Tom Swift and His Cosmotron Express (4 page)

"It only involves the specifics of the contact with Ikyoris and his goon, at least," responded Radnor. "The Feds know all about the
Fire Fury
flyover and the uranium threat message. Obviously they’ve figured the connection to the Brungarian faction. No reason
not
to rely on Collections to forward the transcript and their analysis—in their own time, in their own way."

"It seems Collections is conducting some sort of investigation," nodded the young inventor. "It may involve something Asa Pike revealed to them." Ames, security chief for Tom Swift Enterprises, noted that the Taxman’s words implied the possibility of a high-level breach. "That’s the point, Harlan," Tom went on. "We don’t have the facts behind this visit by Ikyoris and his crony. The Taxman says Ikyoris’s story is phony, at least in part. So what was the purpose, the idea? It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve been used."

"I see what you mean, Tom," nodded Radnor with raised eyebrows. "Ikyoris’s bunch may be trying to force us to pass disinformation along to the government—or maybe to some ‘mole’
inside
the government."

Tom’s face showed his frustration. "But
why
? What kind of sense does it make to—"

"Listen, Tom," Ames interrupted. He was a father, and sounded it. "You’re a thinker. You figure things out. It’s your nature. We know about your motto, ‘the outcome is the reason.’ It’s led us to the truth more often than not. But when things pass a certain point of complexity—when a lot of people are involved with all sorts of personal motives and agendas—logic can be a delusion. And spending time and effort looking for logic can be a trap."

"All right," Tom conceded. "We don’t try to figure it all out this time."

Radnor said, "Some things just
can’t
be figured out. Takes a while to learn that, believe me."

"We don’t need to work the problem at this point," urged Ames. "Whatever might have happened to the
Dyaune
has nothing to do with us—or at least we have no reason to assume so."

Radnor cleared his throat. "Mm, well—it
did
happen up in space. And Tom’s working on—"

"A space project." Tom’s nod was grim. "But at this point there’s nothing obvious to be done, I guess. I just came from the observatory—I spent an hour with the megascope poking around on the lunar farside. Nothing big to be seen... which doesn’t mean much, I suppose. Tens of thousands of square miles..." He shrugged. "In fact, it was a waste of time. But I came in early and had to do
something
. I mean—" He looked away from the two, but they sensed the feeling behind his eyes. "They broke into our home and... threatened Sandy."

"I know," said Ames gently.

"Yes," said Tom. "I know you do." Ames’s daughter Dodie had recently survived a heart-stopping experience that had tested all her father’s skills as a veteran security man—and as a father.

It was the morning following the menacing visit and the sleepless night that came after. Tom had avoided using the telephone to brief Bud on what had occurred, but had arranged to meet him for breakfast in the employee cafeteria after his meeting with Security. Tom’s chum took the news of the home invasion stonily. "Sandy," he said, and paused. "When they do something like that—"

"They’re toying with us, our emotions," Tom said listlessly. "Ikyoris mentioned proving they could exploit ‘chinks in our armor.’ Pal, Sandy and Bashalli have always been points of vulnerability, pressure points." Bashalli Prandit was a close friend of the Swifts and of Bud. Tom and Bash, with Bud and Sandy, were a familiar pair of pairs about Shopton. "We say it over and over, we talk about taking special measures to protect them—but somehow it never happens."

"Because they won’t have it, pal. They argue it. Sandy wants to prove she’s as brave as any Swift, and Bash—face it, she wants to prove the same thing. You know as well as I do that she thinks of herself as a Swift in the making."

"Yes. I know." Tom had no energy to show any embarrassment. "Harlan has suggested keeping watch on them out of sight—even without telling them. Bud, I
won’t
do that," he went on with vehemence and a degree of sorrow. "It doesn’t feel right, secrecy and trickery, even to protect the people we love. Still... maybe..."

Tom could feels Bud’s support, though the black-haired youth was silent for a time, nibbling breakfast. At last he said: "Well. Let’s change gears. What’s the agenda? Weren’t you planning on running some more tests on your space machine today?"

The gears shifted and caught. "Right. The cosmotron spacedriver. Of course we know it does the job," Tom said. "It works. This series of tests... mainly just getting some more numbers to crunch as to the field deformation vectors..." His voice trailed off. "Bud—none of this is necessary. Others could do it. Maybe I should suspend my work for awhile... maybe I..."

Gray eyes met blue. "No, Skipper. Keep moving forward. What if distracting you, immobilizing you, is exactly what the Sentimentalists are after? Maybe Volj is trying to keep you earthbound until he can launch a new rocket, or something." Tom didn’t respond. "Look—invite Sandy and Bash to join us here at Enterprises. They can watch your tests along with me. Then if you feel like knocking off early, we can head for the lake or something."

Tom gave his chum a wry look. "With bodyguards?"

"What do you think
I
am?" Grinning, Bud held up a fist. "Armed!"

The girls were willing, available, even flattered. "I compelled Sandra, under threat of torture, to tell me what happened last night," said Bashalli over the phone. "She was most reticent, given security concerns."

"How many seconds did it take?" asked Tom dryly.

"It did not attain ‘seconds’, plural. And do not dare to criticize, you who have not recently been born female. We are best friends. And best friends must share. No doubt you agree." The young Pakistani added sarcastically: "Consider this Sandra’s ‘well, Bashi’ moment."

Tom surrendered. "See you two at eleven."

"We will bring a basket lunch, Thomas. If you do not eat it, I will hit you over the head with it."

Tom was in mid-test when Bud walked Sandy and Bashalli into The Barn, Enterprises big assembly building. "Tom’s been bent over that go-cart all morning," Bud joked.

The young inventor had bolted a small test prototype of his new invention to a low sled-like platform that rode on frictionless casters, linked to a guide rail that ran the length of the concrete floor. The test version of the cosmotron spacedriver was surprisingly compact. Within a gimbal-mount framework, it consisted of two dull-black cylinders penetrating one another at right angles, like a "+" symbol lying horizontally. A third cylinder penetrated the junction vertically. The whole mechanism was attached, by arm-thick flexible cables, to what the group recognized as one of Enterprises’ neutronamo power generators. "It seems the solar batteries are already obsolete," remarked Bash.

"Space-bending takes a
lot
of muscle," Tom grinned. "And this is just our tiny, low-power test setup."

The girls walked around the cart. "All that power and effort—to make a little cart move along a rail," said Bashalli. "How does—"

"Let
me
do the lecture," Bud rushed in.

Sandy rushed faster. "No, Buddo—me. I
do
have a scientific education, you know." Bud grandly nodded his acquiescence. "Now then, my dear Miss Prandit. What is space?"

Bashalli waved her hand around in the air. "This."

"In other words, the spacetime continuum."

"One might so describe it, Sandra."

"It’s
distance
, basically—distance you can move through. And moving things—such as your dainty and
ringless
hand—have momentum. Mathematically,
momentum
is the product of the mass of the moving object multiplied by its speed."

Bashalli smiled. "Of course you mean speed in a given direction; that is, velocity. A
vector
coefficient."

"I was dumbing it down to the level of my audience," Sandy sniffed with twinkling eyes. "As Tomonomo customarily does with Bud."

"Hey!" protested Bud humorously.

Sandy resumed. "One may think of ‘space’ as being, not merely a blank thing that objects move through, but as a kind of ‘momentum framework.’ The laws of momentum don’t just work themselves out
in
space—they
define
space."

"In other words, perhaps, space is rather like
frozen momentum
," said Bash thoughtfully. "Something set loose by objects as they move."

Tom made a brief and cautious foray. "It’s enough to say that the spacetime continuum—that is, taking time as well as distance into account—is like a
sea of momentum
in potential form, equal and balanced in all directions like pressure underwater. The law of conservation of momentum—"

"Is basic," pronounced Sandy.

"Talk about the billiard balls, San," Bud urged.

Bashalli smiled. "Yes, do."

"I was about to. A fast billiard ball comes in at an angle and hits a slow one. They bounce away at new angles and new speeds. But if you add up all the momentum in all directions on the tabletop—360 degrees—you find that the
total
momentum before the collision and after the collision is exactly the same. It’s just differently parceled out between the moving objects. The speed ratios and directions change, but the total for both of them together is always conserved."

"It’s like cutting pieces out of a pie," Tom added. "You can cut them any size or shape that you want, but when you add all of them back together, you still have the entire pie."

Bud nodded. "In mutilated form. But still edible."

"Very well," said Bashalli. "I am quite convinced. Total momentum is conserved. In three dimensions as well as two, I would suppose."

"Yup, and in
four
dimensions as well as
three
," Tom explained. "The time dimension also counts." The young inventor went on to say that wherever precise measurement of objects moving in space showed that total momentum had been conserved, spacetime was considered, by definition, "flat." "I know you’ve heard people talk about curved space, Bash. Ultimately, what they’re measuring is the conservation of momentum within the bit of the spacetime continuum that they’re looking at."

"But is it not
always
conserved?"

"It sure is. But in curved space, it doesn’t add up as conserved
until
you take higher dimensions into account. Space around a massive object, like the earth or the sun, has curvature of that kind. If you only look at things moving in three-dimensional space, they seem to be gaining or losing momentum, as if there were a slight imbalance with a little momentum left over, positive or negative. The cosmic account books only come out right if you take into account the part of the trajectory that angles off into the time dimension. That’s Einstein."

"Allow me to note for the record that I was about to say
all
of that," pronounced Sandy.

"This business about curvature and spatial time and angles—you have mentioned this before," Bashalli noted. "In your G-force inverter, is there not something about rotating things through higher dimensions?"

Tom mimed hearty applause. "Exactly! We’ve learned how to force objects into a kind of new ‘slant’ in the multi-dimensional framework, so that the components that lie across what we call the gravitation dimension have an inverse orientation. And in the dyna-4 capsule, we do something like the same thing with regard to the fourth dimension, so that the time coefficients of objects in the vector field are distorted relative to
our
time-rate."

"And so when simple peasants such as I roll their eyes and say ‘
what next?
’," said the girl, "the answer is—
this
." She gestured at the mechanism.

Tom glanced at Sandy. "Er—is the lecture over, sis?"

"Yes. Let us move on to the practical demonstration." She giggled. "I’m not sure I understood all those words I said."

"Me neither," Bud concurred. "The words are tough. I just try for the sentences." He turned to his pal. "Okay, genius boy. Warp factor one!"

"More like warp factor .00001." Tom held up his Spektor remote-controller for all to see, and paused theatrically. "Keep your eyes on the test sled. You might not believe them!" A button clicked—

—and the wheeled cart whizzed across the Barn like a pitched fastball! There was no visible acceleration; it seemed to attain its motion instantly. And then it was suddenly sitting motionless near the far wall, as if a DVD player had been put on
Pause
.

"My goodness!" gasped Bash. "It isn’t even breathing hard!"

Sandy looked at her brother with a smile of family admiration that overrode sibling rivalry. "Tom, even with repelatrons—I mean, how do you go from zero to sixty without speeding up? It looked like it was just
there
!"

"Instant top speed!" grinned Bud.

"The cart
did
change location. It
did
pass through the intervening space," Tom stated. "But was it ever actually
in motion?
People could argue over the definition. If the momentum-field defines space, then the cart didn’t so much move through space as space moved through
it
!"

Sandy was nodding. "I remember you said something like that about your time-transformer, the dyna-4 capsule. That was about time, but I think I understand."

"We’re using much the same technology as we’ve already developed, based on Dr. Kupp’s dimensional equations—now now, no faces, Sandy, Bud! The Galilectrum coils inside the perpendicular cylinders create a sort of vortex that grabs momentum-space and pulls it right through the machine. The space in front is stretched out, attenuated—there’s a momentum-energy deficiency."

"But round the backside, it’s all piled up," Bud put in. "A surplus!"

"Mm-hmm," the young inventor confirmed. "And because the ‘books’ have to wind up balanced, a compensating surge of momentum takes place in the space between, driving the cosmotron—and whatever else occupies that space—forward. Dr. Kupp describes the effect as
purely kinematic non-inertial translation.
"