Tom Swift and His Outpost in Space (3 page)

"How so?"

"Because the frame on this door is a little askew. When you latch the door shut all the way, it sticks; so we usually leave it a little bit ajar." Tom demonstrated how badly the door tended to stick. "But I remember that when you opened it, you just pushed it lightly with your hand."

"That’s right," said Bud thoughtfully. "It must have been open a little ways at that. I didn’t notice it from my angle on the floor."

"In that case," said Norcall, "the bullet might have shot, or bounced, right through the opening and into the library."

Asking the others to remain in the den, the police looked about in the library, trying to determine where the bullet would have struck if it had passed through an opening in the doorway only an inch or two wide. But again they came up with nothing.

"We’re not thinking
big
enough," declared Tom. "In fact, I think I can lead us right to the—well, not to the bullet, which is probably long gone, but at least to where it struck!"

"Go ahead, son," Mr. Swift urged.

"We’ll have to go outside," Tom said. "But I guess it’s safe now."

Switching on the powerful yard lights, Tom led the others—like a parade—around the side of the house opposite the side facing the elm. "But how could the bullet get way out here?" asked Sandy. "The whole house is in the way!"

"Maybe not," said Bud, catching on.

Tom stood gazing at the house for a moment, holding up his hand as if making a rough measurement of something. Then he walked a few yards across the manicured lawn to a planter of redwood planks and bent down.

"Look here," he called, pointing.

The planter had a broad, splintery gouge in its side, obviously freshly made. At the center of the gouge was a deep hole, as if made by a hurtling bullet!

Sgt. Norcall whistled and bent over with tweezers and a magnifying glass. But after a moment he straightened and declared, "Tom, you were exactly right—someone’s already made off with the bullet."

"How did you figure it out, Tom?" asked Damon Swift in proud amazement.

Before Tom could respond, Bud Barclay held up a hand. "I think I know. You just have to put it all together. The rifle must have been especially powerful. The bullet went through the window glass, through the crack in the door to the library, straight
through
the library, and on out into the side hallway through the open arch."

"Oh, I see," said Sandy. "It must have gone through one of those little decorative window-panes in the wall of the hallway, which goes along this side of the house." She walked over to one of the narrow windows in the nearby exterior wall and gave a whoop of triumph
. "Here it is!—
another bullethole."

"Sure," agreed Norcall. "And when you line the holes up, the trajectory ends right here at the planter. In fact, you can see that the angle tends downward, which is consistent with an elevated firing position."

Sandy nodded excitedly. "Up in the elm tree!"

"And we didn’t hear a thing!" remarked Tom’s mother.

"You wouldn’t, necessarily," Tom said. "We were already talking kind of loud, and the sound of the bullet going through the glass is so much like the clink of plates that we wouldn’t have paid any attention. Then—while San was telling her story—the Gorilla shinnied down the tree and trotted around here to the planter, where he gouged out the bullet and made off with it."

They all returned to the house, where they sat in the living room as Mr. Swift served some refreshments.

"But I thought you folks were protected by that magnetic alarm system of yours," observed one of the officers, whose name was Darrel.

"No system’s perfect," replied Tom. "A single bullet passing through the field wouldn’t create a strong enough impulse to activate the buzzer, and once it stops moving it becomes invisible to the sensor."

"But the man himself should have set off the alarm," Mr. Swift pointed out. "Perhaps not up in the tree, but when he entered onto our property. He wouldn’t have the neutralizer coils the rest of us have."

"Well,
we
didn’t set off your alarm, did we?" remarked Sgt. Norcall.

"No, because I set the field to ignore you. You can set the override directly from the telephone keypad." Tom frowned. "That may be the answer, too—the Gorilla may be able to temporarily reset the field sensors by remote control."

After further discussion the three officers left, promising to keep an eye on the vicinity from their patrol car during their normal rounds.

"So we have someone watching us," Bud said grimly. "And shooting! But why?"

"I don’t have any idea about the ‘who’ or the ‘why’," responded Tom after a moment. "But the ‘how’ is kind of intriguing."

"M-maybe he was trying to pick me off, because I’d seen him!" said Sandy nervously.

"Then why
didn’t
he?—given that we know he must be an expert marksman with an advanced kind of gun? No, he never intended to hit anything except that planter."

"Somebody must’ve put out a contract on your oleander bush," joked Bud. Sandy giggled in spite of herself.

"Here’s my theory," Tom continued. "I think that wasn’t any ordinary bullet, but some kind of sophisticated microelectronic device. In the split second it flashed through the den, it probably made some sort of visual recording."

"I see," Mr. Swift commented. "It would act like a hyperspeed digital camera with an all-direction lens. The recorded camera output could subsequently be downloaded into a computer and studied at leisure, no doubt with some sort of extreme magnification and enhancement feature."

Tom nodded. "In which case our unknown enemies now have copies of the sketches and calculations I was working on at the desk!"

"What were they about, Tom?" Bud asked.

"The solar battery!"

There was a long and ominous silence as Bud and the Swift family considered the implications of the strange invasion of the property. It seemed Tom Swift and his newest inventions were once again facing unexpected danger! This was nothing new for the scion of the Swift line of scientist-inventors. Just as the first Tom Swift—Tom’s famous great-grandfather—had defeated innumerable adversaries and threats early in the last century, so young Tom had already proven himself in astonishing adventures in the air, the deep sea, and in outer space. Only weeks before he had returned from Antarctica where he and his remarkable atomic earth blaster had been pitted against the ruthless agents of a foreign power.

"Well," said Tom’s mother with a sudden smile, "I don’t know just
why
anyone would want to snoop around our den, but—I think I may be able to help you identify who’s watching. Matter of fact, boys, just one phone call should crack the case wide open—as they say on television!"

TOM AND HIS father tried very hard to be men of the new millennium. But Shopton was a small, slow-moving town in upstate New York; and the Swift family had something of a reputation for being, in many ways, somewhat old-fashioned. All of which is to say that when Mrs. Swift spoke up, the others didn’t know whether to take her seriously.

"Anne, what do you mean?" asked Damon Swift. "How could you
possibly—"

"Oh, Daddy!" Sandy interrupted. "Let Mother finish!"

Mr. Swift fell silent, an apologetic look on his face.

"What I mean is
this—
Dear," smiled Anne Swift with just a hint of sarcasm. "I
do
have a degree in molecular biology, you know; and as part of that program I took some courses in medicine and disease control. I remember a photo of a man, a disease victim, from one of my textbooks. He had the sort of look Sandy described—the disease caused it."

"That would sure make it easier to track the guy down," Bud mused. "He might be registered with local hospitals or something."

Tom’s mother nodded, her eyes gleaming. "It would be even easier than that, I expect. As I recall, the disease is extremely rare—only a handful of people have it."

"What’s the phone call you mentioned?" asked Tom.

"To my old professor, Joshua TeVenter."

"Ah. Yes—he sends us Christmas cards every year," remarked Mr. Swift.

"Yes, Dear. The one you can’t stand."

Tom’s father winced humorously and Mrs. Swift rose and walked over to the telephone. Minutes later she had concluded her call and was able to share what she had learned. "Professor TeVenter is sure I’m thinking of something called Inherited Xenotic Osteomorphosis Syndrome, or IXOS. It’s a form of chromosomal damage that can be inherited, but it almost always leads to stillbirths, or to death in infancy. It’s been traced back centuries to a single North African family of the Bedouine tribe. It causes progressive deformation of the shape of the skull and jaw, and the bones of the arms. In less enlightened times, victims were exhibited as ‘ape men’."

"How many victims actually live into adulthood?" Sandy inquired.

"Professor TeVenter thinks no more than five or six adults are alive at any one time, anywhere in the world. He said most of them live in Algeria, Morocco, Spain, or France."

"Mom, you’re a wonder!" Tom exclaimed, giving his mother a kiss. "Harlan Ames can probably get a list of where the IXOS-ers are living." Ames, a former Secret Service agent, was the head of security for Swift Enterprises.

There were no more harrowing incidents that night. The next day turned out to be a busy day of meetings for Tom and his father. The meeting with Harlan Ames was followed by a teleconference with several of the world’s chief rocketry engineers, and then, after lunch, an unscheduled meeting with Jeb Soberstein, head of the Consolidated Broadcasting Network.

The meeting took place in the office shared by Tom and his father. Soberstein, a rather massive man with a thin fog of white hair drifting shapelessly across his head, talked rapidly and gestured forcefully. "Damon, Tom—how are you, by the way?—the media has been full of little squibs about this space station of yours. When’s the grand opening?"

"Actually, Jeb, it’s all kind of up in the air right now," responded Mr. Swift.

"Up in the air!
Good one. But you must have a schedule, hmm?"

"It really depends on a lot of things, but the prefabricated modules are near completion already, and I suppose we could start launching the rockets in a matter of weeks," Tom volunteered.

"I see. Matter of weeks? Got it. Where do you buy those shirts, if I may ask? Never mind." Mr. Soberstein was quiet and contemplative for a few nanoseconds. "Look Tom, Damon, I know you do deals with private industry now and then—Swift Enterprises isn’t a government operation, thank the Lord. You mind if I smoke?"

"Yes," said Mr. Swift.

"Yes, I can smoke?"

"No."

"No, you don’t mind?"

"If you smoke, it’ll set off a fire extinguisher in the ceiling right over your head," Tom warned.

Soberstein glanced upward and put away his cigar. "Fortunately I can think without it. CBN would like to lease some space in your station for our equipment. In a permanent manned facility at that distance our broadcasts could reach almost half the earth. And, by the way, we plan some exciting original programming, including a miniseries on—you know, the guy with the wild hair, the physicist, Adolf something."

"Albert Einstein?" asked Tom politely with a glance at his father.

"Something like that. What sort of figures should I carry back to CBN?"

"Jeb, we’re not—" began Mr. Swift, but the media mogul interrupted.

"Okay—figures negotiable. Let’s not get hung up on it."

Tom rubbed his eyes, hiding a smile. "It wouldn’t really be fair to give an advantage to one corporation over all the rest."

"What ‘rest’? There
is
no ‘rest’! We’re
it!
But think it over. Memo to follow. That t-shirt really does look good on you, Tom—horizontal stripes suit you. What do you call the dark color?"

"Blue."

"Just ‘blue’? Good thinking. And now, always a pleasure, later, guys." And he was gone.

Tom and his father burst into laughter.

"What do you think?" asked Mr. Swift.

"We should ask Bud or Sandy," Tom replied with a grin. "I don’t watch much TV these days. But as far as working with Mr. Soberstein…"

"I think we might as well give it a try," said Damon Swift seriously. "Public support for space development has fallen greatly over the last few years. It’s hard to make a case for it, given that most folks aren’t really interested in abstract science. But one thing they do understand is entertainment!"

Tom rubbed his chin. "I get the idea. By working with CBN, we’re getting the public accustomed to the idea that space has its practical side—even its
fun
side!"

"Exactly. But we’ll make sure all our agreements are for the short term only, and that we’ll have space for the other broadcasters to lease in due time."

"Someday we’ll have a dozen space stations in orbit!" Tom exclaimed. Then he added: "But Dad, we’ll have to make quite a few changes in our plans. My three-spoke ‘wheel’ will have to be quite a bit bigger and more complicated—and Mr. Soberstein sounds pretty definite about wanting a geosynchronous satellite, not the sort of near-earth station we’d planned. That’s 22,300 miles straight up!"

"Obviously," nodded the elder Swift. "But your basic design is easily adaptable, and the modules are already being constructed. The main difficulty looks to be the launching schedule. Our company doesn’t have the capacity to launch a great number of our big Workhorse-line rockets in a short period of time."

They agreed to think the matter through further, and to try to come up with some figures to guide their deliberations.

As the busy day wore on, Tom arranged to have a different model of his solar battery launched on a brief flight into space aboard a suborbital micro-rocket that Swift Enterprises had developed. Launched from the Enterprises airfield, the sleek single-stage projectile, only twenty feet long, climbed through the stratosphere, ionosphere, and exosphere in minutes, rising into airless space for only ninety seconds before slipping back down into the atmosphere. But even that brief span was sufficient to expose the battery to the completely unshielded rays of the sun. Tom hoped that the alternative formulation of the chargeable metal foil in the battery, which Tom had named sol-alloy, would succeed where the other formulation had fallen short. The original version of sol-alloy had been developed to tap the power of the sun for Tom’s Flying Lab. But that first formulation was too bulky and inefficient for adaptation to a small portable battery cell.