Tom swift and the Captive Planetoid (4 page)

“Man, I don’t blame them! But what was it, Tom? Some kind of remote-control poison capsule?”

Tom shook his head musingly. “We’ll find out if anything’s in his system. But...”

“What?”

“Pal, if it
is
some kind of remotely-controlled implant to take down potential talkers—
how did they know
the guy was about to talk? None of the others were affected. Why him? Why
then
?”

The San Franciscan nodded. “Know what I think? I think those are great questions!”

The danger apparently over, Mr. Swift landed the
Challenger
on its dedicated pad, and the boggling party of space-vacationers were rushed to a well-guarded place of safety, where they slept the night—those who could.

Next morning they all boarded Enterprises’ three-deck Flying Lab, the
Sky Queen
, and had a Chow Winkler brunch somewhere over the state of Virginia. “Wa-aal, guess ever’thing’s per normal—mystery guys runnin’ around gunnin’ fer who knows what,” said the grizzled chef in sour tones. “Got so’s I don’t let it bother me. Not gonna lose weight over somethin’ that happens jest about every blame week.”

“You’ve got to keep up your strength,” winked Tom. “You never know when we might need a little six-gun protection, pardner.”

“You think you’re jokin’, boss. But it’s true as Texas rain.”

Anne Swift asked her husband, who was silent and intent upon deep thoughts: “Dear, what did you find out this morning? Do we know yet where the raiders come from?”

“We know essentially nothing,” replied the head of Enterprises. “If any of them intended to speak, the collapse of that fellow Purjitai has scared it out of them. No one at Enterprises or the government as received any kind of demand or communicae. None of the known terrorist groups have claimed responsibility.”

“It’s in the morning news all over,” Tom noted. “The Federal people don’t like it, but there’s no way to hold it back—not with everybody having cellphones. They’re playing down the security-breach angle, though.”

Sandy turned to Bashalli, who was her closest friend. “Bashi, is that man’s name, Purjitai, one you’ve heard of?”

“In Pakistan? No.” The raven-haired Pakistani thought for a moment. “Well... perhaps I spoke too soon. Pakistan, you know, once had an eastern part, on the other side of India. But East Pakistan declared independence and became Bangladesh. ‘Purjitai’ sounds to me like a name from the northernmost region, which is close to Nepal and Bhutan. The dialect there is influenced by the Tibetan peoples.”

“Might be a clue,” mused Sandy, who loved clues.

“Bash, is there anything unusual about that part of Bangladesh?” Tom asked. “Are there groups there that might be especially opposed to the United States?”

“Or might they have religious objections to space travel?” suggested Mrs. Swift.

“I’ve heard of nothing along those lines,” the girl responded. “I’m thinking back to what we learned in school. The only thing that comes to mind is what they call the area, just a nickname. It is called—how shall I say it in English?—
the handful of sultans
.”

“A sultan’s like a king, idden that so?” inquired Chow. “I heard o’ the Sultan o’ Swat.”

“A sultan is a king or prince,” confirmed Bashalli with a smile. “In Muslim countries that have not adopted the European style of government, sultans rule sultanates, as kings rule kingdoms.”

“But Bangladesh isn’t a sultanate,” objected Tom’s father.

“No, it isn’t. I think the name is just a kind of joke—what Bud calls a ‘dis’.”

“A put-down,” said Mr. Swift. “At any rate, the fact that
one
person
claims
to have a name that
sounds
like it
might
come from a part of Bangladesh—”

Sandy winced sheepishly. “—is admittedly not
conclusive
evidence.”

“They all
do
appear as if they might come from that part of the world,” Tom said. “We’ve sent digital photos of that charm-symbol to Grandyke U., as well as the State Department and FBI. We’ll see if anyone knows what it means.

“But I’m mostly interested in some other things,” continued the young Shoptonian. “What’s the bit about the ‘ninth light’? What exactly is this
u’umat
that Mr. Purjitai mentioned just before he collapsed? If his boss is ‘all-seeing,’ how does he do it?”

Anne Swift asked about Purjitai’s condition. “Carman says he’s stable,” answered Tom’s father. “In fact, all life-signs are normal. No trauma, and he doesn’t show any sign of pain. Nothing in his blood. The EKG is fine. Yet his eyes don’t track a moving hand, he doesn’t react when touched—he doesn’t react at all.”

“My word,” Bashalli said, “it sounds like a meditative trance—the sort of things Buddhist yogis do.”

Tom gazed out the viewpane at the drift of morning clouds. “It’s as if his higher cognitive functions—the ‘top story’ of his brain—have been shut down.”

“A waking coma,” pronounced his father solemnly. “If the Ninth Light can do something like
that
from a distance, anyone could be vulnerable, anywhere on Earth!”

BUD, piloting the mammoth skyship, landed them at Enterprises with a gentle bump. It was not yet noon. The trip had been an effortless hop for the supersonic
Sky Queen
.

As the far-travelers went their separate ways with expressions of thanks and worry, Tom went at once to the big hypersonic wind tunnel in which his newest invention was to be tested. It had beckoned in the back of his mind throughout the trip to Nestria. He was determined to let the mysteries and plotters fend for themselves for the moment.

Bud, at his chum’s side, pretended to take a piece of paper from his pocket and read it. “Oh, that’s right. ‘Tell me about your new invention, Tom.’”

Tom laughed. “Which one?”

“Whichever one gets us into the most trouble the fastest,” Bud joked.

“My duratherm wing is supposed to get people
out
of trouble, smart guy!”

The newest Tom Swift invention was a system designed to rescue astronauts stranded in orbit, along the lines of a life-preserver or parachute for travelers in trouble. “It happens, you know,” he told Bud as the two entered the big test facility blockhouse. “Power can go bad, fuel tanks can spring a leak—”

“Or explode.”

Tom nodded—wryly at Bud, politely at the several test technicians who ambled past them in the hallway. “And even with repelatrons we can’t totally eliminate the threat of meteoroids. There’ll always be cases in which astronauts end up stuck up there, maybe in critical condition, unable to manage reentry. So what we have here is a kind of ‘emergency backup’ reentry vehicle that a spacecraft can carry along folded into a tight bundle.”

“I see—like a parachute,” nodded Bud. “But how the heck do you deal with all the friction heat? It’s like a smelting furnace if you can’t make a fully powered descent!”

“I’ll show you,” promised the young inventor.

The hypersonic wind tunnel, nicknamed Tornado In A Can, had been specially designed by Tom and his father to test the lift and drag characteristics of aerospace vehicles cleaving the atmosphere at speeds up to Mach 10—ten times the speed of sound. To create the air flow, pressure was built up at one end of the tunnel by multistage compressors and drawn off at the other end by a vacuum pump. In both the “pitch” and “catch” elements, the pump mechanisms were supplemented internally by micro-repelatrons tuned to the basic components of Earth’s atmosphere. The walls of the tunnel, which was like a huge long barrel lying on its side, were made of metallumin, a transparent moldable metal that Tom had developed to deal with extreme high pressures.

Arvid Hanson, the big, genial craftsman who helped to build the prototypes of Tom’s inventions, had already set up a large model of the D-Wing on a test mount in the tunnel. Heavily insulated cables for various metering devices sprouted from the base of its swivel-pedestal. “We can’t just monitor performance by wireless transmission from the wing sensors,” Tom explained. “The hypersonic flow-stream creates an electrified plasma around the wing that blocks signals.”

“Right,” nodded the veteran pilot, “that rainbow-colored stuff that gloms around the fuselage when we reenter superfast, like we did in the
Star Spear
.”

“And it’s something we can
use
, flyboy.”

The test D-Wing was in the shape of a delta wing with a lengthy, rounded forward extension, thick enough in the mid-section to enclose a four-foot mockup of a spacecraft. Twin tail booms extended aft from the wing. “Neat. Looks like it’s all molded out of one piece of plastic,” Bud observed.

“That’s the idea,” Tom said. “The basic structuring material is Durafoam, the stuff we made the skyway out of.”

Bud nodded. “Yeah—you squeeze it out into the air and it expands and solidifies. Pretty tough stuff.”

“In this case it’s a lot tougher, because this batch is laced with filaments of metallumin, somewhat along the lines of fiberglass. As you remember, metallumin is very flexible at one stage of its manufacturing process. In this formulation, the filaments are
triboresponsive
; their properties change according to pressure. When the extruded material reaches its maximum ‘stretch,’ the metallumin filaments sort’ve snap into place and become rigid, like an internal support framework for the wing.”

“Pretty good, genius boy!”

Tom added that the wing contained long strips of his transifoil, a composite metal foil he had developed some time before. If folded up in a tight bundle, an electric current caused the transifoil to unfold to a pre-patterned conformation, neatly refolding itself when the current was cut. “It’s the transifoil that establishes the overall shape of the wing as it expands. Same basic idea as the liftbag for the paraplane.”

“Okay, you’ve got the gizmo in a bundle on the rocket, and you get it to blather out into space all around the fuselage—instant wing! But what about all that reentry heat?”

“What about it?” Tom joshed. “Air friction can shoot the temperature above 20,000 degrees Fahrenheit. But my duratherm wing will stay fairly cool.” The secret of the cooling, Tom explained, lay in a myriad of microsized semiconductor terminals—somewhat like transistors—embedded in the Durafoam sheath. Using the thermocouple principle, these would convert much of the surface heat energy into electricity, which would then be stored in capacitor-layers in the core of the wing. “The electrical properties of the plasma actually makes the process more efficient, because we can manipulate it to increase the heat flow and direct it right into the absorbers.” He ended his account by noting that he called the heat-management system a durathermor. “It’ll have plenty of uses apart from space rescue.”

As Bud watched, Tom commenced his test. The shielded machinery was silent even as the walled-in tornado began to grow fierce. Wisps of vapor, darting from one end of the tunnel to the other at bullet speed, hinted at the tremendous power of the test mechanism. Soon even these had vanished from sight as the windspeed approached the supersonic—and then crossed into the hypersonic.

A glowing corona began to form at the surface of the D-Wing. As it expanded, it became a mass of multicolored streamers trailing behind the wing like a neon shadow. “Just passed Mach 9,” Tom announced. “Good night, look at that plasma sheath!—even in the coolest parts it’s hotter than an acetylene torch!”

Bud gulped. “Glad we’re on
this
side of the glass! You’ve, er, tested this tornado rig pretty thoroughly... right?”

“Don’t worry, flyboy. Enterprises doesn’t have any use for crispy-fried spacemen.”

Tom monitored the output readings carefully. At intervals he manipulated some trackballs on the control panel, and Bud noticed changes in the shape and contour of the wing and the boom-extensions. “Did you put little motors in it?” he asked.

“It’s the transifoil,” replied the young inventor. “The rescuees will be able to make small changes for steering purposes—a few key joints remain somewhat flexible even after the wing is fully expanded.” He added that the twin tail booms, drawing power from the capacitor layers, would interact magnetically with the flowing plasma airstream, providing additional control and stability. “It’ll also slow down the plunge in a way that can be minutely controlled and adjusted.”

“You couldn’t just do it with repelatrons?”

“They gulp too much power. Besides, the plasma corona makes it hard for the trons to ‘read’ the element mix.”

A sudden flash of light from the tunnel made the youths flinch back. Weird flares of blinding purple-white luminance were darting and sparking all along the fuselage. “Looking at your face, pal—I gather it’s not supposed to do that!” remarked Bud nervously.

Tom nodded brusquely, not speaking. He cut the power, bringing the tornado winds to a stop. “Looks like half the durathermor absorption terminals have fizzled out,” he said, annoyed but calm. “Well, that’s why we run tests. Let’s see what’s going on.”

As soon as the interior of the tunnel had fallen to normal temperatures, Tom donned protective gauntlets and unsealed the hatch, swinging it open and entering. While Bud watched, his chum ran a hand along the D-Wing, examining the surface minutely.

“What do you see?” Bud called out.

“Not much yet,” was the reply, made hollow by the interior of the tunnel chamber.

A loud sound made them both turn and look. The heavy hatch door to the wind tunnel had swung shut on its own and slammed into place. “Want me to open it, genius boy?” Bud called. Tom, inside the metallumin walls, was unable to hear his friend. The young inventor half-shrugged and ambled around the D-Wing and toward the hatchway.

Bud Barclay suddenly frowned—matching the expression on Tom’s face.
What’s going on?
Bud wondered. Tom passed a hand over his face, then swiveled to look toward the “upstream” end of the tunnel. His frown deepened, surprised, puzzled—and alarmed.

“What’re you looking at?” Bud muttered.

He watched Tom stride uncertainly to the blower end. He stood still for a moment. As he stood, Bud noticed that his chum’s T-shirt seemed to be trembling, as if Tom were wriggling beneath it.