Tom Swift and His Electronic Retroscope (7 page)

At breakfast, which Hutchcraft condescended to join, Bud asked the Bostonian about his mysterious absence during the night.

"I went to get some insect repellent out of my gear," Hutchcraft replied calmly. "I have my knapsack stowed in one of the huts. For that matter," he added, "what were you two doing up wandering around?"

Bud told of their visit to the plane and the looming figure they had sighted. Hutchcraft could throw no light on the mystery. "Sounds to me as if you both were having a nightmare," he remarked with a needling chuckle.

Chow snorted angrily, but said nothing.

Shortly after two, Bud, helping Doc with his examinations, heard the distinctive sound of Castillez’s truck pulling to a stop out on the dirt roadway. He trotted over to help Tom unload and the two chums exchanged greetings.

"Wait’ll you hear this one, skipper! You won’t believe it!" exclaimed Bud. As the youths walked back to the village carrying the replacement helium tank between them, he proceeded to describe the strange encounter next to the paraplane, concluding with: "When we got back to the village, Hutchcraft was already snug in his bag and pretending to snore. Naturally, this morning he made an excuse. He
claims
not to know anything about the giant."

Tom was staring at Bud wide-eyed as they lowered the tank to the ground. "A giant!" he gasped, then broke into a wry chuckle to show he was only ribbing his pal. "Are you sure you two weren’t seeing things?"

"I said you wouldn’t believe me," Bud retorted. "But it’s no joke."

Professor Castillez had ambled up during the discussion, and Tom noticed that Chief Quetzal, standing in silent dignity not far off with several of the village men, had also heard the story.

One of the men cautiously approached them. "You Swifts, what you see, I see." He spoke very haltingly and obviously knew little English.

Tom asked him what he had seen. "What I see—" But the man seemed unable to find the words. After a few attempts, he said a few phrases in his own language, with some Spanish mixed in.

"This man’s name is Xuy," stated Castillez. "He is the head of the food and provisions ministry, one might say. He has seen the what he calls the Big Moon Shadow twice now." The Professor asked Xuy some questions in Mayan-Spanish. "He says others in the village have seen him. They call him the cave man—the giant who can crush a jaguar with his bare hands!"

The man stared fearfully at the two Americans and gave a vigorous nod.

Bud and Tom looked at each other in astonishment. A giant in the Yucatan jungle? A cave man powerful enough to kill jaguars with his bare hands? It sounded weird! Yet there was certainly some kind of giant lurking out in the brush—Bud had seen him with his own eyes, and despite his joking skepticism Tom believed his friend without question.

The young inventor now approached Hu-Quetzal, who gazed at him impassively.
"Ahau,
have you seen the giant yourself?’’ Tom asked Quetzal.

"Tell us more, please," Bud urged the chief. "Who is this giant? Where did he come from?"

Quetzal looked at the two white men as if he failed to understand. When Bud repeated his questions, the chief shrugged and mumbled something in the Mayan tongue and pointedly stepped away from them.

Tom and Bud rejoined Professor Castillez. "Alas, I fear this is an occasion when he does not
want
to understand you," the ethnologist said with a slight shrug. "These people regard such things as intimate matters—private and sensitive. Despite the rules of hospitality, one does not discuss them readily with strangers."

"It seems you’re right," Tom agreed. "I’d better change the subject." The
ahau
was now standing next to his hut some distance away. The chief’s unblinking stare made both Americans feel somewhat uncomfortable. However, when they approached again with respectful nods he seemed as friendly as ever. When Tom spoke of his plan to dig for relics near the end of the ancient road, Quetzal said approvingly:

"You are a very wise young man. Perhaps you will find another stone carved by my people’s ancestors—or the
others."

As the chief walked away and Tom returned to Bud and Castillez, Bud wore a puzzled frown. "What do you make of it?"

Tom shrugged. "He may be embarrassed because his whole village is afraid of the giant."

"I mean, what do you make of that stuff the other guy told us—the cave man business, and crushing jaguars?"

"It beats me," the scientist-inventor replied with a chuckle. "Another thing. If that’s the guy who sabotaged our helium tank, what’s his game?"

Castillez made a suggestion, thoughtfully. "It is possible he is only curious about the plane. If perhaps he’s lived his life here, in the jungle, he may never have seen an airplane except distantly in the sky."

After stowing the helium tank in the safety of Chief Quetzal’s hut, Tom hunted up Doc Simpson, finding him behind a hut at the further side of the village. Chow, who had taken Bud’s place, was helping him examine a half-dozen of the men. After greeting Tom, Doc discussed the progress he had made. "I will definitely be taking five of these six men back to the States. They’re really amazing subjects, Tom."

He told Tom that their basal metabolism—the rate at which their bodies used energy—was five to eight percent higher than that of the average North American. "Here’s another interesting feature," he added, as he held an instrument up to one man’s eyes to allow Tom to see. "Notice this trace of a fold of flesh at the inner corner of each eye, called the epicanthic fold. When large, it’s what gives Asians their characteristic facial appearance. In fact, all these people in this village show unusually strong chromosomal indicators connecting them to Asian ancestors many generations back."

"That seems to bear out the theory that Indian tribes crossed over to this continent from Asia back when Alaska was joined to Siberia by a land bridge," Tom commented.

"Yes, or perhaps travelled across the Pacific by boat."

As Doc proceeded to give the Mayas a more detailed examination, Tom left him and returned to the parked truck. He was anxious to finish assembling the retroscope and to try out the new-version scanner he had brought back from the
Sky Queen
.

With Bud’s help, the improved camera soon stood completed in the afternoon sunlight in front of Chief Quetzal’s hut. Most of the village seemed to have quietly gathered around, respectfully standing back and giving Tom a space in which to work. Even the stolid chief himself seemed fascinated and somewhat awed.

"It looks complicated,
ahau,
but the basic principle is fairly simple," Tom said to him with a smile.

The main chassis of the retroscope was flat, shallow, and rectangular, like an oversized shirt box. It was clamped inside an X-shaped frame of support struts, which were in turn connected to a low wheeled platform on the ground. A metal cylinder extended from the front of the camera, widening at the end to a disk that was slightly concave on the side that would face the carved surfaces. Fastened to the top of the console was a big, transparent dome, looking like an embedded half-bubble.

The entire camera apparatus was connected to two other units. A flexible hose ran from the back of the camera chassis to a collection of pumps and compressors with a small, compact tank—like a thermos bottle—at its center. This unit had a valve wheel on top. In addition several long, thick wire leads ran back and forth from the camera to a fairly bulky box-shaped console that stood separately a few feet away.

He walked about the apparatus, touching its various parts as he spoke. "This cylinder is the main scanning mechanism, by which we detect the underlying patterns. The disk up front is the emitter-receiver for the scanning beam itself. These long tubes along the length of the camera chassis are new sensor units that I just designed; they’ll establish the initial baseline reading for whatever we’re scanning." He moved over to the box-shaped unit. "In here is the battery power source, as well as the primary processing computer. It has to be rather large, as it does most of the work."

"What about that there, boss?" asked Chow, who had joined the crowd along with Doc Simpson and Wilson Hutchcraft. "Looks like a propane tank fer one o’ them barbecues."

"It’s liquid helium, Chow."

"Hunh? You gonna make this here camera float in th’ air like your pair-o-plane?"

Tom laughed pleasantly. "It’d sure make it easier to move around! But seriously, liquid helium is so cold it diminishes the ‘noise’ of molecular motion in our ultra-sensitive detector circuits."

Now Bud spoke. "Genius boy, what’s with the dome on top? It’s new, isn’t it?"

Tom nodded. "Another part of my miniaturization craze. It contains stroboscopic mini-lasers which allow me to eyeball, directly, some crucial aspects of helium flow turbulence. Doing it this way allows me to get rid of a bunch of gauges and meters, and, surprisingly, it’s just as accurate."

"And where do you see the picture, Tom-Swift?" asked Ahau Quetzal. "I thought perhaps a television or cinema film."

The young inventor opened up a small rectangular panel on the side of the camera case which swung open on a hinge. Beneath it was a small screen, slightly recessed into the chassis; and there was another screen on the inner surface of the panel itself. "These are our viewing screens," he explained. "The one on the cover-panel shows the outer view of the rock or carving, as visible to the eye, while the other one shows the image constructed by the computer from the scanning data."

"It’s fantastic," murmured Doc. Even Hutchcraft seemed momentarily impressed.

Hu-Quetzal asked when Tom would begin using the retroscope on actual stones.

"Right now, if we can find any old Mayan stone carvings around here. I’d like to work out all the bugs before using it on your sacred ceremonial stone."

"That is best," the chief said with grave approval.

Tom, Bud, and the other visitors to Huratlcuyon now fanned out to search for marked stones. "Better not stray too far from the clearing," Tom warned. He had the lurking giant in mind.

Minutes later, Doc yelled, "Think I’ve found one!" and the others hurried to join him. He pointed to a round, weather-beaten stone lying almost hidden in the tall grass to the south of the huts. It seemed to bear faint carvings.

"Let’s see if we can lift it," Tom said, bending down to pry the stone loose.

The next instant he recoiled with a startled gasp. A green iguana, almost six feet long from tip to tail, had suddenly raised its ugly head from the undergrowth! Rearing up on its hind legs with jaws open, the reptile lunged as if to rake Tom’s face with its claws.

"Good grief!" Tom gulped, jumping back hastily in the nick of time,

"You really scared that poor lizard, Tom," Doc Simpson teased. "That’s why she went for you. Iguanas really aren’t as fierce as they look."

"Just the same, I won’t try taking this one for a pet," Tom said with a rueful chuckle.

"I made a pet of one once," Hutchcraft remarked. "Died on me, though."

It took the efforts of four men, none of them Hutchcraft, to dislodge the stone and lug it back to the retroscope.

Tom quickly aimed his camera, flicked a power switch, and began tuning several dials. "These markings look fairly recent—not more than a thousand years old," he remarked jokingly, "but it’s good enough for a test."

The others watched the screen over Tom’s shoulder as he carefully manipulated the control knobs, and a faint image leapt into view.

"Brand my spurs!" gulped Chow. "It’s workin’, boss!"

But Tom’s forehead bore a deep furrow of disappointment. The picture produced by the retroscope was a mere blur! No distinct figures could be detected amidst the visual fog.

Tom made numerous adjustments without success. His face filled with dismay.

Was his new invention a failure?

"ANY idea what’s wrong?" Professor Castillez asked in a sympathetic tone.

"Not yet. I feel like giving it a kick, like an old TV set." The young inventor unscrewed the rear panel of the camera’s main unit. "Have to check a few of these circuits first."

Bud and the others watched as he probed deftly among the maze of microelectronic parts. Using an oscilloscope and several other testing devices, Tom made a quick check of the reproducer component, then the "brain," and finally each part of the scanning apparatus.

"What’s the verdict, trouble shooter?" Bud asked, as the young scientist-inventor finished examining the setup.

"Everything checks out," Tom said gloomily, "so the fault must be in my design. I have a hunch it’s the scanner. Apparently it doesn’t ‘see’ the stone in enough detail for the reproducer to form a clear picture."

Bud was almost as dismayed as Tom, but tried to cheer his pal. "You’ll work it out, skipper—probably in the middle of the night!"

Tom gave a wry smile of thanks. "At any rate, at least one part of the retroscope is working just fine—the master time dial."

"What’s that?" inquired Doc.

"A separate function of the camera which uses various kinds of magnetization and radioactive-decomposition data to calculate
when
a carved surface was first exposed. Turns out in this case that it’s four baktuns old."

Bud’s brow puckered into a frown. "Four
which?"

"Ya picked my brain, Buddy Boy!" Chow said.

"Four baktuns." Tom chuckled. "Dad sent some books on Mayan culture with me, and I’ve been reading up on their calendar and system of numbers. A
baktun
is four hundred years. The actual date, if it were carved on the stone, would be—let me see,
8.14.0.0.0 7 Ahau 3 Xul,
which would be September first, A.D. 317, by our calendar."

"Wow! Over sixteen hundred years old!" Bud gave a whistle.

"Our course, your estimation ignores the intercalary ‘bad-luck’ days, as they were regarded," was Hutchcraft's supercilious comment. "But close enough, I suppose."

Bud gave the man a look of irritation. "That’s plenty ancient for me! But what if the inscribed date turns out to be different from what your time dial reads?"