Tom Swift and His Megascope Space Prober (8 page)

The youthful prodigy explained that he had suddenly been struck by the notion that some of the quantum techniques employed by the PER to convey sound could also be used to transmit lightwave information—visible images. "The megascope is kind of an electronic super-telescope, Hank. Instead of a lens, an invisible ‘cloud,’ or sensor-node, of quantum-entangled particles would be established far off in space, carried there by a microwave beam. As light passes through the node, it will ‘collapse’ the superposed states of the particles in a way that corresponds to its wavefront pattern. The pattern will be instantly replicated in the device on Earth, and a computer will use it to produce an image on a monitor screen."

"Like putting a TV camera in space, anywhere you want it," mused the engineer, eyes bright. "What a fantastic thought!"

The two were so absorbed in discussing the details of the megascope space prober that they lost track of time. They were startled when a beep announced that they were drawing near the midpoint of their journey. Tom adjusted the craft’s gravitex stabilizer and eased the reactor alignment lever forward to begin decelerating from the Space Kite’s constant 1-G acceleration.

Dead ahead, in the viewpane dome, the moon loomed larger and larger. Soon they could make out its craters and jagged peaks with startling clearness, the brilliant wash of unhindered sunlight starkly outlined in unyielding black shadow. About fifty miles short of a landing, Tom swiveled the gravity-concentrator and eased the Space Kite into a low orbit.

"Right on the button," Hank said with a glance at his watch. "Boy, what a sweet flight!"

"I’m afraid it’s already becoming a routine commute," Tom chuckled. At the appointed time, Tom activated the PER unit. To his thrilled delight, Arv again responded with no gap in time.

"
This is great
," enthused Arv. "
Normally there’d be a noticeable lag in responding at your distance—about two seconds total. But not now! Tom, it’s as if you were standing here in the lab next to me.
"

Tom shot Sterling a happy glance. "Thanks, Arv. Now we’ll put the whole moon in between us and see what happens."

As Tom clicked off, Hank chortled: "Take
that
, Einstein!"

The Space Kite began to round the moon. The crystalline blue earth seemed to descend toward the lunar horizon and finally dipped behind it.

Tom tried the PER. Again—perfection!

Hank Sterling whistled. "Hard to believe how your signal goes right through all that rock."

"
What
signal?" grinned Tom. "As explained by noted philosopher Chow Winkler, there aren’t really
two
units but
one
—even with a couple hundred thousand miles and a great big rock between the speakers!"

Before Hank could comment he was startlingly interrupted as the PER set developed a shrill whistling noise. Wincing, Tom hastily adjusted the speaker controls, but the whistling seemed to be growing louder.

"A little static in your
no
-signal?" gibed Hank.

"It’s nothing to do with the quantum link," declared Tom. "Some sort of induction must be affecting the sound-reproduction circuitry directly. I’ll have to switch off the speaker."

"What could be causing it, Skipper? An enemy?"

"Or a heavenly body on the loose," Tom stated grimly.

HANK STERLING was startled by Tom’s cool remark! He wondered fleetingly if the young inventor had meant it as a joke. But Tom’s face was deadly serious. The eyes of the astronaut darted to the space radarscope on the instrument panel.

"Look at this" he murmured quietly.

A fine faint line of light seemed to be tracing itself on the screen. Was an object streaking toward them? A meteor? A missile perhaps? The radar scan gave a bright picture of the nearer heavens, but its scale was not designed for an accurate pickup of smaller phenomena at a great distance.

"Why is it so faint and fuzzed-out?" Hank wondered aloud.

The two could make out nothing unusual through the dome. But
something
seemed to be approaching them! The young inventor’s brain was frantically weighing the odds against them, two lone crewmen in a tiny ship. Should he race for earth? Or try circling for cover beyond the moon’s further rim?

But then the two cried out as a brilliant flash of silver-blue light flooded the cabin!

The flare was gone in an instant, but left Tom and Hank dazzled, momentarily unable to read the instruments.
Were they under fire from a marauder in space?

Tom’s vision cleared, and he strained to study the radar monitor. "Whatever it was is gone," he pronounced.

"Right! Mainly because it blew up!"

But Tom Swift shook his head. "There was an explosion all right. But I’m not so sure it was the object itself, whatever it was. Look at these readings."

Hank gulped. "High-energy radiation—hot stuff! We’d be
fried
in here if it weren’t for the Inertite coating!"

"But the triangulation focus isn’t even close to the last position of the radar bogie," Tom pointed out. "Yet there has to be a connection. If a spacecraft set off the blast remotely, it could have ducked behind the horizon while we were getting our eyes back." After a moment, though, he reconsidered somewhat, admitting that what they had witnessed might have been some unknown natural phenomenon. "Hank, that radiation profile almost suggests a matter-antimatter collision—from two masses smaller than a pea! It’s not impossible."

"Know what I say, Skipper?" Hank muttered wanly. "I say,
Earth, here we come!
"

As they orbited out from behind the moon, Tom reported the incident to Enterprises by means of the Space Kite’s conventional radiocom. There was no further danger during the three-hour return trip—nor any clue to the mystery in space.

Back safely in Shopton, the Private Ear Radio having proven its worth, Tom’s work continued apace. After refining the PER console and adding a message-alert beeper, Tom sent Bud one of the units as promised, and Bud used it to call back to tell his friend that the Astro-Dynamics officials had given him permission to take it with him on the mission.

"How’s your pal Chippy?" Tom asked.

"Obnoxious, and getting
really
good at it! But I’ve learned to ignore him. Let the Chippys fall where they may!"

Bud asked if Tom had made any progress in the matter of the Eyeballer drone or the freeze-ray ambushers. "Nope, flyboy," was the rueful reply. "And I guess I’m afraid to admit to myself that I don’t have even a sliver of an idea as to how to proceed. I’m afraid Asa Pike’s confidence may have been misplaced."

"Never! Hey, don’t tell me
I
need to give
you
a pep talk! Just wait, Tom—when you start playing around with your megascope, your Swiftonian brain’ll probably unleash a whole flood of new ideas."

"I sure hope so."

Thinking about Bud’s encouraging suggestion, Tom decided to concentrate on developing the basic components of the megascope into a testable form. "I’ll need to start out with a ‘quiet’ multiplier circuit. That’s for sure," he told himself.

After two hours of benchwork, Chow having just brought a snack to fortify him, the young inventor wheeled the tank of helium Chow had delivered over to his workbench and began to draw off some of the gas into a smaller compression tank, which he would take to the lab room nearby where Arv Hanson had constructed a working model of the improved and redesigned translimator.

Suddenly there was a clatter of cowboy boots down the corridor, and Chow let out a bellowing cry: "
Boss! Tom! Run for yer life!
"

"What’s he up to now?" Tom muttered, striding up to the lab door and throwing it open just as the ex-Texan came running up.

Then Tom was catapulted into the corridor as a terrific explosion shook the laboratory!

The concussion from the blast bowled Tom and Chow over. The cook had given his boss a hard tug, and as Chow rocked backwards Tom sailed right over him as if jet propelled and banged his head against the opposite wall.

"Tom! Son, are you all right?
Say
somethin’!"

Chow’s voice seemed muffled, as if he were shouting through layers of cotton batting. Tom rolled over and shook his head, trying to clear his brain.

"That mean you’re
not
all right?" demanded Chow frantically.

"I’m—I—just let me catch my breath." In a moment Tom struggled up, with Chow helping him. "How about you, pardner? The blast hit you too!"

"Naw, barely touched me. You were standin’ right spang in the way!"

Somewhere or other, alarms were shrieking. Through bleary eyes Tom saw Harlan Ames running up the hall, his normally controlled countenance white with anxiety.

"Thank heavens you’re all right, Skipper!" he panted. "And you, Chow?"

"Still with ya."

Meanwhile, employees were rushing into the hall from both directions. The blast had evidently been heard all over the lab building—outside too, judging by the shouting seeping through the entrance door.

"Exactly what happened?" Tom asked. "Chow? Harlan?"

"I got an anonymous phone tip on my cell phone, just now," Ames explained. "The caller—it was a woman—said someone had substituted hydrogen for helium in a tank delivered to you last Monday, set to detonate when the tank pressure dropped. I tried to reach you by phone and the plant intercom but got no answer, and I didn’t know where you were working. I hopped into a nanocar and blazed over to this end of the plant. I got ahold of Chow in his kitchen and asked if he knew where― "

"An’ I told him I’d jest come from servin’ you a snack," Chow babbled breathlessly, "so’s you’d have something in yer stomach afore you started playin’ with that gas I brung you t’other day. The man said t’stop you or you’d blame blow up! So I started in runnin’!"

Ames gave Chow a slightly chiding look. "Next time, Chow, take a deep breath. You took off without telling me which lab Tom was in! I could have called him."

The westerner looked abashed, but Tom quickly said, "But if Chow hadn’t come running down the hall, I wouldn’t have gone to the door."

Ames nodded, the tone in his young boss’s voice turning him half-apologetic. "Yes. That’s true. And now that I think of it, you probably would have been caught on the lab phone—with me."

"And it was cause Tom came to the door that I didn’t go rushin’ right in! One more second and we’d have been a couple mighty dead ducks!"

"It was a miracle," Tom agreed.

"Thank that anonymous phone tipster," said Ames.

"I’ll be happy to if we ever find out who it was," Tom said wryly. "It’s another strange turnabout, just like the warning note about the jetrocopter. Well, let’s survey the damage."

As Tom and Ames made their way into the lab through the growing throng of employees, Chow stayed behind to calm the crowd. "It’s ohhh-
kay
, buckaroos," the Texan drawled, like a cowhand soothing a herd of skittish steers.

Inside the lab Tom was heartsick as he beheld the destruction caused by the hydrogen blast. The whole shop was a shambles. Windows had been blown out, filing cases lay toppled on the floor, shelves and workbench were littered with electronic debris and broken glass.

"Good great grief!" Ames muttered.

For a moment the only sound was the dripping of liquids from the broken bottles of chemicals. Then Tom walked over to examine the remains of his megascope space prober equipment. The loosely-rigged test components looked as if they had been smashed to bits by a sledge hammer.

"It’s a tough break, boss," Ames murmured.

"We’ve had tougher ones, Harlan, and they haven’t stopped us yet. Neither will this one." Tom swallowed hard and summoned up a grin. "Actually, it’s not so bad at that. I hadn’t invested much time in these preliminary components. I can build new ones in hours," he declared firmly. "It looks as though our unknown playmate has managed to slow me down just a bit. But I’ll tell you this. I’m going to get a working model of the megascope up and running in time to watch Bud’s blastoff to Venus!"

There were no clues as to the identity of the woman who had placed the warning call to Ames. But that evening a clue turned up unexpectedly at Tom’s home.

Sandy rushed into the living room waving a small piece of paper in her hand, the size and shape of a business card. "Tom, I found this stuck in one of my magazines, one that was just delivered this afternoon!"

Tom scanned the card and its brief handwritten message.

H2 for He.
Are you having fun yet, Tom?
We sure are!
Till next time.

Women With Issues

"Hydrogen for helium," Tom muttered, deeply absorbed.

"But this sounds like a joke from a late-night comedy skit!" sniffed Sandy. "Or maybe a rock band—‘
Women With Issues
’! Sometimes I think this ‘political correctness’ stuff is going way too far."

"It’s a threat, sis," Tom said simply. "It has to be taken seriously, whatever these people want to call themselves."

The card had already been handled and scraped about too much for usable fingerprints to be likely. But Tom held it up to the light, keenly scrutinizing it.

"Do you see something?" Sandy asked.

"Maybe so," her brother murmured. He held up the card in front of her, turning it so it was at an angle to the lamplight to accentuate any shadows. "Doesn’t it look like there’s something on the back side, sort of scratched into it?"

"Oh Tomonomo, you’ve
got
to read more crime novels!" bubbled Sandy gleefully. "Or at least watch more television. This card was
obviously
lying loose on a writing surface under a piece of paper, and someone wrote on the paper with a hard-point pen. They pressed down hard enough to etch what they wrote into the card a little."

"A wonderful deduction," the young inventor stated dryly. "Can you make it out?"

Sandy stared at it. "I think I can copy it. Bring me a pencil and something to write on, brother dear." She worked at it for several minutes, and an odd figure slowly took shape beneath her pencil.