Tom Swift and His Flying Lab (11 page)

"Chow, are you in the galley?" Bud asked.

"Yo-ay, Bud. But brand my mavericks, I’m shakin’ like a bowl o’ jelly."

Before starting the ascent, Tom flipped on the audiogyrex system, which he had designed to eliminate the elevator sensation felt in rapid rising by using an inaudible mix of sound frequencies to "distract" the inner ear. Then, gripping the throttle, heart pounding in anticipation, Tom poured raw power into the jet lifters. As the deep growl of the jets slowly crescendoed, everyone waited anxiously for the first sign of motion.

"Load decreasing on the undercarriage pistons," Rip Hulse reported calmly, scanning the dials. "Ten percent remaining… three percent… boys, we’re off and running!"

Bud burst forth with a cheer as the Flying Lab began to rise, first by inches, then with ever-increasing speed. In a matter of seconds it was shooting skyward.

"We’re airborne!" Bud cried jubilantly. "Oh, man, did we leave old Earth in a hurry!"

The intercom from the laboratory section beeped. "Son, I think congratulations are in order," said Mr. Swift.

"Thanks, Dad." Tom’s voice quavered. "But we’ve still to test her hovering capabilities."

At two thousand feet Tom eased off on the lifters. The mammoth craft stood still in the air, as if supported by an invisible giant’s hand.

"We’ve done it!" Tom exclaimed, gazing down at the cheering, waving throng far beneath them.

"You’ve
done it, Tom!" came the proud reply over the intercom. "Your invention is another great step in scientific advancement."

"What about the laboratory?" Tom asked.

"Everything took that sudden rise as well as we did."

Rip slapped Tom on the shoulder. "Magnificent! The new technologies you’re proving here will be a great boon to the defense of our country," he commented.

Bud leaned forward. "I
knew
you could do it, Tom," he said quietly. "This super-skyship is just one step this side of a trip to the planets."

"Hold on! Not so fast!" Tom laughed. "Verano first."

Bud was now listening to Hank Sterling on the ground. He relayed the message.

"The crowd down there can’t believe what they’re seeing. And do you know
what?"
he added with a chuckle. "You’ve tied up automobile traffic for miles around! People are parked on all the roads, looking up at you."

Tom grinned. "We’ll give ’em another show in a minute."

Assured that all parts of the plane were functioning smoothly, he phased down the jet lifters and applied the forward thrust. The
Sky Queen
accelerated smoothly, and Tom was pleased to note that his aeolivanes were functioning as predicted. As Bud watched the air-speed indicator he gasped. In a matter of seconds, it seemed, the Flying Lab was cutting through the air at a thousand miles an hour.

"Great day!" he cried. "You could get around the world before sunset!"

"Better throttle back, Tom," Rip advised. "This is only a test."

"Right. I want to take her up higher, anyway."

To the spectators below, the big plane suddenly looked like a meteor in reverse. The lifters accelerated the Flying Lab so fast that it was out of sight in twenty seconds.

"S-stop—stop!" Chow shouted from the galley. "Brand my dogies, I don’t have enough food fer a trip to Mars!"

"Then we’ll stop off at the moon for supplies," Bud answered, giddy with excitement.

The plane’s altimeter stopped at sixty thousand feet as Tom once again allowed the
Sky Queen
to hover. Not only Shopton but the clouds
above
Shopton had been left far below them. Even Lake Carlopa looked like a small, silver-blue crescent glinting in the morning sun, while around them in all directions was an indigo sky dotted with stars.

Abruptly a warning from Bud broke the reverie.

"Tom, we’ve got a problem!"

"What sort of problem?"

"There’s smoke on the Lab’s special runway. Hank thinks some of the ceramic bricks are on fire—whole sections of them!"

Tom couldn’t believe his ears. "On
fire?
Bud, those bricks were made to take a temperature of—"

"I’m just tellin’ ya what I hear, genius boy," Bud retorted.

As it happened, the fire below was not the only difficulty. The
Sky Queen
was beginning to noticeably list to one side, and was starting to lose altitude as well. Tom knew after a quick glance at the instrument panel that they were in trouble.

"What’s the matter?" came Mr. Swift’s anxious voice from the laboratory.

"I’ve burned out half the jet lifters," his son answered solemnly. "I guess the metal they’re made of couldn’t take that terrific heat."

Instantly he began shifting from the lifters, resuming horizontal flight.

"I’d better take her down immediately," he said. "No telling what other effects it may have had."

"Yes. Don’t take any unnecessary chances," Mr. Swift said, adding, "Everyone fasten your safety belt."

Rip was frowning. "Is your runway long enough to land this big ship under horizontal power?" he asked, plainly worried.

"It wasn’t designed to handle anything this big," Tom replied, "but—"

He quickly gave Bud a message to relay to Hank:

"Clear the field and prepare for an emergency landing. Jet lifters conked out. We’re landing the hard way."

Mr. Swift came from the laboratory to watch operations. "Can you make it, Tom?"

"I hope so, Dad, but I may have to improvise a little." Tom gave his father and the others a reassuring glance. "Don’t worry, folks."

Everyone sat tensely while he guided the great aircraft downward in tremendous sweeps, like steps on a spiral staircase. As he turned into the traffic pattern of the Enterprises field, the airstrip looked frighteningly small. When the plane banked into the groove, Tom angled the nose of the ship sharply upward and briefly fired the remaining jet lifters, which acted against the direction of flight.

"Smart move," muttered Rip Hulse.

Bringing down the nose of the craft once again, Tom lowered the landing wheels and braking flaps. He then cut the forward thrust. The wheels touched the ground and the giant craft hurtled along the runway, brakes howling.

Could he stop it in time to avoid a disastrous crack-up? Tom wondered.

"THE HAIRPIN turn! It’s the only thing that will save us!" Tom murmured grimly. The runway was too short for the giant ship!

Immediately ahead of the ship was the wire perimeter fence, which would easily give way upon impact. But beyond the fence was a wooded, uneven area, miles wide, that could batter the Flying Lab to pieces. Calculating mentally at breakneck speed, Tom applied full left rudder and brake. At the same instant he gave the starboard engines a spurt of power.

In a flash the
Sky Queen
tilted and pivoted around, reversing itself. Tail foremost, it was still racing at great speed toward the fence. But now when Tom opened the throttle and gave the engines full power, the terrific thrust of the jets worked as a brake to overcome the momentum of the plane.

"Hold on!" Tom cried, batted against the back of his pilot’s seat by the powerful forces. To make matters worse, he was no longer able to see where the
Sky Queen
was headed.
Here’s where we test out the automatic brain!
he thought.

In a few heart-freezing seconds the ship rumbled at last to a stop.

No one spoke for some time. Then finally Rip Hulse loosened his safety belt and rose from his seat. Putting an arm across Tom’s shoulders, he said:

"That, kid, was the greatest piece of flying I have ever seen."

Bud leaned forward. "Pal, it was superb! I thought we were dead ducks."

Mr. Swift added his praise. "If I ever had any doubts about your invention and the way you could fly it, Tom, they’re gone now."

"Thanks," said Tom simply, adding, "What about Chow? I hope he’s okay."

As they left the cabin to find out, they met the cook. His face was ash white and he was trembling. Seeing the others unharmed seemed to reassure him. As they filed outdoors, he said: "I’m sure glad to be on this here planet agin." Then his good humor returned and with a grin he added, "Even if it ain’t good ole Texas!"

As Tom exited the ship’s hatchway, his face downcast, a rolling distant sound, like the roar of surf, reached his ears. Looking up, his face slowly lit with pleasure. For blocks around the plant in all directions, the thousands of spectators were applauding, cheering, and wildly honking their car horns!

"Good grief!" exclaimed Tom to Bud with a disbelieving laugh. "They think it was all a planned demonstration!"

"Wave to your fans, genius boy!" chortled Bud.

By this time the ground crew, led by Hank, had arrived in one of the crash trucks.

"Thank goodness you’re safe!" Hank cried. "Anybody hurt?"

Tom assured him that none of the passengers had been harmed and that the undercarriage had stood up to the strain admirably.

"I want it thoroughly checked, though," Tom said. He then explained that some of the lifters had burned out. "We’ll need to replace the thrust chambers completely," he continued, "which is going to mean round-the-clock work if we’re to keep to our schedule. Right now, I’ll need to analyze a sample of those runway bricks and look over the graphs from our earlier metalurgical tests. Somehow we missed something!"

Tom spent the rest of the morning poring over graphs and printouts with Linda Ming and Arv Hanson. "The solution’s got to be here somewhere!" he exclaimed in a moment of frustration. "The lifter models tested out perfectly in the test chamber."

"Tom, do you think…" Linda looked at him worriedly. "Could it be sabotage?"

"I guess it could be anything," replied Tom, frowning. "But if we don’t solve this problem, the Flying Lab won’t be going anywhere!"

Taking a break for lunch, Tom strolled over to his father’s private office. After discussing the problem, Mr. Swift told his son that he had received an urgent message from Washington DC.

"It was relayed by our man in the State Department, Dr. Harold Tennyson—Rigoledo’s friend. Officials down there seem to think Swift Enterprises has the ability to help keep the Western Hemisphere out of trouble."

Mr. Swift had explained that he really knew very little about the situation in South America, but Tennyson was extremely insistent. "I tried to tell him that I am a scientist and a businessman, not a politician, but he kept arguing and I gave in. I’ll be flying down to Washington for a conference on the crisis in Montaguaya—the Verano rebellion."

"When are you leaving?"

"At once." Seeing Tom’s expression, his father smiled. "Don’t worry, I’ll be back here by the time you’ve installed new lifters in the
Sky Queen."

Tom spent the entire next day in the metallurgical lab, making various alloys of iron with titanium, tantalum, wolfram, and other metals of high heat resistance. These he carefully annealed and then etched in mineral acids to examine the crystal structure under a microscope. But when they were tested, each one failed to be an improvement over the material used in the original lifters.

Weary and discouraged, Tom tumbled into bed late that night. But with the morning sun came an idea which so excited the young inventor that he leapt out of bed with new enthusiasm and was dressed for work within five minutes. "It
can’t
be that simple!" he said to himself, accessing his laboratory computer remotely. "But—it
is!"
he cried aloud, staring at the screen.

Tom would have dashed out the front door without breakfast if his mother had not stopped him. She kissed him good morning, saying: "Not so fast, dear. I can tell from your eyes that you have solved the lifter problem, but you must eat before you go."

Tom put an arm around his mother and accompanied her to the dining room. Over sausage and griddle cakes he explained what he had discovered. "Mom, it was the most common, silly mistake a person could make!"

"Those are the ones that are hardest to catch sometimes, aren’t they?"

"Yep, you’re right. The problem didn’t have anything to do with the metal of the lifters at all! It’s just that the computer spat out some erroneous specs, distorting the shape of the thrust chambers so the waste heat wasn’t properly dissipated."

"So all you have to do is re-cast the chambers, is that right?"

"Exactly," he said. "Then we’ll just switch ’em out—a day’s work."

Driving speedily to the plant, Tom’s long strides changed to an eager run as he neared his private workshop-laboratory. Few mechanics had arrived for work yet, but by the time Tom had calculated the last mathematical detail of the design correction, Arv and Linda had come into the laboratory.

"That was a masterful idea, Tom, taking a second look at the printed specs," said Arv. "And it was so simple too. Why didn’t I think of it?"

Linda gave him a bland smile. "Because after all, Arvid, you are
not
a
Swift."

Tom hurried off to order the new jet lifters fabricated at once. He summoned the foreman in charge of the machine shop, who promised to have men working around the clock to complete the lifters and install them.

"But it will take a couple of days," the foreman said.

"A couple?" repeated Tom in disappointment.

"I meant, a couple—starting yesterday!"

That evening Mr. Swift telephoned his family. He was delighted to hear that Tom had conquered the sole weakness connected with the Flying Lab. He also said that what he had learned in Washington involved a complicated and serious menace to the United States as well as to all of South America.

"There’s a technological element involved which I can’t discuss. Our Senator and his committee want me to go to Montaguaya at once, accompanying a small group selected by Tennyson. Unfortunately, I’ll have to change my plans about flying with you, Tom. I’ll meet you down there."

"Where?"

"I don’t know. I’ll be in touch with you by encrypted message."

"Dad?"

"Yes?"

"Where did you propose to Mom?"

Tom could sense Mr. Swift smiling at his end of the line. "During a tour of the Regnier Chemical Works. And thanks for being cautious enough to test me—I might well have been a phony with a voice-mimicker."