Tom swift and the Captive Planetoid (22 page)

Phil Radnor now picked up the round-robin account. “To finally answer Bashalli’s question, two of our key Fearing technicians, husband and wife, were drawn in by the Ninth Light’s ‘powers’ and promise of bliss. They smuggled in a number of the darts and—I hear quite a few employees have complained of bug bites recently. So Orfeo was able to ‘read’ the codes right off the eyes of the code guards who saw them.”

“That couple must have been the ones who sabotaged the duratherm wing capsule,” declared Bashalli. “But I thought the code for the container lock came from Enterprises?”

Sandy, smug and proud, now spoke up. “Oh Bashi, that was so
easy
to figure out.
Obviously
the spy at Enterprises was that custodian who swept up the dead bees!”

Tom chuckled. “Good work, sis.  Yes, it was an employee named Dexter Torrsen, another secret born-again accomplice. He—”

“Now Tomonomo,” interrupted Sandy, “let’s not steal my girlish thunder. Let
me
say it. Clearly it was this man who planted the bee-case and implanted whoever he could—definitely Art Wiltessa—with the sense-tappers. So Mr. Ninth Wave ended up with the container code, and that WiFi console code for the wind tunnel.”

“Close enough, San,” Tom smiled. “Torrsen
sent
the tunnel control signal to get me trapped, but he’d have had no access to the console ‘handshake’ code.”

“You
see
, Sandra, no one was present in that room to watch Tom enter the code.” Bashalli took her turn at smugness. “It came through Tom’s own eyes.”

“I’m sorry,
Dear
, but you
might
recall that Tom wasn’t implanted until later, by the bee,” was the rejoinder.

Tom shook his head. “Not that either.”

“Since we’re doing this explanation buffet-style,” gibed Bud, “let me dish out some. It was
my
eyes! I was stung by the island raiders, remember? I watched Tom put in the console numbers and enter the tunnel—while somewhere nearby the custodian guy waited with his override transmitter, getting direction by way of the
Apocalypso
. See?”

“Brand my ole droopy brain, when they write this’n up fer one o’ them Tom Swift fiction books, they better cut th’ blame stuffin’ out of th’ explainin’ part,” groaned Chow.

“Nor can I follow it,” sniffed Mirov. “Yet it is therapeutic for the speakers, perhaps.”

“Hey, my part isn’t finished,” Bud complained jokingly. “I haven’t told you girls about Tom’s laser-camera hoax.”

“
What!—?
” was the double reaction.

“Of course I didn’t know it either, not until Tom told me yesterday,” Bud went on sheepishly. “He
couldn’t
tell me, right?—because I was
bugged
.”

“It’s like this,” said the young inventor. “Orfeo’s addiction to risk caused him to con himself. He just
had
to try that stupid bee stunt! It put me on alert. I tried and tried to figure out the why of it—and finally I realized—”

“Sorry, boss,” grumbled Chow, “mebbe I better jest go set m’self in the kitchen fer th’ rest o’ this.”

Tom looked at his friend apologetically, then strode over to a writing desk and picked up some pieces of paper. “Tell you what. Just for fun, I actually started writing that account of my ‘genius’ that I promised to send to Orfeo. I won’t really send it, but maybe I’ll just read off the bullet points.”

The young inventor cleared his throat and began to read, some distance in. “Here was my reasoning at that point, Mr. Orfeo. My logic wasn’t perfect, most of the evidence wasn’t in, a lot was speculation and guesswork—but that’s how
this
Tom Swift works. It seems I was pretty much right.

“One. Someone was gaining access to secret, even personal, Enterprises information by unknown means.

“Two. If the means was technological and not paranormal, it was most likely some kind of monitoring device planted undetectably on various key personnel.

“Three. The use of the Qalqaram symbol, and the short wave intercept, suggested a link to Desh Zai and his yacht.

“Four. The incidents at Enterprises indicated that even some of my top co-workers and closest friends, perhaps even family members, had somehow been tagged with the monitor devices. I had to keep my thoughts to myself.

“Five. The test tunnel business made it likely that Bud Barclay had been tapped. The device had to provide a
visual
feed, because it was only Bud’s
seeing
me that indicated exactly when I had entered the tunnel.

“Six. When I went over the
Fire Eagle
after the reentry sabotage, I realized that the glue that bound the sabotage material to the Durafoam had to have been based on one of the earlier Durafoam reformulations, not the final one. A
perfect
binding polymer, adhering to the new Durafoam completely, would have ruined the heat cells all at once, when first activated upon extension of the wing, not in a gradual way during reentry.

“Seven. Only Sterling and myself saw the notes for the final reformulation. If the enemy
didn’
t have that final formula, it meant we two were not yet tapped. That meant that Bud Barclay, who never saw the last formula but
had
glanced at the earlier one, must have been the source. I knew then that Bud carried one of the audio-visual bugging devices.

“Eight. I assumed that, later on, I had been implanted myself. It was the best explanation for the bee incident. I reasoned that my being stung could have been the way a micro-unit was inserted into me.”

The young inventor looked up from his papers at the roomful of rapt listeners. “Then I knew how alone I was,” he said quietly. “Anything Bud saw or heard went right to the enemy. Same with me. If I heard
my own voice
trying to get help from security or anyone—if I told you girls what was going on—if I saw my hand writing a note or watched something I was typing appear on the screen—it would tip off the Ninth Light. He would know, by tapping my eyesight, where I was traveling. No way to sneak up on him!”

He continued to read his summary account. “Nine. There was one out for me to try. I began to work up a counter-strategy based on the idea that you didn’t yet know, Mr. Orfeo, just how much I’d figured out. I couldn’t enlist my usual help and support to carry it out. I had to keep it all a secret, almost a secret from myself.

“Ten. Some time before the planned beach outing, I got in touch with an acquaintance in Shopton, Vern Sholt, who was an occasional actor. I told him that I wanted him to play a scene in front of us on the beach, which I explained would be filmed from hiding by a spy. I told Sholt that when the film was given to an enemy, he would assume his agent at Enterprises was taking action against me, on his own, which might make the larger spy operation too risky.

“Eleven. Of course, no one was filming the scene. You, Mr. Orfeo, would have taken the situation to show that I had figured out that Bud had been tagged and was attempting to throw you by the phony ‘betrayal’ you’d pick up from Bud. But because I made my arrangements with Vern Sholt openly, it also implied, logically, that
I didn’t yet know that I myself had been implanted
.  In reality, I knew my every move had been monitored and that my enemy, you, would know in advance that my supposed ‘plot’ was just a ruse. What I wanted, Mr. Orfeo, was to
absolutely convince you
that I had no idea that I had to watch everything I said and did, to keep it from you. I wanted you to assume you could take at face value what I was doing, not presume it was part of some plot. Which is exactly what it was.”

“Wow!” exclaimed Doc Simpson. “To strut my creds, I see it as a sort of inoculation, Skipper. You used part of the guy’s own scheme to protect yourself against the rest of it!”

The girls were glaring sourly. “I take it the charming laser death ray that frightened us was a fake,” frowned Bashalli Prandit.

“Just a harmless simulation I threw together and couriered over to Vern—who really
does
run a camera shop, by the way—after my call to him.” Tom added with a wince of apology, “You can’t imagine how sorry I am for all that.”

“And because of all that, you were free to travel to Madagascar for what Orfeo would assume was an ‘innocent’ meeting with Louis Talmadge—not a
sneak
visit to the Zai compound,” noted Harlan Ames approvingly. “I’m neon-green with professional envy! Your only error was your assumption that Zai himself was the mastermind, and was off on his yacht with his short waves.”

“As for
me
, I almost blew the whole deal,” Bud declared with a shrug. “I sorta confronted Tom about letting Vern go. I guess I pretty well forced him to let me in on things, to get the big Barclay mouth shut and sealed for a while.”

“Then you
did
know of this after all!” exclaimed Hank Sterling in surprise. “But—how in—”

Tom essayed his own boastful look, humorously. “Naturally I dealt with the Barclay threat by sheer genius! We both understand American Sign Language, so—”

“Now hold yer horses, boss,” Chow exclaimed with wrinkled brow. “Fer all yew knew, this Oreo feller knew sign language hisself! He’d know about what you said t’ Buddy Boy, cause Bud sawr it with his own eyes—your eyes too!”

“You didn’t let me finish, pardner. I didn’t use the sign language
visibly
. I put my hand on Bud’s back and
finger-spelled
it!”

Bud explained, “I don’t remember the exact words, but it was along the lines of ‘
Shut up—play along—I can’t explain aloud or in writing—we’re both bugged—go along with whatever I say
.’ That sort of thing. Probably more eloquent.”

There ensued a lengthy silence. Some had followed the plot and were mentally panting. Others were just panting.

“One thing I’ve wondered, dear,” said Tom’s mother meekly. “I understand that you needed to have Bud somewhere else while you went to Madagascar, to eliminate an extra source of monitoring. And you couldn’t tell him openly that you wouldn’t be at Enterprises. But why did you let everyone else think that you had gone with him to Idaho? I don’t see the purpose of that.”

“Well, the idea there, Mom—” But Tom suddenly interrupted himself with a grin. “Hey—I’m not going to explain that one right now. Sandy, here’s your chance to get back your ‘thunder’—
you
look over the whole thing and come up with my reason!”

Sandy smiled at her brother sourly. “Thank you. With any luck I’ll come up with a good reason why you
shouldn’t
have done it!”

Bud asked Chow Winkler, “Did you follow all that, cowpoke?”

“Shor did!”

“Really?”

“Naw.”

Explanations over, the many tasks of Tom Swift Enterprises went forward. Preparing the Bartonia colony according to Neil Gerard’s futurist scheme now, at last, took full priority. Even as the planetoid began to distance itself from Earth in the new orbit Tom had given it, the
Challenger
was freighting tools, equipment, and construction materials to the visitor from the depths of space. Just before the orbit was stabilized and Tom’s “cannon” was shut down for good, he slightly altered the thrust vectors to give Bartonia a mild rotation. Inside the great hollow that would be a permanent home for the solarnauts,
down
suddenly arrived—pointing upward toward the stars!

One morning, as the young inventory pored over some experimental findings—research that would lead to his
G-Force Inverter
—Bud arrived with the now-familiar form of Neil Gerard in tow. The great speculationist seemed uncharacteristically animated, even verging upon outright excitement.

“Mr. Gerard has some news, genius boy,” Bud announced.

“Not huge news,” said Gerard. “Huge to me, not you. Wha? Yeah. So it’s not
news
, because I already know it. Anyway, I’m adding a new person to the list of colonists. New to you. Not to me.”

Tom smiled. “I see,” mentally adding:
I guess.

“Classified by name Cythera Duff. Physical female, complete.”

“It’s his old sweetheart, Tom,” explained Bud, “the one I mentioned.”

Mr. Gerard nodded. “Thirty years back. But what’s time? Right. See, Tom, it’s all possible futures, right? Even the Big Future—who knows? We just walk along the road, look right, look left, pick this future or that, collapse the vectors. There it is! Precipitated into reality. I do it, you do it. Landing that sapphire was a
pick
. You plucked out a future, Tom. Same thing with Bartonia. You did what you did and collapsed it into existence. I’m the futurist, but
I
couldn’t make it happen. I needed you.”

“It was my honor,” replied the young future-maker.

“Okay. Maybe. Wha? So what you did
inspired
me.”

“There’s that word,” muttered Bud humorously.

“So I looked for a future I could make. Made myself a new one. Looked up Cy. Boston. Unmarried, naturally. Nonstandard personality, getting a little heavy but within reasonable limits. Know what I said? No you don’t—different spelling—nuh.

“I told her I still wanted to marry her. I told her she’d had thirty years and I was running things over in my mind and her not answering wasn’t an answer to the future-minded heart.” Gerard paused. “Yeah. She said, ‘Sweetwired, I
did
answer. I answered before you asked me. You were too busy
talking
to
hear
.’ Get that!”

“Congratulations, sir,” Tom said, shaking his hand warmly. “Love is important to making futures. That’s true even if what you love is inventing, or traveling off into the unknown.”

“Yeah.
Large
truth there, Tom.” The man lowered his voice. “But that doesn’t mean you don’t get scared. The future can surprise you, friend-o. Sometimes it comes at you
way
too fast!”