy!" said Bud, scratching his head. "What does it do?"

"Takes video images and picks up sounds through walls and solid objects," Tom replied. "After a five-second processing delay, it displays the result on the screen and through the headset earphones."

Bud nodded his understanding but said, "Can’t your tele-tec machines already do that?"

The young pilot was referring to the television detector, invented by Tom’s famous great-grandfather and namesake in the 1930’s and improved over the succeeding decades with advances in electronics technology. It was in use for security purposes at Swift Enterprises and around the world.

Tom’s answer was, "Actually, it’s a further evolution of the Swift television detector." He explained that the device still worked by projecting an electromagnetic scanning beam through obstructions, which was reflected back by objects in the range of its focus. "But this model uses
three
beams that intersect at the focus-point. This allows us to use extreme low frequency waves, which can pass through water up to a distance of about 100 feet. That’s something the standard tele-tec can’t do. We can also register sounds by using a Doppler-diffraction technique to ‘read’ the molecular motions of sound vibration."

"The all-seeing eye!" Bud exclaimed in admiration. "What do you call this super-snooper?"

Tom winked. "Well, I
was
going to call it a
snooper-
visor, but maybe I should leave the puns to you."

Bud assumed a humorous look of superiority. "But of course. How about the Eye-Spy camera?"

"Perfect!" The young inventor flicked on several switches, and the monitor screen began to glow. "The color-processing unit isn’t ready yet, but I can show you this black-and-white job in action." Tom wheeled the bulky camera dolly over to the far side of the room. "We’ll watch the traffic out in the hall," he said, adjusting several control dials as Bud looked over his shoulder in fascination.

Five seconds later a clear view of the corridor sprang into focus on the screen. Along came a roly-poly figure, bald-headed and bowlegged, pushing a cart loaded with food.

"It’s the Chow Winkler show!" Tom said, grinning broadly. Chow, a happy-go-lucky former chuck-wagon cook from Texas, had met the Swifts while they were constructing an atomic research facility in New Mexico. He had returned to Shopton with them to be chef for the Swifts and culinary expert for the Enterprises plant.