Tom Swift and the Visitor From Planet X (5 page)

"Wow!" the youth gulped. "But have they done anything like that here in Shopton?"

"Well, no. But there’ve been some incidents I find... odd." Captain Rock hesitated, involuntarily lowering his voice. "They’ve only been open for business for a few months, and already eight of their members—well known Shopton citizens who’ve joined the church, upstanding folks—have been charged with shoplifting in town. Piddly stuff, I’ll admit. But three of those eight were apprehended during storefront and home break-ins and charged with attempted burglary!"

"I’ll bet the Church bailed them out," commented Tom.

"Sure did. And as a matter of fact, there have been other local burglaries recently with similar MO’s, so far unsolved. When you get a rash of this stuff in the span of a few weeks—!"

"Right. And Mr. Wullgrath may have been planning some sort of theft last night, at Enterprises. It couldn’t possibly have worked, though, not with our security setup. He was dumb to think it could pull it off."

"Dumb? My opinion, these folks are
nuts!"
the captain grumbled. "Just my personal opinion, naturally. I have nothing against anyone’s religion but my own."

But when Tom clicked off the phone, he couldn’t stop thinking of the intent look on Wullgrath’s face, the fierce energy with which he resisted capture.

"Crazy they may be," the youth murmured to the inert phone in his hand. "But something tells me we have a lot more to worry about than tinfoil weapons!"

IT WAS later that morning that Tom, working in his design lab on the problem of creating a mobile container for the energy brain, received the welcome news that a response from the X-ians had been received at last.

"We just finished receiving it, but your Dad was here and had a chance to look it over," Nels Gachter reported. "He was anxious to get the preliminary translation to you."

"That’s great!" Tom enthused. "Now I can work on something more than vague notions! What was the content of the message?"

"Listen, I’ll read it to you—the first part, anyway."

TO EARTH CONTACT SWIFT. WE ACKNOWLEDGE YOUR ACCEPTANCE. ENERGY BRAIN IS NOW IN TRANSIT AND WILL PENETRATE EARTH GASEOUS ENVELOPE IN 6.52 AXIAL ROTATIONS. NECESSARY PHYSICAL PARAMETERS NOW FOLLOW.

Tom couldn’t help gasping softly. "Six and a half days!"

Gachter chuckled. "Like father, like son! Your Dad’s reaction was louder. Still, he said to tell you that the parameter data is extensive. Basically, you’ll just be working from their blueprints."

Tom, however, was not certain of this. The inhabitants of distant Planet X clearly knew the details of their own creation. But it was up to Earthly scientists to give the visitor the power to engage with an environment that was, apparently, radically different from that of his mysterious creators.

After the parameter details had been sent to Tom, he sat almost motionless for a time, studying them.
How in the world do I begin?
he asked himself.

Finally his youthful brain began to percolate and the magic of his scientific intuitions took over. The computer-like "space brain" was evidently a
four
-dimensional pattern of self-reinforcing energy, inscribed directly upon the fabric of spacetime and stable at the quantum level. The X-ians seemed to be indicating that modulations of the different segments of its peripheral "shell"—composed of dense motes of charged particles twined together by looped cords of electromagnetism—would be directly grasped by the entity, not merely as coded data but as something like a conscious experience.
So the first thing to do is design receptor ‘organs’ that can respond to specific factors in the environment, like the five basic human senses,
Tom thought as he pulled out his "sketch" notebook.

Like the space beings, Tom Swift had discovered how to manipulate the flow of spacetime. His method was to ignore it by means of deep concentration. The morning hours passed unnoticed.

"Chow down!" boomed a foghorn voice. Chow Winkler, wearing a white chef’s hat, wheeled a lunch cart into the lab.

"Oh, hi Chow... thanks." Tom scarcely looked up from his work as the cook set out an appetizing meal of Texas hash, milk, and deep-dish apple pie on the bench beside the young inventor’s papers and computer keyboard. Grumbling under his breath, well-aware that his grumbling would go utterly unheard, Chow sauntered out.

In the manner of a robot fueling itself automatically, Tom went on working intently between mouthfuls. In another hour he had finished a set of pilot drawings. The young scientist-inventor frowned as he studied the rough sketches he had drawn. "This setup’s full of bugs!" he muttered. His progress seemed minimal.

Nevertheless, Tom decided, the basic idea was sound. Grabbing pencil and hand calculator, he began to dash off page after page of diagrams and engineering equations. Near the end of the day, though Tom hardly knew it, he called Hank Sterling and Arvid Hanson and asked them to come to the laboratory.

They listened with keen interest as Tom explained his early concepts in great technical and theoretical detail. "This is a case where we can’t really perform advance tests to fine-tune the approach, obviously. No telling if it will work when the energy arrives from space," Tom said. "But I
think
everything tracks okay with the data from the space message. Hank, get these concepts blueprinted and assign an electronics group to the project. You’d better handle the hardware yourself."

"Right." Hank rolled up the blown-up copies Tom had made of his notebook pages. "I’ll also ask Dean Stegner from Life Sciences to go over them with me, since the goal is to emulate basic human sense processes. They’ve been doing emulation work in connection with AI stuff."

"Great idea. And Arv," Tom went on, "I’d like a scale model made to guide them on assembly when they get to that phase of things. How soon can you have it?"

Hanson promised the model for sometime the next day, and the two men hurried off. Their young boss had signaled, by his brusqueness, the tremendous importance of the project at hand.

As five o’clock crept toward six, Tom reminded himself of the need to record the day’s tasks and progress in his encrypted computer journal, which only he and his father had access to. He worked carefully for some time, then paused for long moments, staring at the screen. Was the entry finished?

Suddenly he stiffened, eyebrows lifted in surprise. Words not written by him had flashed onto the glowing screen!

BRUNGARIA PROBLEM
NEWS TO PUBLIC TOMORROW

"Collections!" gasped Tom.

When Tom had first begun to venture into space, an ultra-secretive government group, now nicknamed Collections, had made contact with him to warn him of dangers and developments in the shadow world of foreign affairs and international espionage. They had some sort of high-tech means of accessing Tom’s personal files and communicating interactively via any computer he chose to utilize. Incredibly, it sometimes seemed that his primary contact, who had accepted the monicker "the Taxman," could actually see and hear the young inventor at his keyboard!

The Taxman—evidently a team of specialists alternating in the role, not just a single individual—rarely intervened in matters other than those related to space exploration and national defense. He had last contacted Tom when the space friends had directed Tom to a rendezvous, on the moon, with a vessel containing extraterrestrial animals.

Tom typed,
"Where were you jokers when I was trying to find Li Ching and the stolen ship?"
He was referring to a recent deadly affair that had endangered many lives, Tom’s and Bud’s included. His attempts to contact Collections had then gone unanswered.

DOESNT MATTER NOW
COUP WILL IMPACT VISITOR PROJECT

Visitor project!
"You mean our brainy guest?"

SUCH VISITORS
COULD CHANGE OUR WORLD
SENTIMENTALISTS NOW IN CONTROL

Tom frowned deeply. This was a new angle. He knew the government of the European country of Brungaria—formerly a totalitarian state hostile to the West, now democratic and nominally friendly—had been threatened by a faction of internal plotters who termed themselves The Sentimentalists.
"We were sure that group had been smashed!"
he entered.

ACTIVE IN SECRET
TAKEOVER IMMANENT

The news was dismaying. Tom probed for more information. "How will this coup affect our project here?"

NO MORE TO SAY

And no more
was
said. As Tom clicked off the computer in frustration, he told himself: "The guy didn’t even use his usual tag-line—
your tax dollars at work!"
Why had the warning taken such a vague form? Was Collections afraid their own communications might be tapped by the rogue Brungarians?

Then a more unsettling thought popped into his brain.
What if the real danger to be guarded against was not the Brungarians, but the Masters from Planet X?
Collections knew the details of the Swifts’ space contacts. Perhaps something about the impending visitation was compelling an unusual degree of secrecy!

It was a chilling possibility Tom preferred not to think about.

In the morning, a night of little sleep behind him, Tom sat with his mother at the breakfast table. Mr. Swift had already left for work, and Sandy had an early dental appointment in town.

Tom chatted with his mother about the pending arrival from space. "Goodness, mightn’t it get out of control and be rather overpowering? Suppose it went berserk!" commented Anne Swift.

Both she and Tom became thoughtful as they discussed the problem. "That’s a mighty scary possibility, Mom," her son agreed, smiling wryly but not reassuringly. "But I trust our space friends wouldn’t let that happen."

"Yes, but you said this ‘x-man’ isn’t coming from the space friends," she pointed out.

Tom nodded. "True. But in the past the Mars scientists were willing to slip us a warning when their superiors were—you know, pushing the envelope. All we can do is go forward. After all, nothing prevents the X-ians from shopping elsewhere for Earth contacts if we become difficult or suspicious. We just about have to play along."

"I understand," said Mrs. Swift. "And there’s
so
much to be learned from them. If anything’s worth the risk,
this
is, surely."

"Mumsy, I agree." As Tom stood to clear the dishes, he added soberly, "And Dad was sure right the other night, Mom. This is a terrific challenge on all counts."

Shortly thereafter, as he sat down on the living room sofa to pull on his shoes, Tom flicked on the big TV screen. Instead of the usual morning interview program, a news conference was in progress, and the tone was grim.

A familiar figure, the Secretary of Defense, was speaking. "It now appears," the man was explaining, "that only one segment was quelled. Other members of the antigovernment movement are active again and are said to be strongly organized."

"Mr. Secretary, what’s the bottom line here?" asked a reporter. "Does this coup in Brungaria endanger our allies in Europe?"

"We mustn’t jump to hasty conclusions, Jane," was the reply. "The statement from the White House urged calm and caution, and that’s certainly the attitude where
I
work, in the Pentagon." The assembled group laughed as he added: "Matter of fact, we didn’t even interrupt our morning coffee break!"

Yet even as the man spoke, a "breaking news" message was sliding across the bottom of the TV screen.
President confirms ouster of democratic government in Brungaria. Rioting engulfs capital city of Volkonis. Border clash reported.

"Oh, Tom, what’s going to happen?" murmured Mrs. Swift softly, watching the news program from the dining room.

"Guess it’s not for us to know, Mom," Tom responded, trying not to show that he was as concerned as his mother.

When Tom arrived at Enterprises, he found Bud and Chow waiting with Mr. Swift in the administrative building office. "Guess we got a little spooked by that there Brungaria business," Chow declared. "We had more’n enough trouble with them pesty foreigners on th’ moon!"

"And there’s a real connection with all that, genius boy," Bud pronounced, grim-faced. "Harlan Ames just got word from his sources in D.C.—the main assistant to this guy Samson Narko, the new President of Brungaria, happens to be our old buddy Nattan Volj!"

Tom groaned, sinking into his chair behind his desk. This was the most disturbing news yet! Nattan Volj, who proffered the title of "professor" but seemed more of a military man than a scientist, had commanded the moon mission launched by the Sentimentalists faction in a race with the Swift Enterprises effort. Striving to gain control of the capsule of alien animal life to use it to develop germ warfare, Volj had treacherously violated a brief truce, attacking Tom’s crew with a volley of missiles before being repulsed into space. There had been no word of him since, nor any confirmation that the faction’s spacecraft, the
Dyaune,
had successfully returned to Earth.

"If Nattan Volj is now the number two man in Brungaria," began Mr. Swift, "America can expect a total turnabout in the—"

Suddenly the desk phone shrilled—a direct interoffice call from George Dilling. Tom’s father answered and put it on the speaker. "Damon—Tom—I know a lot’s going on this morning, but I assumed you’d want to hear of this right away. There’s been another unexplained earthquake, a devastating one. The Trumman rocket-engine lab in Ohio has been completely destroyed!"

GEORGE DILLING told the astounded listeners that he had recorded the most recent news reports of the disaster. "I’ll send it to the videophone setup in your office. It’s disturbing stuff."

Mr. Swift activated the broad curving screen of the videophone unit, one terminal of the private Swift Enterprises telecommunications network. Connected via satellite, the system kept the company well informed of scientific developments and other matters of special interest across the nation.