Tom Swift and His Repelatron Skyway (13 page)

The next morning the idea got itself explained, as had so many other ideas, to Bud Barclay. Sauntering into Tom’s design lab, he asked his pal, "Got it wired yet, Tom? Maybe you could still make that ‘flying bridge’ gimmick of yours do the job. Man, just think of it—a highway in the sky. A real repelatron skyway!"

Tom laughed, heartily enough for Bud to stare at him in surprise. "What’d I say?
That
one wasn’t even
supposed
to be funny."

"Sorry," said Tom. "I just think it’s great how your brain seems to pick up signals from mine now and then. Yesterday I figured how to lick our whole problem. ‘Skyway’ is right! Instead of running a road through the jungle and the swamp, we’ll build an
aerial
highway above the treetop level!"

Bud’s brow was knotted as he eased down on a lab stool. "So you found a way to speed up that repelatron carrier-beam system?"

"No, it’s a completely different approach." Tom went on enthusiastically, "By running an actual solid roadway above the trees, we can sidestep the mess of hacking a route through the jungle!"

"While keeping out of the way of any loose T-rexes, hmm? Great, but how do you intend to support this skyway deal? Put it up on dino-sized pylons, like an overpass?" When Tom shook his head, Bud responded with: "Fine. It certainly can’t float in the air!"

"That’s just exactly what it
will
do," Tom explained. "The roadway will be made of strong but featherweight material, supported in mid-air by repelatron beams—invisible ‘pylons’ that we can make as long and high as we want! Instead of pushing directly on the moving vehicles, with all the difficulties that that entails, repulsion rays will be attuned to the general composition of the ground below, which is stable overall. Here, look."

Grabbing pencil and paper, Tom pushed back the luncheon dishes and began sketching out his idea. The rays to hold up the highway would be generated by repelatron transmitters of special design, planted at widely spaced intervals and bolted down solidly to foundations sunk deep into the soft ground. Installing these would be a much cheaper and easier job than building a continuous highway through the jungle.

"And these funny-looking transmitters act just like the usual dish antennas, aimed up at the road material?" Bud asked.

"That was my first thought, flyboy, but it wouldn’t work." Tom pointed out that if the transmitter towers had to support the weight of a lengthy span of highway material as well as the fairly large volume of traffic driving across it, the back-reaction would crush them. "And mounting individual repelatrons on the underside of the skyway means that they’d have to support the added weight of their own mechanisms, as well as their power-plants. And the trons would have to be
big
ones, like the ones we use for our undersea hydrodomes."

"Which gulp energy from their own atomic reactors. So what’s the answer?"

Tom added some arrows to the sketch he’d made. "For the spectromarine selector, I worked out a way to make a repelatron-type spectronic beam bounce back from dense, solid matter. Now let’s say that we extend that principle to repelatrons directly. The beams from each transmitter will sweep back and forth along the stretch of road above it a thousand times a second, and the road material will cause those beams to be reflected back down, with considerable diffusion and a very precise change in the frequency profile."

"Hey, I think I see!" Bud grinned. "The reflected beam is tuned to the ground, and the back-pressure comes back on the skyway material, not back to the transmitter."

"You got it," Tom congratulated him. "The downward component of the repulsion force will be so widely distributed over the local landscape that it’ll be more or less undetectable, but the component in the other direction will be concentrated on the road, pushing it up and keeping it suspended."

"Genius boy, I’m dumbstruck with awe—as always!" Bud joked. "I suppose you’ll lay out each road segment on the ground, then lift it up into place."

His friend shook his head. "I have a simpler method in mind." He began to detail his approach as his chum listened, fascinated.

An hour later, conversation behind him and inspiration on pause for the moment, Tom went to the administration building to meet with Harlan Ames. "We’ve turned up exactly nothing about the vanishing Mr. Kwanu—or rather his phony substitute, R’na Inbimah," Ames reported disgustedly. "He walks back to the Visitors Center, steps in, closes the door behind him, and—
The End!
"

"What was he trying to accomplish?" Tom mused. "To steal something? To spy on us?"

Ames’s eyes receded into a crease of deep concentration. "But there must be plenty of easier, more subtle ways to sneak onto the grounds. Sure, he was given one of the anti-patrolscope amulets—big deal! He was in view of the security cameras most of the time, and as soon as we started to wonder about him, we transmitted the amulet cancellation code. It would’ve been useless to him after that."

"I know," agreed Tom. "So the question is: why make a show of himself by meeting with me?"

"Yup—the question. We may not be seeing the whole picture, though. When I called the airport rental car company to ask why their car was still sitting here in the lot, they said he’d checked it out for eight days—they didn’t realize anything was amiss. Eight days... what more was he planning to do? Did something foul him up? Has he done it?" The former Secret Service agent shook his lean face in frustration. The he gave his young boss a slight, rueful smile. "I’m trying to follow that motto you like, Tom—
‘the outcome is the reason’
. But I don’t see any outcome at all."

"
Or
any reason."

The two fell silent, thinking intently.

Suddenly—at the same moment—their eyes met. With a shout, Tom and Ames leapt to their feet!

TOM exclaimed, "
Harlan, it’s
― "

"—
the car!
" Ames snapped in conclusion.

The security chief went into high gear, making a few quick calls, then leading Tom out to the ridewalk that led to the visitor parking lot. "So there’s your ‘outcome,’ Tom," he declared in cool fury. "The whole charade was all about planting that car in the lot!"

"As usual, the ‘obvious’ wasn’t obvious," replied the young inventor. "He replaces Kwanu, visits Enterprises openly, then disappears somehow in those few minutes before we killed his amulet. He never returns to his car and drives off. He even made sure the rental company wouldn’t go after it. Result—there’s a plausible reason for his car to sit there day after day."

"Which means there’s some devilish something in the car, his followup to that ‘poison pen’ attack!"

"But that car’s been combed over for prints and evidence, hasn’t it, Harlan? By our guys as well as the Feds."

Ames nodded as the two stepped off the ridewalk at the parking lot. "And it was also scanned as it drove through the gate. But that’s a pretty cursory procedure, Tom. And because it wasn’t his own car, just a local rental released to him at random twenty minutes before, no one thought it important to scrutinize the car
itself
—get under the hood, so to speak."

At the car they met several security technicians Ames had contacted, who had brought along various sensor instruments, including Tom’s penetrating Eye-Spy camera and a submicroscopic imager called the leptoscope.

In fact, the quarry turned out to be "hidden in plain site." "
Good grief,
" Tom muttered. "We all just assumed those tubular things were fancy flex-mounts for the front bumper."

"Clamp-on launch tubes for solid-fuel mini-missiles!" pronounced Ames. "PlazPac ‘warheads’. And note how he parked."

"I know. He was aiming right at the Admin building!"

The frightful mechanisms were expertly removed and dissected, and the report forwarded to Ames’s office within hours. "Those plastic explosives packed enough punch to do a huge amount of structural damage to the first floor, even if they didn’t happen to kill anyone outright," Ames told Tom. "Remote-control activators."

The young inventor pointed out that Inbimah had himself been subject to detector devices as he entered the Visitors Center. "No sign of any electronics on him, or in his briefcase."

"Mm-hmm.
So
maybe that’s another reason why he planned to stay here on the grounds. He was going to actually put the signaller together here at Enterprises, which wouldn’t be that difficult for a savvy technician to do."

"Good thing the guy’s research was a little sloppy," said Tom. "He didn’t stop to think that a low-grade analog signal, which is about as much as he’d be able to manage, wouldn’t get much distance at ground level, not with all the electronic interference we generate here. But to stay hidden and defeat the patrolscope system, I think he’d need a confederate already working at Enterprises. Someone who’d know which of our buildings block out the radar scan. At any rate, he found that something had gone wrong with his plan. So he escaped the grounds without detonating the missiles."

"What makes you... " The security chief interrupted himself. "Oh—got it."

"Those metal ‘birds’," confirmed Tom. "He knew he wouldn’t be able to cross Enterprises out in the open without setting off the patrolscope alarm."

"So he arranged for his pal to mess with the radar signal, giving him a ‘sneak window’."

Another grim idea suddenly struck Tom. "Harlan, this Inbimah guy must’ve been behind the spear attack.
He threw it himself!
"

Ames looked skeptical. "With his own little muscles, hmm?"

"With his own
big
muscles! The Ambassador thought it odd that Inbimah chose to dress differently from Kwanu," continued the young inventor. "Now I see the reason. That robe hid his unusual upper-body physique—the musculature of a trained Wanguru spear warrior!"

"Wanguru? I thought he was Ulsusu."

"They might call him that because of his political sympathies. Or maybe they just don’t know."

Ames grinned. "I’m afraid there are a lot of us who
just don’t know
, boss!"

In the days that followed, Swift Enterprises hummed with activity, its usual sound. Even as he labored over his repelatron skyway idea, Tom worked night and day organizing the supplies, schedules, technical personnel, and equipment for the project. At Swift Construction Company Jake Aturian took charge of recruiting teams of workers and technical personnel and putting together a small armada of freight-bearing jets to accompany the
Sky Queen
back to Ngombia.

The frazzling of Tom Swift led to teasing expressions of concern by others. A few evenings before the expedition was to take off, Sandy and Bash gave a
bon voyage
masquerade party at the Swifts’. Tom, in a gorilla suit, grinned when he spotted a green Martian.

"Your pointed head gave you away, Bud," he joked.

"Listen, wise guy, that’s my built-in radio antenna," Bud retorted. "In case I need to let Mars know I’ll be out late!"

Tom glanced around the room, chuckling at the costumes of the guests. "I’d hate to meet
that
on a dark night," he remarked, pointing to a skeleton figure who had just arrived, luminous plastic rib-bones attached to his black garment. "Wonder how Chow will disguise his bay window!"

"He can always come as a circus fat lady," Bud suggested. "Say, I’ll bet that walking palm tree over there is Darcy Creel crashing the party."

"Could be! Maybe he’s hoping to get himself
hugged
."

Later, with the party in full swing, Tom was called to the phone. Harlan Ames was calling.

Ames didn’t bother with
Hello
. "Are your guests all masked?"

"Masked and costumed both. Why?"

The security chief’s voice was tense with alarm. "Tom, I’ve just received an anonymous tip that one of your guests is an impostor. He may be a killer who aims to stop you from carrying out your African project!"

Tom stiffened at the news. "How did you get the tip, Harlan?" he asked softly, glancing about to make sure he would not be overheard.

"An unsigned note. I got home late and found it had been faxed to Dodie’s private number. No clues."

"Okay, don’t do anything just yet," Tom told him. "Let me try to handle this."

After hanging up, Tom stood for a moment deep in thought. How could he check out the tip without alarming the guests?
After all, it may not be genuine
, he told himself.

He stripped off his costume to ready himself for action. A few seconds later Tom strode off in search of his sister. Sandy, dressed in a leopard costume, was just bringing up a new set of dance squibs on the music system.

"How many guests are here at the party, sis?"

Sandy giggled. "At least a houseful! Why? Not enough?"

"Just wondered. Did everyone show up?"

"Now that you mention it, I’m not sure.
Mm
—let me see. If you want to count Bud and Bashi, there should be twenty-four." Her pert face took a sour turn. "Tom Swift, don’t you
dare
tell me you’re going to ruin our party with the usual nonsense!"

Tom smiled blandly. "Not me! Thanks."

Tom went out on the patio and then came back inside, discreetly counting every guest in sight.

There were exactly twenty-four!

Tom frowned uneasily. Could Ames’s tip have been a hoax after all? Or had an impostor overpowered and taken the place of one of the real guests?

Unfortunately, the Swifts’ alarm system had been turned off for the evening, since some of the guests did not possess the special wristwatches with their neutralizer coils. Sandy and Bash had felt that with the grounds brightly illuminated, there would be no danger, especially since all the guests would be asked to show their embossed invitations at the door. But Tom realized that the impostor might have used his victim’s invitation, or created a counterfeit.

I’d better have everyone unmask—pronto!
But then he hesitated. Even that would be risky, Tom reflected. What if the intruder
was
a killer, as Ames feared? The sudden threat of being detected might panic him into shooting, or into some other hasty action which would endanger the merrymakers.