Tom Swift and His G-Force Inverter (17 page)

He cried weakly, "T-Tom... I—I can’t hold on..."

Again the young inventor closed the distance. To put Bud in a more stable position for the transfer, he hoisted the youth upward, until he was sitting precariously in the valley between two adjacent triangles, arms looped about them and leaning forward. "Okay," panted Tom. "Now as I—"

The
whup
! of chopper blades cut him off. Pike was buzzing them! He came close, sending the downwash into their faces, then backed off and again darted near like a dragonfly. "
No, boy, not that easy! Your friend goes! You stay! We have business to conduct!
"

"He’s completely lost it!" Bud choked. "He’ll ram us both! G-get out of here, Skipper! I can hang on a little longer."

No you can’t!
Tom’s thoughts retorted. Snarling upward at Pike, the young inventor backed away, rising up and up until he was several hundreds of feet from Bud and the monotrack.

He had bet with himself how the crazed agent would respond. The mini-chopper veered, turned, drifted above Tom, and began to inch downward as if to crush him. As the chopper blotted out the sky, Tom readied his right hand to activate an evasive lunge—and his left hand tugged a ripcord.

The top of his backpack flipped open and a slug of antiballast, like a big brick, began to fall upward, accelerating under the force of gravity that it was defying. It glanced off the pilot dome like a slow cannon-shell, making a spiderweb crack, and angled upward into the hazy disk of the spining rotors. With an explosive
Bang
! the helicopter wavered and slid sideways drunkenly. The sound of the blades became a stutter.

Tom didn’t stay to listen. Pumping power into the repelatrons to compensate for his decreased lift, he zoomed back to Bud. In seconds they were chest to chest—and falling!

As Bud gripped him tightly, Tom worked the suit controls. "We’ll make it, flyboy," he murmured. But he knew that with Bud’s added weight, they were falling freely—almost freely, for Tom still had use of the two repelatrons to slow them. Yet more important was the gravitex. The device could be re-aimed to pull them, not downward, but sideways.

Before they had fallen more than a few yards, their downward course had shifted to the side at a sharp angle. "Get ready. This’ll be bad," whispered Tom.

They rammed into the wall of the canyon—soft clay and sandstone, fortunately, but with enough bone-wrenching force to knock them away from one another. They tumbled and slid, scraping across boulders.

And then they came to rest, near each other on a ledge. After a long bout of panting and precarious scrambling, Bud husked: "Wh-where is he?"

"Gone," was Tom’s reply. "I wounded him. He won’t get far."

"Tom, you should’ve left, but—I knew you wouldn’t."

Tom grinned woozily at his best friend, who now looked like one big bruise. "Ever think about moving back to San Francisco?"

"Naw. I’d have to get a real job."

Their wait in the deep shadows—it was now twilight and cold—was brief. The electronic headlights of the
Silent Streak
suddenly descended from somewhere among the stars. "Room for both of you if you don’t mind a tight fit!" called Hank Sterling.

Tom asked as they weakly clambered aboard, "H-how on
Earth
did you find us so fast?"

"Oh, not so hard—given that we were watching the whole thing start to finish! Or at least
someone
was. Phil Radnor called Mike Halmer at Enterprises and had him watch the action with your megascope! He narrated the main events by radio, like a prizefight."

"Do we know where Pike went?" asked Bud.

"I’m afraid we were distracted watching you two showoff aerialists." He added that the Monoswift passengers hadn’t been able to see Bud on the track, though the cybertron had detected him and had begun braking the car, though it was too late.

Bud snorted. "I’m just glad those anti-bird beams didn’t send me flying!"

The youths were checked over in the camp infirmary. Tom was classified a hopeless case and set loose; Bud was kept, grumbling, in a cot.

After a small, barely-touched supper, Tom dragged himself back into the big GDI lab-hangar. He stood for a time gazing up at the G-force inverter, now up near the high ceiling atop a chassis of material-feed equipment, monitors, and controls. "What can I say, kid?" he murmured at his invention. "You were tough to get straightened out, but it’s always us humans that make the real headaches."

In a way he was barely surprised to hear a voice answer him, from above on a railed catwalk near the ceiling. "
My
headache isn’t over, Tom," rasped Asa Pike, gun drawn and pointing. "But I’m a bit calmer. Flying doesn’t agree with me. Got a bit out of control up there. Control!—gotta keep it if you want to finish the job alive. Enough juice left in me to worm my way in here, eh?

"By the way, don’t move, don’t take a step."

"Look, Asa," Tom said quietly. "I don’t have The Picasso. I don’t know where it is. Know something?
I couldn’t care less about it!
Waving a gun at me, shooting me—why bother? It won’t help you get what you want."

"What I want, young feller, is Rampo Ociéda. I know he crossed the border. I know he came to you. Where is he?"

Tom shrugged.

"Tell me where he is," barked Pike, "or I’ll destroy that fancy machine of yours!"

Tom gave a weary chuckle, surprising even himself. "So?
Go ahead!
Doesn’t it ever occur to you guys that we can just build another? Good night, Asa, it’s just a bunch of wires and metal!"

"I see." The man was calm now, his face almost sorrowful. "Collections is already after me, Tom. They’ll never let it rest. They can’t afford to. All I can do to protect myself is hold The Picasso hostage. All I can do.

"So I guess, well, I’ve had a breakdown. I didn’t deal with stress like a pro. Maybe I’m too old. But that’s why you can’t depend on my being logical or reasonable. I’m not the kindly old character you met up in Maine. No lobster stew on the stove. I’m a man who will kill for spite if I don’t get my way.

"Now tell me, Tom, if you would. Where is Rampo Ociéda?"

Tom sighed and shook his head. "All right. You can have him. I’ll fetch him."

"From where?"

"From, oh, twenty feet away. No, don’t give me that look, Asa, I mean it. Watch." Tom fished some coins out of his pocket and tossed them through the air toward the back wall. They clinked against an unseen barrier and fell to the floor. "It’s called periplex. Things behind it are more or less invisible. It works pretty well in big flat sheets, don’t you think?

"We made Rampo a comfortable little mobile trailer out of the stuff. We decided to keep him close to us. He liked the idea." Tom smiled. "Get it? His own invisible ‘house on wheels’."

"Bring him out!" snapped Pike.

Tom strode across the floor and halted next to the GDI chassis. He fished a small control device from his pants pocket, about the size of a cigarette light, and manipulated it with his thumb.

A doorsized rectangle of empty air became oddly distorted and blurred. Light streamed forth, then a shadow, then a man. "What’s up,
señor
?" yawned Ociéda. "I was in the middle of—"

Tom pointed over his shoulder and upward. "Sorry, Rampo. That man with the gun, Asa Pike, insists on talking to you. But say hello quick, because—"

Because
had already begun! Pike shrieked as the gun was ripped from his hand and sent spinning through the air—spinning on its own axis like a top. Then he himself was grabbed, twisted, whirled, and bounced over the catwalk rail to the cement floor.

Tom reached over to the controls on the GDI base unit. "Guess I must’ve bumped it," he said dryly. "It’s embarrassing, Asa, but the invertegrator has a little flaw. If you don’t keep it carefully ‘in tune,’ it sends out this force deal that makes things spin. Up there level with the flux gap you were right in the way. My apologies."

Pike was sitting up on the floor, holding his shoulder. "All right," he said. "All right. Now come the federal authorities, big men in uniform to take me away. But there’ll be no trial for Asa Pike—whoever
that
might be. No prison. Never heard from again. Maybe I can make a deal. Maybe.

"They might want to know who the leak was, my contacts in Mexico. I was always planning to run, Tom. I went rogue
inside
a long time ago. The Picasso would have been my ticket to—

"But where is it, Ociéda? Where did you stash it?"

Rampo grinned. "A very safe place indeed, just as Tom stashed me."

"Someplace in Mexico City? In a bank? Safe deposit box? Buried under cement? Just curious."

"Even better." The pickpocket reached into his own back pocket and pulled out a battered leather wallet. "You want this stupid thing? Aaa, here, take it! More trouble than it’s worth." He tossed it across the floor.

Tom, who had quickly recovered Pike’s gun, was as astonsihed as Pike. "Good night, you had it on you the whole time?"

"But surely. Why not? It’s just a wallet! Some odds and ends, some money. Not even a drivers license or credit card! Now that,
muchacho
,
that
would have been something worthwhile. Wallets?—I have them by the pound."

Crawling over, Pike picked up the wallet and looked through it, hands shaking. "But—but where is it?
Where is The Picasso?
"

"Didn’t see nothin’ that looked like a Picasso,
señor
," shrugged Ociéda.

"A five-hundred peso note!" barked Asa.

"Oh,
that
?" Rampo chuckled. "What, they don’t pay you so well? I spent it, naturally. Matter of fact, it got me across the border."

"Mind satisfying my curiosity?" Tom asked Pike.

"Why not?" Pike said disconsolately. "All nonsense, isn’t it? The Picasso is a diagram of a certain building, an underground complex, printed on a real Mexican bank note in a way that blends in with the background."

"A building?"

"Think of a country on this Earth that threatens its adversaries with the possibility of building a nuclear arsenal, in secret. Think of how they must protect it from detection, in deep underground complexes, highly secure. To take them out from above requires a floorplan. You see, ‘young feller’? That was it, the big ‘macguffin,’ as they call it. Everyone wanted it, everyone killed for it. Including me, by the way. I was the one in the cathedral that night. I shot that man—he worked for the Adversary—as he waited for you, Rampo. No one gets to you but me, eh?

"Of course I knew you and Bud were down there, Tom. I counted on it. Thought you’d lead me right to Ociéda. And you did, sonny. But things got complicated. I didn’t expect the cartel to barge in and start shooting. What a life."

"Ah,
sí, señor
," agreed Rampo. "And who of us asks to be born?"

Tom glared at Asa Pike with the coldness of steel. "Murders and terror. All for a little slip of paper. That’s the game, right? Little big things. Little big lies. Incidentally..." Tom’s face lost its steel. "That lobster stew of yours? I’ve had better."

The man called Asa Pike managed a very slight smile.

Radnor’s men took Asa away. As Tom watched, his fertile mind was already elsewhere. He was free to think. And he knew his G-force inverter was only the first step to taming the forces of nature. He would next tackle a force much more mysterious, far more formidable—time itself! That was a challenge for a day soon coming—and for
Tom Swift and His Dyna-4 Capsule
.

Rampo interrupted Tom’s reverie. "I suppose I should go back in my box, eh? Don’t feel bad for me. I’m ready to go back to prison. I want to see all my old friends—to catch up, you know? ‘So how’s the wife?’, that sort of thing. Oh, by the way."

Rampo pulled a bill from his pocket. It was a 500 peso bank note! "
Sí
, that’s the one. As I gave over the wallet, I thought,
Well, I do deserve at least some compensation
. Ah, a pickpocket’s hands—oh so quick!"

"So I see," said Tom dryly; "or
don’t
see!"

"But take it. It brings too much trouble." Rampo started to turn back, but then paused. "
Señor
—if you don’t mind—could you soon remove that little snitch from the back of my neck? Makes me nervous. Besides, young ears should not hear the kind of language I use."

Tom grinned. "I’m afraid I lied to you. I didn’t implant anything, just nicked your neck. But it made you behave, didn’t it?"

The man chuckled. "I see. You are not above a wise lie, young Tom. Confess now—deep down inside, are you not a little bit of a crook, like me?"

"No," said Tom. "An inventor."