Tom Swift and His G-Force Inverter (6 page)

Sandy nodded vigorously. "Gravity! But with gravity the bend is one dimension higher, in the fourth dimension, time."

"And you can only
observe
the effects in the dimensions that you can
see
—three-dimensional space," concluded Mr. Swift. "You can’t ‘see’ the real cause."

Mrs. Swift said tentatively, "But if the cause of gravitation is a bend in the space and time outside the object that moves, how could you get at it? What does your machine grab onto?"

Tom winced slightly. "Now comes the hard part. Dr. Kupp developed the mathematics of a theory that had been floating around..."

"Dr. Kupp
himself
floats around," inserted Sandy dryly, in the best Swift tradition. The man was best described as
obscure
.

Tom chuckled. "I know! Anyway, the idea is that most of the work of gravity is done, not in the four neighboring dimensions at all, but in a higher space-like dimension. Rather than assigning it a number—how do you count up dimensions, anyway?—we just call it the G-dimension."

"Okay, Tomonomo, but how do you—"

"I’m getting there, sis. Remember how, in Dad’s story, the depressions from the two gravitating objects pool together? Both objects make a contribution to the effect. Dr. Kupp calculated that if an object with mass were to be inverted, turned over, along the G-dimension axis, its inverted warp would interact with the normally-shaped warp of nonrotated objects with a reverse effect.

"So there it is! Rotate a normal object through the G-dimension, and its ingravitized version falls
upward
in Earth’s gravitational field."

Sandy gave a smile. "I’m going to love telling all this to Bashi." Bashalli Prandit, Tom’s usual dating comrade, was also Sandy’s closest friend.

"But dear, you haven’t really said just how your G-force inverter—
inverts
," admonished Anne Swift.

"Aw, who care about that technical stuff!" joked Tom. "Basically, we have two units, facing one another and rotating internally at tremendous speed, that generate an MHD ‘vortex’ in the gap between them. Just as iron filings rotate on their own axes near a magnet, any object inside the vortex is forced to rotate 360 degrees
through the G-dimension
. You see no change in its visible dimensions, but it has become ingravitized—as we call it."

"You must mean
180
degrees," declared Sandy. "360 is a full circle—you just come back to where you start."

"Not when you move along the
i
-axis," retorted her father. "You’re dealing in a geometry described by ‘imaginary’ numbers. They really
are
numbers; but they have unexpected properties. 360 degrees is equivalent to a
half
-rotation. You have to go around
twice
, so to speak, to return to your original orientation. It’s only by these bizarre mathematical monstrosities that you can add two valleys together and make a mountain!"

"I see," said Sandy, "why they call them
imaginary
."

The amusement was interrupted by an odd sound, a high wavering tone. The four exchanged glances of curiosity inching toward alarm.

"What in the world
is
that, Damon?" asked Mrs. Swift nervously. "It’s not the telephone or the magnetic field alarm."

Tom stood abruptly. "I know what it is. It hasn’t been used before. It’s an override alert telling me that something coded ‘urgent’ has been received as an email on my computer upstairs!"

The young inventor dashed up the stairs to his bedroom and checked his computer, killing the alarm tone. Then he scanned his email registry, opening the tagged message that had just arrived.

It appeared to have come from Enterprises, and had the urgency code attached, a code known to only a few key personnel. But as the young inventor scrutinized the underlying coding he could tell that the original message had only been routed through the plant, acquiring the code by some unknown method.

The message had no words. A blank square appeared on the monitor screen as the body of the email.

"An empty box," Tom murmured. "Asa Pike got the message, and I
don’t
think he’s happy about it."

In fact, the terse response gave Tom the feeling he was being threatened—being warned bluntly to reverse course and fill in the box with his acceptance of Pike’s demand. Or face the unstated consequences!

"BUT you’re not going to give in to him," stated—not asked—Harlan Ames.

Tom grimly shook his head. "No. I don’t know whether to trust Pike or not, but I definitely
don’t
trust the setup. I’m not going to lead him to this Rampo Ociéda fellow so he can beat the truth out of him—or whatever he’s been trained to do."

Ames’s stocky assistant, Phil Radnor, spoke up. "What if Rampo really
is
a thief? What if this fabled ‘Picasso’ is cataclysmic in the wrong hands? What if Asa Pike is America’s best friend—who got a little unlucky? Not that I have any answers to these rhetorical questions, Tom. Just keeping you on your toes."

It was the day following the phantom message. Tom sat in the security office—seeking a feeling of security. "What if. Lots of those, but not a lot of choice, Rad," replied Tom seriously. "The ‘Winkler approach’ still seems best to me. I don’t know if Pike or Rampo Ociéda or neither or
both
are The Good Guys. So instead of leading Pike to Rampo and letting
him
worry about recovering The Picasso—"

"You’ll conduct your own search and recovery by the proven Swiftian methods," finished Ames. "Radnor and I have gone over that data disk Pike slipped you. We’ve also plied such contacts as we have in Mexico’s police and criminal justice agencies. I do ‘discreet’ well, boss, but it’s a little exasperating."

Tom nodded. "I’ll bet. But we have to avoid setting off any governmental ‘tripwires’ that would give away the game to Collections."

"Or any of the other shady types."

The young inventor went on, "I had a long converation this morning with Veracíta Jualéngro—remember her, the Chief of Police in Las Mambritas? She had a few useful tips on dealing with the bureaucracy. Or rather,
not
dealing with them."

"Well, we’ve verified everything we’re in a position to verify. There really
is
a smalltime crook named Rampo Ociéda—basically a pickpocket, grab artist, and burglar—operating in Mexico City. He’s done some jail time, been identified as a suspect fairly often. Never anything ‘armed’, far as we can tell. Friends, relatives—unknown."

"What about a connection to drugs or that cartel?" asked Tom.

"Nothing in the records. Certainly no connection to any foreign group or espionage activity."

"Asa didn’t tell me anything about this group he called
the Adversary
," Tom mused. "Rampo could have some relationship to them, whether Pike thinks so or not."

"Whether he
says
he thinks so or not," corrected Radnor bluntly. "Maybe Rampo Ociéda was hired by the Adversary as some kind of backstop if the trade went bad."

"Or by Pike himself—part of a scheme to keep The Picasso to sell, or ransom, or pass along to someone else," declared the youth, frustration in his voice and clearly resenting the fact.

"A scheme betrayed." Ames’s lean fingers tapped his desk. "Or—perhaps it’s all working as planned. Or
would
have—"

"
If
I had fallen in," Tom said. "Fellows, I’ve talked it over with Dad. He said, basically—going down to Mexico after Rampo and The Picasso is dangerous—"

"True," noted Ames.

"—but no more dangerous than almost everything I do."

"Even truer," noted Radnor.

"When do you and Bud leave?" asked Ames. "Got the
Queen
gassed-up and ready?"

Already halfway to his goal, mentally, Tom smiled with determination. "No ‘Tom,’ no ‘Bud,’ and no
Sky Queen
," he said. "Just two naive tourists named Don Sturdy and Rick Cantwell, leaving from Shopton Airport this afternoon. With baggage!"

AeroMexico whisked the incognito pair south.

Wearing faux eyeglasses and other touches of disguise, "Don" and "Rick" conversed—in absolute silence. "Too bad we had to stop using your televocs in whatever’s left of our normal daily lives," Bud "said," lips remaining closed. "Man! A mini-cellphone for your throat muscles!" At a loud sound, a real one, he winced. "Maybe we should provide them for babies."

Tom chuckled aloud, then replied by silent movements of his larynx and tongue, transmitted and transformed electronically into the sound of his voice, heard internally by the recipient. "They’ve always worked great, ‘Rick’ old chum. But that’s the problem. Imagine how spies or terrorists would make use of them! Good thing we keep ’em locked away."

"Except when
we
do our spy thing."

"We’re lucky airport security didn’t detect them," Tom continued. "George Dilling wouldn’t like the headlines."

"They say jail’s a good place to make long-term friends. Genius boy, I know Rover Boy’s too big to sneak past the authorities, but how in the world do you plan to find this Rampo guy without the sensitector?" Tom’s sensitector was a remarkable tracking device of recent invention which made use of the molecular scent-trail left on the ground by nearly anything that moves. "You said you had some tricks up your sleeve?"

"In the luggage, actually. Remember how I came up with ‘plastic circuitry’ for the Video Viking probes?"

"Sure. You couldn’t use any metal in them."

Tom nodded; an observer would wonder why. "It was an elaboration on that conductive powder used in the giant robots. It didn’t take Arv Hanson and Linda Ming more than a few hours this morning to put together some modularized, snap-together gizmos that look fairly dull to the eyes of airport security—but’ll give us something of an edge in Mexico City. But still, you’re right. It’s nothing like Rover Boy."

They landed at Mexico City’s modern international airport and slowly wormed their way through customs. "Don" felt guilty at their fakeries. "Rick" seemed to be enjoying himself! "I like this role a lot better than that foreign dude you had me be when we snuck in to the Black Cobra’s base," Bud televoc’d.

Tom grinned. "I don’t think my Australian drawl was very convincing."

"No, it wasn’t. But at least we lived through it."

"Eventually."

Their hotel was a big, modern, glassy tourist trap near the Zocálo, Ciudad de México’s great central square and civic hub. In their room, Tom began to assemble his helpful spyware, laying the parts out on the bed cover. Hairdryers, cellphones, a mini-laptop, a CD player, as well as a few odds and ends concealed in the suitcase linings—even inside the handles—eventually became a compact flashlight-sized device, plus debris.

The young inventor held it up to Bud. "Not bad! Tom Swift and His Spy-O-Tron!"

Bud eyed it. "A tracker?"

"A poor excuse for one," Tom nodded. He held it up in front of his pal and indicated the light and reflector. "Believe it or not, it’s a sort of stripped-down version of the telesampler! It generates a very short-range ‘capture beam’ to sweep up surface atoms wherever it’s pointed—up to twenty feet or so."

His friend boggled. "Jetz! I’d never believe you’d be able to shrink a big contraption like the telesampler into something so small!"

Tom set the device on the bed, shaking his head. "It’s
not
possible, as least as far as the transmitron unit is concerned; the wavelength imposes a lower limit on size. This ‘spytron’ is just a very crude and puny adaptation, using a little solar battery." The young inventor explained that the spytron would sweep-up microsamples and analyze them for evidence of a trackable trail. "But there’s no repelascan baseline or elaborate readout. We won’t even be able to tell what direction the person was heading along his personal route. We’ll just know where he’s been, that’s all."

"That’s a lot," grinned Bud. "But genius boy—I wouldn’t wave it around too much. Even naive American tourists might look a little suspicious using a flashlight in broad daylight."

"Or one without a light beam at night."

After a nap and a fast meal, Tom and Bud headed for an industrial section at the distant edge of Mexico City—the largest city in the world. On a narrow shadowed street lined with warehouses, the windows of old office buildings gazing down blindly, Tom shined the invisible spytron beam back and forth on the sidewalk and the street, as "Rick Cantwell" leaned nonchalantly against the side of a building.

"Scooping up anything nice?" asked Bud by televoc.

"Not sure I’d call pieces of Rampo
nice
—but there’s a clear scent-match." Tom nodded toward the end of the street. "The trail runs along that way," he stated. Then he turned and indicated the opposite direction. "And that way too. If Pike hadn’t told us the direction Rampo ran off in, we wouldn’t know which way to go."

At the end of the street, the trail continued around a corner, down a long block, then into an alley choked with reeking trash. "I hope your spytron isn’t
too
sensitive," Bud commented, nose wrinkling.

"It isn’t—unfortunately."

The scent-trail came to an abrupt end. "What we expected," declared Tom. "A car."

"Can you track it?"

Tom made the attempt, but ended up shaking his head. "The spytron just isn’t powerful enough to separate the car’s trace-profile from all the others. It’s too old and faded."

Pike’s information made clear that Rampo Ociéda, small and wiry, 34 years old, specialized in tourist pickpocketry. Tom’s plan was to visit as many of the city’s tourist sites as possible—which were many indeed. "A pickpocket likes big crowds," noted the Shoptonian. "I’d guess his mugging of Pike was just a ‘crime of opportunity’."

"Maybe he was casing the area."

"Maybe. He might’ve been planning to burglarize one of the offices or warehouses."

"Which goes to show, ‘Don,’ that you never know when opportunities are gonna show their heads."

"I know that, flyboy. I’m an inventor."

"No. A tourist."

They dutifully visited the city’s many tourist draws, driving the main thoroughfare, the Paseo de la Reforma, wincing at the choking waves of smog and avoiding mention of Bud’s native state, California. They explored Chapultepec Park, welcoming its green beauty and the crowds at its several big museums. Alameda Park, near their hotel, dated back almost to the conquest of the Aztec empire and the days of Montezuma. "Says it was an Aztec market," noted Bud, guidebook in front of his gray eyes. "Also executions, burnings, and hangings." He glanced at his pal. "No mention of human sacrifice, though."