Tom swift and the Captive Planetoid (7 page)

“Man, the thing sure doesn’t waste time,” exclaimed Bud with a back-clap for his chum. “But—say, what happened to the capsule?”

Tom grinned and reached for the megascope controls, shifting the position of its viewpoint in relation to the duratherm wing. “There—you can see a bulge protruding from the upper surface of the wing. The capsule’s inside, completely enclosed in the sheathing material.” Bud nodded as Tom checked some readings on his Spektor. “All right, you two. Time to bring her down!”

Using the Spektor as a communicator, he told Hank to commence the set reentry procedure. The capsule drifted downward on the screen, and Mr. Swift touched the space prober’s trackball control. “I think I can keep it centered by eyeball,” he said.

There was no detectable movement against the stellar backdrop, but suddenly faint streamers of haze began to flick across the screen. “A few traces of air,” murmured Tom. “Still pretty much a vacuum.”

Bud nodded. “But just wait! By the way, genius boy, with no retros, what gets it out of orbit in the first place?”

“Micro-gravitex units inside the wing, pulling backwards to create drag and slow it down. They also help maintain stability and orientation. As you know, they take very little power, especially compared to a repelatron. Each one runs off a tiny solar battery.”

As the D-Wing speared into the denser reaches of the atmosphere, its shape was altered by remote control. The nose stretched further up, curving into a windshield-shape. The plasma corona had begun to form.

“How’s the temp?” Mr. Swift asked Tom.

“Fierce, Dad, but within the parameters. The new Durafoam sheathing is doing fine.”

The backdrop had begun to fade from the black of space to the indigo of the ionosphere. The duratherm wing now changed its angle relative to its trajectory, tilting up. Tom noted: “She’ll take the worst of the heat belly-first, flyboy. Then when she falls below hypersonic, we’ll straighten her out again and fly her more or less like a standard jetcraft.”

“Where’s the wing right now?”

“Over southern Illinois. Minutes to go.”

As planned, the flux-coils that interacted with the streaming plasma were used for fine-tuning the wing’s course, and to further slow it. “Dropping below Mach 1,” Tom announced, too intent to shout in triumph. “Dad—Bud—I’m bringing her in for a landing. She’s in one piece and cool as a cucumber!”

“More than I can say for myself,” joked Mr. Swift.

They abandoned the megascope and ran out into the sunlight. Like a great bird of prey, the sofa-sized duratherm wing was low in the sky and streaking toward its roost in Swift Enterprises. It slowed tremendously. Seconds later, ambling along at a modest forty miles-per-hour, it pancaked down on its designated runway, smoothly sliding on its flat plastic belly as if on wheels. Its molded wings grew flaps to slow it further. And then, with barely a sound, it had bumped to a stop.

“
All nominal, Skipper!
” radioed Arv Hanson through Tom’s Spektor.

And now the watchers were free to cheer! “Son, you’ve hit the mark on your first try!” exulted Mr. Swift.

As always, the young inventor responded modestly—a mountainous effort! “We don’t really know until we go over the telemetry record, but—it looks like it, doesn’t it?”

After a long gleeful day of tests and electronic debriefings, Tom finally headed home. Too late for dinner, he joined the others in the living room with a plate kept warm by his mother.

“You must feel like a million, big brother,” commented Sandy with a twinkle. “You’re scarfing up your dinner at meteoric speed!”

The crewcut youth wiped his mouth and grinned. “I’m pretty pleased. Okay—
I’m bustin’ at the seams!
Even though it
seemed
we’d solved the terminal problems we had in the test tunnel, you never know till you put it through the wringer ‘out in the world’. The test model was perfection on wings!”

“I’ve already given a dramatized account,” chuckled Mr. Swift. “Had to add a little suspense to something that turned out boringly perfect.”

Tom’s mother smiled. “I don’t mind a little boredom now and then—as a change of pace.”

“So what’s next, Tomonomo?” Sandy asked. “How do you plan to push your luck this time?”

Damon Swift answered for his son. “Tom and Bud go up in the
Fire Eagle
day after tomorrow,” he noted. “That’s the manned test flight I mentioned.”

“Is that some kind of new spaceflight invention?”

“No, sis, more like a little dummy ‘space canoe for two’,” Tom explained. “Art Wiltessa built it around technology and spare parts from the space outpost shuttle capsules. It can do a safe powered landing in the ocean if there’s any problem with the D-Wing, but what I want to accomplish is to fully test out the entire rescue routine. In other words, we’ll be playing ‘stranded spacemen’.”

“I don’t suppose I should even
ask
whether this test is particularly dangerous,” murmured Anne Swift very soberly.

Tom’s expression softened. “I know how much I put you through—all of you.”

“Bud’s dad Glynn deals with it in a fairly casual way,” Mr. Swift stated. “When I’ve mentioned the life of risks to him, he’s just said,
Oh well, that’s Bud
.”

“Bud’s dad,” observed Mrs. Swift, “is not a mother.”

Silence descended—broken seconds later by the burr of the house telephone. Sandy answered and called out: “It’s Bashi, Tom.”

As Tom greeted her, the young Pakistani cut him off excitedly. “Thomas, turn on Channel Nine this instant! Some nitwit is saying terrible things about you!”

Tom rushed to the control for the big wall-mounted TV, and in an instant it was filled with talking heads. “That’s the Brady Culvert program,” he muttered. “Who’s that with him?”

The Who was identified by a bottom-crawl of text as
Henshaw Teek, Thor Astronautics
. “Oh good Lord!” snapped Tom’s father in disgust. “What’s that foul-tempered babbler ranting about now?—!”

Teek was concluding a mighty mouthful of babble, piping hot from his thin pinched lips. “...media always falling all over the Swifts, so I wouldn’t expect much in the way of sanity. But I’ll tell you this, Brad. Bringing down that little mock-up meteor over Shopton today was a typical publicity stunt—typically irresponsible. And now he’s about to take a little space jaunt in a couple days, to test this new reentry wing of his. Call it
duratherm
or call it Big Bird, it’s a deadly risk for anyone underneath it. And
I
call that
criminal
!”

“DAD!” Tom exclaimed over the audio. “Who
is
that guy? What’s he talking about?”

“Who? Henshaw Teek!” snorted the elder scientist. “You’ve heard of Thor Astronautics, Tom.”

“Sure I have,” the young inventor replied. “But—but I don’t understand. Do you know him personally?”

Damon Swift clicked off the set. “I’ve known him for years. He was a classmate in college.”

“Does he have something personal against us, Daddy?” asked Sandy. “Against the Swifts? Enterprises?”

“He’s just a bitter man who can’t let go of ancient grudges. He always felt that I was given special treatment at the university because of my name. He’s always carping and grumbling behind the scenes. I didn’t think he’d
dare
make a jackass out of himself in front of the public eye.”

“Dear,” said Anne Swift softly, reprovingly, “we don’t need to keep this from the children. Let’s tell the real story.”

The eyes of the younger Swifts swiveled back and forth between their elders.

Mr. Swift sighed. “Very well. Tom, Sandy—Shaw Teek was something of a friend of mine. Not terribly close. We’d play handball together, golf. Talk about science. When I began seeing your mother, he joined us now and then, not always by invitation. Well. It seems he—”

“Oh!” Sandy interrupted excitedly. “Romance!”

Her mother nodded wryly. “I’m afraid I wasn’t as interested in him as he was in me. And Shaw became rather exercised over the whole situation.”

“This is fabulous!” tittered Sandy. “And of course then you two married, and he threw himself under a train!”

“Certainly not!” frowned Mr. Swift. “He was a scientist—or at
least
an engineer. But from that moment on he never lost an opportunity to make slighting remarks about me and my work. He’s used blogs, technical sites, letters to the journals—his constant taunting and needling—!”

Tom held up a hand. His father was becoming uncharacteristically agitated. “Whatever his motives, how could he possibly know about our test flight plans? Dad, we moved it up by nine days! We only finalized schedule it a few hours ago—we haven’t even told Fearing Island yet!”

Calming himself, Mr. Swift sank down in a chair. “You’re right, son. Our general preparations are known, of course, but not that we’ll be launching the
Fire Eagle
day after tomorrow.”

“Yet he specifically said ‘a couple days’,” Sandy noted. “He must be bugging your office!”

Mr. Swift shrugged. “Perhaps. But that small-minded
pipsqueak
of an engineer
hardly
has the capacity to rig—”

“Er—let’s remember that there’ve been other ‘leaks’ recently,” Tom rushed in, “such as the ‘coincidental’ discovery of the Follower planetoid. Now that I think of it, those raiders got through Fearing’s defense setup thanks to somebody leaking the control code to them.”

“Yes,” agreed his father. “And also what happened in the test lab—some kind of security breach, obviously.”

“My goodness, is it really so easy to unravel all these security codes?” Sandy exclaimed. “What
good
are they?”

Tom smiled. “Guess that’s a good point, sis. But it’s
not
what I’d call
easy
. For example, the Fearing aquatometer access code is changed frequently. The code is broken into two segments; two ultra-cleared employees look into two separated view-visors to see the code segment, which they each memorize and then enter separately, by hand, which allows remote access to the equipment. Neither ‘code guard’ ever knows the other half of the code.”

Mr. Swift elaborated: “When remote resets are performed on the aquatometers, each code guard keys in his part of the access code himself. The code is only good
once
; when the reset is concluded, access via that code is ‘de-recognized.’ Next time, a new pair of code segments is randomly generated electronically. No ‘record’ is made—the computer output
creates
the final set directly on the visor screen. What they see isn’t a sequence of numbers but a series of simple
visual
shapes, like triangles and linked rings, drawn from a list of about twenty. It doesn’t exist in
any
form prior to the point at which it is readable to the eye. When the guard breaks contact with the visor, the image is obliterated.”

“Then that
obviously
means that the two guards are turncoats,” Sandy said in a smug tone. “That Rajah, or whatever he is, must have a hold over them. Maybe he’s holding their families captive!”

“Not a very novel idea,” commented Tom dryly. “And it doesn’t explain these other breaches—including the one we just heard on TV. I don’t think even a potentate can hold
every
body’s family hostage!”

Mrs. Swift said, “I suppose all we can do is turn the matter over to Harlan and Phil.”

“Not on your life!” snapped her husband. He stalked over to the house phone and called George Dilling, the plant’s head of Communications and Public Interest. In minutes came a callback providing Henshaw Teek’s private number. “Dilling says that program is taped an hour in advance,” Damon Swift told the others. “Teek’s probably in his car; maybe already at home. If not—I have a message to leave!”

Wherever Teek was, he was answering his cellphone. A lengthy, loud, barely civil conversation then commenced. The half of it at the Swift home was hard to follow. But it was easy to get the gist. “I
wish
your father would calm down,” whispered Mrs. Swift to Sandy and Tom.

At last the confrontation ended. “He admitted his words were a bit ill-chosen,” reported Mr. Swift. “He said he received the information from what he called a ‘reliable third-hand source,’ whom he refused to identify. He mentioned you, Anne. He said to say hello. Always a little jab!”

“We’ll leave it to Harlan and Phil,” declared Tom firmly. At the moment he felt like a parent.

But the next day, as Tom worked over some final details for the upcoming space test, his father seemed uncharacteristically distracted and terse. At last a call came through from George Dilling. “Damon, I spent some time with Legal this morning. They have some concerns about what Teek said on TV.”

“Concerns about damage to the precious Swift Image falls under
your
job description, George,” pronounced Mr. Swift coolly.

“That’s not the issue,” came the sharp retort. “It’s just that—with public charges of criminality—there could be an impact on liability...”

“Yes. Of course. Sorry to snap at you. What would Legal like Old Man Swift to do?”

“Just talk to the guy. Calm him down. See where all this is coming from.”

“I doubt Shaw will be willing to take my call—not if he’s expecting it.”

“He will,” said Dilling. “I talked to his people just now.”

Mr. Swift frowned uncertainly, anger still stuck to his face. Tom, who stood next to his father listening, said quietly: “Dad—we really need to find out the details of where Teek got his information.”

The elder Swift nodded. “Very well, George. I’ll call him immediately. Tom can listen in—to nudge me if I become...”

“That’s great. Perfect.”

In a moment the awkward conversation commenced—clearly as difficult for Henshaw Teek as for Damon Swift. After some face-saving preliminaries that lowered the temperature below incandescence, Mr. Swift politely asked for more detail on Teek’s source. “Obviously you
don’t
have to tell me... Shaw... but we’ve had some security problems recently, and my son is about to be launched into space.”

“All right. I understand...
Day
.” Teek cleared his throat. “Here at Thor we have an informal group of ham radio enthusiasts who meet weekly. After hours, of course.”