Tom swift and the Captive Planetoid (3 page)

“
Jetz, Skipper
!” Bud protested. “Those inventive eyeballs of yours are sure to pick out clues the base guys would miss! Look... Mr. Swift, you can fly this rig. Drop me and Tom off, then burn rubber outta here!”

Despite the situation, Tom flashed a grin at his chum. “Inventive eyeballs? But Dad, he’s got a point.”

Mr. Swift acknowledged the point reluctantly and took over the controls as Tom and Bud hastened down to the ground access elevator. “If the base’s power supply has failed, their central communications may be cut off!” the elder scientist muttered to the others. “I’ll start alerting the mainland authorities on the standard radiocom.”

As Tom’s father spoke excitedly over the radio, the Enterprises CEO “did a 180” and sent the
Challenger
swooping back to its special launchpad, the same spot from which they had taken off only a few score hours before. No one had any idea what had caused the explosions or whether their craft might be coming down in a danger area. The thought of lives to be saved or injured men who might need attention drove all other considerations from their minds.

“Yow! Look at all that blue fire!” gasped Bud as the hull hatch panel slid open and the elevator cab began to descend.

The eerie light through the view windows made their faces pale. Geysers of bluish flame were spouting up from a dozen different places around the island base. “Almost like incendiary bombs going off!” Tom commented.

As they neared the ground, dark figures could be seen dashing away from the flames. Other fires flared at scattered points. “They
are
incendiaries!” Bud shouted. “
And those guys are throwing them!
”

The words were hardly out of his mouth when the boys saw another figure sprint toward the timbered scaffolding around a half-constructed blockhouse. He aimed something that looked like a flamethrower, and a gush of fire sent bright tongues of light flicking over the wooden framework.

A force of merciless invaders was seizing the Enterprises space base—or destroying it!

AS THE sealed elevator touched down, the boys leapt from its cab. By now the lurid glare of the numerous fires was dispelling the darkness. Frantic shouts mingled with the crackle of the flames.

“Good grief, what should we do, Tom?” Bud queried anxiously. “Chase down some of these guys?”

Tom shook his head. “We need to reconnoiter—get some idea of what’s going on. Let’s find Mr. Bowden!”

Bowden was the chief engineer in charge of the base’s physical facility. Tom and Bud ran toward the two-story administration building where his office was located.

The whole base was in wild confusion. Security guards and construction workers were trying to cope with the attack as the raiders darted to and fro, spreading fiery destruction. The extent of the Fearing spaceport, Tom realized, would make it difficult to bring the situation under control. He could see that the attack had already spread beyond the space facility itself to the shoreline, where various Enterprises submersibles were docked.

Running, he scanned the mysterious attackers. They were clad from head to toe in black, tight fitting suits which masked their faces except for eye slits in a sort of bulbous hood. The mouth area was covered by a small cylinder. Some of the men were armed with the peculiar flamethrowers and others with the blue incendiary grenades. “Hold it!” Bud yelled. He broke away from his friend and rushed to the left, toward a raider who was about to ignite a stack of oil drums.

“
Careful, Bud!
” Tom cried in alarm as the raider swung around with his flamethrower to meet the unexpected assault.

Bud dived headlong and rolled beneath the viperlike tongue of flame. Springing to his feet, he knocked the man sprawling before he could trigger his weapon again. The raider fought back viciously, but he was no match for the athletic young flier. Bud, fighting mad, smashed an uppercut to the jaw that stretched his opponent senseless. Then he snatched up the raider’s fire weapon and turned to rejoin his friend.

Bud rubbed the back of his neck, wincing. “Oww! It stings! Got a little singed, but—” He held up the captured device. “I got a souvenir!”

“Good work!” Tom exclaimed, relieved. “Won’t be long before we know where those guys came from—and what they’re after.”

Both boys paused for a moment to stare at the one-piece outfit of the semi-conscious man. Tom bent close. “As I thought—an underwater suit. Not scuba, though. This little cylinder uses a compressed—”

“Never mind that now!” Bud urged. “Let’s find Bowden first and do something about these fires.”

“Right!”

Using the tubular weapon still grasped in his hand, Bud waved over a trotting platoon of security men, who immediately grabbed up the raider Bud had downed. “We’ve got a detention center going in the mess hall,” panted the lead officer. “Got quite a bunch of them already.”

The boys continued their dash toward the administration building. Several of the base fire trucks were in action. With sirens screaming they sped toward the worst of the myriad blazes. Along their sides clung the base’s firefighters, clad in spacesuit-like garments of Tomasite and Asbestalon. Midget helicopters had now joined the firefight as well.

Tom and Bud found Bowden issuing frantic orders on a walkway in front of the building to a cluster of the base personnel, including the Enterprises employee in charge of security, Mace Vendiablo.

“My dad’s radioed an alarm to the Feds,” Tom reported. “Help should be on the way soon.”

“Thanks! We can sure use it!” Bowden said in relief.

“But we’ve got the raid fairly well under control,” added Vendiablo with a defensive scowl. “My security guys are roundin’ them up.”

“How about power?” Tom asked Bowden.

“The power plant’s okay, but the line towers were knocked down right at the blockhouse. Tom, if you can help the crew patch up a connection, it would solve one problem.”

“I’ll see what I can do.” Suddenly Tom turned to Bud and held out his hand. With a
can’t-fight-it
half-smile, Bud handed his chum the flamethrower device.

The young inventor scrutinized it for a moment, then called over one of the suited fire crewmen. At Tom’s behest the man walked a distance away and pointed the tube toward an empty span of the walkway, pulling its trigger.

A weird jet of fire, like a tight beam of flame, laced thirty feet through the air!

“Good enough,” Tom muttered. He swiveled and hurried off toward the powerhouse.

“We already seized a bunch of those things,” declared Vendiablo.

Bud was put to work with several others setting up extra pumping equipment to fight the fires. Strangely, the raiders seemed to make no effort to hinder the base personnel from coping with the damage. Nor were any of the black-uniformed attackers in sight when the lights came on again fifteen minutes later thanks to Tom Swift’s ingenuity.

By now, Federal forces were on the scene, deployed from a Coast Guard cutter which had sped to the restricted islet from a point down the Georgia coast. “Where ya been, boys?” asked Mace Vendiablo. “Pretty much all over.”

Almost an hour went by before the scattered blazes were finally brought under control. Then Tom and Bud joined Bowden and a group of Enterprises security officers, FBI agents, Coast Guardsmen, and a National Guard colonel in the administration building.

“Whoever the raiders were, the bulk of them have escaped without leaving a trace,” Colonel Trump was saying. “Just melted away in the darkness.”

“What about the one I knocked out?” Bud put in.

“In your detention hall with the dozen others Vendiablo’s people apprehended,” an FBI man said. “We’ve been over every inch of the base and the island.”

“Any idea how they got in? Or out?” Tom asked. “We know those are diver suits they’re wearing.”

“Right. An underwater operation,” Bowden replied. “Definitely not by air or surface craft. They would have been spotted.”

“Trump, Fearing has one of the most sophisticated security systems on Earth,” stated Vendiablo doggedly. “Patrolscope personnel radar, mini-drones in the air, sonar alarms covering the seabed—”

Tom was grim and worried. “And since we found that tech-savvy frogman invaders can get by even that, we put in the new aquatometer system. Overlapping repelascan zones completely encircle the island, set for anything in the water that even
might
be human or artificial.”

The chief FBI agent shrugged. “And yet—the most likely answer seems to be that they sneaked in by water, probably on the windward shore from the outer edge of the point, using scuba gear or whatever you’d call it. Left the same way. I doubt they could conceal a sub from us, so they probably entered the water from the mainland coast.”

Mr. Bowden had been conferring in whispers with one of his employees. Turning to the others, he said: “Well, guess we’ve got one piece of the puzzle. Foss here just told me that four of the aquatometers went down—all of them adjacent to one another in a row. A big slice of underwater was unprotected.”

“They all failed at the same time?” demanded Bud skeptically.

“Sure did. Obviously not a coincidence. They’re not wrecked, power’s still on. They’re still
‘beeping-in
.’”

“Then the most likely answer is—pretty unlikely!” Tom exclaimed. “Someone must’ve transmitted the coded ELF signal that recalibrates the scanners.”

“Or in this case,
de
calibrates them,” snorted Bowden. “We do a remote recalibration frequently, gentlemen, to compensate for changing seawater conditions. The access ‘handshake’ signal code is replaced twice weekly. Only two trusted workers—security-cleared by you FBI fellas—have access to the code at any one time.”

“We’ve begun interviewing both of them already,” Vendiablo piped up. “We don’t let a minute pass—”

“Calm
down
, Ven,” snapped Bowden. “Nobody’s accusing you of anything.”

“They’d better not!”

“The big question is, who were they?” said the leader of the Coast Guard unit.

“Want a guess?
Enemies
!” Bud’s capacity for wisecracks had resurfaced.

Tom nodded. “Enemies with access to some very high-tech equipment. That flamethrower device is a neat bit of work. It fires a hair-thin stream of globules of pyrolytic fluid under high pressure, which it simultaneously ignites en route by a focused laser beam. Good night, it’s almost like a rocket engine!—but there’s no pushback because all the ignition is out in the open air, separated from the unit.”

“I wouldn’t spend time in admiration, young man,” admonished Colonel Trump sternly.

“You’re right, sir. Come on, Bud.”

“Where are you going?” demanded Vendiablo.

“To take a look at the prisoners,” the youth replied. As the others began to protest, Tom cut them off. “I’m here representing Tom Swift Enterprises, folks. This may be an imminent threat. I have an obligation to investigate the matter personally and report to my father.”

“As this facility is under multiple jurisdictions, I’m not sure who has the authority to stop you, Tom,” grinned the FBI man, Ron Mardack. “Mind if we listen in quietly?”

“Please do.”

They hastened to Fearing’s large mess hall, where guards armed with Enterprises impulse guns had herded about a dozen of the raiders together in the middle of the broad floor. Their underwater togs had been replaced by cotton tunics from the base infirmary. One oddity was immediately evident: all the men, of dark cast and black hair, wore a silver loop in their pierced left ears. At the bottom of the loop was a small dangling object, like a charm on a bracelet.

“What are those loops? Communications antennas?” speculated Trump.

“If we’re speculating,” murmured Bud, “I’d
like
to speculate that they’re
not
explosive.”

“We’ve used the detectors on all of them, top to bottom,” noted one of the guards. “Those fashion accessories are just cheap metal. Nothing inside.”

Mardack chuckled. “Guess they wanted to dress up as buccaneers.”

Tom approached one of the raiders, who glared back defiantly. “That ‘charm’ must mean something,” he told the others as he scrutinized the object. “It’s been worked into a shape like a letter or symbol.”

“These guys don’t talk,” said the guard. “Just grunt.”

Suddenly Tom jumped back, and Bud’s muscles tensed, as one of the raiders strode forward toward the young inventor. “No, no,” he said in a quavering voice, raising his hands to show they were empty. “Please, I shall not hurt—
I must speak!
”

“Don’t come any closer,” Tom said coolly. “What do you want to tell me?”

The man jolted, startled, as one of the other prisoners hissed out “
Purjitai
!” in a threatening voice.

“Guards—guns at ready,” commanded the Colonel.

“Is that your name?” Tom asked the man. “Purjitai?”

The man nodded, stark white with evident terror. “Yes, yes, I am he. My comrade, he warns me, but—but Swift, you are a science man, all know of you. Protect me! I beg you! I no longer wish to serve the Ninth Light, but—but he is all-seeing! If he should work
u’umat
on me—!”

Purjitai stopped, trembling violently head to toe, eyes bulging. Tom tried to speak in a calming tone. “No one can hurt you here. What is this ‘ninth light?’ Whom do you serve? Tell me!”

The man gasped. “It has started!
U’umat
!”

Before Tom could speak the terrified man dropped to his knees—then collapsed completely! Tom started to kneel down, but Bud shouted out: “No, Skipper! It could be a trick!”

Tom edged back toward the group. “We need to separate this man from the others and get medical help. He might be having some kind of seizure.”

“I’m calling Dr. Carman,” declared Bowden.

An ambulance team arrived, and the man named Purjitai was rushed away on a stretcher-cart. He was breathing and his eyes were open, yet he was limp and lifeless as a burlap sack. He spoke no more.

As the group left the mess hall, Tom glanced back at the crowd and nudged Bud. “The raiders are terrified—utter terror! They must be afraid the same thing will happen to them.”