Tom Swift and His Flying Lab (7 page)

But even as he acknowledged his fears, he breathed a sigh of relief. The
Kub
was roaring in for a landing. As it rumbled to a stop and Tom opened the hatch, Bud walked over to the
Kangaroo Kub,
raised his eyebrows, and gave his friend an arrogant look.

"Well, fly boy, want to sell your jet cheap and buy a windmill?" he asked.

Grinning ruefully, Tom explained that he had been forced to compensate for a jammed rudder. Concerned, Bud helped him examine the plane. They quickly found that a loose sensor chip had caused the appearance of a jam.

"Thank goodness it’s just a brain problem, not a muscle problem," Tom joked, clicking the tiny unit back into position.

"Now I’ll give you another chance," Bud proposed. "After all, that wasn’t much of a speed test."

Once again the two craft started on the course. This time Tom flipped the
Kangaroo Kub
sharply around the turns. Shooting far out in front on the first leg, he lost sight of Bud on the second, and whipped quickly in from the third and last stretch.

When Bud finally brought the
Skeeter
back to earth, Tom was waiting for him with a look of exaggerated triumph on his face.

"Been away?" he asked, showing Bud a series of equations and formulas he had been making on a pad. "I’ve had a lot of time to work on these space symbols.
And
solve the problem of perpetual motion."

Bud gave him a shove. "Listen, I’ll admit I can’t beat your plane for pure speed, but I’ll take this little number any time." He patted the jetrocopter’s fuselage. "Tom, this ship’s a dream! She handles like a baby carriage. I can set her down on a dime and give you nine cents change!" Tom grinned. Bud was so enthralled he was repeating his superlatives!

After checking over both aircraft, Tom was well pleased with their performance. "I guess that about winds up our work on them," he remarked. "All we have to do now is berth them inside the Flying Lab."

Parting from Bud, who had a morning aerial delivery assignment that would take him to Trenton and back, Tom returned to his office in the main building. He hoped to find a message from Arv Hanson saying that the new detector was ready for a trial. But there was still no message on Tom’s computer.

"Poor Arv!" Tom said to himself. "Guess I really handed him a hard nut to crack." But no sooner had Tom thought these words than he heard the delicate chime-tone of the televoc, as if in his ear. Tom responded and heard the familiar voice of Arv Hanson, which still bore traces of his Scandinavian ancestry.

"This is Hanson over in H-3, Tom," he said. "We ran into some snags with your new device."

"I figured that must be it," replied Tom. "What kind of snags?"

"I’ll let Linda tell you. She’s been working with it for hours now."

There was a pause, and Tom could visualize Hanson signaling Linda Ming, one of the plant’s best technicians, to activate her televoc. "This is Linda, Tom. I’m sorry we couldn’t finish everything for you overnight, but there seems to be a problem that didn’t occur to anyone until we ran the final tests."

"A big one?"

"I’ve come up with a solution, but you’ll want to look it over in some detail, I think. It may involve slightly altering the oxygen compressor ducts in the plane."

"Oh really?" Tom felt completely baffled. "I don’t see how there could be any interaction at all between them."

"Pretty surprising, isn’t it? I’ll show you what I’ve come up with."

"I’ll be right there," Tom replied.

Tom hurried over to the multistory technical labs facility, Building H. He took the main elevator to the third floor, going over the problem in his mind. Stepping into the third floor hallway, he noticed, in an absent-minded way, that the doors of the large service elevator, at the opposite end of the hall, were open.

Guess someone’s moving a piece of equipment,
he thought.

He strode to Lab 3 at the middle of the hallway, gave a couple raps on the door, and turned the handle. Stepping inside, he let the door slam shut behind him and stopped short in surprise. The large windowless room was dimly lit by only a single counter-top lamp, rather than by the bright overhead lights. And no one else seemed to be present!

"Arv?" Tom called out. "Linda?"

He whirled at a slight noise behind him—a man’s throaty chuckle.

Pressed tight against the wall next to the door stood a shadowy, menacing figure. In his hand he held a small silver pistol of elegant design. The gun was aimed directly at Tom’s chest!

"YOU DON’T NEED that," said Tom carefully. "There doesn’t need to be violence. Tell me what you want here."

The man shook his head sharply, as if in warning. In the dim light Tom could see that he was wearing thick wraparound welder’s goggles to disguise his eyes, with a bandana covering the lower half of his face. He was dressed in what looked like a nondescript Swift Enterprises coverall outfit.

"But I promise you this," the young inventor continued, "if you’ve harmed any of my employees or my friends in any—"

"Shut up!" hissed the man. "You’ve got yourself into some things that don’t concern you, Mr. Swift."

"What things?"

The man refused to answer, but approached closer to the young inventor. He motioned with his pistol. "Now we’re going to do this very quietly. According to the blueprints spread out on this workbench, your new device is complete and ready for testing. I want you to give me a little course—the three-minute version—on how to calibrate and operate it."

"And then?"

"And then I suppose it depends on my mood at the time, don’t you think, Mr. Swift?"

Tom stifled the protest forming in his throat, sensing it would be useless. "All right. But remember, I don’t yet have the feel of the machine. I’ve only seen it on paper."

"Oh, that’s all right," whispered the man in an almost convivial tone. "We can’t expect you to do better than your best, now can we? Just show me—"

The intruder never finished his sentence. Beyond the door, which had latched automatically behind Tom, came a loud voice from the hallway.

"Hey there, buckaroos, someb’dy get the door fer me, would you? Got a full tray o’ my new Rio Grande crullers fit t’be tried." It was Chow! After a moment the Texan tapped on the door with the toe of his boot. "Aw, now lissen, Hanson, I know them chocolate flapjacks t’other day weren’t to everyone’s taste, but this here’s a real delight. So let me in, dang yer buttons!"

The door lever jiggled. Even in the dim light, Tom could see it start to turn. The intruder backed away, momentarily pointing his pistol at the door. In that moment Tom sprang like a panther!

He charged the gunman full force, slamming both of them to the floor just as Chow burst through the doorway—only to stumble over Tom. Chow’s tray went in one direction and Chow himself in the other, landing like a beached whale next to Tom’s ear.

"Boss," Chow panted, "what in all-gol-tarnation are you
doin’
down there?"

But Tom Swift was already struggling to his feet. The intruder had just slipped out the door behind Chow, and Tom could hear his frantically sprinting footfalls upon the hallway tiles. There was still time to capture him!

Throwing back the door to the lab, Tom catapulted into the hallway. But which way had the man run? No one was in sight, and there were elevators at either end of the hall.

A
ding!
from Tom’s right decided the issue. "He’s taking the service elevator!" Tom thought, hurling himself down the hall toward the elevator’s twin doors, which were already halfway closed. He reached the doors in seconds and clawed at their edges, trying to keep them open, but they slipped from his grasp and the elevator clanked shut.

"And I can’t beat him down to the ground," he told himself in angry frustration. The open stairwell was at the opposite end of the hallway next to the main elevator; and because the service elevator opened to the outside at ground level, Tom would have to exit and race halfway around the building to catch his quarry.

Chest thudding, he activated his televoc. "Harlan Ames," came the response.

"This is Tom. We’ve had a break-in at Building H!"

"What happened?"

"Never mind for now. Can you monitor the ground-level exit of the service elevator with the security minicams?"

"Sure can." After the briefest pause, Ames continued: "Got it on my monitor now. I’ll zoom in."

Tom began to breath more easily. "At least we’ll be able to track him as he starts across the plant."

"Right," said Ames, "and I’ve just signaled half a dozen of my guys to seal off that side of the building. Tom, are you all right? Was this guy armed?"

"With a small pistol," Tom replied. "The indicator on the elevator shows he’s stopped at the bottom. Has he come out yet?"

"Negative," was Harlan Ames’s terse reply.

"Weird," muttered Tom. "What’s he doing in there?" Then an alarming new thought struck the young inventor. "Harlan—he may have stashed some weapons in the elevator! Tell your men—"

"They know their jobs, Tom," said Ames simply. "They’re in position now. Could your gunman have gotten off on the second floor? Or between floors?"

"Not a chance. I’ve been watching the indicator." Tom paused, thinking. "This doesn’t make sense, Harlan," he mused. "What’s he trying to do, lure us into coming and—"

Then Tom winced. There was another possibility! "What a chug I’ve been!" Tom cried, turning and launching himself toward the other, distant end of the hallway.

"Tom?"

But Tom didn’t pause to answer, flinging himself at the stairwell and taking it three steps at a time, fairly leaping over the second floor landing. From the first floor landing he threw himself through a pair of swinging doors that led into the employee lounge.

The lounge served several buildings and was quite large. It was already abuzz with employees—mostly technicians and runway workers—coming on for the late morning shift. Dozens of eyes turned curiously in Tom’s direction as he burst through the doors.

"Listen up, everybody!" he shouted. The room fell silent. "I’m looking for a man, maybe five-eleven, in hangar coveralls or something similar—he would have come through these doors behind me within the last five minutes. I think his hair would have been kind of messed-up. It might be someone you know—or maybe not. Did any of you see anything?"

There was a mutter of low voices and a shaking of heads.

"A whole team came down from the second floor just a few minutes ago, Tom," said one young engineer in a white shirt. "But it’s their break time, and they always take the stairs."

"I didn’t notice anyone acting funny," said a middle-aged woman, whom Tom recognized from the accounting office. "Something going on?"

"No," answered Tom. "Nothing." But he shook his head disgustedly.

"Tom!" came the loud voice of Harlan Ames as he came running up with two of his security staffers. "Did you see him?"

Tom shook his head again. Ames continued: "We just used the tele-tec on the elevator. It’s empty, which I gather you already figured out." The tele-tec was the latest version of the television detector invented long years before by Tom’s namesake. It was a camera that could take x-ray-like images from a distance through solid obstructions, such as the walls of buildings.

"He really played me, Harlan," Tom said. "He must’ve set the service elevator door on override, so it would stay open, and then plugged some micro-gadget into the circuit that would respond to his remote signal. He runs down the hallway to the end next to the
main
elevator, pressing the button on his remote control. Then he steps around the stairwell corner, out of sight, just as I come out into the hall and hear the bell of the
service
elevator ring."

"Leading you off in exactly the wrong direction," said Ames. "And so, he can take a leisurely stroll down the stairs. I take it he was wearing something to disguise his face? Without your telling me what it was, I’ll guess it was easy to take off, and easy to stow somewhere in his clothes, or in something like a briefcase."

"And then he mingles with the employees, and leaves when he feels like it," concluded Tom. Then his eyes widened. "Good night! We’ve got to check on Arv and Linda up in the lab!"

"No we don’t," said Ames, with a wan smile. "My men just voc’d me that the whole lab team is fine. Apparently the gunman locked them in the shielded test chamber, the one with reinforced walls. It’s no wonder you couldn’t hear a peep from them. Oh, and Chow’s fine too—except, something about his snacks being ruined."

For the next hour, Tom and Ames questioned the laboratory workers and sought after fingerprints or other clues to the identity of the intruder, to no avail. It developed that neither Arvid Hanson nor Linda Ming had made the call that brought Tom to the laboratory. "But the first thing the guy did was pluck the televocs off our collars," said Hanson. "If he used those units to talk through, their circuits would have allowed him to imitate our voices almost perfectly."

"Which shows that he knows a lot about the inner workings of Enterprises," commented Tom. Later in the day, the two tiny units were traced by electronics to a dumpster near Building H.

"Things are getting mighty serious, Tom," commented Harlan Ames. "It’s pretty clear the Verano rebels have the resources to get around our standard security measures, high-tech or not."

"And to think the guy works here among us!" added Tom.

"It’s likely he’s a relatively new hire. I can pull the records on those and do some additional checking." Ames paused. "I hate to admit it, but I don’t know what else to do at this point."

After Ames and his men had left, Tom went back up to the laboratory with Arv Hanson to run the first formal tests on his new invention, the long-range radioactivity detector.

"It looks promising, Tom," remarked Linda Ming, who had set up the equipment. "Of course Ole and I couldn’t resist a few preliminary tests—just out of curiosity."

"It was all the Dragon Lady’s idea," said Hanson. "Still, it allowed us to tune things up a bit. By the way, what do we call this brainstorm of yours? Is it still a ‘super-Geiger counter’?"