Tom swift and the Captive Planetoid (19 page)

“You could even see
that
, hunh,” grated Doc disbelievingly.

“One might call the sense-tapping system
1984-squared
,” laughed the Ninth Light. “These miracles, strategically employed, convinced that credulous lard vat Zai to hand over to me and my inspirations the management of his affairs. I have put his family’s vast fortune to work, for ends that are useful if not precisely ‘God’s work.’ Don’t think harshly of the lazy slug, gentlemen. Much flesh, little mind.”

“Your nano-units... what about power and transmission?” asked the young inventor, absorbed in fascination.

“Yes, back to topics of significance. Power drawn from local nerve processes,” Orfeo replied. “Very slight power available, of course, but it was all that was needed. Transmission? Now we get into my own singular contribution to the system. Here we have complex sensory data to be sent over great distances and through solid matter. As you mentioned to your father, even
you
haven’t solved that problem with respect to your space prober. But I, Tom Swift—I, Eid-F’lqa—
I
have solved the problem!

“Yet to be honest, my solution was not entirely original. The quantum-link approach of your megascope wouldn’t work, but you might consider your other quantum application—”

“The parallelophone!” Tom burst out, chagrin on his face. “Your sense-tappers transmit their data like our Private Ear Radios!”

“Yes, yes, and yes again!” exulted the sometime Eid-F’lqa. “Distance is eliminated; our signals pass through the Earth, through the void of space, anywhere—instantly! One only needs to reduce the basic equipment to the size of a few human cells. Which
is
what nanoelectronics is, after all.

“Of course, your quantum technology has been carefully guarded, Tom, but—”

“But you
do
have your personal source of celestial inspiration,” Tom finished bitterly.

“Wonderful, isn’t it? You’d boast too, Tom. If you had reason to. Which you do not.”

Tom ignored the jab and said, “Just seeing this room and these people helps me put a lot together. Your transmission-reach may be miraculous, but the actual content is spotty—a lot of noise for very little signal. So you distribute interspersed segments of the ‘readings’ among your followers, who—”

“They are parallel processors of vague and confusing sense-organ data,” interrupted Orfeo. “All the ‘noise’ is biological. The signal input is perfect, but tells us nothing in and of itself. You cannot cause a blind man to see by discussing with him the activation coefficients of his retina. But the human cortex is preprogrammed for interpretation if it is given the right ‘feed’.”

“In other words, these meditators are human receivers,” pronounced Tom with cool contempt.

“In a way. Look closely and you’ll see the viewing visors or earphones carrying impulses from the various quantum couplings aboard the
Apocalypso
. The auditory team, selected for talent in mimicry, tries to reproduce by voice what they ‘hear’ in the raw input, each one individually speaking into his own throat microphone. The computer then combines these many confused interpretations and determines a ‘best match,’ the obscured signal in the noise. Thus I hear through Tom Swift ears. Something similar for the visual team. We use sketch artists, and the computer seeks common elements with advanced pattern-recognition processing.

“We cannot monitor all our sources all the time, unfortunately. We move from one to another in a strategic manner, as needed.”

Simpson asked what source was now being tapped. “After you two arrived on the yacht,” replied Orfeo, “we switched from Tom here to, let me see, I believe it is Amos Quezada on Fearing Island.”

“No doubt you’ve tapped Talmadge and Desh Zai,” Tom snapped.

“No doubt. Talmadge is much more interesting, though, between the two. Some of his visual and auditory episodes are quite... arresting. Romantic fellow.”

Doc’s voice trembled, overcome by revulsion and outrage. “These are human beings, Orfeo! What do you and your people get out of this sick abuse?”

“My people? I
am
my people!” The smile of placid bliss now appeared on the face of the Ninth Light. “Must I reply to such a hostile question? Is it not enough that I have rekindled spiritual faith in Zai and his retinue, and such others as Louis Talmadge? Is it abuse to give them a useful purpose beyond their squalid routines? And my meditators here—how can you be so arrogant as to declare them abused? Are they not content with their enlarged lives?”

Tom snorted in contempt. “You’ve made them slaves.”

“I have simplified and clarified their thoughts. They have, each one, a
dedicated
function. Perhaps
we
are the slaves, eh?—dominated by the tedious distractions of daily life. They have no worries about lost loves or next meals. As to money—” The man smiled broadly. “I do their worrying for them.”

“This is all about money, isn’t it,” growled Doc Simpson.

Orfeo shrugged indifferently. “Now, alas, we pass beyond those matters I can boast about—so we stop.”

Tom looked steadily at the bogus mouthpiece of the Divine. “How long do we have?—before you kill us?”

Orfeo mockingly glanced at his wristwatch. “What time is it
now
?”

“EXCUSE me?” responded Tom, leaning forward and cupping a hand to his ear. “Would you mind saying that a bit louder?”

Francesco Orfeo sneered. “I am honored to be the very last to enjoy your bravado, Tom.”

“Sorry, sir, would you repeat that?” persisted the young inventor as Doc looked on with bewilderment and dawning traces of hope. “
I
hear you fine, but I’m not so sure about the other listeners. I don’t mean the meditators in this room. I mean a bunch of interested folks aboard our ship
Sea Charger
—as well as your dupe Desh Zai, who is probably boiling like lava under his skin by now.”

Orfeo backed up a step. “Your final bluff is hardly credible, my friend. The sensors in the entryway are much more than metal detectors. Your entire bodies were scanned to the bone. No hidden circuitry, no transmitters, no microphones. Obviously I checked for those televoc communicators you’ve used—even for parallelophone circuitry. Neither your people nor the cretinous Mr. Zai can possibly be listening to this boasting of mine. No one can know of your presence here now, or your
absence
later.”

“Your detection setup sounds amazing, Mr.
He Who
,” smiled the young inventor. “So I suppose it detected your own nano-units, sitting there doing their sacred duty inside my skull—didn’t it?” As Orfeo stared uncertainly, Tom continued, “But say, you know, the whole idea of those tiny things is to be hard to detect, to slip by ‘under the radar.’ If you do get a ping from something in my cranium—”

“I will shoot you with my own gun, Swift!”

“—well, your equipment operators would assume it was just your own sense-tappers. But the fact is, sir, you’re not the only one fascinated with micro-midget electronics.”

Orfeo was close to panic. His eyes shifted about the room wildly, as if contemplating escape—or murder! But he tried to shore-up his facade of skepticism. “What wit, Swift, to taunt me with my merely human inability to rule out every possible contingency. But if you knew enough of the scheme to insert your own camouflaged devices, you would have known enough to remove mine. You didn’t.”

“I guess it didn’t occur to you that I’d stay vulnerable in order to trick my way into your hands, your base of operations? To shut you down?”

“I’ll tell you what the Celestial Voice didn’t tell him, Skipper,” said Doc faintly—but happily. “He didn’t know just how far you’d go to protect Bud from—”

“From life as a waking sleeper,” Tom concluded. He nodded toward the revolver that had found its way into Orfeo’s hand. “Is there really much wisdom in committing murder in front of the ears of listeners in my
Sea Charger
, who’ll be boarding your ship in just a few minutes? Sounds like hard evidence to worm out of! And I don’t suppose the Bose family will overlook your dragging them into an embarrassing public proceeding.”

Orfeo suddenly made a last grab at the upper hand. “Your life depends upon your ability to convince me, Swift, and alas, I remain unconvinced. I fear the only cure for my skepticism is to see my adversaries as they board the
Apocalypso
. By then, you two will see nothing.”

“Hmm,” responded Tom, “that’s a reasonable point. How about if you hear instead of see? If you have a phone in this room with a direct-access number, tell me the number—say it loud and clear. If you get a call within, oh, ninety seconds—”

“Should such an improbable thing happen,” snarled their captor, “you are free. Very well, then.” He picked up a cellphone and read off the number. Then he held his wristwatch in front of his face. “If there are those who listen, let them tell me so now. I call your juvenile bluff. Stay back—far back.”

The seconds ticked, inaudibly but, in their own way, deafeningly. Doc Simpson was stark white. Was Tom bluffing? Should they try to attack Orfeo?

“Ten seconds!” muttered the Ninth Light.

“You know,” said Tom, “if the
Charger
crew try calling at the same moment as Desh Zai—”

“Three—”

“And we—uh, we have a rotary-dial phone on the ship. Takes a moment to—
t-to
—”

Orfeo raised and aimed his revolver.

His phone shrilled.

“Never fails, hmm?” grinned Tom with relief. “You step in the shower and—”

Tom and Doc could hear the voices, American voices, coming through the cellphone. The fast
Sea Charger
, just over the horizon, would meet the
Apocalypso
in minutes. With weapons at ready.

There was no titanic struggle aboard, no melodramatic last stand. Even the ranting and raving was concise and mild. Francesco Orfeo, Ninth Light, Ret., surrendered like a man in a daze. As he was led away in handcuffs, he muttered toward Tom, “It seems I’ll miss the dramatic account of how you saw through my genius, eh?”

“I’ll send you a copy.”

Doc Simpson lingered aboard the yacht for a time, examining some of the captive meditators—who were confused but physically healthy as they were carefully disconnected at the surgically implanted intravenous plugs in their arms. “I suspect they’ve been drugged in some way,” he told the
Charger’s
medical team. “Something psychoactive and probably addictive. Good lord, they took their nutrition by IV!—he wouldn’t allow them to break for meals. After they’re ‘clean,’ it’ll likely take years of therapy to return them to normal life—if they ever had it in the first place. I think the Ninth Light appealed to some very marginal types who came to him voluntarily.”

Aboard the
Sea Charger
, Simpson, all but in a state of normal and healthy collapse after a near-death experience, managed to ask Tom if the ship, or Enterprises, had been told to monitor them from the start of their trip. “No, Doc,” the young inventory replied, his bravado now giving way to trembling relief. “Because Big Magic Brother was listening and looking, I couldn’t tell anyone anything, not even by writing. I even had to make my notes to
myself
just about unreadable!

“I had to carry out the plan by myself, in my own mind—and I’m sure sorry to have had to keep it from you as much as the others. But before I inserted my nano-microphone-transmitter—you’ll get a real thrill, Doc, when I tell you what it’s like to insert something right into your head without looking!—I had found a way to cause it to emulate short-wave signals of the same frequency the
Charger
crew was already listening for. I activated it by scratching my head as we came aboard the
Apocalypso
. I knew they’d dope out that I wanted them to be ready to intervene, but—”

“But not before you gave them the ‘okay’.”

“Right, by telling Orfeo about them. I had to delay calling them in until the last possible moment; I had to do what I could to find out about the Ninth Light’s methods and how to block them. Remember, the PER-type link ignores all shielding. For all I knew, a crony could induce a seizure in Bud even after we took the mastermind off the board. We had to know enough to shut the whle thing down.”

“I know, Tom. And you’d be just as vulnerable as Bud if you hadn’t penetrated to the center of the scheme. Incidentally, do you know yet how Zai reacted to what he heard?”

The youth grinned. “Oh, that part was pure bluff. No need to distract Mr. Zai from his internet poker.”

Tom and Doc were interrupted as a crewman stuck his head through a hatchway. “Sorry, Mr. Swift, but I have a call from your father on the Swift Enterprises PER. He says it’s an emergency!”

“This thing’s not over!” Tom told Doc grimly.

Damon Swift told Tom to wait as he brought Henrik Jatczak into a conference call set up by a separate connection to the Nestria PER. “I’ve been trying to get in touch with you since yesterday, Tom,” said the astronomer excitedly. “Something inexplicable has happened—perhaps a matter of grave danger!”

“Something on Nestria, sir?” asked Tom.

“Something in space! My boy, little Petronius has disappeared!”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the planetoid can not be located,” declared Dr. Jatczak. “In recent days I have focused my attentions on Bartonia and its shifting orbit. I presumed Petronius would proceed along its course as before. But it has either deviated from that trajectory—or been destroyed!
My instruments cannot locate it!
”

“Nor can the megascope, son,” put in Mr. Swift.

“As someone once said—
jetz
!” Tom exclaimed.

Jatczak seemed to be nodding vigorously across the void. “Indeed so! Whatever has happened to Petronius, we clearly are facing some tremendous unknown power that might well prove the very threat to our world that Bud Barclay worries over!”

“Tom,” said Mr. Swift, “the space friends—or their Planet X masters—may well be behind this.”

“It’s a possibility,” Tom pronounced. “Have you tried contacting them?”

“I tried immediately, both through our magnifying antenna and the transmitter on the space outpost,” his father replied. “As of now, no answer.”