Tom swift and the Captive Planetoid (5 page)

Then, suddenly, Bud understood. The loose shirt was rippling in a wind! “Jetz!” he gasped. “The blower must’ve started up!”

The young pilot remembered how rapidly the tornado had grown, becoming a full-fledged blast in less than a minute—and not stopping there! Running up to the glass-like metallumin shell, Bud pounded against it and yelled at the top of his lungs: “
Skipper, get the heck out of there!”

If Tom had the same idea, circumstances made it futile. The young inventor staggered backward, trying to shield his face. He bumped against the nose of the duratherm wing and stumbled, falling to his knees. Then, to Bud’s horror, he began to slide on his knees along the glass-smooth floor. The airstream blast had become overwhelming!

Bud looked about frantically. Which buttons, which switches on the control board would shut the tunnel down? If he chose the wrong one, who knew what would happen inside the chamber? If might prove fatal to his best friend!

The black-haired youth tried to hand-signal:
how do I turn it off?
But Tom was already beyond paying attention to the affairs of the outer world. The wind had driven him against the exhaust grating at the back end of the cylinder. The force was so powerful it had lifted Tom right off his feet, pinning him flat against the middle of the barrier and twisting his white face into a contortion of pain.

Desperate, Bud picked up a lab stool and commenced pounding on the metallumin shell with all his strength. The only result was to smash the chair to bits. He grabbed a fire extinguisher tank and attacked the hatch area, but if Tom’s metallumin could resist the pressures of the deep sea and multi-mach wind, it could easily shrug off Bud’s puny efforts!

Any moment now the thermal plasma would start appearing on the wing. The deadly pressure would be compounded by incinerating heat, the heat of a screaming reentry at rocket speed!

“Jetz!” Bud gasped. “
What can I do?
”

TOM SWIFT was within minutes—perhaps seconds—of being crushed flat. His breath was being ripped from his lungs!

Heart pounding, Bud glanced at the lab phone. Should he call for help? An engineer? A technician? But even dialing the phone would waste precious moments of Tom’s life. Even standing and debating the issue was wasting time!

Then inspiration struck in a flash. The way Tom had flipped open the multiple latches on the tunnel hatch...
The blowers started up after the door slammed shut!
he thought desperately.

Bud leapt at the hatch, fumbling with the sealer-lock latches with hands made steely by resolve. He had no time for trembling. “Come on, come
on
—!”

Suddenly the hatch clicked forward a notch, and a shrill
whoosh
! of burning-hot air jetted into the lab through the hatch sealer flange. Bud threw one more lever and yanked with every muscle in his body—and the hatch flew open with such speed and force that the athletic youth was flung tumbling halfway across the lab floor!

Bud winced from the hot blast and crawled to one side as worktables overturned. But in an instant he was on his feet and dashing toward the tunnel—and Tom!

The blower compressors had shut down. The fantastic Tornado In A Can faded in a matter of seconds. Bud staggered into the oven-like heat and yanked his pal, collapsed in a heap, out into the lab.

With barely a glance at Tom, Bud set the air conditioning at full blast and grabbed the phone unit. “Doc! Aerodynamics 1-7—Tom’s in bad shape!”

“Bud—
listen
!” commanded Doc Simpson, the plant’s youthful medico. “Tell me quickly the nature of the injury.”

“I—I think—suffocation—pressure on his chest f-from a supersonic jetstream—and m-maybe burns and heatstroke or something—jetz,
just get here
!”

“We’re on our way!” Doc promised.

Bud ran back to Tom and was relieved to find him moaning and moving. “S-Skipper...” said Bud gently. Then, impulsively, he grabbed a Bunsen burner setup from a lab counter. Igniting it, he stretched up on tiptoes and held the flame next to a sensor on the ceiling. Instantly the lab was awash in a spray of cool water.

Bud returned to the young inventor. Tom’s eyelids fluttered. “Bud...” he gasped faintly. “I’m—I think I’m—
unggh
!” He groaned in pain, forcing himself into a sitting position.

“Jetz, pal,” murmured Bud. “If it isn’t one thing it’s another. If you’re not high-diving into the bottom of Lake Carlopa, you’re gettin’ yourself blasted to death in your own—”

“Bud, you look terrible,” Tom observed with a trace of a smile. “I’m not too hurt—just aching. The tunnel never got beyond the default setting. Just enough to knock me around.”

“Yeah. I’m afraid you’re gonna have deep-set
black
eyes for a few days.”

“What’s with the sprinklers?—oh, I get it. But get me off this floor.” As Bud helped him up, Tom looked around. “Where’s the lab stool?” Bud pointed. “Oh.”

Doc burst in at a run, two assistant medics at his heels. They inflated an air body-cushion and pulled off the young inventor’s clothes, now in tatters. Examining him, Doc said: “Hmm. Not too bad this time—though you did the right thing, Bud, calling it in. Skipper, you’ve got bruises, on your front from the wind-force and up and down your backside, from the grating. What we call
air burns
on your face, not from heat but from the impact of the air jet.”

Bud gasped out a chuckle. “Don’t worry. The waffle look is ‘in’ this year.”

“Any damage to my ‘brand signature’?” Tom asked jokingly.

“Crewcut, blues eyes, all intact. But boss, stay out of the breeze for a few days, hunh? And somebody turn off this water!”

Tom sighed. “Look at this place! Flyboy, that was great thinking, opening—”

Bud grinned, almost shyly. “I just figured—with all that fuss to unseal the hatch when it’s closed, it must work like the door on a microwave. Breaking the seal cuts the power!”

“Yup. A safety measure that really paid off!”

Bud insisted on driving Tom home immediately, and Tom’s mother was equally insistent that he should take to bed. The young scientist-inventor was plainly outnumbered.

Yet the following morning found Tom, bandaged, back in the test lab, joined by Arv Hanson and Enterprises’ young lead engineer Hank Sterling. “I’m not making excuses, boss, but I can’t see how my prototype could have had anything to do with the problem,” Arv declared. “What do you say, Hank?”

Sterling shrugged. “Nothing obvious. The heat-absorbers got fouled, but that has nothing to do with the pneum-accelerator system. Remember, boys, things didn’t start to go wild
during
the test, only later when things had cooled off.”

“It was when the hatch slammed,” Tom mused. “And it must’ve been quite a
slam
if it was forceful enough to engage the sealing flanges. Without a full seal the air equipment couldn’t have powered up.”

“I s’pose you’ve considered an invisible enemy lurking in the lab?” joked Arv. “Hey—maybe he’s still here!”

Tom grinned. “I did consider that. The only reason it’s not still on the list is—an invisible guy would’ve been visibly outlined by the water spray!

“But seriously—less cutting edge!—I wondered if some kind of pulse effect from the plasma might have both fried the durathermor terminals and affected the basic motor circuitry in the hatch in some weird way.”

“We can eliminate that possibility,” noted Hank. “I didn’t see any trace of mechanical or electrical problems, in the tunnel or in the D-Wing. The absorbers just got warped by the heat a little more than we’d anticipated. Easy enough to fix. The big question, Tom,” he went on, “is why and how that heavy metallumin hatch door decided to slam itself. That’s the start, anyway.”

The young inventor strode over to the hatch, scrutinizing it with an intense, troubled look. “Heavy is right—which is why there are micromotors at the hinges to assist in opening and closing it.”

“They’re completely insulated from any kind of random power surge or induction pulse,” Arv reminded them. “And anyway, sealing the hatch doesn’t make the blower system start up; just makes it
possible
.”

The three fell silent. Presently Hank Sterling said thoughtfully: “You know, it’s a mighty big coincidence when you think about it—the hatch slamming, the tunnel starting up,
just
at the moment Tom Swift is inside. If it’s one of those personal attacks we all seem to get every second Tuesday, my question is: how did they know?”

Tom nodded ruefully. “As Bud says, great question! If this is the work of enemies, they’d have to know several things—my own movements, more or less in real time; how to close the hatch; how to activate the tunnel... and all of it remotely. You might say they’d have to be...
all-seeing!

“But Harlan Ames’s crew went over the whole lab building personally, starting with the lab itself, before Bud and I even left the room.” Ames was the experienced head of Enterprises Security. “The TeleTec and other instruments showed nothing, no hidden cameras, no relays, no transmitters. Nothing!”

“Then
Nothing’s
got a grudge against Tom Swift!” Hank observed.

“It’s just like what happened on Fearing Island,” said the youth. “Some kind of effect produced by remote control—by the ‘all-seeing’ Ninth Light.”

Suddenly Arv Hanson gave a sharp handclap. “Hey, I don’t know about this ‘Light,’ but I think I know what must have happened in the lab!”

“What?”

“Skipper, this new control console is wireless—WiFi! The controls aren’t
physically
connected to the tunnel mechanisms!”

“Good gosh!” Tom blurted. “I forgot all about it! If someone knew the security-signature, he might be able to access the relay transponders on the tunnel directly and override the board. He could command the system to shut and seal the hatch, and then fire up the pumps and compressors!”

“But could it be done from a distance? Maybe outside the plant completely?”

“I’d say it’s possible,” replied Hank. “This test building isn’t shielded-up like the big hangar. But you’d have to have cracked the ‘permission’ code that’s always running behind any control signal from the console.”

“Just as the raiders did with the aquatometers,” Tom noted grimly. “Raiders from nowhere, with no motive, and a great big fear of something called
u’umat
!”

That afternoon, paper-working in the administrative office, Tom received a call from the Department of Historic Language Studies at nearby Grandyke University. “Hi, Professor Simallen,” he said excited. “Did you find out something about that charm symbol?”

“Oh yes, Tom, it wasn’t difficult,” she replied. “It’s a stylized combination of two letters in Middle-Persian—Arabic, basically.”

“What do the letters mean?”

“They don’t constitute a word, but they were adopted to signify a certain phrase—”

“The Ninth Light?” Tom prompted, rushing in.

“The what? No. It’s idiomatic; the original sense of it might be rendered as ‘
seek in faith all paths
’.”

“A religious motto, maybe?”

“Yes, associated with a very tiny sect called the Qalqaram.”

“I see,” responded Tom. “By any chance—does the sect have something to do with a region up near the Himalayas, in Bangladesh? I’m told it’s called ‘the handful of sultans’.”

Dr. Simallen chuckled. “Well, you seem to already know most of what I’m telling you! The sect first emerged in what we now call Afghanistan, back in the 1200’s. But it was only practiced to any great extent in a small region just below Nepal and Bhutan. But Tom—Qalqaram was never any sort of important religious movement. I suppose you could call it a cult. The only reason it survived beyond the death of its founder, Eid-F’lqa Qalq’r, is that it was briefly adopted as the state religion in one of the so-called princely states. With the death of the Rajah who had proclaimed it, it was abandoned and forgotten.”

“What was the principality called?”

“Gureshpal. A pitiful thing, about the size of Monaco.”

“Does Gureshpal still exist?”

“It rather depends on what you mean by ‘
exist
,’ Tom,” she said with a touch of patient academic sarcasm. “It was absorbed into India in the 1700’s, then went with East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in the division. The people are almost entirely Muslims, going back to the Islamic rulers of India, the Mughal, you see.

“I did a little research before calling you,” she continued. “To summarize, Gureshpal is now just the traditional name for a minor province, not a real political entity.”

“No ‘Gureshpal Liberation Front’ or anything?”

The academic laughed. “Oh dear no! The original people blended into the surrounding population centuries ago. I doubt they know anything about their ancient heritage. The only time the name even comes up nowadays is when the old ‘first family,’ the Boses, want to brag about their lineage. But to put it with the
utmost
respect, they’re just ultra-wealthy buffoons. They’d much rather enjoy the international high-life than run a country.”

Speaking later with Harlan Ames in the Security office next door, Tom related the end of the discussion. “Naturally, I asked all about the Qalqaram sect—I guess I had in mind the old Hashashim, the assassins cult. But it’s not like that at all. The founder tried to put together elements of Islam with Buddhism and Christianity. As religious sects go, it was pretty peaceful.”

“Yet the charm-symbol does look like a possible tie-in,” Ames nodded. “What about this wealthy family she spoke of? I take it they’re descendants of the old sultan.”

“The Bose family? Old money made centuries ago, hoarded and carefully invested. Professor Simallen said that if one person had the wealth of the entire extended family, he’d probably be the world’s richest man. But it’s divvied up among some seventy relatives, who own it jointly, as in a trust.”

“Interesting. One person must be in charge, though. Somebody’s got to hire the C.P.A.”

“She said the head of the family is a fellow named—let’s see—Desh Zai. No big ambitions. He doesn’t even live in his homeland, just cruises around the sunny Indian Ocean in his yacht. She said he has an estate in Madagascar for when he gets waterlogged, but he’s rarely there. I tried to find info or a photo on the Net, but I gather he lives a quiet life of luxury and avoids the public eye.”