Tom Swift and His Megascope Space Prober (15 page)

"I don’t know just what you’re up to, Tom," the man replied. "Probably wouldn’t understand it anyway." He was an Enterprises employee stationed in New Orleans as part of the Swifts’ private television system, the videophone network. "You say it’s a test? My gosh, that’s quite a getup you’re wearing!"

The electronic "chameleon suit" worn by Tunbridge Jackson had been altered to fit the tall, lanky youth. With its image system switched off, a tense, determined young man in a bulky but flexible garment—which now included a light, close-fitting helmet with a narrow wrap-around view slit—stood before the technician. "It’s not hard to move around in, though," Tom remarked, holding his helmet open. "No questions, Gary, on what you are to do?"

"Pretty easy. Nothing! No matter what happens."

"Not until midmorning tomorrow. Then call my father at Swift Enterprises."

"Sounds like this test is a little on the
dangerous
side."

"Oh—maybe just a
little
." Tom winked as he switched on the suit’s solar battery circuit. "You know that great big building out there?
I’m going to climb it!
"

In a moment the mobile home door swung open, then closed again. In the dim starlight a casual viewer, even at a moderate distance, would have made out nothing definite—perhaps only a slight, misty outline, a silhouette, walking briskly across the parking lot. A ghost. Or more likely, imagination and a slivered moon.

Tom could only hope and pray that he hadn’t already been observed. It was all but certain that Li Ching had put his scientist-mercenaries to the task of finding some method to remotely penetrate the stealth drone’s anti-detection system, which with the image-repeater setup was virtually invisible to all forms of energy—even light. Had they already succeeded?
It’s funny, he wouldn’t even have to actually solve the problem,
Tom thought ruefully as he walked along.
If we don’t recover the stolen Eyeballer, the government won’t build any more for fear the technology’s been "busted." And meanwhile the guy can palm off some kind of bogus detector to foreign powers and charge whatever he wants for it!

Such were the musings of the Semi-Invisible Man as he approached the shadowed tower.

Tom’s shadow-trackers had provided a clue as to where the drone’s base might be situated inside the structure. In all its final approach trajectories, it had descended to the same altitude, about 170 feet above ground level. The scientist-inventor guessed that Li’s control room, and probably a sort of office suite, was located around the fourteenth floor. "Fourteen floors of climbing, straight up," Tom muttered. "Piece of cake!"

But it wasn’t.

The owners of the Selland Building had provided a chart of the tower’s layout, which Tom had studied until it was memorized. He knew the lower floors had too much damage to allow easy access to the higher levels. Climbing a sheer wall was the only route up.

He stood for a long moment at the bottom of the north wall, leaning back awkwardly to look upward.
I could still call it off
passed through his mind. But along with the thought came deft movements of Tom’s arms and hands as he activated the ingenious climbing mechanism he had devised.

Tom was wearing a boxlike backpack, its tight-gripping harness beneath the suit, its surface covered by the image units and antidetection sheathing. The yank of a concealed handle sent four rods, thin as pencils and painted a dull gray-brown, shooting out from the backpack toward the ground, a concrete walkway. Droplets of a gluey substance oozed from the tip of each rod, anchoring it to the concrete. As Tom manipulated hidden controls, the duraflexon rods began to extend rapidly, spun off reels inside the backpack. While wound on the reels the duraflexon was flat as tape, but as it shot through an electrical contact while being extruded, it bulged out into a tubular shape and became rigid—and very strong.

The extending struts lifted Tom like an elevator. Inside the chameleon suit, firmly attached to the harness, were small gravitex units. They required little power, but held Tom upright and balanced, keeping the entire lift-structure perfectly stable.

What would Bud say? "
Just call me Jack, and keep the beanstalk growing, Skipper!
"

The wall rushed by Tom’s eyes, floor upon floor. He counted them, and as the fourteenth floor neared he slowed, then stopped, the extrusion of the rods.

In front of him was a break in the wall with blackness behind it. With a gulp Tom extended his feet to rest on the bottom of the "sill" and gripped its sides with his hands. He then, in a single smooth movement, rocked forward into the gap while unclipping the backpack from his harness. It would remain there atop the rods until Tom returned.
If!

He entered the room, waiting a moment for his eyes to become accustomed to the traces of wan starlight. He could see that the floor was littered with construction materials. And ahead of him was a doorway without a door.

The young inventor found himself in a hallway that encompassed the entire floor in four right-angle turns. When he had returned to his starting point he had found—nothing.

Where now?
he wondered.
Up or down?

He approached an emergency stairwell, flinching as the fire door made a creak.

There was light above him!

A miniature handheld device assured him that there were no alarm sensors in the stairwell area. He made his way up to the higher floor, treading softly, very conscious of the thud of his heart in his chest.

He made the landing. There was no fire door—the doorway to the hall gaped open. The light he had seen was reflected from a single dim bulb carelessly fastened to the wall near a door that was clearly new, and plated with metal. A small disk was set into the wall next to the door frame.

Tom examined the disk carefully. A thumbprint sensor, he concluded. Not a DNA-keyed scanner, thank goodness!

The young inventor had come prepared. He pulled open the front of the suit. From a pouch attached to his harness he removed a small oblong device from which a bulge protruded, the size and shape of a human fingertip. Asa Pike had provided Tom with a digitized "map" of Li Ching’s fingerprints, including both thumbs, and Tom had loaded the data into a 3-D surface emulator he had designed some time before. Now he pressed the curved, soft-flexing business end of the emulator, warmed to the temperature of human skin, against the thumbprint pad.

There was no response.

"Good grief! He must be left-handed," Tom near-whispered. He altered the emulator’s output and tried again.

The left thumb was the key. The heavy door unlatched with a slight click. Slight—but would it cause any heads to turn inside what could well be Li’s control room?

With the edge of his hand Tom eased the door open slowly, gently, by the millimeter. He felt relief as the crack thus revealed showed only darkness—which turned to dismay as bright lights flashed on inside!

THE SHOCK caused Tom’s hand to lurch, flicking the door open further. The young inventor drew back—and stopped. No one was inside the room!

Automatic switch!
he declared silently in relief.
Very funny, Comrade-General!

The room was large, square, and crammed with electronic equipment and what looked to be, in Tom’s expert eyes, a sophisticated antenna setup. The far wall was covered by an upswinging panel. Tom was sure that the open sky lay beyond.

At the end of a slanting "runway," in a cushioned cradle atop a pedestal, rested the young inventor’s quarry, a metal starfish named Eyeballer. From several steps away Tom played his scanner across the pedestal.
Okay, then—an electric eye alarm
, he thought.
Pretty simple. Then again, it’s just an afterthought. Li doesn’t expect anyone unauthorized to make it this far. Maybe he’s the only one who ever enters.

The alarm was simple yet effective enough in making any attempt to seize the Eyeballer a risky, probably fatal, proposition. But Tom Swift had no intention of doing so. He turned his attention to the various consoles, scanning them with his device and making shrewd judgments as to their use.

This one’s the main control,
he decided.
Here’s the nerve center for the drone.

Tom took out another small device from his pouch and gazed at it silently for a moment. What irony!

The ingenious mechanism had been an unintended gift from Tom’s enemies. Some time before, while perfecting his space solartron, he had confronted a murderous foe who had acquired, from a foreign source, a device capable of remotely interfering with certain kinds of common computer-processing components. It even possessed the limited capacity to forcibly reprogram computer-run systems from a distance, with no need for a physical connection.

After acquiring the device, Tom and his engineers had spent time studying it and replicating it with some improvements. Now it would serve him well—he hoped!

The young inventor began a complicated and delicate process, entering new commands into the Eyeballer’s guidance system that he knew would be hard to detect and—like a super-virus endlessly copying itself—harder to delete. "Sorry, Li," he murmured. "Next time you fly the thing, you’re in for a big disappointment." Tom reflected that he wouldn’t want to be anywhere within the reach of the Comrade-General’s rage at that moment!

Completing his task, he turned to leave, and his eyes fell for the first time on two small objects glinting on a metal shelf. Could it be—? Yes!—his father’s wristwatch and his own, stolen by Julia Pellasen!

Tom hadn’t expected to see his watch again. He turned it over and read the inscription. "
To Tom Swift, conqueror of air, water, fire, and earth! BNB
" It had been a gift from Bud.

Then he stifled a gasp—voices and footfalls outside the door, which Tom had wedged open a crack. He thought with alarm:
Good night, I can’t shut the door now, and I don’t know how to turn off the lights!

He shoved the watches into his suit pouch and looked frantically for a place to conceal himself. But the consoles butted up against the walls, leaving no hiding space. He finally decided to take up a position flat against the wall next to the door frame, where the opening door would conceal him for a moment at least.

Even as Tom pressed against the wall, slim fingers pushed through the crack of the door, swinging it forward a few inches.

"Mr. Li, sir? Are you in here?" Julia Pellasen’s voice!

Then the fingers withdrew. "Left the lights on. He must be upstairs in the office." Tom recognized the voice as another of the Women With Issues, the sister named Lana.

"You said he’s expecting us, didn’t you, Jules?" asked a third Woman.

"You heard me say it, didn’t you? Use your head or get a better one, Mireva!—we couldn’t have got in unless he let us. Up the stairs."

The footsteps withdrew.

There were a million good reasons for Tom to sneak back to his "elevator" and make a safe getaway. He ignored them all. Science and invention bred curiosity, and Tom Swift’s curiosity had taken him over.

Yet his mind worked furiously. Even if Tom risked surveillance from the hallway in front of the Comrade-General’s door, it was a sure thing that the visitors would have shut the door behind them—and no doubt the door was thick to provide the Great Man with protection. Tom would see and hear nothing from that vantage point.

Was there another way?

He cautiously reentered the hallway, pulling shut the control room door behind him, briefly wondering if the room lights had clicked off. He scouted out several of the nearer rooms, and quickly found one with an unfinished window gaping open. He stuck his head out into the night and looked up to the floor above. A tiny patch of room-light, invisible from ground level, fell upon a decorative ledge fifteen feet up and about twenty feet to his right.

He studied the source of the light as best he could.
Looks like a gap between two temporary panels
, he decided.
I could stand there and listen—maybe even squeeze forward a ways without getting caught.

How to get there? He now looked downward and saw that his body-lift mechanism was one floor down and quite a ways to the left. The ledge above didn’t extend all the way across, and there was no time to descend to ground level and relocate the base of the system. He had to make his move
now
!

The young inventor looked up again, his forehead creased with fear and determination.
Good night, maybe I should join a circus as a Human Fly!
he thought.

Tom edged out the opening, simultaneously making precise adjustments to the gravitexes inside the suit. Angled toward the mass of Planet Earth near the distant horizon, the gravity concentrators pulled Tom against the building wall with such pressing force that he could scarcely breath. Yet it was necessary if he were to squirm his way upward using the rough texture of the building’s unfinished surface to push against.

The edges of his boot-soles had a good contact-grip, fortunately. He worked his way up the side of the Selland Building with a froglike crawl. There were a few momentary slips. But in a short time that felt like eternity, Tom was standing on the narrow ledge before the open slot.

Now he could see that the slot was the end of a side-twisted gap walled-in by plywood construction materials—little more than a very narrow crawlspace, unprotected. Evidently the Comrade-General had never entertained the possibility of an intruder from the heights outside! At the end was an irregular opening just a few inches square.
But it’ll make a good peephole if I can manage to squeeze myself close to it!
Tom told himself.

As he worked his way forward in desperate silence, he could already hear voices coming through his helmet eye-slot. "Of course we know how busy you must be right now, sir," Julia Pellasen was saying.

"Do you? I rather doubt it," came the chilling, accented voice Tom so well remembered—as if a snake could speak! "But I take it you have another of your gifts for me, personally delivered."