Tom Swift and His Giant Robot (2 page)

"Great performance! I was completely convinced!"

She returned a toothy smile. "You should see me down at the Nugget Grill and Family Theatre!"

As Tom drove the lonely stretch back to the Citadel, he went over the conversation in his mind.
What would it be like,
he wondered,
if I saw something floating ahead in the headlight beams?

The next morning, as Tom walked across the grounds of the Citadel toward the facility’s airstrip, a distant figure waved at him and came trotting his way.

"Bud!" Tom called out with pleasure. "Not staying in San Francisco?"

Athletic, dark-haired Bud Barclay, Tom’s closest pal, had been spending a week with his parents in the city by the bay, where he had grown up. "Got tired of it," he replied. "Too much charm! And now they tell me you’re hitting the stratosphere before breakfast!"

"I’ve already
had
breakfast," Tom laughed, "and where I’m heading—and you too, if you want to—is the ionosphere."

The two friends strolled through the already-warm morning sunshine to a small high-altitude jet that had been made ready for Tom’s use.

"Haven’t flown one of these before," Bud remarked.

"Which is exactly why
I’m
taking the controls this time," said Tom. Knowing how avidly Bud loved flying, Tom added apologetically, "Besides, flyboy, I need some time behind the stick too, or I’ll lose my edge." Bud nodded but gave Tom an airy look that seemed to say,
Okay—but I’ll be watching you!

Soon the little craft was charging its way higher and higher into the bright New Mexico sky.

"Hey, Tom, take it easy! We can stand only so many G’s, you know."

"We?
I
feel just
fine,"
responded the young inventor suavely. "But if you insist." He pushed forward on the wheel of the sharply climbing jet plane, flattening its steep arc. He had just climbed through the relatively thick air of the troposphere, home of the clouds, and was now above the lower edge of the stratosphere. Leveling off the v-winged craft, Tom grinned at the protesting voice from his friend seated directly behind him. "What’s the matter, pal? Seventy thousand feet too much for you?"

"Hey, that’s nothing when you’ve been halfway to the moon!" Bud joked. "But I think my stomach has gotten a little wimped-out on that rich San Francisco food."

"It’s all for science," Tom said, chuckling.

Bud knocked a knuckle against Tom’s flight helmet. "Next time you’re taking the high road to try out a gimmick for that giant robot of yours, why don’t you take the old rivet-head himself along?"

"Smile
when you call my robot names," Tom growled back with mock ferocity.

Both boys looked like well-padded fullbacks with oversized helmets. Inside their flight gear, however, they were quite different. Tom, lean, tall, and with a perpetually ragged blond crewcut, had a serious look in his deep-set blue eyes as he scanned the horizon. Bud was only a shade taller than Tom, but he had shoulders like a hammer thrower and the open, frank face of an athlete who liked to play for fun.

"The worst is over," Tom called back through his mike. "But keep that tender stomach buckled in tight in your protective suit. We’ve got quite a bit more climbing to do before we cross into the ionosphere, where we’ll get hit harder by cosmic rays. It’ll be a better test of the effect of radiation on the relotrol."

Tom glanced up at a black metal box bracketed firmly inside a translucent dome above him. If the relotrol brain inside it were to successfully direct the robot, which was designed for working in areas where the radiation would be fatal to human beings, it would have to be immune to the deadly rays.

"How did your gimmick react when you went up the other day, Tom?" Bud asked.

"Not good. I had to make some changes. Under really stiff radiation the relotrol would foul up the radio orders to the robot."

Bud grinned at the image. "You mean Mr. Robot wouldn’t know what to do? He’d sort of go berserk?"

"Right. And until the unit can handle this lesser degree of radiation, I don’t want to risk putting the robot itself anywhere near the Citadel’s main reactor."

As they flew high, Tom checked the instruments that were monitoring the relotrol’s functioning. His face fell. "Well, we might as well head back down."

"What’s wrong?"

"The relotrol is doing even worse on this test than yesterday’s. I’ll have to try another approach." Tom nosed the plane down in the direction of the Citadel’s airfield, now beyond the horizon. "But at least I have something in mind. As soon as we land, Bud, I’m heading for the electronics lab," Tom said, looking downward through the heat shimmer.

But Bud’s eyes were not on the distant ground below. They were following a black dot that had suddenly appeared against the dark violet strato-sky above the horizon.

"Something’s coming at us from three o’clock high," he said. "It’s too small to be a plane."

The speck quickly increased in size.

"It’s a bird!" said Bud in amazement. "A big black crow."

"Above us? At
this
altitude? Couldn’t be!" But Tom descended a few hundred feet to avoid hitting it, then cut the jet’s speed. As the bird winged across the backdrop of midday stars high above the cockpit, he craned his neck and said, "That’s too big for a crow. It’s larger than an eagle."

"But it
is
a crow!" cried Bud.

Tom looked again and caught his breath. The bird was immense! It was shaped exactly like a crow but was far larger than a vulture—or any flying creature the boys had ever heard of. The monstrous bird glided majestically across the sky, then wheeled.

"Maybe we’ve discovered a new species," Bud said excitedly. "Let’s get a close look at him."

"I’m not sure that would be safe," Tom replied warily. "The bird might panic and fly into one of our control surfaces."

He banked away from it. The bird, however, flew even closer to the plane, diving rapidly through air that was far too cold and thin to support any normal feathered flyer.

Fascinated, Tom put the jet on autopilot and swiveled to take a closer look. It was definitely a bird, and Tom had to agree that, but for its size, it had the characteristic form of a common crow. Though the silhouette of its flapping wings and tail showed the zigzag outline of feathers, its body was black as soot and revealed few details. Its claws and beak were visible, but its most eerie feature was a pair of beady eyes that seemed to glow like red coals in a brazier.

How can it keep up with us?
Tom thought. They were traveling at nearly the speed of sound!

"I’m going to get a picture of it," Bud said, slipping one arm free of his parachute harness and reaching for a digital camera he had noticed in a forward compartment. "May be a prize shot. Put her into a slow circle and hold her steady, Tom."

"Steady as she goes," Tom replied, his earlier qualms forgotten.

Loosening his chute still further, Bud peered through the range finder and focused the lens on the crow. He was about to trip the shutter when he gave a shout and suddenly lurched violently. "Tom!"

"I see it!" yelled Tom, almost breathless with wonder—and something akin to horror.

The monster crow was splitting apart like an amoeba!

Smaller crows—each one still of mammoth size—were peeling off in all directions from the main body of the creature. As they split away into the air they seemed to find their bearings immediately, all of them continuing to streak in the direction of the jet.

"For the love of Mike," Bud exclaimed fearfully, "what’s going on?"

"I’m trying to figure it out," was Tom’s terse, and equally fearful, reply. "Sit tight!"

Tom began a series of increasingly desperate aerial maneuvers, veering and diving in a frantic attempt to leave the crows behind.

Nothing worked. Within seconds the deadly flock, now multiplied to dozens, would smash head-on into the speeding jet!

TOM AND BUD watched helplessly as the monstrous crows bore down upon them. The ebon forms stretched out their claws toward the jet and opened their beaks wide. Out darted long forked tongues, like those of a rattlesnake. The eyes of the creatures seemed to burn redly with sheer hate.

Then the youths gasped in unison.

Like the flicking-off of a light, the crows had vanished completely!

"Tom…" Bud whispered hoarsely into his helmet microphone. "Wh-where did they go?"

Tom was silent for several moments. Then he said, "Back where they came from."

"But—but—"

"Let’s get back to base," Tom said, shakily.

They landed safely without further discussion. Tom immediately proceeded to scrutinize the cockpit with a variety of instruments, paying particular attention to the material of the transparent viewpanes. Lastly, he examined the visors of the pressure suits they had worn

"Anything?" Bud asked.

Tom shook his head.

Bud squatted down on the tarmac next to his friend. "Never heard of anything like it," he said.

"But
I
have," Tom retorted. "Last night, in fact." He now told Bud of his encounter with Nicky Ammo, and the strange ghost story that had emerged.

"You think there’s a connection, Tom?" inquired Bud.

"It seems likely. What we saw in the sky had some of the characteristics of what Nicky saw floating in front of his car—especially the way the phenomenon seemed to keep pace with the vehicles."

"Say, I just thought of something!" Bud exclaimed. "Maybe Nicky is
causing
the ‘crow ghosts’ somehow, so you’ll be drawn into staying here in New Mexico and working on his mystery!"

Tom smiled wanly at Bud’s idea. "Maybe. But why? And how’s he doing it?" Tom rose to his feet, squinting into the New Mexico sun. "I suppose the first thing to do is to get in touch with the people who are supposed to be keeping tabs on our Mr. Ammo—the local FBI!"

Back in his personal quarters, Bud at his side, Tom put through a call to Harlan Ames at Swift Enterprises in Shopton. After giving an account of the events of the last two days, he asked to be put in touch with whichever Federal authorities had a special interest in the doings of Nicky Ammo.

"Will do," the security chief replied. "I’ll have them call you at your private number."

Less than fifteen minutes later, Tom was speaking to Sam Valdrosa, an agent of the FBI field office in Albuquerque.

"Nicky’s my boy, all right," said Valdrosa. "We have authorization to monitor his activities, including his telephone calls—‘probable cause’ has been well established at this point. Last night, Tom, there were agents in a car next to the restaurant. If you two had come out together in a way that suggested a kidnapping, we would have taken him down in about ten seconds."

"Do you know what he was doing over the last couple hours?" Tom asked.

"Sure," responded the agent. "He got up, sat with his wife on his patio drinking breakfast, and went swimming in his pool with his son Jarret. No phone calls, no sign of anything unusual."

After conversing with the FBI agent for a few more minutes, Tom thanked him and hung up.

"He mentioned contacting the Federal Aviation Authority, but I think I downplayed our incident enough to have made him think twice. I’d rather have some freedom of action right now," Tom explained to Bud.

"Me too," agreed the young airman. "Do you still think Nicky’s involved?"

"Yes," Tom replied. "But not necessarily as the perpetrator. Maybe as the victim."

"The victim of
ghosts!"
Bud looked uneasy. "Just how do you handle something like that?"

Tom’s brows knitted together in concentration. "I’m not yet willing to believe this is anything supernatural," he said.

"I just wish I’d been able to snap a photo," remarked Bud. "But when I saw that thing splitting up, I forgot—"

"Wait a sec, Bud," Tom interrupted. "Are you
absolutely
sure you didn’t click the button? You were startled and jerked back—"

Bud’s eyebrows rose. "Say, you’re right! Maybe I
did
get a shot after all, by accident!"

The two rushed to the hangar where the little jet had been berthed. Tom opened up the cockpit and pulled the camera out of its compartment, where Bud had stowed it during the plane’s descent.

"The indicator registers one exposure!" Tom cried triumphantly. With Bud peering over his shoulder, he triggered the inbuilt video panel on the camera.

The shot showed the edge of the cockpit viewpane and the starry sky beyond—and nothing else. "I don’t get it," said Bud in disappointment. "I guess I wasn’t aiming right."

"Look here," Tom said, pointing to one corner of the viewscreen. "See that?"

"A lens flare?"

"I’m not so sure. It’s not the right shape or position for that. But it does match where the big crow was located in the sky!"

"Yeah—except no crow," objected Bud. "What you and I saw wasn’t just a little smudge of light."

Tom agreed. "Let’s take the camera back to the lab. Maybe we can extract a little more data from the image."

"Great!" exclaimed Bud. "Then I’ll get a chance to see if Robo Boy has found a head yet!"

Robo Boy
was Bud’s characteristic nickname for Tom’s giant robot, which was presently under construction and incomplete from the neck up. The bulky mechanical form had been shipped to the Citadel from Swift Enterprises so that Tom could continue to experiment with it while perfecting the relotrol that would control it.

"He’s still headless." Tom grinned. "But from his neck down he works well. And I happen to know he can’t wait to see you—to tell you to stop calling him Rivet-Head!"

Bud followed his pal to the cube-shaped lab building next to Tom’s apartment. Using an electronic code-key they entered Tom’s warehouse-sized metallurgy and electronics laboratory, filled with motors, workbenches, and lathes. In a corner stood the giant lifelike robot.

Even without its "head," the looming automaton stood more than eight feet tall. A special coating partly composed of Tomasite, the wonder plastic developed by Tom and his father, covered every part of its frame except the joints. This resilient radiation-resistant sheathing was a dark olive-green in color, appearing almost black to the eye, and contrasted with the bright silver hues of the joints. Eventually these were to be enclosed in protective "sleeves" of overlapping bands, which stretched and contracted with the movements of the joints.