Tom Swift and His 3-D Telejector (2 page)

"Well, you surely don’t expect us to be scared twice, do you?" asked Bashalli smugly. "One must not repeat a trick too soon."

The image was the phantom sea captain as before, seaweed and all. Yet there was something different in the quality of light. The parts of the image seemed to waver, as if it were about to fall to pieces. It seemed somehow
unreal
.

The eyes fixed on Tom. The figure extended a hand, and they could all make out its lips moving amid a pleading expression.

Then, suddenly, it dissolved into air.

The four exchanged glances, reactions mixed.

"Well," said Bash, "I will admit it is all
very
impressive. But you forgot to switch on the sound."

"The telejector prototype isn’t set up for sound," muttered Tom, still staring. "I read his lips, though."

"Hunh? What did he say?" Bud demanded.

"He said, ‘
Tom Swift, Tom Swift—the time is near
!’"

"THE time is near," repeated Bashalli. "Now I
know
we are dealing with television, the land of abundant cliches!"

Puzzled and frowning, Tom strode over to the telejector and crouched down to examine it. "The power’s off, just as it should be." He depressed a button and a small DVD-type disk popped out into his hand. "And this is definitely the recording disk we made—I wrote a label on the top by hand, myself."

Sandy asked if a further video track could have been added to the disk. "No," the young inventor replied. "This is an experimental disk specifically designed for the telejector system. Nothing can be added after the original imprint."

"And let’s not forget that the machine was switched off," Bud noted.

"Then what was it, Thomas, the real ghost of Old Pegleg?" demanded Bashalli. "Perhaps we should check the attic for skeletons!"

"This house doesn’t
have
an attic! We just made up the story," Tom retorted. "Dr. Grimsey is a communications technology engineer—nothing to do with ghosts."

"Well," said Bashalli, "I want nothing to do with them either. Let’s go."

They loaded the equipment into the trunk of the convertible and left the old house, mystified and just a bit
spooked
.

Minutes later, passing Swift Enterprises on the way to the Swift home, Tom asked Bud to drive in through the executive gate and let him off. "Dad’s working late in the observatory. I said I’d join him. We’ll drive home in his car."

"Looking over the Green Orb with your space prober, Tomonomo?" Sandy guessed.

"Right. We finished refurbishing the liquid helium feed this afternoon. Now we can try the megascope on her."

A strange heavenly body had been sighted only days before by astronomers in the Enterprises outpost in space, orbiting the planet at a distance of 22,300 miles. Still unseen by Earth-based instruments, the station’s powerful electronic telescope had detected the extremely faint, greenish object, which the scientific press had instantly named the Green Orb. It was apparently moving in an elongated, sharply canted orbit about the sun. Tom and his father hoped to scrutinize the space phantom with Tom’s revolutionary video-telescope.

Bash glanced up at the night sky from the open convertible. "Can we see it from here?"

"Not with the naked eye," Tom said. "But if it
were
visible, it might be quite an exotic sight. Its greenish color isn’t like anything else in the sky."

Let off in the walled, four-mile-square experimental station outside the town, Tom took a ridewalk ground-conveyor past the broad airfield to the high dome of the observatory.

The interior was dominated by the latticework antenna of the space prober, which utilized an electronic quantum-link principle to establish an invisible "camera eye" in space. Beneath the huge, slanting column of metal rings was the monitor and control console, where Damon Swift was intently at work. "Just finished powering up the system and checking her out," he greeted his son. "No sign of that leak in the helium gasket."

"I knew we could count on Hank," Tom nodded. Hank Sterling, a good friend, was the Swifts’ talented chief engineer.

Tom pressed a button to open the dome, then tuned the electronic circuitry and shifted the looming antenna into position, using the parameters sent down from the space outpost. A flashing light confirmed that the megascope’s tightly focused beam was on its way to the vicinity of the Orb.

"It’ll take about fourteen seconds at light-speed for the beam terminus to get there," Tom remarked. "The Orb’s some two and a half million miles away. Let’s look over the data and photos Professor Goldstone transmitted."

"It’s all pretty puzzling, son."

"Hey, wait’ll I tell you how my joke on the girls worked out. Now
that’s
a
puzzle
!"

Presently a beep alerted the two that the imaging point had been established in deep space. Before switching on the viewscreen, the scientist-inventors studied the high-definition photographs from the outpost. Even at maximum enhancement and magnification, the space station’s telescope showed nothing but a dim, hazy disk floating among the stars, slightly yellow-green in hue. It was utterly featureless. "They can’t get a better image?" asked Tom.

"There’s no more light to collect," Mr. Swift replied. "Even the Hubble Telescope shows only the same blur—no surface features at all." He added: "If it even
has
a surface."

"But they’ve calculated the Orb’s size, at least."

"About ninety miles in diameter. Bigger than Nestria." Mr. Swift referred to Earth’s second moon, which Tom had explored in the name of his country. "A fairly healthy-sized asteroid, son—and yet it has many peculiar characteristics. An atmosphere, apparently."

"Assuming that’s the cause of that hazy halo." Tom nodded thoughtfully. "Speaking of Nestria... You know, Dad, it’s possible the Space Friends are behind this. They certainly have the ability to manipulate celestial bodies."

For a considerable period of time Earth had been in cryptic contact with extraterrestrials, radio contact by way of Swift Enterprises. The unseen beings, who communicated with humanity by means of a concept-language of mathematical symbols, had moved the moonlet Nestria into Earth orbit for reasons never adequately clarified. Though trusting Tom and his associates, these friends, who appeared to have established a scientific station in orbit about Mars, preferred to remain secretive and enigmatic.

"The thought occurred to me as well," Mr. Swift responded. "Tomorrow let’s begin composing a message to send them."

Tom turned his attention to a set of long-range spectrographs, and his surprise increased. "Good night! This doesn’t look like a spectral profile at all!"

Mr. Swift nodded, grinning at the beckoning scientific mystery. "Just a blur without a trace of data. And as you’ll see, radar probes get only a weak, diffuse bounceback at the threshold of detectability. Clearly the intruder isn’t a solid object at all. It must be a cloud of gases and ice particles—but unlike a comet, it has no core."

"A cosmic dust bunny," Tom joked. "It sure doesn’t reflect much light from the sun."

"Goldstone doesn’t think it’s reflecting
any
light from outside sources," was the response. "He thinks what we see must be some sort of natural luminance, perhaps from a radioactive process. Yet there’s no sign of radiation, or even
heat
. If the Orb
is
reflecting external ambient light, it’s a mystery how it’s managing to do it."

"We know one thing, though," said Tom thoughtfully. "It’s not part of our solar system. It’s coming in practically at right angles to the plane of the ecliptic."

"Yes, from interstellar space, I would suppose.
Quite
a long-range traveler."

Tom activated the monitor. After he had tuned several dials, a picture came onto the prober’s circular screen.

There was no trace of the target. "Just stars," Mr. Swift muttered in baffled surprise.

"I’ll check the settings."

But in a moment Tom reported that the imaging point was precisely where it had been sent. He rubbed his chin. "Could the figures from the outpost be off?"

"Rotate the view angle," suggested Mr. Swift. "Let’s look around."

Almost immediately the screen showed a small blob of greenish light against the black of space. "Well, there’s the Orb," Tom declared. "But if the parameters weren’t plain wrong, it has an irregular orbit. It’s a good hundred thousand miles from where it ought to be."

"But perhaps that’s to be expected with an object of such low mass," the elder scientist mused. "It’s further away from the sun than we are, but getting closer by the hour. Even something as slight as the pressure of sunlight, or the solar magnetosphere, might deflect its course."

"And yet it doesn’t dissipate. Looks like a puff of smoke," Tom remarked, a tiny bell of memory in his brain trying to remind him of—
something
. He manipulated the controls to bring the viewpoint close to the space body. But as the disk swelled on the monitor, he suddenly halted the approach. "Look at that, Dad."

The mysterious object had begun to shine with a weird green aura, vividly reproduced on the megascope viewscreen. Second by second the glow became more and more intense and brilliant—alarmingly so!

Damon Swift gasped softly. "What could be happening, Tom?’’

"I don’t know. I can’t even guess—but the Green Orb sure isn’t a dim bulb anymore!" Alight with a fiery halo, the disk, still small and distant, showed hints of a writhing turbulence!

Suddenly the picture wavered and rolled across the screen. Tom reached out to adjust the monitor. As he did so, he and his father jumped back in surprise as a streamer of sparks wisped down in front of their faces, from above them.

Tom glanced upward—and cried out in alarm. An entire section of the antenna was enveloped in steam and smoke, and sparking violently!

As the pair began to back away, a cluster of metal rings broke loose and arced down directly on top of them!

"DAD!" Tom snatched at the older man’s arm and yanked him back full force as the antenna section, still connected to its support struts, smashed down on the megascope control chassis. The next instant, the broad circular viewscreen exploded with a lurid electrical discharge and a spray of shattering glass! Father and son staggered backward, clutching their faces.

The observatory quieted. Scratched and cut by the hurtling glass, the hands of both were flecked with blood as they dropped them from their faces.

"
Whew
!" Damon Swift looked at his fingers. "Think we’ll need major surgery, Tom?"

The youth smiled ruefully. "No, but I guess we
could
use some first aid."

Taking the electric nanocar Mr. Swift had parked next to the observatory, the two scientist-inventors whisked across the experimental station to the plant’s infirmary. Here they found Doc Simpson, Enterprises’ young medic, on late-evening duty. With a few wry and apt comments about the durability of Tom and his father, he cleaned their cuts and applied antiseptic.

When they returned to the observatory, Tom unscrewed the back panel of the prober console to examine the circuitry. Many of the electronic parts were still hot, and some of the fused insulation and resistors were smoking faintly.

"What the devil happened, Tom?" asked Damon Swift.

"Something must have been knocked out in the power stages, causing an extra big surge. All the liquid helium gaskets cracked, and the overheated, charged-up ring section came down, with its power cables still attached. And goodbye monitor!" The young inventor sighed. "A chance in a million."

"The new helium feed setup must have failed—an undetected flaw."

Tom stood up in disgust and added, "Well, it’s a cinch we can’t fix all that tonight. So much for our lookover of the Green Orb."

Before leaving, Tom contacted the space outpost on his quantum-link parallelophone, nicknamed the Private Ear Radio, or PER. Dr. Goldstone reported that the mysterious sky object still glowed with a weird brilliance in the electronic telescope. "Seems to be calming down, though," the astronomer remarked. "Yet it’s strange—we’ve detected no radiation or unusual electromagnetic activity."

"The little orb that isn’t there," Tom murmured.

Next morning, the young inventor and his father were down early for breakfast, eager to bear the latest news reports about the strange heavenly body. As they tuned the big wall-mounted television to a science channel, Mrs. Swift, a dainty, pretty woman, joined them, then Sandy.

The newscaster was saying, "As an update on an ongoing story, that strange object in the sky is still baffling astronomers. At first it was thought to be a new asteroid because of its orbital path around the sun. But last night the space voyager briefly took on a mysterious green glow that has thrown observers into an uproar. Where the Green Orb came from is now a bigger question than ever, and the world scientific community has yet to determine just what it is—but whatever the answer, on the human scale it’s far from Earth, and will be getting farther as it crosses the plane of the solar system and begins its return to deep space. Perhaps we should be grateful!"

"You had a front row seat at the big sky show last night, Dear," Mrs. Swift remarked to Tom.

Tom grinned wryly. "Ringside seat is more like it."

"All that and a waterlogged ghost," Sandy observed. "Just another quiet evening in Shopton."

Tom spent much of the following day working to repair the megascope with the assistance of Hank Sterling. They were joined by Enterprises’ new hire, Dr. Edmund Grimsey, a somewhat exotic figure with his full bushy beard and shock of iron-gray hair.

"Good to be here, Tom—learning by doing, so to speak," he said to his young employer. "Swift Enterprises gives its people rather more freedom to learn and explore than was typical at my last position."

Tom grinned at the older man. "We’re glad to have you with us, sir."

"Mmm. Rather difficult yesterday, back in Thessaly to collect my remaining files at the old office."