Tom Swift and His Megascope Space Prober (10 page)

"Sounds a little obvious, I suppose," Tom had noted. "But we have to make it irresistible, as well as an easy steal."

The real security system would be Tom Swift himself, watching from a hidden vantage point high within the observatory’s dome.

Late that night there was no radar alert, no shouted challenge from patrolling guards. Yet shortly after midnight, a silent vibration in his shirt pocket told Tom that someone was rifling through the contents of the security file next to the base of the megascope’s antenna!

Using infrared goggles, he peered over the rail of his high eyrie. A small, thin figure, barely more than a silhouette, crouched stealthily next to the cabinet! Tom guessed that he was photographing the documents and probably using a portable device to copy the memory chip in the drawer.

After a few minutes the figure stood up as if about to make a run for it.
That’s about enough!
thought the young inventor as he tossed the goggles aside and pressed a remote-control switch near his hand. The voluminous chamber was flooded with bright light, shining into all corners and leaving no shadows.

The light left Tom Swift wide-eyed and dazzled with astonishment.
In a split second the thief had vanished completely!

"Good grief!" gasped Tom helplessly. "What was I looking at? Some kind of projected image?"

Then he suddenly bolted to his feet! If it was
bright
light that somehow made the thief unable to be seen—!

Tom leapt to the edge of his platform to attain a view through the long open slot that curved up the face of the dome. Sure enough, in the deep semi-darkness of this corner of Enterprises, which was some distance from the brightly-lit airfield and laboratory buildings, Tom could make out a figure hunched close to the ground and sprinting along frantically. He seemed to have a definite destination in mind, probably the point at which he had breached the wall surrounding the plant. By the time Tom could signal security, or even reach the floor of the observatory, the thief might well have made his escape!

Yet Tom was well-prepared that night. He turned to a small object firmly bolted to a metal support strut, a mechanism sporting at its end a small parabolic dish antenna. Tom swiveled the device in its bracket and aimed the small but very powerful repelatron at the fleeing figure.

He thumbed the activator switch. The repelatron itself was soundless, but as it surged to life there came a sharp
creak!
as it was forcefully thrust backwards against its bracing strut. And the sound was echoed by a wild cry from the grounds below!

Tom ventured a brief glance, then clambered down the access ladder and out into the starlit night. Near the wall, a small dark shape, prone on the soft ground, was thrashing and struggling. The powerful repulsion force had pinned the erstwhile thief down flat.

Tom had to strain to see the vague figure, who seemed to blend into the dimness. It was easier to see the flattened grass than the thief himself! "You might as well stop wasting energy," Tom called out as he approached. "My little repelatron always wins its fights. Not to add insult to, er,
ongoing
insult—but all you’d have had to do was wriggle out of your clothes. I tuned the ’tron to cotton fabric."

Tom drew a small flashlight from his pocket and illuminated the thief, who had ceased to struggle yet still seemed strangely elusive to the eye. The youth played the beam across the man’s head. The first sight was such a shock that Tom almost dropped the light!

He was gazing at a man with two piercing, darting eyes—
but no lower face!

"Wh-what in the― " Then as Tom edged closer, his horror fell away. A mask! It seemed the mask was almost transparent in one section, allowing the intruder’s own eyes to peer through. But the rest of it, covering the entire face and head, was the color of flesh but unmarked by any facial features. At such close viewing range, the eye was able to catch the outlines of the figure despite the electronic "chameleon" effect.

Tom propped up the flash on the ground nearby, then took out one of his electric i-guns and warily held it trained on the thief. "Wouldn’t want to blow all your circuits!" warned Tom. After a moment’s study, he reached down and pulled off the weird mask.

The young inventor burst out laughing! "Well! Come back for a little night work on my crewcut? Nothing like professional pride!"

Tom explained the scenario to Harlan Ames later, after the thief had been led away by the Shopton police. "He’s been calling himself Tunbridge Jackson. I don’t know if it’s his real name, of course. Alvin Freud hired him a couple months back."

"That’s your barber?"

"He prefers the term
hair care professional and personal stylist,
" grinned the young inventor. "As you know, I’ve been having Al come out to Enterprises whenever I manage to remember to get a haircut."

"Doesn’t hurt to avoid a crowd when you can," Ames noted approvingly.

"The last couple times Al sent his new assistant, who really seemed to know his stuff. But now I guess we know what he was doing with my hair—extracting DNA traces!"

"Which explains how he picked the lock mechanism. And of course," Ames went on, "we know now that on his last visit he kept his antiradar amulet and substituted a dummy. So when he scaled the wall, the patrolscope didn’t pick up on it. Which leaves― "

"Right, Harlan. Why was he so hard to see in the light?" Tom had a hint of admiration in his voice. "Fantastic technology, obviously adapted from the Eyeballer system."

"That image-repeater shell he wore?"

Tom nodded. "His chameleon suit! Jackson wore it like a work garment over his street clothes. Even the mask had rows of the diode light-emitter elements embedded in it, creating a digital image that reproduces the immediate background. It isn’t quite science-fiction-style invisibility, but it’s close enough—or maybe I should say, too close for comfort.

"I could see him with the IR goggles, but evidently, when I switched on the lights, he blended so well into the background that my eye wasn’t drawn to him. Didn’t occur to me to try putting the goggles back on."

"And so he slipped outside. Seems like the system would be even more effective in the darkness."

"Oh, it would be. But alas!—the pixel elements have a slight glow to them that would stand out against a really dark background. So the system automatically ‘stops down’ in darkness, and goes to full power in bright light." Tom added that it was only due to his elevated viewing angle that he had been able to see the thief in the first place. "Even stopped-down he was hard enough to make out at ground level—in fact, that’s exactly why the guards never saw him, not from a distance. But the high-tech tailors slipped up. They neglected to put diodes on the top of his head!"

This brought out a laugh from the security chief. "Guess everyone makes mistakes. Even Li Ching!—he’s clearly at the back of all this. So far, though, I haven’t been able to trace anything on our peripatetic hair stylist. And he’s not talking. Probably afraid, with good reason."

"We don’t know just how he delivered the goods," Tom noted, "or whether he went directly to Li or used the Women With Issues as some sort of go-between."

"For now we’ll have to hope your energy-shadow device gives us our lead. But great work, boss!" Ames concluded heartily.

Some hours later as Tom sat in his office in the light of morning, Munford Trent entered with news of an unexpected visitor. "She was escorted in by Security to speak with Yuri over in the Billing Department, but she took off on her own—says she wants to see you."

"If it’s a billing issue― "

"She says it isn’t, Tom. Something about a personal invite to a demonstration—a radio being manufactured by some company in Sweden."

Tom was elated! Somehow he was being invited—or perhaps
lured
—to a demonstration of the very device that had been pirated from Tom’s Private Ear set! Despite the obvious mystery and hint of personal danger, Tom could not help thinking,
What a break!

Trent was frowning at his boss. "What shall I do with her, Tom?"

"Did she give her name?"

"Of course. I
always
ask their names, Tom. Julia Furster."

The woman was shown in—young, pretty, and blond.
And
somewhat on the tall side. Her attire bespoke sleek professionalism.

As Tom greeted her and shook her hand, she said with a smile, "My, I gather
some
of your reputation must be exaggerated, Tom."

"Excuse me, ma’am?"

She sat down. "The way you looked me up and down, I thought I was meeting the typical middle-aged businessman I see six days a week. Not America’s pure and upstanding boy-next-door inventor."

Tom shrugged. "Er, sorry. Guess I made a bad first impression. But you know, ma’am― "

"Yes, I know—no appointment. In fact, I’d say I rather
crashed
your office. But I think my motive will interest you." She handed Tom a white business card which read:

JULIA FURSTER
AUTHORIZED REPRESENTATIVE
SODER-MAMBREEKT TECHNOLOGIES OF
UPPSALA
NEW YORK OFFICE

Tom stared at the card in his hand for a long moment. "Let me give you one of mine," he said, taking a business card from within his desk drawer. She took it, and Tom winced. "Oh, good night! Those were just printed—the ink is smeary. Sorry." He plucked it out of her hand and handed her a piece of paper. "You can daub with that while I get a tissue for you."

"Never mind," she said rather coolly. "I’ll use my handkerchief, from my purse."

Finally, awkward preliminaries over for the moment, they began to talk.

"I take it you know of Soder-Mambreekt’s communications breakthrough."

"I know what I read in the papers," Tom replied. "I don’t recall anything appearing in the engineering or research journals, though."

"Well, corporations have their secrets, don’t they?"

"Perhaps so."

"Still," she continued, "SMT’s Kontakt-Q Urfona, as we call it, will change the face of human communication forever!"

Tom nodded. "It’s a wonderful achievement."

"The word you want to use, Tom, is
revolutionary
! Imagine its application in times of war, for example. SMT feels very sure that the armed forces—of many nations—and the aerospace industry will swamp us with orders when they find out what we’ve got. We’re not in full production yet, of course."

Miss Furster paused and tossed a smile in Tom’s direction that looked sly, perhaps even mocking. "I—er—hear you’ve been working on a similar type of radio device. Grapevine gossip."

"Enterprises is always working on new scientific developments," Tom said noncommittally, though curious as to where this particular "grapevine" might have planted its roots.

"Oh my. Cautious type, are we?" The woman laughed rather too loudly. "But very understandable these days. In any event, Tom, SMT would feel privileged if we could demonstrate our unit to you at our lab and test center in New Jersey."

Tom responded with a thoughtful, slightly quizzical nod. "I’d find that very interesting, ma’am. But if I might ask—why is your company especially interested in our opinion?"

"Oh, I see." Miss Furster’s stare was barely polite. "You’d like a reason, a
justification
. There
is
such a thing as professional regard, isn’t there? Even these days? Yet it’s true—we’d like to create a certain relationship between SMT and Swift Enterprises. There may be some mutual advantage, in the long run."

"I take it you’re suggesting some kind of cooperative venture. That’s really more my father’s end of things."

"I see. Well then, why not bring him along? The two Swifts. How delightful."

A meeting was set up for the day following, Tom and his father to be met at the Trenton airport by Miss Furster. "I’m looking forward to it," Tom said as she left, with a Security escort.

As the elevator door shut, Tom hastened into Harlan Ames’s office, adjacent to the Swifts’.

"Got something interesting for you, Harlan," Tom announced to the former Secret Service agent. "A business card just handed me by a rather tall woman, one of our Enterprises cards with a finger-smear in ink, and a piece of scratch paper with a few more fingerprints!"

"Boss, you never fail to amaze me! Rad and I will have some kind of report for you by the end of the day."

But the results came in well before the end of the day, as Chow served a light lunch in the Swifts’ office. Phil Radnor reported to Tom and his father: "There are a number of Julia Fursters in the U.S., and quite a few match this woman in terms of likely age. No fingerprints recorded in the criminal justice system. Nothing from Interpol."

"I contacted Asa Pike through Congressman Van Arkyn’s office," Tom said. "He says the woman is almost certainly someone they tagged as working for Li Ching’s organization. But they’ve all become experts at covering their tracks, and Collections didn’t have a name on her."

"Did he tell you to be careful?" asked Ames.

"Didn’t bother!"

"We do have some further info," Ames continued. "Her business-card fiber matches traces we found on the message card from Sandy’s magazine, and her prints match those of ‘Big Bertha’, including the scarring on her fingers."

"And as we told you, Tom, Soder-Mambreekt clammed up right away, which could mean
anything
, I suppose—or nothing. They say they’re in the process of establishing an office in New York, no public phone number as of yet, no comment on a laboratory in New Jersey, and no intention of sending invites to you two Swifts!" said Radnor with a grin.

"It’s obviously some sort of hoax, and probably a trap for us," stated Mr. Swift.

But Tom did not entirely agree with his father. "But it’s obvious we’d be suspicious of the setup and would check with SMT. They’d expect it. An outright trap or kidnapping would be foolish, don’t you think? We’d be prepared."

"All true," agreed Ames.

"My guess is, they don’t plan to tip their hand at all, not this time," Tom went on. "They’ve taken a chance because they want to show us something, maybe something that will warn us away from them."