Tom Swift and His 3-D Telejector (13 page)

"Uh-huh. On the night TV."

"Late night news shows?"

"Uh-uh. The TV in your head, when you go to sleep."

Lorna Darvey interjected, "That’s what she calls her dreams."

"Ever’body has it," said Jennifer. "But most people don’t tune it in. A few people do. I meet them in the TV and we play. That’s how I met you and Bud."

Tom sucked in his breath and glanced at Bud, whose gray eyes were wide. "Do you remember when you met us, Jenny?"

"Uh-uh.
Jennifer
! It was last week. You were in the window, where all the stars are. You talked to me."

"What did I say?"

"Dream things. You’re not s’posed to repeat ’em."

"Who says?"

"No-buddy. You
can’t
, cause there’s no
real
words, just things you see and feel. But both of you were
skeered
."

Tom grinned. "We sure were! We never met a little girl up where the stars are."

"Some of the dream TV goes up there, right past the moon. I even play with― " She stopped herself abruptly. "I can’t tell you about
them
. They don’t want me to."

"Oh, that’s okay," Tom said. "Have you seen that big green place out there? The one Bud and I were going to?"

She nodded excitedly. "Uh-huh! It’s all funny. There’s all those people!"

"
People
!" Bud blurted out. "See, Tom, it’s just like I― "

Tom shushed him with a look. "Jennifer, who are they? What do they want? Do they want you to tell me something?"

She shrugged, in the eloquent way children can shrug. "I dunno."

"You can tell me. I’ll keep it a secret."

She looked at him soberly. "It’s
bad
to tell lies, Tom. You already know you’re gonna tell other people."

The young inventor reddened slightly. "Yes, I—I know. But, see... People could be hurt if you don’t tell me. It’s
really really
important."

She suddenly plopped down at the edge of the sandbox, which was bordered by a redwood bench. "The dream people think so too, but I don’t know
how
to tell you. They get so sad. When I saw you in the window, I
tried
to tell you, but I
couldn’t
!"

The last was said with tears in it. Dr. Darvey knelt down and held Jennifer’s hand reassuringly. "Would you like to go back to playing, honey?"

She didn’t answer, but hunkered down in the sand and began to draw with her finger. "Look what I can do, Tom."

The girl drew a big fat circle, then added a squiggle to it. Tom and Bud exchanged startled glances, and Tom asked in a faint voice: "What—what is that, Jennifer? It looks like― "

"It’s
not
a ‘Q’ letter, Tom," she declared firmly. "I gave it to my friend the old mother man, but when he got woked up he
thought it wrong
. See, look." Her pointing finger traced out the circle. "
That’s
the green balloon, where the people live. That’s why it’s round. This little tail..." She indicated the squiggle-mark. "That’s the snake coming up to bite it."

"The...
snake
?" Bud repeated.

"You a’ready know, Bud," Jennifer stated reprovingly. "Tom knows too."

"Jennifer—why does the snake want to bite the Orb? The green thing?" inquired Tom.

"I dunno. It’s not
real
biting. It’s more like when you have telephone wires, except it’s for the dream TVs. There are lot’s of ’em, cause he has a buncha my friends with him. He’s trying to make them tell him about the green balloon people."

Tom murmured quietly, "Li is using the kidnapped psychics to communicate with the Green Orb."

"I
knew
you knew it."

"I’ll bet you did."

Jennifer searched the young inventor’s eyes intently. "It’s okay to say
die
, Tom. The green balloon people are all going to die if you don’t go to them. That’s what they want me to tell you."

Tom crouched down to her level. "Jennifer, I’ve seen strange pictures, and so have other people. Did you― "

"Oh, you mean the pirate, and the man with the towel on his head, and when you were in the chair."

"Did you make those pictures yourself?"

"Nuh-uh. Umm, not
zackly
. See, it’s the balloon people. They told me to tell you what they want you to do, and they made me strong so I could do it, just sometimes. But I can’t just think it up, like I do on the night TV. I just..." The girl hesitated, perplexed. "When there’s pictures in people’s heads, I can push ’em out in front. But for some people, like the towel-head man—they’re like my friends, the ones with the snake man. I just
tap
them, and they can see what the balloon people want to show them."

"Hey, Jennifer," Bud interjected, "could you make us see something right now?"

She waggled her head at Bud. "Not now. The balloon people aren’t making me strong now."

"But the next time they do it, do you think you could ‘tap’
me
?" asked Tom. "It’d be cool if I could talk to the balloon people myself."

Jennifer December looked at the crewcutted youth for a long moment. "Uh-uh. Nope. You got turned off, like a buncha your friends."

Tom frowned. "How do you mean?"

"It was what the snake man did. Oh—you named him the Black Cobra! He made you sick, so your nightlight would go out."

"Yes. That’s exactly what he did!"

"He wants to be the only one who can talk to the people in the green balloon. Tom," she added very gravely, "he’s real bad."

"Real
real
bad, Jennifer."

The little girl had begun to fidget, and Dr. Darvey called a halt to the visit. But as the three turned to walk away after their goodbyes, she called out, "Tom, she’ll say no, but then she’ll say yes." Then she turned back to the sandbox, dismissing them.

"I don’t know what she means by that," said Lorna Darvey apologetically. "I don’t know what any of it means, really. But has this helped you, Tom?"

"Very much, ma’am."

On the way back to the airport, Bud asked if the plot now had been given more resolution. "It sure has, flyboy," Tom answered excitedly. "Evidently Comrade-General Li has known about the Orb for some time, somehow, and he learned that the only way to communicate with its inhabitants is mentally."

"By telepathy, hunh."

"Well—it doesn’t seem to be exactly what most people mean by that word. It seems to work by using the mind’s own store of visual images to bring up feelings that communicate the essential message. Sometimes it stops there, as when Pete Langley’s thoughts about me—which were pretty negatively charged, I’d say!—pulled in Jennifer’s ‘signal’ and made him see my image."

"With a pleading expression."

"Which was as much of the message as got through. But when we all saw old Pegleg, for example, more came through, what I lip-read. The ‘ghost’ was at the top of all our minds, so we all saw it together."

Bud nodded sagely. "Uh-huh, sorta like on the tip of your tongue, but higher up!"

"Right."

"Okay, Tom, the jigsaw puzzle is making a picture," Bud agreed. "An arm, a little sky, half a tree, Abe Lincoln’s nose. But still—what about that phantom phone call you got? Howcome Chow and the others on the
Challenger
saw images that basically meant
buzz off
?—scarecrow stuff. Not the message I’d send if I wanted somebody to come help me!"

"I don’t know," conceded the young inventor. "Those other images were frightening, or disturbing in some other way, and they did seem to communicate the idea that we should go home and
not
approach the Orb. I wondered if it might be coming from the Cobra’s captive group at his instigation—but why didn’t it happen on Earth, but in space as we got near the Orb?

"Anyway, now we know one thing more," he continued. "The purpose of that fever-contagion has something to do with ensuring that none of the people likely to comprise an Enterprises space team has the capacity to communicate with the ‘Orb-ites’ directly—and that includes me, along with anybody else who’s unlucky enough to be in the ‘hot zone’. He can’t tag
everyone
—he didn’t infect
you
yet, pal—but he’s sure working at it!"

Bud absorbed the matter quietly. But as the two sat in the Pigeon Special awaiting departure permission, he turned to his friend and asked, "What do you want to do, Tom? I know you—even better than Jennifer December does. You’ll try to rescue those Orbites, whatever it is that’s threatening them. But how? Nobody really knows what anybody’s talking about!"

"You’re right," stated the young inventor. "And that’s why my Video Vikings have to storm the Green Orb before― "

"Before the Cobra strikes?"

"Before the end that’s
near
—
is
here!"

"IT SEEMS you were right all along, son," nodded Damon Swift. "All our instrumental studies suggest that, in some bizarre and barely conceivable way, the Green Orb is a three-dimensional form of
light
, a kind of self-sustaining image that can only be made subject to science by means of a device like your telejector."

Tom whistled slightly. "I never would have dreamed that this invention, mostly meant for entertainment, would turn out to be a real scientific instrument—like a microscope or a telescope."

"Nor did anyone dream there could be such a thing as the Orb. Much less that this image-object could be inhabited!"

Returning to Enterprises, Tom had immediately sought out his father and given a full account of his encounter with Jennifer December. The elder scientist had in turn apprised Tom of some recent findings concerning the eerie space intruder. "The matter seems indisputable," continued Mr. Swift. "We applied the decryption algorithms, the ones you used in cracking that ‘Drowning Roman’ code, to the raw optical data from the outpost telescopes. Sure enough, out popped features that our usual enhancement techniques missed completely."

"Jennifer calls it a balloon," Tom mused. "That’s a pretty good description of an object that’s basically a spherical surface with no measurable thickness and nothing inside."

"Just the vacuum of space, completely empty. All the work is done by the surface of the ‘shell,’ absorbing all but a tiny fraction of the ambient light and emiting—nothing! Where is the energy going? What is it being transformed into?"

"The inhabitants, the Orbites, must be utilizing it somehow," Tom noted thoughtfully. "We may not be able to detect them, but I believe Jennifer when she says they’re in the ‘balloon’ somewhere."

Mr. Swift leaned forward across his desk. "And
I’m
sure of something too, Tom. The Green Orb is using some form of energy to alter its movements through space."

Among the new findings was something intriguing and somewhat ominous. Since its original sighting, the space object had deviated from its course. At first the variations were relatively small—though sufficient to have thrown off the megascope’s beam settings. But within the last few hours the Orb had begun to swerve alarmingly and unpredictably from one heading to another.

"I know what people are worried about," Tom responded. "If the Orb were to turn toward Earth, it could constitute some kind of danger."

"All the more reason for your video probe to proceed, Tom."

Leaving the administration tower, Tom began to cross the plant grounds on a ridewalk as he headed toward the lab where the telejector was being worked on. Seeing a familiar figure, he hailed him and waved him over. "Come join me on the ridewalk, Dr. Grimsey."

The older man did so. He seemed somewhat subdued. "I’m a bit... preoccupied with this fever business, Tom," he said. "I’m not one of your space-travel team. Yet I was one of the ones infected deliberately by this Li Ching."

"Yes. I understand your worry," Tom responded. "But while we’re out here by ourselves, let’s be honest, shall we?"

The man seemed to pale under the Shopton sun. "Honest? But—what do you mean?"

"I’ve figured it out, Doctor," Tom went on. "Maybe I’m wrong. Let me run it by you, though. I decided to use the triamplicon to fix the telejector’s problem—its
apparent
problem. I recall now that it was you who first mentioned that approach. It was you who got the component, and you who took it out of its container, which
appeared
to be sealed. But perhaps it wasn’t.

"When the chassis blew, you said something like,
That wasn’t supposed to happen
. Hank and I didn’t think much of it. But Doctor― "

"It
wasn’t
supposed to happen," said Grimsey slowly, in a strained, husky voice. "The doctored component would only have produced a ‘mysterious’ system anomaly that might have taken days, even weeks, to work out. It was never suggested that there would be an explosion, much less that the smoke from it would spread some sort of infectious agent."

"Are you working for Li Ching, Dr. Grimsey?"

The man sighed deeply, looking off into the distance. "Certainly not! Yet I suppose it
isn’t
certain, is it. It seems I’ve been duped into doing his work."

Tom thought for a moment. "Then, much as I hate to think it—I gather Peter Langley was behind your actions."

But Grimsey shook his head. "No. I’m sure he knew nothing about it. He’s a good lad, basically, though not likeable. Shortly after it became known that I was leaving Wickliffe for Enterprises," he continued, "I received the first of several telephone calls from a man who said he was a major stockholder in the corporation. He refused to give his name, but claimed to be concerned that if the Enterprises 3-D system came on the market before Langley’s version—well, it would affect his financial interests."

"There’s the motive, then."

"As you’ve surely guessed, he offered me a great deal of money, with a substantial down-payment. All I had to do was foul your telejector enough to cause you to install the triamplicon he mailed me. He said he only wanted to impede you, to delay the public release of the machine for just a little while."

"And no one would ever know," Tom stated.

"As they say—no harm, no foul."

"The Black Cobra’s preferred style is to use and manipulate others. You’re just his latest tool. But thank you, sir, for confirming my hypothesis."