Tom Swift and His G-Force Inverter (12 page)

TOM SWIFT was first out the door, Bud at his heels. In the parking lot a crowd was gaping at the flaming, smoking hulk of a car, its window glass scattered in all directions. "We were standing across the lot," a girl was saying with quivering fright in her voice. "It just—there was a big—"

"Did you see anyone near the car?" Tom demanded forcefully. "Does anyone know—was someone—
is
someone inside?"

Bud hadn’t waited to ask the question. He had dashed close and was circling the flaming car, trying to peer within through the shattered windows. "I don’t see anyone inside," he called. "Most of the fire and stuff is underneath."

Tom approached and knelt down on the asphalt. "Some kind of incendiary device was tossed under the car," he pronounced. "From the way the window glass scattered, it must have gone off near the front, away from the gas tank."

"Thank goodness,"murmured Bashalli.

"But still—if someone
had
been inside, it might’ve hurt or killed them," Bud insisted.

Ritt Kincaid had run out and joined the crowd. "No," he said with gritting anger. "It wasn’t meant to kill. It was a
spanking
! That was my rental car."

Tom looked at the youth. "You think it was Martabat?"

"Sure I do," shrugged Ritt. "Or at least someone working for Turley—or someone hired by my Father. Who else would know to look for the one rental car in the lot?"

"It would have been even easier," Tom stated. "Your Technautics people obviously knew you’d flown to Shopton, but they’d have no idea you’d end up here unless they had someone follow you from the airport."

"I’m never out of
Daddy’s
loving grasp," snarled Ritt bitterly.

"I think he just underlined the point!" Bud gulped.

Despite the damage done—to eardrums as much as the car—the fire had burned itself out before the fire department and police arrived. What remained of the explosive device was collected for whatever clues it might yield—which turned out to be none.

"But I’ve been thinking all night of some other possibilities," Tom told Ames and Radnor the next day. "The fingers are all pointing to Kincaid’s cronies, but—"

"We know," Phil Radnor nodded. "Asa Pike also has a point to make. And he mentioned your friends."

Tom snorted. "A point aimed right at my crewcut head! Even if he’s still ‘sticking to schedule,’ an agent of Collections wouldn’t have any trouble contacting someone to plant a firebomb."

"Yup," Randor went on. "But if we’re treating Pike as ‘innocent-until-proven,’ remember the other groups involved in recovering The Picasso—the group he called the Adversary, as well as that drug cartel. Both have reasons to scare you into helping them find Rampo to recover the thing for themselves."

"Or just prevent anyone
else
from doing it first."

Both Tom and Phil glanced at Harlan Ames. He seemed unusually subdued, as if preoccupied. "We’ll look into all this," he said vaguely.

Tom asked quietly, "Harlan, is everying okay?"

The lean former Secret Service agent smiled wanly. He rarely spoke about himself. "I’m concerned about my daughter. We had a nice talk when she
finally
got home—rather
late
, I thought. Dodie’s quite taken with Ritt Kincaid."

Tom smiled, understanding. "I gather Dad doesn’t approve."

"I have nothing against the boy. I don’t know him well enough to disapprove of him. Yet."

"In fact, chief, you’ve never met him," noted Radnor.

"Thanks for pointing out the obvious, Rad," snapped the security chief. "Perhaps I
am
a bit overprotective of Dodie, especially since we lost her mother. She would have known what to say to Dodie. I don’t... but I do know that Ritt Kincaid is turning out to be a dangerous choice for a boyfriend!"

"Well," said Tom dryly, "maybe he’ll have a chance to redeem himself in the
second
twenty-four hours of the relationship."

The young inventor plunged back into his work on the GDI demonstration project, the Monoswift observation car and its remarkable sky track. He checked with Franzenberg, who reported that he had made further improvements to the mechanical process of feeding materials through the focus of the G-force inverter. "I must have piled up twenty pounds of ingravitized lead," he reported preeningly. "On the ceiling, of course."

Later Bud found his pal in his lab—playing with an electric train! "Just like you promised, genius boy," laughed the black-haired San Franciscan. "A kid on Christmas morning!"

With the help of Enterprises modelmaker Arvid Hanson, Tom had assembled a looping track composed of a chain of miniaturized fieldstat units, all joined together at their bases, their triangle-points upward. The "beam-rail" monotrack ran along the floor next to the walls, but in some instances angled upwards over various obstructions. "C’mon, play with me!" Tom grinned, motioning Bud over. "I’ve applied the coating of obduraton to the inner wall of that slot on the underside of the car model—let’s see what she can do!"

Tom lay the little model down on the track between two steadying struts, resting it uneasily atop the series of narrow jagged-peaked units. "Ouch!" joked Bud. "Doesn’t look like an easy ride so far."

The young inventor picked up one of his all-purpose remote-control boxes, called a Spektor. He switched on the flow of power through the beam-rail. Instantly the railcar jumped upward a couple inches, its longitudinal slot poised above the line of vertices but not touching them. "The series of magnetic bubbles merge together along the run of the track," Tom explained, "forming something like a continuous tube of force that the Monoswift floats on."

"That’s what I figured,
naturally
. But how do you get the car to move forward?"

Tom thumbed the Spektor and the model railcar abruptly accelerated along the invisible beam-rail. "As I’m
sure
you’re anxious to know—basically, I’m sending a pulsed microwave ‘current’ through the linked bases of the fieldstats," explained the scientist-inventor excitedly. "The passing charge of extra energy distorts the field in the direction of the forward-facing ‘slat,’ making the field-force asymmetical—unbalanced. There’s a delay built into the system, and the succession of charges, one fieldstat after another, proceeds down the line at our desired cruising speed, which won’t be any faster than 30 MPH. In other words, the Monoswift gets wafted along by a series of little shoves."

"Thirty miles per hour? Pretty slow," Bud observed.

"That’s the idea if want to see the sights, chum," smiled Tom.

While Tom had been providing one of his customary expositions, the model railcar had been accelerating, absolutely silent. Now it was circling the lab in a matter of seconds—and going faster all the time. As Bud turned his gray eyes to have a look, all he could make out was a bulleting blur.

"Um... Skipper, just how fast are you planning to run this thing?"

"Oh, no more than freeway speed this test—55 or so."

Bud gulped—then flinched back with a yipe as a section of the monotrack that surmounted a chair jumped and fell back as the car whizzed over it. "Tom! The thing’s gonna jump the track!"

"Don’t mean to spook you, pal," needled Tom. "But remember, the car is more strongly stuck inside the beam-rail field than the whole fieldstat line is stuck down to the floor. The car won’t pull free—that’s the main point of the experiment. But when it goes around a tight curve, vertical or horizontal, centifugal force gets transmitted to the monotrack structure."

"R-right," Bud replied. But a moment later the young inventor showed mercy and slowed the car, very rapidly, to a stop. "I hope you didn’t put on the brakes on my account, Tom," Bud said apologetically.

"Not at all," grinned his chum. "In fact, I was anxious to test the braking system."

"Do you reverse the current?"

"No. It’d be safer to make the mechanism part of the car module, not the whole line." He explained that the sides of the underhull slot covered a grid of high-conduction material. "Think of it as a flattened-out electromagnetic coil of very high capacity. As a semiconductor interruptor-switch is slowly damped down, current is produced in the grid elements, by induction, as the hull slot passes along the magnetic bubbles. The induced forces resist the forward magnetic vector and drag the car to a stop."

"Without a screech, hm?"

"But with a blast of heat—not a problem, though." Tom noted that each car would be equipped with an adaptation of the repelatron anticrash setup used in his triphibian atomicar, which would ease the effects of even a sudden stop on the passengers. "Oh—and speaking of the atomicar... how’d you like to go for a spin in my ugly little baby?"

Bud laughed. "Aw, she’s not so bad! Where are we going?"

"Not so far. How far is it to Arizona?"

"Jetz!" exclaimed the young pilot. "The Grand Canyon?"

Tom nodded excitedly. "We’ve been given official permission to do some scouting work—from the air! We have to do it before we can start ‘laying track.’ And I have a new invention to help us!"

"Ye-aah," drawled Bud. "As usual. But Skipper—let’s just hope those guys who are gunning for you haven’t taken up surface-to-air missiles!"

BUD piloted Tom to a landing in big empty field near Flagstaff, Arizona, the atomicar nested inside the skyship’s hangar-hold. Within minutes they had taken to the sky in the small bubble-domed craft, the
Silent Streak
.

After a brief northward flight, the youths were hovering effortlessly a mile above the painted grandeur of the mighty Grand Canyon. "For all the times I’ve seen it—man, it always knocks me flat!" breathed Bud.

"And just a few million years in the making," Tom murmured with shared feeling. "You can really see why just being able to
look
at this—just
look
!—is important to Americans—to everyone!"

"Which is where the Monoswift comes in," Bud commented. "We sure are hitting the big tourist sights these days, Tom."

"I’m hoping this one doesn’t come with dead bodies. Take ’er down, captain!"

Bud, in the driver’s seat, complied gleefully. As they passed below the rim and the canyon encompassed them, Tom switched on the
Streak’s
cybertron guidance computer—and then his new invention, which he had come up with before their sudden summons to the moon.

An extension strut-arm came into view from beneath the nose of the atomicar. As it stretched to full length, Bud eyed the object at the end of the strut with curiosity. It resembled a colossal cut diamond, though composed of some dark, opaque material. Elliptical in overall form, it was covered over with a great many flat facets, all identical. "Genius boy, you never repeat the same shape twice," joked Bud. "You say this is some kind of camera?"

"Mm-hmm," responded Tom distractedly, studing the readouts on his Spektor. "It feeds data into the cybertron’s topographic emulator."

"What sort of data?"

"Oh, distance and texture—as well as a super-detailed visual image, in 3-D."

Bud looked reasonably impressed. "So—
really
great snapshots of our trip to the Grand Canyon."

Tom chuckled as he looked over at his friend. "The circumscoper is a bit more sophisticated than those throw-away cardboard cameras you can buy at tourist stands. Even better than a mini-digicam—though you can’t carry it in your pants pocket."

Bud felt out the name with his tongue. "Circumscoper," he repeated. "Yep—it’s a Tom Swift gizmo, all right. It’s going to help you map-out where the Monoswift track will, er, float?"

"Right. A
big
help!" As he made adjustments with his remote-controller, the young inventor described how the circumscoper made use of the basic technology he had developed for the holoceivers that supplied his 3-D telejector with lightwave data, which the telejector turned into an image in three dimensions. "But the scoper ‘sees’ on all sides at once, 360 degrees—or maybe I should say 360
squared
, because it also sees upward and downward."

"The guy’s a little wall-eyed!"

Tom explained that by analyzing wavefront interference patterns and propagation vectors, the circumscoper would capture exact positional data, detailed almost down to the inch. "By outputting it through a telejector, we’ll be able to create a perfect replica, in light, of the entire Grand Canyon to examine back at Enterprises—an electronic replica we can turn to whenever we’re making choices about where to run the Monoswift beam-rail."

Bud nodded but asked, "Couldn’t you get the same thing from high-def photos? Maybe from orbit?"

"No. Think of the angles. Viewing from above distorts the appearance of the vertical canyon walls. Even with computer correction and enhancement, data is always lost. But the circumscoper captures just about everything!"

"Jetz!" enthused Bud. "Hey, why even bother taking folks through the real thing? They can sit at home with the 3-D simulation."

"Sure. You could do the same with
any
place—San Francisco, for example." Tom’s sly comment led the San Franciscan to change the subject.

They spent hours guiding the
Silent Streak
through the in’s and out’s of the Grand Canyon National Monument, occasionally waving to excited hikers and sightseers on cliff-rims. Helicopters sputtered across the sky almost continuously. "Don’t know if it does any real harm," Bud shrugged. "But it doesn’t
feel
right, having big metal birds blundering around over all this beauty."

Tom nodded. "And making a racket. The Monoswift would make a better impression."

"With just a little line across the sky—the floating track."

"Even less than that," said the young inventor. "I think I can add a sort’ve camouflage element—maybe chameleon is a better word!—to the fieldstats, to make the track virtually invisible from the ground."

"I’m anxious to see it." Then Bud thought a second. "I mean—
not
see it!"

At last, sun touching the horizon, Bud piloted the atomicar back to the parked
Sky Queen
.