Tom Swift and His Dyna-4 Capsule (11 page)

She paused. Silence hung. "I’m so sorry," Bud said to her, earnestly.

"Oh? Why?"

"For what I did to you. You needed me to help you, Reb. Back then. Now I understand."

"No, I don’t think so," she faintly replied. "No, you’re very far from being an understander, BB. I understand love. You don’t. You
can’t
. Even when you have it, even when you feel it, you don’t
understand
it. Now listen—that’s very
profound
. It’s what Friendly Village taught me, down here, with you, our last dredge of time together. Deadbolts!—
that’s
Bud Barclay."

Baxx sneered. "Rebby needs protection, bo. That’s what I can give her. You—what can
you
do, little flyboy?"

"I’ve faced death and made death blink," grated Bud.

"We really shouldn’t wink at death," said Reb vaguely. "You always make your jokes, but Death shouldn’t be made fun of. Death should be welcome at our table. The blackness is all around us, always, so we have to be all the brighter."

"Rose Reb, please listen—"

She smiled warmly. "Oh, I’ve been listening all along.
Escape! Tom Swift!
—mm-hmm. You’ll always be just a little boy flying after the moon."

Rose Reb climbed into the jeep as Baxx waved Bud back with his handgun. The gun seemed to be growing bigger and deadlier with each tick of time. "By the way, Barclay, two things," he chuckled. "First, Mr. Eck wants you to know how much he enjoyed talkin’ to you the other day on the phone. Made him smile. Guess he forgot the office number’d been posted in the phone booth. Other thing?" Baxx swung hand and gun into position like an expert marksman. He fired. Bud felt the wake of the bullet as it tore by his neck. Behind him a sporting goods shop gained a hole and lost a plate glass window. "Real bullets in this gun. In case you wondered. Yep, a few real things in Friendly Village."

Baxx gunned the engine, and Reb suddenly turned to search for Bud’s eyes, the expression on her face as ambiguous as always—perhaps scorn, perhaps longing. "Wait, Gar," she said. "Just a sec."

She jumped down and approached Bud, Baxx keeping his gun at ready. She seized Bud’s wrist, and in a moment his wristwatch was looped in her grasp. She gazed at it luminously, turning it over. "Thank you," she whispered. "Tom gave it to you, and you—now you’ve given it to me. Thank you so much. What a wonderful thought. It means forgiveness. It moves me. I’d hoped you’d feel good about my happiness. Whenever I wear it, even when I’m sleeping, I’ll think of you, Bud, little-boy Bud."

Her lips said something unheard, and she climbed back up next to Baxx, the watch dangling from her thin white fingers. They roared away, around the corner. By the time Bud reached the intersection, they had taken another corner and were lost to sight.

"That’s
one
way to get out, Rose Reb," Bud said. "But there are others. There are always others! If it takes a day or a week or a month of Sundays,
I’ll get out of here!
"

But as the days passed, many days, weeks alone wandering through the vacancy of a town without time, Bud Barclay began to wonder if he could keep his promise to himself. And if sad little Friendly Village might be able to claim him in a way the moon never could.

"SAY THERE, boss—"

"Hi, Chow."

"Kin I talk to you? Jest fer a second?"

Tom’s pushed his wheeled chair back from his office desk. "Sure." But something in Tom’s expression was uninviting, and Chow Winkler felt like clomping away down the hall in his cowboy boots.

But he stood in the office doorway, a wide and robust figure in a chef’s hat and shirt of many a western sunset. "Guess mebbe it’s none o’ my business... Naw, dang it, it shor
is
my business!" After his outburst he looked sheepish.

"It’s about Bud, isn’t it," Tom pronounced coolly.

"It’s about you, son. This here thing—"

Tom half-sighed. "I suppose I owe you this conversation, pardner. I’ve had it with just about everybody else, one by one. Sandy’s riled up. Bashalli wants to be supportive but keeps
nudging
. Mom and Dad don’t know what to say. Hank Sterling doesn’t either—and says it. Know who agrees with me, Chow? Bud’s parents!"

"Th-they do?" Chow’s forehead folded upward. "What kinda blame parents is
that
? Didden they see that there little movie he made?"

"They did," Tom replied. "Now tell me the Wide Open Spaces take on all this." He immediately cut himself off with a headshake. "No—sorry. I’m... a little—"

Chow eyed a chair but didn’t ease his way toward it. "Aw, I know, son, I unnerstan’. He’s ever’body’s friend, but fer you—"

"It’s just been four days, pardner."

"Four days is four days. Buddy Boy said he’d be back in th’ corral in—"

"I know what he said!" snapped the young inventor, shadow under his deep-set blue eyes.

Chow finally descended on the chair. "Don’t need t’ pertend with ole Chow, Tom. Yuh’re not takin’ all this any more easy than th’ rest of us."

Tom now sighed all the way. "Just what is it people want me to admit? That I’m concerned? Sure I am."

"That gal’s a mite loco, clear as sky. I heerd these wimmin sometimes boil people’s pet rabbits, and I don’t mean fer stew! Or mebbe she pushed him over blame Niagaree Falls!"

"If that’s what happened, Chow, it’s a little late to fret over it." Tom’s face hardened with stubborn determination. "Maybe
you’ll
understand this, cowpoke. Mr. and Mrs. Barclay do, and agree."

"Hit me with it, boss."

"People are overlooking the most important part of the vidcap.
He wants to deal with the problem on his own!
He asks the rest of us to
butt out!
He doesn’t
want
to make this another Tom Swift invention adventure. He doesn’t
want
me to mobilize Harlan Ames or my sensitector tracker—or any of that. Don’t we all owe it to Bud to respect his request?"

Chow half-winced and scratched his head. "Wa-aal, I guess he
did
say
please
. Butcha know, sometimes—dealin’ with these here romance-brained wimmin—and you know I’ve had m’ share—even
more
than m’ share—"

"That’s the point!" Tom declared. "The whole thing is kind of—intimate. Bud could barely bring himself to tell us about it at all." He fell into musing. "He jokes about it, never complains, but—what does it do to a guy, always being in somebody’s shadow? ‘The guy standing next to Tom Swift in the pictures.’ Even if he doesn’t admit it to himself, it must eat away at him. Now he finally has a chance to untangle a knot without
Tom Swift and His Swift Enterprises
charging in to rescue him.

"What do you think, Chow? That Bud should phone home, tell us he’s gonna be a little late?"

"Now you well know I didden say that."

"If the, the
matter
took longer than expected—if it takes a week... or..." Tom was frowning, looking away. "Maybe they decided to spend some time together, take a vacation. Why not? Good grief,
am I supposed to use the megascope to peek into motel rooms across New York State?—!
He’s a big boy."

"Hmm," responded Chow, rising. "He shor is."

"I’ve got to get back to—to the dyna-4 capsule, to the project..."

"Yep," said the cook. "Speedin’ up time. That’d be handy right now, wudden it. Sorry t’ bother you, son. Like I said, it was about
you
. An’ now I know sumpin about you, and you know sumpin about me."

He ambled away, leaving Tom to think and—to fret.

He submerged his fretting for a time by wandering over to Lab 3, on the third floor of technical labs facility, Building H. "Hi, you two," he said listlessly to Enterprises’ talented modelmaker and miniaturizer Arvid Hanson and his assistant Linda Ming. "How’s time treating you?"

Arv answered, rather hastily, "Just fine, Skipper. The new mini-model is ready for its workout."

"We didn’t put in a desert diorama," joked Linda, "but it sure looks like those sketches you gave us."

The micro-scaled time-transformer apparatus had been assembled on a sturdy worktable. Tom eyed it with as much interest and pleasure as he could summon. Unlike Arv’s initial test model, the new prototype carefully replicated the design of the full-scale device that was to be built beneath the Nevada Test Range.

The time-transformer consisted of two thick disks that slightly bulged toward one another, like a pair of convex lenses set vertically, in line above one another with a wide gap between. Inside this gap, at the precise center, was the dyna-4 capsule itself, a rounded circular housing with tapering conical extensions above and below. "Never realized how much the capsule looks like a Christmas tree ornament," Tom remarked. "You two have done a fantastic job, as usual."

The youth reached out to touch the capsule with his fingertip, but Arv’s hand blocked him. "You’ll cut yourself. The filaments of the support web above and below are thinner than a razor’s edge—which is why you can’t see them. And they’re mighty strong, boss."

"Thanks. I should have remembered."

"But they do the job perfectly," noted Linda. "It’s just amazing how we can tweak the position and orientation of the capsule to keep it right at the chronolens focal point."

Tom nodded, unsmiling. "It’s the rotation of the earth in the warp and woof of spacetime that causes the drift and distortion in the c-lens field. If the focus isn’t centered on the housing perfectly—if it’s off by as little as the tenth decimal place—objects in the capsule will time-slow or time-speed internally at different rates. A time differential inside a living body would be fatal."

"Well," said Arv, "we licked the problem. Another triumph for the Swedes and the Chinese!"

"Yes—though not necessarily in that order," Linda added mischievously. Beneath lowered lashes she looked to see if she had made Tom smile. The absence of Bud Barclay was well known across the great invention factory, even if the details were not.

"Let’s try ’er out," said the young inventor.

A scanning microlaser made the taut filaments visible to the eye. As an access port popped open in the side of the capsule, Tom used a narrow set of metal tongs to maneuver a miniature timing chip into a holding basket inside. As he slowly withdrew the spidery tongs, he said, "Okay, Linda, seal her up."

There was a click. Suddenly the young inventor yelped in startled alarm as the ends of the tongs, still in the chronolens gap, flashed weird colors—and disintegrated in a burst of light like a magnesium flare!

"
Tom
!" cried Arv, jerking the youth backward as the remainder of the tongs were knocked from Tom’s hand.

"Th-thanks," Tom gasped. He flexed his fingers and examined his hand. "I’m not burned—stings a little, though." He looked up, face pale. "Thank goodness my hand was outside the field!"

Linda was almost tearful. "Oh, Tom, when you said to close the port, I didn’t think—I activated the—"

Tom nodded sympathetically. "It’s okay, Linda. Sometimes a person’s hands have a mind of their own, don’t they? But we’ll have to work out a special safety routine for handling the machine. It looks so innocent, but we’re playing with the force of time—the most
irresistible
force of all!"

"But what happened to the metal tongs?" asked Hanson. "Don’t tell me they
aged
themselves to death!"

Thoughtful, Tom rubbed his chain. "In a way, I think that’s
exactly
what happened. The tetramagnium alloy that the tongs are made of is doped with ferrochroma, which will rust if you leave it exposed to air long enough. And rusting—oxidation—is a super-slow form of combustion, you know, and evolves energy, though spread out over years it’s undetectable—normally. What we had here was a thousand years of rusting in a fraction of a second!"

"Gosh goodness!" murmured Linda in abashed awe. "The tongs
rusted
themselves to death!"

Tom came up with a smile. "Now let’s see if it was worth the millisecond wait." Linda cut the power to the mechanism and Tom plucked out the timing chip. He compared the result to his ultra-precise electronic watch, a gift from Bud and the exact model Bud himself wore. "While we lived one hundred seconds, the chip passed through—good grief, it’s below the measurement threshold!
Less than one millionth of a second!
"

Linda gasped. Arv nodded slightly. "Right—I keep forgetting that the flux vector inside the capsule is opposite that of the field on the outside. Time was almost stopped in the capsule—but super-accelerated in the surrounding area."

"The time-transformer did a great job reminding us," declared Tom dryly, eyeing the remnant of the tongs.

After testing the converse setting, causing the chip to register the passage of years in a millisecond, the young inventor decided to explore the effects of the outer margins of the time-distortion field, which filled the space between the chronolenses and terminated on all sides beneath their circular rims.

"I don’t recommend poking it with a metal rod," commented Linda wryly. "How about a wooden pencil?—er,
are
there still such things as wooden pencils?"

"Let’s take a more conservative approach," Tom responded. He took a single straw from a vase of dried flowers near the lab door and held it gingerly with the tip of his fingers—in a hand now gloved in Tomasite. He slowly pushed it forward toward the dyna-4 capsule—and it stopped at the periphery of the exterior field, as if hitting an invisible barrier.

Tom held it up to his eyes and scrutinized the end of the straw. "As we calculated," he said. "You can’t enter the timeflux field from outside it when it has a time-negative orientation. Even at the very edge, time is moving so slowly that an object can’t make any headway, no matter
how
much force is applied to the part outside the field." But then he corrected himself. "Well, that’s an exaggeration. A guided missile or a bullet—or a laser beam—could elbow its way in. We do see light coming through, after all, though it’s downshifted toward the red. But the interface has a powerful effect. A time-barrier."