Tom Swift and His Repelatron Skyway

THE TOM SWIFT INVENTION ADVENTURES

TOM SWIFT

AND HIS REPELATRON SKYWAY

BY VICTOR APPLETON II

This unauthorized tribute is based upon the original TOM SWIFT JR. characters.

As of this printing, copyright to The New TOM SWIFT Jr. Adventures is owned by SIMON & SCHUSTER

This edition privately printed by RUNABOUT © 2011
www.tomswiftlives.com

"I GOTTA tell ya, Tom Swift, ol’ buddy, you’ve come up with a lot of strange-looking flying machines, but
this
one—!" The speaker, Bud Barclay, spoke from knowledge and experience. He was not only an expert pilot, but best friend to Shopton’s fair-haired young inventor.

Tom laughed. "Uglier than the atomicar?"

"Hey, I
like
the atomicar. And this automatic skywriter of yours isn’t exactly ugly, just—peculiar."

The two were seated side by side in Tom’s newest vehicular invention, a twin-blade helicraft of radical design. The craft sat ready for takeoff, blades a spinning blur, on a helipad at the great Swift invention factory, Swift Enterprises.

"It’s not just a fancy skywriter, flyboy," Tom pointed out. "The Workchoppers will be able to do all manner of things. The line could be as popular as our Pigeon Specials when Swift Construction starts turning ’em out."

"Assuming they come through the test flights with the usual
flying
colors," Bud noted.

The dark-haired youth had joined his friend for the prototype Workchopper’s first venture beyond the confines of the four-mile-square grounds of Enterprises. The two sat in the cockpit dome that topped the craft’s odd, high-sided fuselage, the horizontal lift blades set at the top of narrow support columns that rose on either side of the pilots. In a way the chopper resembled a stubby metal fish poking through the middle of a huge, old-fashioned portable TV set.

Tom, a rangy youth with an untended blond crewcut, drew back the control lever in front of him. With barely a sound, just the faintest whisper of sliced air, the Workchopper took to the sky.

Bud looked impressed. "Mighty smooth."

"That’s the idea, pal," responded Tom. "The chopper isn’t just versatile but extremely agile, capable of very precise maneuvering—real thread-the-needle stuff. And because the blades are so short, they don’t extend beyond the ‘footprint’ of the fuselage. You could set her down in a small clearing—even in an alleyway between two buildings, practically."

"Like your cycloplane."

"True. But it’s designed for special tasks the cy-cloplane could never handle."

Peaking at one thousand feet, Tom guided the craft out over nearby Lake Carlopa.

Bud asked how fast the Workchopper could travel. "Well, nothing like our jet-powered jobs," Tom conceded. "About the speed of a conventional helicopter." He added that forward motion was achieved by slightly tilting the vertical axis of the blades. "They can be tilted in any direction, which lets us make sharp turns at low speed, or rotate the fuselage by giving them opposite slants. We could even back up!"

"Wow! My
convertible
can’t even manage
that
!"

Passing over the middle of the gleaming crescent of lake, they mounted higher, settling in at one mile. Upstate New York, dotted with green hills and patches of woods, spread out before them.

"Guess you can’t escape pollution these days wherever you go," commented Bud, gesturing toward a low brownish-gray haze in the distance.

Tom’s eyes narrowed. "Bud—I think I see flames on the ground."

"Good grief, a forest fire!"

"Yes, and those woods curve all around Northshore Park, right up to the lake!"

Tom gunned the copter toward the woods. An updraft of heated air buffeted the ship as it neared the smoking area.

"This is going to be a real blaze!" Bud said.

"And no lookout station around here, either," Tom muttered anxiously.

Tongues of orange flame could be seen through the smoke, leaping from tree to tree. Perennially short on water despite the lake, the region was especially dry at this time of year. The trees and underbrush would feed the flames like stacks of old newspapers.

The fire was spreading toward the main park road. "With those arching branches, the blaze could easily jump across the road!" Tom exclaimed. "Everybody in the park will be trapped!"

Tom’s copilot shuddered. "They don’t realize what’s happening yet—the breeze is keeping the smoke down low and the ridge is blocking their view. But it sure won’t block the fire! Think we could set this copter down on the road?"

"No point to that now." Tom headed the ship in a wide, circling sweep over the woodland. At a number of spots the boys glimpsed people grouped around picnic tables. Tom said grimly, "You’re right—they haven’t the faintest notion yet that a fire has started! I’ll alert the police." Tom used the cockpit cellphone to call his friend Captain Rock of the city police force.

"We’ve been alerted already," the man replied brusquely, "and the fire crews are on the way. But—!"

"But they’ll have to drive the whole circuit around the end of the lake," Tom declared. "We’ll have to warn the people ourselves. They’ll be relatively safe if they head toward the shore, but if they try to use the park access road they’ll be trapped."

"Hold it, Tom," Captain Rock warned. "Don’t go in low with that copter of yours—you’ll fan the flames and make things worse."

"No, sir, it won’t be a problem. The Workchopper blades—I call them
aeolivanes
—use an electronic principle to create high-pressure air pockets underneath them as they rotate. It not only gives them super-strong lift, but there’s virtually no propwash at all."

"Okay. You can tell me all about it—later!"

Tom clicked off his phone and Bud suggested: "Let’s go down as low as possible."

Tom elevatored down to treetop level, and Bud opened the dome hatchway next to him and leaned out to bellow at one group of picnickers seated at a table. His voice was drowned out by the loud music they were playing. The people merely laughed and waved back—obviously unaware of their danger.

"Jetz! 1 can’t get through to them!" Bud exclaimed in despair. "Drop down, Tom, and I’ll do a Paul Revere act on foot!"

The young inventor shook his head. "Even if we both ran around shouting, we’d be trapped ourselves before half the people in the park got the word."

"But we must do
something
!" Bud insisted.

"We’re going to," Tom calmly replied. He took the Workchopper up to several hundred feet, where nearly all of the grassy park, which was divided by sections of woodland into several separated areas, was visible. Picking up a microphone from the board, the young inventor activated the craft’s external speakers.

"
Attention, everybody! There’s a fire spreading through the woods! Don’t try going to your cars—you’ll be safe if you head toward the lake!
"

He repeated the message several times. A few clumps of people seemed to understand and began hurrying toward the shoreline. But the youths were dismayed to see that most people seemed to be ignoring the message. "Maybe they can’t make out what you’re saying," Bud declared worriedly. "Got
another
‘something’ to try, Skipper?"

Tom nodded. "As I told you, the Workchopper is versatile and has a lot of special uses. You’ll see one right now!"

Heading the craft on a course high over Lake Carlopa, Tom began writing with an electronic stylus on a sensor panel in front of him.

FOREST FIRE! NO CAUSE FOR PANIC BUT ACCESS ROAD IS BLOCKED. HEAD FOR THE LAKE SHORE IMMEDIATELY. YOU WILL BE SAFE THERE. FIRE FIGHTERS ARE ON THE WAY.

As Tom wrote, enormous glowing letters began to appear in the sky in front of them, as if on a giant, floating movie screen. Bud noticed that his pal’s hasty scrawl had been automatically transformed into neat, clear lettering that stood out against a dulled background.

Next, Tom switched the skywriter’s color selector and added a sweeping green arrow, slanting down to point toward the lakefront.

"Man, this is the greatest thing since the invention of the fire engine!" Bud enthused. "That sky-sign can be seen for miles around!"

Pleased and relieved, Tom gave a nod. "And I selected an option that causes the image to be visible inland, but not in the reverse direction, from the lake. It’d be safer not to have a fleet of boaters trying to pull off a rescue and getting in the way."

"Plan to spend a
long
time explaining to me how all this stuff works," Bud said wryly. "How long will the writing keep its shape before the paint or gas—or whatever it is—scatters?"

"It won’t scatter at all, although the lines of writing may drift with the air currents." Tom added that before the arrow was blown out of line, he himself would dissipate the image at the touch of a button. "One way or another, everyone in the park will have gotten the message in a minute or two."

Tom’s skywritten warning had an immediate electrifying effect on the park patrons. They grabbed their footballs, doused their fires, and hurried toward the shore, where a crowd quickly assembled. The boys were pleased to see that there were no signs of panic.

Tom deleted his sign and guided the chopper across the fire. The two waited patiently in the air, watching the main highway on the far side of the burning woods. "Here come the fire fighters!" Bud exclaimed presently.

Several fire trucks could be seen speeding toward the turnoff to the park. One by one they halted and began to deploy their high powered hoses and special equipment.

By this time, as feared, the fire had become a hungry inferno, glowing like a furnace under the billowing clouds of black smoke. "Looks like they’re beating it back pretty well, though," observed Bud.

"If this Workchopper were fully loaded, we’d be able to help them fight the fire directly. But I guess all we can do now is fly back to Enterprises. At least the people are safe."

"And
mighty
grateful, I bet!"

They put about and angled off in the direction of the lake.

Suddenly Tom gasped. "
Bud
—!"

Below them, a crowded minibus had halted in the middle of the park’s unpaved access road, its passengers craning their necks out the side windows fearfully. The fire had leapt the road in front and behind them, and blazing tangles of branches had fallen across the way in big clumps. They were completely surrounded!

"Good night!" Bud whispered, mouth dry. "M-Maybe we can land next to the van and get the passengers on board!"

"All those passengers? They’d never fit!" Tom didn’t need to add that the crawling edge of the fire was closing in rapidly, a tightening noose. It seemed they would have less than a minute to mount a rescue.

Tom said no more. He steered the Workchopper to a point directly over the bus, then began to descend. Tiny cameras, mounted at various points on the fuselage, including its underside, showed in clear detail what lay beneath them.

The helicraft stopped smartly just a few feet above the roof of the minibus. Through external microphones, the two pilots could hear the frantic cries of those below—fear and panic, now tinged with hope as the shadow of the chopper fell across them.

As Tom worked the controls, his pal’s gray eyes grew big with wonder. The monitor showed that four metallic "arms" had telescoped down from the underhull of the Workchopper. At the end of each arm was a mechanism that evidently rotated various selected implements—
hands
for the arms—into position for use.

The young inventor had selected a thick, disk-shaped implement. He lowered the units to four corners of the base frame of the minibus and brought them into contact with it. Then he gunned the blades.

The Workchopper lurched into the air, the imperiled bus dangling beneath like a fish on a line!

The linked vehicles made a smooth, high arc over the borders of the park and the woods beyond. Tom set the bus down at the side of the highway, releasing it and retracting the gripper-arms. "
Have a nice day!
" he called through the loudspeaker, winking at Bud.

Out over Lake Carlopa, Bud found his voice. "Jetz! That was—I dunno
what
! Pal, I’d say your new chopper is a terrific success." Bud grinned, settling himself back in the copilot’s seat. "Okay. Now that my eyes are starting to believe themselves, tell me more about it."

"My main reason for inventing the skywriting gear," Tom explained, "was because I felt it might be useful in time of disaster—situations in which the usual means of communication are knocked out."

Bud nodded. "You sure proved
that
! But what
is
it anyway, some kind of projection? It’s sure not the usual smoke-trails they use in ordinary skywriting."

"The chopper shoots out a fine spray of Inertite nanofilaments—the same sort of arrangement we use for the XAIP balloon-bag."

Inertite, a phenomenal substance composed of "non-matter matter" with extraordinary properties, had first been discovered by Tom during his expedition to the caves of nuclear fire in Africa. He had subsequently found many uses for the anomalous quasi-substance, which could be fabricated in the form of stringy inter-linked particles smaller than the nucleus of an atom. Almost weightless and completely transparent in thin sheets, he had used a stable webbing of Inertite as the skin of the lift-bag of a high-altitude vehicle he had recently developed. "Do you get the idea, Bud? As I write or draw, a computer-controlled ‘scanning beam’ induces the electromagnetic resonance effect that causes the filaments to link up and mesh together, just as they do in the protective airdomes we make."