Tom Swift and His Polar-Ray Dynasphere (8 page)

After circling the block, Bud found a lookout spot in a dark doorway across the street, next to a movie theater that had seen better days and a higher caliber of entertainment. Tom stationed himself in the alleyway behind the shop. A pile of trash—steel drums and discarded crates—hid him from view.

Presently Susak came out the back door. He glanced around furtively, in the traditional suspicion-provoking manner, then scurried off down the alley. He appeared to be carrying something in the crook of his arm, slouching to conceal it.

The man rounded a corner, ducking into a narrow gap between the old buildings. After waiting a moment, Tom started in cautious pursuit. Edging his eyes around the corner, he stifled a surprised grunt. To his amazement, Susak was already out of sight! Had the clerk slipped into the alley entrance of some other building?

As Tom darted forward to investigate, he passed a grime-laden door. A slight noise made him turn his head just enough to see an arm lunge into view—an arm clutching a heavy stick!

In an instant Tom was sprawled on the pavement, dead to the world!

TOM stirred and opened his eyes as consciousness painfully returned. "What happened?" he wondered dully.

A huge gray rat scuttled across his line of vision.

"Ugh!"

Wincing, Tom forced himself to his feet, and rubbed his throbbing head gingerly. He struggled to collect his wits while looking around the alley.

Suddenly he remembered what had happened. "That clerk—Susak! He must have guessed he was being followed and was lying in wait for me!"

Tom was disgusted. The suspect had slipped through his fingers! And as it developed there was worse to come—both the Buddha Tom had brought, and the Buddha Tom had
bought
, were gone!

Good night!
he thought in self reproach. There was nothing to do but join Bud and return to Enterprises.

Brushing himself off, Tom strode through the alley and across the street that ran in front of the import shop. He darted to the dark doorway which Bud had selected for his stakeout—but he was no longer there!

Tom was perplexed. Could Bud have spotted Susak after the man emerged from the alley? The young inventor knew Bud would call him on his cellphone. Fishing the instrument from his pocket, glad that it hadn’t also gone missing, Tom noted that a new voicemail message was waiting. "Hey, pal, you don’t need to stake the guy any more—he came running out the alley and grabbed a cab. I’m following him now—you know, ‘follow that car!’. Call. I’ll put the phone on vibe, but if I don’t pick up, I’m probably in the middle of a shootout! Anyway, don’t get clunked on the head
this
time, okay Skipper?"

Tom called and found his friend available. Bud said the taxi had dropped Susak at a cheap rooming house near Battery Park. "His name’s not on the doorbell cards, but there’s somebody who sounds like a countryman—J. Radamantha, Apartment 305. The other names are hispanic."

As he told his chum what had happened, Tom’s brain was working fast. "Bud, I have a hunch Susak doped out that I was waiting for him and panicked. So he dropped me to give himself time for a getaway."

"Then why would he risk stopping here?"

"Maybe to clear out some incriminating evidence. Are you sure he didn’t spot you?"

"Fairly sure," Bud replied. "Which I guess means,
No
."

"Where are you now?"

"A little cement playground down the street. I have the rooming house in plain sight."

"Okay. I’ll call the FBI and get there fast." Tom recorded the address Bud provided and added, "Don’t let him get away!"

Bud chuckled. "You’re not gonna warn me not to get knocked out?"

"For all the good
that
ever does."

Tom made a quick call to the FBI field office, then took a taxi to the street Bud had given him. He got out some distance down the street and started walking back toward the rooming house. He quickly found where Bud was waiting, next to a forlorn swingset.

Minutes later a black car glided to the curb. A square-shouldered, gray-suited man in a snap-brim hat leaped out and walked over to Tom. "Hello, boys," he said.

Tom nodded. "Thanks for coming so quickly, Agent Martin."

The man looked surprised. "Excuse me? I just stopped to ask for directions."

As the man drove off again, Bud groaned. "Good grief, our boy Benni’s going to lose himself before the FBI gets here!"

"Let’s consider ourselves deputized. Maybe we can find out something about that rooming house."

They strode toward the rooming house, hurried up the steps, and walked in the front entrance. The tenement building was shabby and dirty. A spring lock on the inner door did not work.

"Whether or not he lives here, apparently our chum had no trouble getting in," Tom observed as he pushed the door open.

Inside was a long hallway ending in a flight of stairs. Tom and Bud hurried up the steps as cautiously and quietly as possible, earning a few suspicious stares through some half-opened doors. The wailing of babies and the clamor of television was everywhere.

As they neared 305, weird East Indian music reached their American-tuned ears.

"Susak’s in the room," Bud declared in a whisper. "With that racket going on, we could slip in and take him before he knows we’re there!"

Tom was puzzled. If Susak were eager to make a getaway, why would he be lingering in his room? Then a new thought occurred to him.

"Did anyone else arrive here after Susak?"

Bud shook his head. "Nobody except us. Why?"

"Susak may have called someone—maybe his boss in the spy setup—and now he’s waiting for that person to pick him up."

"Good hunch, Tom," Bud agreed. "Maybe we should wait and see who comes up."

They found that the landing halfway up the stairs to the next floor afforded a good hiding place, with a peep view of the door to the suspect apartment. Here they waited, tense and silent. Minutes dragged by. Suddenly Tom gasped in dismay.

"What’s wrong?" Bud hissed.

"That music! The same piece has played three times now—the player must be on auto-repeat!"

Bud’s face fell. "Good grief! You mean Susak’s not even in there?"

Tom was already on the move. He hurried down to the door, Bud behind him, and found to his surprise that it was not only unlocked but open a slit. With a gulp Tom inched the door open.

The furnished room was vacant! It was clear from the turned-out drawers and general disarray that Susak had made a hasty flight. "Aw jetz, he’s off on his merry way to somewhere!" Bud groaned.

"My lousy attempt to tail him must’ve made him extra alert. I’ll bet he noticed your taxi following him, Bud, or else he spotted you after he got here," Tom speculated. "So he ducked out either by the roof or the rear fire escape."

Chagrined by the suspect’s escape, the two entered and looked around, careful not to touch or disturb anything. "These magazines are in Hindi," Tom pointed out.

"No surprise with this incense in the air. And look." Bud was leaning down over a trash basket. "I see a trashed envelope with a name handwritten on it—Jaisit Radamantha. And the return address― "

Tom’s face was right next to his friend’s. "Mukerji and Sons, Ltd.—Mumbai, India!"

The delayed and embarrassed FBI agent, Martin, finally arrived. His search of the room failed to turn up any further clues. "Our guys’ll go over it, of course," he said. "Fingerprints, hairs, the works. But for now I don’t see anything screamin’ out at me. And I have to point out," he had to point out, "Mr. Susak is only a ‘person of interest’ at the moment."

"True," conceded Tom. "I don’t even know if he’s the one who slammed me in the alley."

"Right. This
is
New York, you know."

"I hear it’s a lot better, though," Bud remarked.

The FBI agent telephoned the police, requesting that all prowl cars be on the lookout for the fugitive "person." Then he drove Tom and Bud to the jetrocopter and they returned to Shopton with their freight of mystery.

Next day brought Tom both possibilities and disturbing news. A call alerted the scientist-inventor that the Kronus probe had begun to orbit Titan in an even more erratic manner, giving Tom a renewed sense of urgency. If anything could be done, it would have to happen sooner—not later!

Bud dropped by the laboratory and found his pal deeply engrossed in an experiment. Tom was just switching off a vacuum pump connected to a thick-walled chamber with a view-window of ultrastrong Tomaquartz. Inside the chamber, a small object, like a ping-pong ball, hung from a nylon cord, while the large model of the electrodynamic controller glowed on the workbench at Tom’s elbow.

"What’s this—a new game?" Bud asked.

Tom chuckled. "No, a demonstration of how I hope to rescue that loopy satellite. I guess my head-bang yesterday shook down a few fresh thoughts."

"It should happen to me. Give me the low-down, prof."

"Well, let’s pretend that the ball is the satellite," Tom began. He switched on his dyna-field device and trained the sphere’s inner focusing ring toward the chamber.

Instantly the hanging ball swung toward Tom!

"Neat, genius boy. How does it work—by magnetic attraction?"

"Nope. You might say I’m using the machine to turn the problem against itself." When Bud looked jocularly blank, Tom explained that the scientists in charge of the Kronus project had finally gained some insight into the cause of the satellite’s strange behavior. "Their analysis is based on new data from Japanese space studies involving the solar wind—the stream of charged particles that jet into space from the sun."

"Which you’ve used on a couple inventions already."

"Yes, but without too much knowledge of some of its details—for example, the specific process that accelerates the particles, which are mostly hydrogen atoms and helium nucleii, to something like
two million miles per hour!
"

Bud gulped. "Hey! You just stunned my quip-maker!"

"The team consulted Aciema Musa and her study group on Fearing Island, who think the new data indicates that something called
Alfven Waves
—huge surges of magnetic force induced by the interactions among the charged particles—are driving the wind. The particle-wind makes space a conductor of what amounts to electric current, producing erratic ‘eddies,’ called
spicules
, near the sun’s surface. Now it looks like similar eddies are disrupting the local environment around Saturn, which Titan is part of."

"High winds and bad weather, hunh?"

"Very high!" Tom grinned. "Basically, the solar-wind Alfven Waves are interacting with the halo of gas molecules and ice particles that surround all the giant planets and give Saturn those big rings. Some of the material is always being scooped into space from the various moons by the ‘wind,’ or blasted into space by meteor impacts or volcanism."

"And that’s what’s bouncing the space probe around?"

"They think so. Now what I’m trying to do with this, mm,
yet-unnamed
polar-ray beamer is to distort the electrodynamics of the effect in the area of the Kronus. The main idea is to turn the surges back on themselves to change the direction of push, and also to concentrate it. You can see what happens. The near-vacuum in the test chamber contains a haze of charged atoms and replicates the Alfven Wave space phenomenon on a small scale."

Bud nodded enthusiastically. "And it works! You’re basically going to
shove
the Kronus back on track—like using a hose to blow leaves out of a drain gutter. But look, Skipper, why not just use a big repelatron to push the satellite around? Couldn’t the Nameless Wonder beam the repulsion field across space—like you did the other day with the electrostatic field?"

The young inventor shook his head. "Wish I could. But the dyna-field only affects electrical and magnetic dipole phenomena. The repelatron’s spacewaves are based on an entirely different principle. It interacts with the force that holds the atomic nucleus together, called the strong nuclear force."

"Okay. Scratch my Swift idea."

"
My
Swift idea is tough enough," replied Tom wryly. "This little lab demo is nothing compared to the difficulties involved in producing controlled effects on the other side of the solar system. It’ll require a much more advanced model. But I’ve already begun designing it in my head."

Bud snorted admiringly. "Glad you’re keeping busy, chum."

"Busier than that—I’ve also been thinking of a carrier spacecraft to mount it on. I’m beginning to realize how the device could have many uses. If I can beam out a powerful enough field― "

A call from the Security Office interrupted the thought. "Harlan Ames," Tom murmured to Bud as he answered. "Maybe it’s news on our Buddha mystery."

It was. "Agent Martin just contacted me, Tom, about Benni Susak. He’s dead!"

"
What
!"

"The police found
his
body—I suppose it’s not exactly his body
now
—washed up on the East River docks. He’d been beaten to death with some sort of club or blunt instrument, looks like. No sign of those little statues, by the way. Guess somebody wanted them back bad."

Tom paused, shocked. "Was anything else found on him? It looked to me that he was carrying something when he left the shop, something too big to put in his pocket."

"Funny you should ask, boss. Something
was
found on him," reported Harlan Ames. "And when I say
on
him, I mean that literally!"

AS Bud listened in excitedly, Ames explained to his puzzled boss that the unfortunate Benni Susak had been found to bear a peculiar tattoo that might be of significance to the case. "Oh? I didn’t notice any tattoos, Harlan," Tom remarked.

"Right—because it wasn’t there! Despite the effects of river water, not to mention being beaten to a pulp, the medical examiner thinks Susak was already dead when the tattoo was inscribed on the back of his neck."

"What did it say, Harlan?" Bud asked. "One of those ‘dire warnings,’ maybe?"