Tom Swift and the Mystery Comet (8 page)

"And," Tom concluded, "the curving receiver panel functions as what’s called a wave guide, sending the sample through the connecting tube to the recovery tank—in this case the plastic beaker Bud was scooping the icing from."

Chow shook his head admiringly. "Brand my burro, it’s plumb wonderful! Why, a prospector wouldn’t need t’ pan fer gold with this lil ole whatchamacallit! A feller could jest fly around up in th’ air takin’ samples and mark it on a map."

"Yes." Tom nodded. "Matter of fact, this afternoon Bud and I are going to test this preliminary model in mineral prospecting. It has practical uses here on Earth as well as out in space. It won’t just detect radioactive substances like my Damonscope does, or metals like Dad’s metal detector—it will actually scoop up samples of anything I aim it at—or so I’m hoping."

"So the beam can pierce soil?" Bud asked.

"Not yet. The ‘capture beam’ itself has little penetrating power—that gold of yours, Chow, would have to be lying on the ground in plain sight, I’m afraid. But my perfected model will have something extra for subsurface probing." Now energized himself, Tom added that the telesampler system also would analyze and identify the sample automatically by a Swift Spectroscope and some other advanced instruments developed by Enterprises. "With my space model, I’m hoping to mineral-prospect distant moons and other celestial bodies. It’ll be the heart of the comet probe operation I’m putting together."

"Wow! How about that, Chow?" Bud exclaimed. "Imagine bringing home a piece of comet!"

"Sure beats a pickax."

Chow plucked off his chef’s hat and ran a beefy palm over his sparsely-attended scalp. "Looks like your fuzz up there is starting to run wild," gibed Bud. He patted the telesampler controls. "Want a little off the top?"

"Naw, Buddy Boy. Ain’t had much need fer a real haircut since Texas came t’ Abilene." Chow turned to Tom. "Jest one o’ my colorful Texas toss-offs, boss. Like as they allus have me spoutin’ in them―"

"Let’s start packing up the machine," Tom said to Bud, darkly.

Presently the two boys jeeped out to the airfield. The
Sky Queen
had already been raised from its special underground hangar. This giant, three-decker aircraft, solar-powered and equipped with jet lifters for VTOL hovering, had become known worldwide as Tom Swift’s Flying Lab.

Several employees and mechanics who had just completed the prep protocol were standing by. Hank Sterling, the blond, square-jawed chief engineer of Enterprises, and Arvid Hanson, a hulking master craftsman who oversaw the fabrication of working prototypes of Tom’s inventions, hailed their young chief as he climbed out of the midget electric vehicle, called a nanocar.

"Ready for take-off, Skipper?" Sterling asked.

"Sure thing, Hank!"

"Here’s the model," Bud called over, "packed in this―"

He was overlapped by: "
Say there, fellow travelers!
" Lett Monica came strolling up from where he had stepped off Enterprises’ moving-walk conveyor system, the ridewalk. "All set up in the bungalow, Tom. I thought I might meet some others of your
posse
. You are Bud, aren’t you?" The Brungarian offered his hand.

Shaking it, Bud grinned. "Strong grip, Lett! Is muscle-building part of space training over there?"

"No, physical development is a national goal in the new Brungaria. These muscles come from high school gym class!"

After introducing Lett to Hank and Arv, who had been briefed on the astronaut-exchange program, Tom asked Lett to join the
Sky Queen
’s testing mission. Lett reacted enthusiastically. "My word,
Skipper
! Fabulous! Your celebrity airship and your latest invention too—um, have I misapplied my English, Bud?"

Bud’s grin had thinned down at the word
Skipper
. "No... not at all. You speak better than
I
do, Lett." He flashed Tom a glance that spoke volumes.

Arv Hanson said hastily, "Where’s your telesampler to be installed, Tom?"

"I had the hangar crew pull out the big searchlight and bolt some clamps onto the extender boom. We can use the searchlight’s gimbal base to aim the telesampler." He explained to Lett that the Flying Lab’s powerful Swift Searchlight was designed to be extended out beyond the metal skin of the huge jetcraft. "The sampler beam is blocked by solid objects. It took some doing to figure out how to get through
air
without fuzzing out."

The five climbed aboard the ship with the telesampler carrying crate rolling on a handtruck. As Tom and Hank installed and checked over the jerry-rigged device in the searchlight bay, Arv and Bud gave Lett a tour of the versatile skyship. "A marvel of the air, quite majorly, dudes," exclaimed the Brungarian. "Cool! Wowee! Man, send my sinuses to Arizona!"

"Er—
we
like it," said Hanson politely.

"Say, Lett, whereabouts in Brungaria are you from?" asked Bud. "Volkonis?"

"Hey, a city which owes much to you
amigos
!" The young trainee laughed. "No, no, our capital is too stately for younger people—we who have grown up after the Revolution. I hang with my family in newly built suburbs, in the northwest. And your family, Bud—in San Francisco?"

"I’d say I have family in
two
places—S’Fran and here in Shopton."

"Love it!—this loyalty to your best pal. Alas, chum, back in dear old Brunka I have only a girlfriend or two."

Arv Hanson commented dryly, "That sounds like a sufficient amount."

"Yeah. But don’t think me oppressively macho. You see, in the new Brungaria the young women have been liberalized."

Tom called them to the forward control compartment over the intercom. The small sky crew had completed the pre-flight check list, and the tower radioed clearance for takeoff. With a roar of its jet lifters the
Sky Queen
soared vertically into the blue, smoothly turning onto its heading over Lake Carlopa. "I plan to do some swimming in that lake of yours," Lett remarked as the whole broad landscape of upstate New York began to unfold below them. "I hope to learn a great deal of this country during my stay. I wish to learn to surf and become a typical beach bunny. You surf, don’t you, flyboy?"

"When I can," replied the Californian. "But I’m low on the bunnyhood scale."

At a thousand feet Tom leveled off and pursued the short flight to the west. Presently he eased down to a lower altitude as they came to a barren, hilly area chosen for the test. "There’s a pretty varied and interesting geology in this region," Tom told Lett. "We saw it from
underneath
not too long ago—in my underground vehicle, the geotron."

"Jetz, chum, now
there’s
a book for which I could set my seat on fire!" exclaimed Lethal Monica.

Foregoing interpretation, the young inventor turned to his copilot. "Okay, take over, Bud. Keep her hovering steady until I com you to move on to the next spot."

"Roger!—
Skipper
."

Asking Hanson and Sterling to monitor the telesampler’s overall performance through the main board monitor readouts on the command deck, Tom climbed down into the searchlight bay and wriggled into a small fold-down seat facing the telesampler console. A low hum came from the machine as he switched on power. Thrilled as always to commence chipping away at the Unknown, Tom shoved a lever. Through the observation slit in the bulkhead before him, he saw the emitter antenna of the transmission unit move out into position, silhouetted against mottled ground and bright sky. He aimed it at a bare patch of soil below and tuned the circuits.

A blink of light on the monitoring board proclaimed welcome news even before Tom glanced into the sample receptacle. "Got something!" he chortled over the ship intercom. "Just a tiny smudge—but something!"

"Congratulations, Tom," Hank Sterling commed in reply. "Everything meters out fine up here—the output profile is exactly as you calculated."

With a grin of pure pleasure, Tom eyed the master analysis oscillograph. "Dredged up some aluminum silicate—that’s
clay
to you boys up there. Let’s try that next hill, Pilot Barclay."

The
Sky Queen
moved ahead with a twitch of forward power, ambling along slowly on its jet lifters. Again Tom aimed and tuned the telesampler beam-transmitter.

He frowned in startled surprise at the indication on the readout panel—but only for a split second. Before he could give name to his thoughts, a blinding flash arced upward from the ground and the compartment exploded around him in purple-white lightning!

THE INTERCOM speakers throughout the skyship screeched like fingernails on a blackboard, then collapsed into static. "What’s happened?" gulped Hank Sterling.

"Jetz!
Tom
!" choked Bud. A swath of indicators on his board were flashing red! With a single sweep of hand he switched on the craft’s sophisticated automatic pilot system and rocketed out of his seat toward the metal stairs leading down to the bottom deck. Wisps of yellow-gray smoke were already billowing up the stairwell, and the air was tainted by the acrid smell of fried electronics.

The youth was horrified by the sight that met his eyes as he leapt from the bottom step in the direction of the searchlight bay. The overhead lights, flickering dully, gave only faint illumination to a compartment thick with stinging smoke.
Visibility zero!
thought the copilot desperately.
The searchlight bay must be on fire!

Bud tensed to dash forward through the smoke. Then he drew back—a dark silhouette loomed up in the bay hatchway in front of him. As it came nearer, he made out two figures: Lethal Monica and, sagging and stumbling in the grip of his arms, Tom.

"H-how—how is—?" Bud stuttered.

"
T’neb
—here, help lower him," gasped Lett. "The air low down―"

"I know, better," said Bud, taking half his pal.

The young inventor was stunned but conscious. As Bud and Lett eased him down flat, he whispered, "I’m—I’ll be okay—the air circulators..."

"Hank, step up the air system!" Bud shouted up the stairwell. "Arv, get down here with a flashlamp!"

Even as Arv Hanson joined them, flashlamp in hand, the ship’s interior circulation and filtration system had begun to whisk away the pungent smoke. Tom sat up weakly, ignoring Bud’s gentle protest. "No... no, I’m all right. Nothing broken."

"What about your eyes?" asked Lett.

"Still working. There was no concussive blast, fortunately; no flying glass. Got a few burns and scrapes, though—oww!"

"If you think you’re all right," said Arv, "I guess the next question is—what about the ship? Was the hull breached?"

Tom rose to his feet unsteadily before he answered. "No. I’m sure we’re intact. At least... Swift and the
Sky Queen
are intact. From the glimpse I got, I’d say our test routine is over for today."

Tom slowly approached the bay hatchway and asked Hanson to shine his light within. "Good gosh!" he murmured. "The console looks like it went through a blast furnace—and that’s just the part inside the plane. The transmitter setup out there must look like a battered bird cage!"

Standing close at Tom’s side, Lett asked, "Not an explosion, but
what
then? Great heat, but I see nothing burning."

Tom ran a hand through singed hair. "Think of it as a lightning strike."

"Hunh?" Bud objected. "The sky’s as clear as anything!"

"Not from the sky, pal," responded Tom. "This was man-made lightning that struck upward from the ground."

"Some kind of weapon?" Arv inquired worriedly.

The young prodigy gave a weary half-smile. "Not
this
time, I think. It’s something I’d envisaged as a danger and thought I’d ruled out.

"The outgoing pulse-charge beam must have cut into a buried power conduit, near the surface under loosely-packed dirt. Feeble as it is, the capture beam nibbled the rest of the way through the insulation to the cable itself."

Bud asked, "But what caused the flash? Wouldn’t the power short to the ground?"

"Normally yes, but this
is
one of those famous Tom Swift inventions, and nothing is exactly normal. Some of the current—more than enough!—must have surged up the path of the ionized particles in the beam, like a lightning discharge." Tom frowned and ran his fingers through his blond crewcut again. "Anyhow, that’s my guess. The telesampler’s wave action is so complicated, it’s hard to tell exactly." After a moment he added that the dense smoke and charring came, not from flame, but from the flash-vaporization of the device’s protective plastic panels under the electrical onslaught. "The Tomaquartz window and Tomasite-Inertite coating on the hull stopped most of the surge. It came inside through the main power leads and connector sockets. Looks like I was pretty lucky—the spray of hot particles mainly jetted into the bulkheads and ceiling."

"Yah!" agreed Lethal Monica. "Or it would be
Fire Sale on Young Inventors!
"

"This is no time for jokes," Bud frowned.

After a last look Tom led the others back up to the control compartment and briefed Sterling. "The damage was fairly well contained," he reported. "The
Queen’s
main systems read out okay."

Tom nodded, but his face showed no relief. "Well and good. But
something
went wrong
somewhere
, guys. In planning our route I checked out all the underground placements and made sure the guidance brain kept us clear of them. I was only making small adjustments on the stick. The cybertron and localculator set the overall course."

"We didn’t deviate from that course by an inch, genius boy!" Bud insisted. "Our locational readouts were exactly as you’d told me!"

Tom gave his pal’s shoulder a tap. "I’m not doubting it, Bud. I think the readouts themselves are at fault. We’re miles away from the designated test area." He quickly confirmed his judgment by running a series of diagnostic routines on the ship’s systems. "I was right," he pronounced, "but in this case I’d rather be wrong. The problem was a sudden glitch in the localculator’s central spin-vector resolver. Not an electronics problem; a major deviation in the spin component of the calibration particles themselves."