Tom Swift and His 3-D Telejector (15 page)

Bud glanced back at the watching scientists. "You don’t want the image closer to their setup?"

Tom shook his head. "Not right away, at least. The Orb is itself an ‘image,’ more or less. For all we know, the replica image here on Fearing might actually replicate some of its powers! Safer if everyone stands back a little."

"Except for Tom and Bud."

"Except for Tom and Bud."

Day had begun to break through and touch the Atlantic with its cool, colored fire. The two looked skyward. The speck of greenish light was still tiny, faint and hazy among the southward stars; but by now the whole Earth had seen it—and wondered.

"Confirmation, chief. The Video Vikings have been ejected from the carrier," PERed Horton. "The longboat is veering away as planned."

"Good. Ballistic trajectories from here on. We’ll do everything we can not to startle our big friend into a fit of temper!"

Bud nudged Tom and pointed. Up on the elevated vehicular stage of the
Challenger
, which projected like a front porch from the central cabin, a number of workers had gathered to take in the astounding 3-D telecast from space.

They waited tensely, minute by crawling minute. "All right," muttered Tom. "Time for the fan-out maneuver. It’s showtime." He switched on the telejector, using the remote controller in his hand, and the two stepped back unconsciously.

"
Signal acquisition!
" whispered Tom Swift. "Now—let’s see!"

BEFORE the boggling eyes of dozens of startled Earthlings, an eerie sight, like none ever seen, blinked into view!

Awed, almost frightened, Bud ran a nervous hand through his black hair. Tom stood and stared, heart thudding.

The Green Orb floated low over the Fearing Island airfield, a globe of yellow-green that only faintly reflected the light of the sun. The Video Vikings, still hundreds of miles distant from their objective, were fanning out to assume their various positions around the object, but the computer wove their six points of view—and the separate inputs from their many holoceivers—into a single form, startlingly real.

"Tom," Bud gulped, "I—I think it’s starting to get mad."

The image was now large enough, and detailed enough, to show the strange churning and writhing of the Orb’s visible, immaterial surface. Separated sparkles and glows began to multiply and join together across and around the spherical form.

"So much for a
gentle
invasion," Tom said wryly. "It knows the Vikings are there."

"Pal—it may know
we
are
here
!"

The Orb swelled as the Vikings drew steadily nearer, and its details became sharper. Now the watchers could see clearly that what seemed to be, from a distance, a featureless haze was composed of thousands of small specks or motes, swirling about one another in furious motion. "Can you tell what those little things are, Tom?"

"Not so far. That’s why we’re probing."

The flatbeds had begun to circle the 3-D projection, taking instrumental readings from all sides. Not far away, a crane boom swung up high for a top view.

The luminous globe grew larger still. Tom knew the six Vikings were carefully maneuvering into their assigned positions, guided by tiny ion-drive thrusters. "We have configuration," reported Ken Horton. "Vikings are in position. Descent program on your word, Fearing."

"That’s go, outpost," Tom said as calmly as possible. He turned to Bud. "This is it. The Vikings are coming together as they approach, to video-capture the smaller local features. Now we find out what that sphere is made of, besides light."

The boys had the dizzy feeling of watching through a great window, the viewport of a spaceship descending into the murky atmosphere of an unknown world. Adjusting the telejector settings, Tom allowed the lower parts of the expanding sphere to disappear beneath the tarmac. Only an ever-flattening horizon protruded into view, a curving band of luminescence boiling with silent energy.

"
Ohhhh
!"

The crowd of watchers shouted as one.

The image of the Green Orb had shattered into a myriad of whirling, writhing fragments!

For a moment the projection was replaced by a weirdly twisting flicker, a surreal tangle of stars wrapped in 3-D "static." Then it all vanished.

"Tom!" gaped Bud. "Wha—what in the― "

"I switched it off," Tom grated, plucking the PER from his belt. "Outpost, what is the status of the― "

"Signal breakup, Fearing. Total loss of targeting. In other words, Tom," Horton went on, "the Vikings have flipped out."

"Are you getting anything?"

"We still have locator tone from all six, but no coherent 3-D image data. I’d say it’s the same thing that happened to the Donkeys—they’ve gone tumbling off in all directions."

"Good gosh!" rasped the young inventor in bitter disappointment. "Nothing can break through that green shell!"

Bud put a hand on his pal’s arm. "The welcome mat says
No Visitors
, I guess. But look—that’s never stopped a salesman yet, genius boy."

The team dispersed with their equipment, hoping they had managed to scope out some useful data from the initial phase of the probe. Tom packed the telejector away, downhearted. "Humans are knocked out if they approach the Orb, and drones are just batted away. Whatever it is, it doesn’t want Earth to approach it. But it sure doesn’t mind approaching Earth! Bud, the sort of power used to affect the Vikings could easily overwhelm the world’s defenses!"

"And you don’t know what it is—the Orb, or the force it uses."

"There’s no sign of electromagnetism or nuclear radiation, or the sort of spectronic wave field we use in the repelatrons." Tom hesitated. "I guess I should face another possibility, which I’ve been dismissing. Bud, the Orb may be a kind of black hole!"

Bud gulped. "Like the micro-sized black hole we nicked in the
Star Spear
? Jetz, it just about tore us to pieces!"

"We’d have no protection against it," Tom nodded. "But in some ways the reaction of the automated probes, and the way the Orb seems to use light, suggests what’s called
gravitational lensing
—local distortions of the fabric of spacetime connected to intense gravitational stresses. And yet..." The young inventor seemed to be resisting his own theory. "How could such a thing exist? We detect no gravitational anomalies—no G-field at all!"

"Only light," Bud pronounced. "But light that packs a punch!"

Within hours the science team began to issue reports based upon their various instrumental observations. Aciema Musa sought Tom out and told him, "Tom, your telejector gave us just what we needed, right up to the moment of― "

"Of failure," said the young inventor.

"But a good deal of success before that point. My own assessment is that there’s really something to your hypothesis, the gravity-lensing idea. But the forces involved are intensely localized—to a degree no one thought possible."

"Then we couldn’t detect the G-forces because they don’t radiate far enough into space."

She smiled. There was excitement in her eyes. "They don’t radiate
at all,
Tom! We’ve made a very minute, unorthodox interpretation of the optical data, the 3-D wave patterns, and the only conclusion that makes sense is that the gravitational effect is turned
sideways
to us in spacetime! Fantastically, the Green Orb is a
self-contained two-dimensional object!
"

Tom drew in his breath. He knew he had an involuntary expression on his frank face that bespoke skepticism. "But it’s
not
two-dimensional, Aciema. If nothing else, the 3-D telejector image showed us
that
. It’s a sphere."

Musa gave a nod. "Of course. But look, exactly what do we
mean
when we say something is a three-dimensional object?" She picked up a piece of paper from a nearby desk and drew a line on it. "The idealized, abstract line that this visible line stands for is treated as having only length, not thickness—it’s one-dimensional, true?" She drew a simple circle next to it. "A circle is a two-dimensional figure, we say. But if you think about it,
every part of a circle is just a line
, isn’t it?"

"Well—you’re right. It can be regarded as an infinite number of infinitely small line segments, connected together."

"Every part, down to the smallest, is one-dimensional. Yet somehow the
bunch
of them acquires the property of being two-dimensional! In that special sense, you could say that a circle is a one-dimensional object that extends into a two-dimensional space."

Intrigued, Tom murmured, "Yes, I see."

"Tom, I think the Orb is similar. What we think of as its surface is really a curved two-dimensional plane with no measurable thickness whatsoever, limited in extent but having no internal boundaries, that penetrates our own 3-D space—cuts into it. The Orbites are not living inside the sphere,
they’re embedded in its surface!
"

The youth gasped at the thought. "Good night, a ‘balloon’ of twisted space—its own separate space that barely touches ours!"

"Physical objects of our sort would just slide sideways as they tried to enter it. They’d whirl away on their own momentum."

"Yet these inhabitants can make themselves aware of our realm," declared Tom, "and communicate with it psychically, mind to mind—probably the only kind of communication possible between our two spacetime worlds!"

The astounding picture of the Orb’s sideways world haunted the young inventor. What would happen if such an object were to enter the atmosphere, or touch the solid body of the 3-D world of man? The interface forces could unravel the material substance of the planet, he thought desperately, setting off a chain reaction that nothing could stop!

Tom called Shopton by PER, then sought out Bud. "Get ready for a supersonic trip back to Maine, flyboy!"

"To the orphanage?"

"Yup, to Bylands. All our cards have been taken by the Black Cobra—except one."

"Jennifer December."

"We need to bring her here to Fearing, and take her into space with us to the Orb! The Orbites’ extrasensory powers seem to be limited by distance, to some degree. But if we can bring Jennifer near the ‘skin’ of the ‘balloon’, she may be able to put us into contact with whoever,
what
ever, is in charge up there."

Bud’s brow crinkled above his gray eyes. "Tom, I don’t think it’ll be easy, getting permission to take an untrained little girl on a space trip to—to
whatever
Mr. Green-genes is."

"Easy?" Tom snorted. "It’s just short of impossible! But if we don’t succeed, the
outcome
that’s our
reason
for trying could be a cataclysm for this innocent little world of ours!"

TOM SWIFT had a talent for doing the impossible.

It was Bud who piloted the jetrocopter to Maine and back again. "Saying
No
at first was just common sense," said Lorna Darvey, quiet but resigned.

Bud grinned. "But then you said
Yes
, just as Miss Mental here predicted."

Jennifer giggled. "I
knew
she would. I
guess
I sorta threw a tantrum."

"That’s not what made me change my mind, sweetheart," Dr. Darvey continued. "It wasn’t even to ‘save the world.’ I don’t understand any of what Tom Swift told me. But I know they took my friend Stanton Rogo away, and I know they won’t stop until they take
you
, Jennifer. Take you—or― "

"It’s okay to say
die
, Docky-Dee," stated Jennifer firmly. "Ever’body dies."

"That’s right," Bud commented. "But maybe this way
ever’body
won’t have to die before Christmas."

Darvey sighed despondently, looking out and down at green landscapes. "Let’s see, what am I guilty of? Let me count the ways! Child abduction, child endangerment, violation of medical ethics... if I had told my superiors, it would have been insubordination, too. What’s going to happen to me?"

"Well," said the black-haired pilot, "maybe we’ll all be heroes."

"You’re an accessory," the physician pointed out; "you and Tom. But they’ll let you off easy, because you’re so young."

"It’ll be okay, Docky-Dee," said Jennifer December. But she had to add one reluctant word: "
Maybe
."

The jetrocopter landed them at Harrietts Bluff, the Georgia town nearest by air to Fearing Island. Tom met them at the small airfield with a car. "We’re putting you two up in the Ashmueller Hotel under assumed names," Tom explained. "New and safe, and you’ll be more comfortable there overnight than on the island. Let’s keep that talented brain of yours as calm and relaxed as possible, Jennifer." The young inventor knew that the asserted skills of even adult psychics were vulnerable to stress and anxiety, and he hoped to minimize it for the little girl. "We’ll fly you across to Fearing tomorrow afternoon. The ship takes off at 5 PM." He glanced in the mirror at the little figure in the back seat. "What do you think, Jennifer? Scared? I’m always a little scared when I― "

"No you’re not," she interrupted.

"No," he admitted, chagrined. "Guess I’m not
always
. Just sometimes."

"Uh-huh."

As the car approached town, Bud suddenly exclaimed in a choked voice, "J-J—
Tom, stop!
"

Tom screeched on the brakes. "What?"

"To your left. Up!"

Tom looked. His eyes widened. "No! Good gosh, it—it
can’t
be!"

"The Orb!" Bud whispered.

A green disk, slightly luminous in the light of sunset, was moving in the clear sky against the early stars!

Tom threw open his door and ducked out, face white. "It
can’
t have gotten so near the Earth since I left Fearing! We have to leave for― "

"You’re
silly
!" giggled Jennifer. "Look at it!"

The Orb had turned as it bobbled. Something black appeared on its rim and slowly moved inward.

GREEN ORB DINER
sky-high service—down-home cookin’

"Somebody’s a mighty smart businessman," Tom muttered sheepishly as he got back in the car. "Squeezing some advertising out of current events."