Tom Swift and His G-Force Inverter (5 page)

Hours of intent, strenuous work were broken by a late lunch, served by Chow with mother-hen-ish cluck-clucking. "Not so worried about
you
, Franzenberg," grumbled the cook. "Got a fair side on ya a’ready. But Tom here’s still growin’."

"Thanks for keeping an eye on me, Chow," Tom grinned.

"Yes," said Rafe. "A nice case of
in loco parentis.
"

Chow looked at the physicist suspiciously. "Call it
loco
if you want, but it right sure gits th’ job done." He turned to Tom. "Say now, son—what’d you decide t’do about that Asa feller? Gonna take up with him like he wants?—him’n his blame lobster stew!"

"My mind’s churning over it," replied Tom soberly. "What do
you
think, pardner? You haven’t met him, but you’re pretty intuitive."

Chow beamed at his young boss. "Thanks kindly! Not ever’body
wants
t’ reckernize that ole Chow has a few uses b’sides sloppin’ out th’ beans ’n bacon." His broad and vertically unending forehead puckered with thought. "So he wants you t’ find the sneak who stole th’ thing he jest then stole himself, right?"

"That’s what it amounts to."

"But fer all you know, he might jest be out t’steal it plain—fer himself, not fer Uncle Sam like he says. That so?" Tom nodded. Chow continued his summary. "And yew cain’t jest
ask
somebody, cause if he
is
a good poke, it’d put him at the wrong end of a shotgun."

"You might say that."

Chow’s concentration had now proceeded to the point of his removing his cowboy hat and scatching his generously bald dome. "Wa-aal then... howzabout this? Hand ’im a
Nope
—turn ’im down flat—but then go find that Picasser thing yerself, on your own. See? If you turn it over to th’ Collections folks, you’ll know it got to th’ right place. That’s what ol’ Asa says he wants to do anyway. Mebbe they won’t blame him s’bad, long as they got their hands on it."

Tom ate his sandwich quietly for a moment. "Chow—it’s a great idea. It means that
we’re
in control of the situation, not Asa Pike. If he still thinks Collections will do... something to penalize him, he can probably figure out a way to just drop out of sight."

"In fact," added Franzenberg, "if you
did
do as he asks and help him locate the thief, he’d be smart to take The Picasso and run, rather than turn it in and be forced to explain any deviations from plan that might come out. In other words, doing as our culinary strategist suggests may be the only logical way to bring this life-or-death situation to a good end."

"Yup!" Chow enthused.

Tom nodded. "It makes sense. We’ll have the verdict on the GDI today or tomorrow, and the demonstration project can advance here at Enterprises for a few weeks without my being present."

Franzenberg’s thick eyebrows rose. "Demonstration project? Have we already passed from the pure atmosphere of physics to mere engineering matters?"

"There’ll still be plenty of physics to play in, Rafe," Tom chuckled. He patted the notebook in his shirt pocket. "I got wind of an opportunity to solve an engineering problem that the government is interested in. Last night I looked up the details on the Net. It seems to me we can meet that challenge while putting the GDI to a test in the practical world, right out in front of the public eye."

"Yew don’t say!" muttered Chow.

Franzenberg was frowning but briefly silent. "I’m sure Dilling would be ecstatic," he snorted. George Dilling was the head of Enterprises office of Communications and Public Interest, in plain language the company publicist and news-relations chief. "Now please tell me the relevance of such PR stunts to science."

"It wouldn’t
just
be a PR stunt, Rafe," Tom retorted. "It’d be a practical test of how to incorporate ingravitized matter, from the GDI, into real-world engineering applications." He described the call for environmentally-safe approaches to sightseeing accessibility in the Grand Canyon.

"Then that omnipresently notable notebook of yours contains ideas for some sort of weightless observation vehicle?" asked Franzenberg in his customary long-winded manner.

"And, er, now—whaterya mean
weightless
?" Chow put in, patting his middle width.

"I have all manner of ideas floating around," was Tom’s reply to Rafe. "Maybe something very different from what I think you have in mind." The young inventor turned to Chow. "Right now we’re working on a machine that could, in principle, cause materials to react invertedly to the earth’s G-force—gravity, in other words. They’d fall
upwards
!"

"That so? Hunh. Couldja make a belt outta it?"

"We’ll see, pard." Tom smiled affectionately. Scientific miracles were lost on Chow Winkler—at least the science part.

Tom and Franzenberg returned to their tasks. The refabricated rotor units—a simple matter for Enterprises technology—were installed in the caissons and given a low-power test. "All numbers are right on the money," said Tom, scanning a bank of meters and monitors as they stood outside the sealed test chamber.

"Fantastic erg levels from the helixes," noted Franzenberg. "Chief, there’s no reason to delay a test rotation along the
i
-axis. Just a minute amount of mass, of course."

The young inventor gave a nod of sheer pleasure. "We can use the air in the gap between the forcers," he stated. "Let’s see how a clump of molecules take to being rotated through the G-dimension!"

Tom set the controls and a computer countdown commenced. Though both knew that there would be nothing to see, the couldn’t help keeping their eyes on the GDI apparatus, intent gazes piercing the thick viewpane of ultra-strong metallumin, coated with layers of radiation-proof Inertite.

The countdown ended with a beep. Meter needles suddenly twitched. "It’s happening, Tom," breathed Rafe. "We’re twisting molecules through another spacetime angle, right across—"

"
Wait
!" interrupted Tom. "Something’s going on in there! Look at the stress readouts on the helix forcers!"

Lights began to flash red. Tom’s hand darted for the cutoff switch—and then was pulled away violently as if gripped by something invisible! He was yanked sideways, then shoved backwards. To his astonishment, he felt his body being twisted—pulled into a spin on the slick lab tiles.

Rafe Franzenberg was staggering, trying to resist his own rotation with all his considerable strength. But even as he planted his two big feet on the floor, they skidded helplessly.

Every loose object in the lab had begun spinning on its own axis!

"
C-come on!
" Tom gasped, trying desperately to fight the unseen force. "We’ve got to get—to g-get—"

But then the breath was knocked out of him as invisible hands grabbed him by the shoulders, whirling him around violently and tumbling him to the floor!

THE HIGH-ENERGY lab had descended into a whirligig chaos. Tom and Franzenberg—floored—tumbled and spun like human tops as chairs, tables, and loose items pirouetted and crashed about them.

Strong arms gripped the young inventor and encircled him. Slipping and twisting as he shoved the sides of his shoe soles against the smooth floor, Franzenberg was nonetheless making headway toward the door, dragging Tom behind him. The physicist’s face showed the strain and his muscles corded. Tom added his own strength to the effort as best he could.

They scrambled along like crabs—and suddenly the lab door, open and jerking back and forth wildly, was before them. "
Nngh
!" groaned Rafe as he swung Tom around to the front and charged out through the door like a bull!

Tom managed to grab the door handle and yank himself to his feet, jerking the door closed at the same time. The latch caught and an automatic locking mechanism came into play.

But there was no respite. The invisible force seemed to surge right through the walls! "We’ve—we’ve got to cut power to the lab—" Tom choked as he struggled against the spin effect. Yet even if he managed to hold his cellphone and press the buttons that would connect him to the plant power station—what then?
What if the phenomenon extended throughout the four-mile-square grounds of Swift Enterprises?
All workers could be completely incapacitated!

A weird sound—a
scree-eech!
—drew such attention has Tom could gather as he stumbled and spun. The locked lab door seemed to be vibrating. Next instant it was torn from its hinges and came whirling through the air! It barely missed Franzenberg, slamming into the corridor wall next to him.

And suddenly it was over. As the door tumbled to the hallway floor, the pressures against Tom and Rafe ceased, leaving them limp and prone—and bruised.

"And now, chief," panted Rafe. "I suggest we terminate the test!"

"It’s already over," Tom said weakly as he staggered to his feet. "I can see the board from here. Red lights! I think the GDI twisted itself to death!"

The scientist-inventor was right. Inside the test chamber, the apparatus had been reduced to tortured ruin, its metal rotor caissons lying in long, twisted strips on all sides of the chamber. "Idiot thing!" snarled Franzenberg, wiping a streak of blood from his face. "The dimensional rotation opened a window to something terrifying—namely confusing test results!"

"What do you make of it?" asked Tom.

"Oh, well... nothing we can’t deal with," was the more controlled reply. "It always
was
a possibility, you know—induced gravitational ‘eddies’ forming at the margins of the vortex. Fanned out horizonally at the level of the gap. We’re dealing with the
bizarritude
of force vectors with components along the
i
-axis."

Tom nodded, his face still pale where it wasn’t livid with bruises. "A propagating force that produces
torque
in free masses, not simple attraction or repulsion."

"Like a mad Tilt-A-Whirl at the carnival. I suppose we can’t complain though, chief. After all, we’re dealing with a branch of mathematics that permits negative numbers to have square roots. My high school math teacher would grab at his heart and collapse."

"This whole
room
has collapsed," groaned the young inventor. But he reflected that he had destroyed more than one laboratory in his quest for invention.

With ready help from other departments, the lab was restored to something like order by the end of the day. There was even a new door! "Really, it won’t take long for Arv Hanson to recreate a working GDI from the final plans," noted Tom hopefully.

"Let’s generously allow him to forego any preliminary testing," pronounced Franzenberg sourly. "I’m going home to my lonely, yet seductively well-appointed, bachelor apartment. And there I shall brood over the unfaithful mistress known as
physics
."

Before leaving, Tom did one thing more. Accessing the Enterprises online site
ForeSite
, he inserted a blank rectangular box beneath the masthead-logo. "Sorry, Asa, or whoever you are," he murmured. "I’m doing things my way." He stared at the empty box on the screen for a moment. Then he logged out and went home.

For once the family avoided discussing the family business at the dinner table, a regimen Tom’s mother enforced with sweet glances of doom. But afterwards, relaxing in the big living room with dessert, Tom’s pert sister Sandra pertly brought up the GDI project. "Since Buddo isn’t here to pry a simplified account out of you,
I’ll
ask you how this antigravity machine is supposed to work," she said. "I mean—despite what Sci-fi writers like to think, I know gravity isn’t just some kind of ‘radiation’ that you can shield and block. Dad taught us that it’s a basic force of nature. Did it change?"

"Well, heat was once thought to be a fluid called ‘caloric’," noted Mr. Swift. "Same with electricity. Even the basics sometimes get re-understood."

"And each time is the absolute
last
time," joked Tom; "until the next time."

"Why do you call it a ‘GDI’?" asked Tom’s mother.

"It stands for Gravitation-Dimension Invertegrator. Don’t blame me—Dr. Franzenberg came up with that one. I’d just as soon call it a G-Force Inverter."

"Maybe you can whisper it in private settings," Mr. Swift chuckled.

Sandy nodded wisely, as if grasping the concept to the end. "So it’s a machine that inverts the force of gravity—turns it upside down. Nice."

Tom raised a cautioning palm. "That’s the way so-called antigravity devices are usually portrayed, San, but what the GDI really does is invert the
reaction
of matter to the G-force, not the force itself."

"So things ‘fall upward,’ is that it?" When both Tom and Damon Swift nodded, Sandy continued: "But how is that possible—inverting the
fall
but not the force that
makes
it fall?"

"We call gravity a force of attraction, but it’s not like some kind of invisible rubber band stretching between objects," Tom explained. "The General Theory of Relativity—now that’s
really
‘nice’!—describes distortions or bends in the underlying fabric of spacetime surrounding all gravitating masses."

"I remember. Something about geometry in four dimensions, three of space and one of time."

"That’s it."

Mr. Swift broke the brief silence. "Imagine yourself looking down on a stretched rubber sheet from directly above. Place a cannonball on the sheet and it creates a circular depression that spreads out in all directions, becoming shallower as it goes. It sits there in the middle of the ‘dimple’ it’s made without moving.

"But now place a second cannonball on the sheet some little distance away. It creates its own depression, and the two depressions cross one another between them. They pool-together, one might say. Where they intersect, the dimple is double-deep; and since it always lies
between
the cannonballs, when they each roll down the slope into it—"

"They
clunk
! together," Sandy finished.

Tom continued the example. "Since you’re looking straight down on all this, you can see the two-dimensional spread of the sheet, but you don’t actually see the third dimension of the depressions. All you know is that the cannonballs accelerate toward one another if they start off close enough.
As if
some unknown force were pulling them together."