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

A beep announced an incoming call to the
Sky Queen
on Tom’s quantum-link Private Ear Radio. "It’s the office channel," Tom told Sandy. "Munford Trent has the counterpart unit on his desk."

The efficient secretary to Tom and his father came on the line. "I was sure you’d want to know this right away, Tom. It’s—well, Bud Barclay—"

Sandy darted at the mike. "Has something happened?"

"A vidcap chip was just delivered to my desk, Sandy. It’s from Bud, and it’s marked:
for Tom Swift—private and personal!
"

BUD BARCLAY waved his chum a jaunty farewell, standing in front of his apartment as he watched Tom’s bronze-hued electric sport car glide silently away down a sleepy sidestreet. Tall and muscled, broad of shoulder, the black-haired youth stretched, knowing he would wince. They had just returned to Shopton from the Grand Canyon project, the levitating monorail made possible by Tom Swift’s G-force inverter.

As souvenirs of the adventure, Bud had brought back colorful bruises, cuts and scrapes, groaning muscles, and a bad sunburn. "Dangling sky-high from a monorail track does
not
do a body good," he told himself wryly. "Bouncing off the Grand Canyon—worse." The majestic canyon was streaked with color; so was his black-and-blue body.

Bud’s apartment was small—living room, kitchen, bedroom, bath. The first three somewhat ran together, distinguished mainly by their wall fixtures. The bath was mostly a shower stall. The furniture was spartan. Even Draconian. Bud’s most impressive piece of furniture was his television screen. As he stood in front of its domineering eye, looking at his reflection as his reflection looked back at him, he wearily dropped his baggage where he stood and began to strip down for the shower his body ached for.

And turned—and frowned.

"Okay,
Bod
Barclay, you’ve made your point," he muttered, addressing body and brain. "I’m stopped dead in my tracks. So why?" Something was wrong. Something was out of place. An inner alarm was sounding.

It filtered up into consciousness. Something unaccounted-for lay on the cheap flimsy end-table next to the sofa, amid the pale rings of sweating soft drinks long forgotten. It was small and square and a shade of rosy-pink—a particular hue that meant something to Bud Barclay, the spear point of an insistent memory. "It can’t be," he told himself. "It
can’t
be! But how the heck did it get there?" Because it hadn’t been there when he had locked up weeks before.

He approached with trepidation. It was, as he had thought and dreaded, a folded greeting card, hand made, the stiff paper expensive, embossed, textured. On the cover:

THINKING OF YOU

It couldn’t be. But it was.

Bud picked up the card, sniffed the perfume, read the familiar handwriting within. "
Always
. Waiting for the day. Time passes. Make it stop." And separately, at the very bottom: "
C’ya. RR
"

His inner elevator was dropping fast.

When he sat in his bedroom and made the video for Tom, weeks and incidents later, Bud commenced with the backstory.

"Hi Tom—and I suppose your dad and Sandy and Bash and Harlan Ames and a whole crowd—Chow too, o’ course. Hiya, pardner! Doesn’t matter, pal, long as
you’re
there.

"Been wondering what’s up with me? Sure. I thought it would just go away. Then I thought I could handle it here in Shopton, after hours. Two bads for flyboy. Now I have to take action.

"Okay. I’m not the explainer you are, genius boy, but I know you’re supposed to start at the start. Here goes. Hey, for once it’s a ‘well-
Tom
’ explanation!

"The start of the start is back in San Francisco. Like you know already, I went to this special private high school—expensive place, but Mom and Dad were able to swing it. You start there early, in eighth grade, and then it’s five years. I went there, not because I’m so smart—pause for the jokes—but because I was pretty good—okay,
really
good—at things having to do with... I guess you’d say skill. Not just muscle stuff—hand-eye stuff. I already knew I wanted to fly. Dad said he expected wings to pop out of my back any day. This school kind of helps kids get their dreams started early, if you get the idea. Kids who aren’t the intellectual type, but who have what they call
nerve intelligence
. Body-thinkers, get it?

"It was called—don’t groan, it’s really cheesy—
Personal Success Edu-cademy
. PSE. The kids just called it PS-1.

"So there I am, an eighth-grader with a pile of muscles throwing balls around all the time and trying to get through science and math and junk like ‘
Silas Marner
.’ You can just about
taste
what it was like, right?

"When you start in, everybody gets assigned what they call a
success-partner
. Sorta like a permanent study partner who sits next to you in all the general-type classes you’re taking. You help each other, study together, do homework together. You’re kind of accountable for each other. Could be a boy, could be a girl; at PS-1 they say they don’t know the difference. Which I believe.

"Can you see where this is goin’, sports fans?

"Her name was—and still is—Rose Rebecca Truncheon. She liked to be called Rose Reb—as in
rebel
, see? She was kind of wiry and weird. She wanted to be a dancer; not a ballerina, but what she called jazz dancing. Think of sort’ve a semi-grunge type, short black hair, pale, dark lipstick, poetry. Loose-limbed type. Always slouching. For a while they called it the goth look. It was, like,
I’m a vampire, got any blood?

"Despite which I liked her. She was fun—she hated
everything
. We’d hang out with the guys. It was like you and me and Sandy and Bash, junior version, with total sarcasm. And we’d study together. I owe her bigtime for keeping my grades up that year. And, you know, I think I helped her too. I’m not just a tackle dummy. Not
just
, pal.

"Okay, I can be dense. She was, you know, falling for me. I knew she was looking me over. But I just thought,
yeah, that’s natural
. We were pals. We did the sharing thing—hopes and dreams, secrets. We were
kids
!

"But here’s the deal. I know it now. Back then I didn’t think about it. The thing is: after the
looking-over
comes the
trying-out
. It’s sort of a rule. It was for
her
, anyway. Matter of fact, a law of nature, like gravity and—uh—chemistry. A lot like chemistry. Is there such a thing as a one-sided compound?

"I didn’t want it. I didn’t think of Rose Reb that way at all. Talk talk talk. Cry cry cry. Really blew the study sessions.

"Maybe I was just a
little
bit insensitive. Guys get that way when they’re scared. Right, Tom?

"It didn’t stop. She got unhinged. I should have seen it. She told people I was her
boyf
. Boyfriend and girlfriend. Said we’d done stuff we hadn’t—Skipper, we
hadn’t
! I was into sports and jets and that stuff. She thought we should spend intimacy face time instead of studying or hangin’ out. On and on, like she couldn’t think of anything else. Little notes stuck in my locker door on this pink paper she bought. Every morning. Is this what being married is like? It just about drove me to read ‘
Silas Marner
’ again.

"And man—
texting
. She sent pictures of herself that—you get the idea. I tossed my cellphone. Can you guys imagine being a kid in high school without a
cellphone
?—!

"She would find ways to take pictures of me and post them on the Net. Man, I am
so
glad she couldn’t get into the locker room! Wellll... Naw.

"
My Bud, my boyf.
It wasn’t flattering anymore—okay, maybe a little, but kind of scary. She was sucking up my oxygen. I guess that’s when I started thinking about moving away...

"Finally—a guy doesn’t like to ask for help—I talked to my counselor at school—they call ’em
Success Enablers
. He said he’d talk to Rose Reb’s folks.

"I guess he did, because she changed. She wouldn’t talk to me. We got new partners. Every time I saw her, she was already staring at me. Like the Mona Lisa without the smile, see?

"She must’ve spent the summer brooding. Second year she went from unhinged to
unglued
. The wings fell off. The hinges popped. She was out of school a lot. She did weird stuff, dangerous stuff. One time she was arrested. I’d heard she’d run somebody over.

"Jetz! What do you do? I felt guilty. Maybe I encouraged her by being too
stupid
to pick up on her feelings at first. I was all wrapped up in myself. But man... I was just a kid! Bein’ big doesn’t mean you’re grown up.
You
were grown up when you were
born
, Skipper, but me...

"So to make up for bein’ stupid, I did something even
more
stupid. I called her and asked her to meet me at a restaurant—an expensive restaurant—so we could just talk and clear things up. I can hear you rolling your eyes Sandy, Bashalli. I was just trying to be honest. I even thought I was being
sensitive
. Yeah.

"She came sweeping in the door like she was on her way to the Oscars, Tom. Beautiful gown, hair done up, makeup, the whole nine yards plus touchdown and victory dance. Me, I was in jeans and a sportcoat. I mean, the place wasn’t
that
expensive.

"We ate and talked and she cried and I told her how much I liked her, and because I liked her so much I didn’t want to mislead her, and all that stuff, stuff you say when you can’t really say the truth. She got loud and threw her tapioca at me and flew out the door like a rocket.

"She left the school. Nobody knew where she’d gone to. Somebody said her parents had put her in a hospital. I never knew, not exactly. People stopped talking about her. I guess no one really cared. By that time she didn’t have any friends—just me. And I don’t know exactly
what
I was.

"That wasn’t the end, though. I started getting those rose-pink cards again, by mail. They always just said
‘C ’— apostrophe — ‘Y ’— ‘A’
. Get it? ‘
See ya
’. Over and over. As in
crazy
.

"One time there was a razor blade taped to the card. I got scared—for myself, for my family too. So I thought again about somethin’ I’d had on my mind since I was a little kid, the whole Swift-Newton thing, the hard feelings, the separation way back when. I wanted to be the Newton, the
half
-Newton, to end it. And I guess I already wanted to work for Swift Enterprises. And to fly jets. So I made up my mind and moved to Shopton. Sixteen years old. Fugitive from life, hunh.

"I thought it was all over.
But
."

Here Bud paused. His video watchers—first Tom alone, then all those predicted and a few more—could see the pain on his face as he collected his thoughts and continued.

It had escalated after the first note was left in his apartment. He had come out of the local supermarket to find the windshield of his beloved red convertible, TSE TSE FLY, spiderwebbed. "Sorry, Tom, but it wasn’t a rock from an open truck, like I told you. There was a rosy note.
‘C’ya. C’ya. C’ya.’
Over and over.
All
over it in tiny letters. Musta been a hundred times."

The next day, coming home from Enterprises, he found a splash of rose-pink paint slopped across his apartment door. Bud’s neighbor mentioned a dark-haired girl scurrying along the street with paint dripping from her hands. "Do you get that, genius boy? Not from a brush. She had sloshed it on with her
hands
!"

When Tom had asked Bud to join him on the trip to Nevada, Bud had shrugged it off distractedly. "The real reason was, I had an appointment with Rock at the Shopton PD. Secret, confidential stuff. He promised that. He said there wasn’t much he could do, not yet. He said I should see a lawyer, maybe get a restraining order."

But Bud Barclay was never one to believe in restraint.

He had returned to his quiet apartment and had sat in a Draconian chair with distressed and hopeless cushions, sat for quite a time before a wall of opaque thought. He felt guilt, confusion, dread.

The shrilling phone gave him a jolt. He recognized the voice instantly. It was breathless, tearful, disjointed.

"She apologized. She kept saying she didn’t mean anything by it. That she was upset—like,
duh
! She said she knew she needed help. Talked about being on medication that sometimes made her a little crazy.

"Then she’d sort of flip, click over to a different mood—
so how are you, Bud? How’s work? What was the moon like?
But then when I’d mention your name, Tom, she’d get
weird
. She kept sayin’ stuff about
time
—time passing, time taking me away, we’re all prisoners of time... I tried to keep her talking. I was afraid maybe she was calling to say she was gonna kill herself.

"And then came the power drive.
She said she was going to get married!
She said she’d met some guy somewhere, I dunno, she didn’t go into it. But she didn’t know if she wanted to, it was all messed up, she couldn’t stop thinking of me...

"I congratulated her, but then she started crying—you know, hysterically. Maybe I shouldn’t have congratulated her. But hey, she was getting married...

"So here’s the upshot, Tom—guys. After I drop off this little video, I’m gettin’ in my poor TSE TSE to go meet her where she’s staying, in—oh
man
—Niagara Falls. She says we’ll meet out in the open, she’ll stay calm, she just needs to see me once more and talk face to face...

"I dunno, pal. If I don’t do it, maybe all this won’t stop. But it’s
got
to stop. Maybe it’s my fault. I was stupid. I have more feelings than people—

"I mean, I should have
known
what was happening to her. Now, I would. Then, jetz!—
I was just a kid
. I hadn’t even been to the moon.

"So off I go. Sorry I couldn’t tell you, Tom. You’re my pal, my best pal. But you’re a guy, so you know how it is. It’s
my
prob. For this once, I have to solve it on my own. No science, genius boy. That’s a
please
.