Tom Swift and His Polar-Ray Dynasphere (9 page)

"No, it didn’t say anything—no words, just a picture. Offhand I have no idea what it signifies, or even what it is. Then again, I suppose the perps didn’t have much time for artistry." Ames asked his young boss to stop by the office to look over what he’d been faxed from New York City.

The image turned out to be very hard to describe and impossible to identify. "What the heck is it?" Bud asked. "Some kind of crab?"

"It looks more like a plant," offered Ames. "Maybe an undersea plant."

Triangular "fins," ending in curved claws or thorns, fanned out from a central body. At the top was something shaped like a sea-shell, with markings inside it. "Can’t imagine what it is," Tom murmured, fascinated. "Which end is up?"

"The FBI is trying to identify it. It could be a symbol used by an Asian or Indian gang," Ames explained. "They’re holding this back from the media for now, as they often do—helps separate the good tips from the bogus ones. You can keep this copy, boss."

As Tom and Bud entered the Swifts’ shared office next door, Bud’s skepticism was writ large on his handsome face. "Makes no sense to me, Skipper. I know nutjobs like Li Ching leave ‘calling cards.’ So do serial killers. You gotta wonder, why leave these dumb ‘clues’ that just help the police to track you down? In-your-face arrogance?"

Tom shrugged. "Don’t count it out. In this case it could be an attempt to plant a false lead—maybe that was the whole point from the beginning. On the other hand," he added mischievously, "I hear wolves make a point of marking their turf!"

They spent some time on the office PER unit speaking to Sandy, Bashalli, and Chow in Vishnapur. "Oh Tom, it’s just
wonderful
here!" Sandy enthused. "The royal buildings—it’s like a combination city and museum!"

"Shor is fancy stuff," noted Chow. "Feel like I orta wipe m’ fingerprints off ever’thing I touch. An’ then ya got these here elephants runnin’ around."

Tom laughed. "Do they have elephant traffic jams at rush hour?"

"With trumpeting instead of honks," giggled Bash. "Thomas, you really must try to get here in time for the festival."

"We’ll try," replied the young inventor.

"Better try right hard, son," Chow added meaningfully as the call ended. "That prince feller’s got more charm’n he knows what t’do with. Yew catch my drift?"

Tom’s father passed through the office briefly on his way to a meeting at the Swift Construction Company across town, and Tom reported on the Benni Susak affair.

After he had left, Tom and Bud chatted for a time. Suddenly George Dilling came rushing in, swathed in panic! "
Tom
!"

Bud grumbled sarcastically, "Do we
ever
finish a sentence around here?"

"
There’s a—I just—they want—!
"

"Come on, slow down, George," Tom interrupted. "What’s going on?"

"The FAA just called me on my cell—there’s some kind of crippled airline flight—a disaster on the way! They’re asking if Enterprises can do anything!"

"Which means you, Skipper!" Bud exclaimed.

Tom asked for the details. "I’ll tell you what they told me—talk to them directly for more," answered Dilling, wiping his brow with an Enterprises-monogramed handkerchief. "A big passenger jetliner out of India is over the Atlantic right now, apparently on autopilot. It’s en route to Baltimore. They’ve lost touch with the pilots—
completely
! The cockpit is totally sealed off, and the flight attendants are reporting by cellphone that they can’t communicate with the pilots either. It’s slowly drifting off course minute by minute."

"Heading for a crackup," declared Tom grimly. "But why can’t they get into the cockpit?"

"Something about a security system—protection against terrorist takeovers."

"Okay, George, put me in touch with whoever knows something about it."

It developed that the commercial flight, out of New Delhi, had gone silent while crossing Spain, with no prior warning or hint of any unusual conditions aboard. A representative of the Indian airline company explained to Tom: "With respect to our cockpit, Mr. Swift, the company has instituted new safety measures. In effect, the cockpit is an entirely separate unit from the passenger section, entered through its own hatchway in the hull. The connecting door has been welded shut. Indeed, even direct communication by intercom is prevented, to discourage hostage-taking among the passengers, by terrorists who might use such threats to impose some new course upon the pilots. But something must have happened to the flight crew, two very experienced and trusted pilots. It has been almost ninety minutes since ground contact was lost."

"Do you know anything about the physical condition of the jet?" asked Tom.

"Such telemetry as we have indicates that there are no mechanical problems or failures in the major systems, and fuel is adequate for now. But what of the future? The pilots may well be dead!"

"I—I
think
we may be able to help, sir. Please transmit to Enterprises blueprints and specs for the jetliner, and its precise course and location."

"Immediately, Mr. Swift. I pray you can do something!"

The call ended, and Bud stared at his friend. "
Whoa
!"

"Yeah."

It took only minutes for the
Sky Queen
to take to the air with a skeleton crew, Bud manning the controls as Tom pored over what had been sent to him electronically.

"Well—I’ve eliminated a few approaches, Bud," Tom muttered. "That’s a kind of a start, I guess. It looks like our minidrone landing-forcers couldn’t affect this brand of system electronics."

Bud glanced back over his shoulder. "Maybe you could use the
Challenger
, as you did in bringing the
Highroad
down."

Some time before, while Tom had been perfecting his megascope space prober, Bud had participated in an attempt to make a manned flyby of the planet Venus. When his craft had become disabled, Tom had used the
Challenger
to carry it down to Earth safely, papoose style, on the cushioning beams of its repelatrons.

Tom had to shake away the idea. "This jetliner is a lot bigger and bulkier than the
Highroad
command module, flyboy. We’d have to put so much repelatron power into carrying it we wouldn’t be able to keep aloft."

A crewman, Jack Vincenzo, cleared his throat respectfully and asked, "Okay, but you do have
some
thing in mind—right?"

"Yes. Something off-the-wall. It’s why I brought along the new polar-ray machine, Jack. I’m working on the plan. But as they say, the devil is in the details."

"In this case," muttered Bud tensely, "I’d say the devil is in the clock!"

As the Flying Lab hurdled the miles at supersonic speed, Tom’s tentative, hopeful plan evolved into solid action. When radar detected the jetliner nosing toward them ahead, Bud took the
Sky Queen
in a loop that brought her into a station-keeping position some two hundred feet above the stricken craft, slowing her to the cruising speed of the jet. "Okay, Tom. Speed matched. We’re in position. Ready?"

"Dressed and ready." The young inventor had donned a pressurized flight suit and spoke to his pal via the suit’s transiphone.

Descending to the lower deck, Tom entered the skyship’s big hangar-hold, sealing the hatch behind him. He ran a quick, final check of the dyna-field machine, which had been firmly bolted to the deck. Then he ran a cable of twisted Tomasite fibers through a ring on his suit harness, hooking its free end to a stanchion. The other end was coiled around a winch-drum, putting Tom at the vertex of a V.
This ought to hold me in place!
he told himself, urging the truth.

It would be death if it didn’t, as Tom intended to partially lower the hangar deck, opening it to the battering-ram force of the airstream!

The rescue of the jetliner depended upon a skillful utilization of the youth’s new invention. The test model was far too puny to affect the craft directly, in the manner Tom planned to employ to give the Kronus its shove to safety. But Tom calculated that he could use the dyna-field to distort and extend the intense electromagnetic flux surrounding the pontoon-like nacelles of the
Sky Queen
’s aeolivanes. Mounted on either side of the bottom of the fuselage, this pair of devices used intensely localized electromagnetic fields to funnel the air streaming next to the hull toward the ship’s contoured underhull, providing additional lift to the wingless
Queen
. It was Tom’s plan to beam these aeolivane fields to the jetliner, using them to alter the airflow around its wings. If all went well, this would allow him to guide the jetliner along, and eventually to slow it for a safe water landing near the coast—far ahead, but now not so far.

"All right, Bud," Tom signaled. "Lower away." His heart thudded. It understood the danger ahead.

With the slightest of jolts, the deck began to descend like an elevator on its extension pistons. As a thread of sky appeared, the windwash blasted the young inventor, rocking him backwards. His safety line snapped taut.

"Okay, Tom?" came Bud’s voice, almost lost beneath the roar filling Tom’s helmet. "Want me to take in the line a bit?"

"Maybe three feet—the controls are out of reach." Tom was unable to make any headway toward the machine against the wind. His feet were barely skimming the deck!
Good gosh, I’m just about flying like a human kite!
he gulped.

The winch-drum began to turn, reeling in the cable. As it slipped through Tom’s suit-ring, the tension inched him forward against the roaring blast. He stretched out a hand toward the polar-ray machine’s master control.

And then the cable broke.

TOM SWIFT cannoned backwards helplessly across the deck. The break had occurred where the cable-end had attached to the stanchion, and as Tom hurtled at, literally, jet speed, the now uncoupled safety line sizzed through the ring on his harness.

His brain formed no words, but even as the rear edge of the deck flashed by and he shot into space, he had managed to grab the slithering cable with his thickly gloved hands. The cable whipped through them, and for a terrifying instant Tom was sure its torn end would fly through the harness ring before he could get a grip. Almost by instinct he exerted full pressure, trying to tangle the fleeing line about his forearm. He saw the cable-end darting toward him—and then was snapped to a painful halt as his grip took hold.

Dragged along by the
Sky Queen
at the end of a string, he spun and bounced in open air twenty feet behind the hangar deck!

Battered, in agonizing pain, it was impossible for the youth to collect his thoughts. But there was a voice in his ear. "
Pulling in!
" The winch was continuing to revolve. At the controls, Bud had seen what had happened on the deck videocam!

Vision was chaos. Tom couldn’t mark the moment when he again passed across the aft edge of the deck. But at some point he was sprawled flat on a deck that had just clicked back into place in the hold of the ship.

Infrared heatlamps spread their warming glow as Tom lay in surging pain, barely conscious. In seconds the hatchway hissed open and Bud and Jack came sprinting in.

"G-genius boy!
" Bud cried, kneeling down to unseal his pal’s helmet and bring his white, bruised, blue-lipped face into the open air.

Tom eyelids tremored. "Uh—I—
oww
!"

"We’ve got to get him to a doctor," fretted Jack. "He’s pretty banged up."

"No... no," gasped the young inventor. "I’ll be okay. I have to work the machine. No other way."

"But—!"

"No, l-look." Tom struggled to his feet, trying very hard not to wince. The arm that had been wrapped in the cable shrilled with shouts of pain. "See, guys, I’m... all right."

Bud impulsively drew Tom into a bearhug. "I’d never accuse you of lying, Skipper," he murmured. "But I know you are."

"Th-thanks for reeling me in."

"Tom, you’ve got to stop this business of falling out of planes."

"I’m trying to quit."

Jack examined the end of the cable. "The lynch-hook failed at the join," he pronounced. "Easy to splice up. But are you sure you want to trust it again?"

Tom said bleakly, "I’ll have to."

In minutes the program resumed. The deck was again lowered and Tom began to work the controls of the electrodynamic modulator, daring the waves of pain to distract him. Over the open edge of the deck Tom could see the stricken jet below.

"Take the
Queen
closer, Bud." The Flying Lab descended, but the youths knew there was a limit. To maintain forward flight without the full lift of the aeolivanes, Bud would have to open up the jet lifters slightly. The down-thrusting jets would endanger the stability of the liner at too-close range.

Tom tuned the dyna-field to the form and frequency of the aeolivane flux. Contact! He rotated the focusing ring and began to extend the field downward.

At a touch of the controls, he saw the jetliner sway against the clouds beneath it, just a hair. "It’s working!" he exulted. "Start feeding me the numbers, Bud."

The rest was easy—if taken proportionally to what had gone before. The jetliner was herded toward a waiting rescue ship, then guided downward, gently. Finally, as it was nearly clipping the waves, Tom used the field to divert the airstream away from the jet intakes. The jets stalled out—just as the craft skimmered down onto the cushion of the Atlantic. "
She’s down
," Tom breathed. Above, Bud and Jack cheered.

Tom spent the flight back to Shopton lying flat in sickbay, powerful analgesics stifling his pain. At Enterprises the plant’s young medic, Doc Simpson, gave him the once-over. "Bruises and muscle trauma," he pronounced. "Nothing broken. You managed to keep all your bones in their sockets. And of course we don’t bother worrying about your skull anymore. Anyway, let’s keep that arm wrapped for a couple days. By the way," Doc added, "how are those plane passengers?"

"I’m told everyone was taken off in fine shape," Tom replied. "That is—the passengers were."

"What about the two pilots?"