Tom Swift and His Polar-Ray Dynasphere (4 page)

But Tom laughed nonetheless. "It’s just the casual way he refers to dipolar field phenomena—basically electromagnetic radiation and the electrical fields and magnetic flux effects that produce them. All electromagnetic waves—from radio waves to gamma rays, with plain old light in between—are basically electrical and magnetic fields propagating through space at right angles to each other, alternating between positive and negative polarity."

"I’ve managed to pick all that up somewhere or other. So what’s the latest on the polar-ray scene?"

Tom made an adjustment to the Space Kite’s ascent trajectory before answering. "Nothing that most people would find at all interesting, though it’s a very big deal to scientists. Dr. MacIllheny is investigating some unexpected properties of space itself that can be used, in principle, to modify how field phenomena and associated forms of radiation propagate across distances. He asked me to develop a test device to more fully explore the theory. I’ll probably work on it a little before we rejoin the girls and Chow—maybe it’ll clear some
space
in my mind for the Kronus problem."

"Let’s face it, genius boy—that’s your idea of a vacation."

Soon radar, and then two pairs of eyes, alerted the astronauts to the tiny GenRev satellite ahead, gliding along its orbit in silent serenity. Tom guided the Space Kite to within 100 feet, but then stopped the approach. "What’s wrong, Skipper?" Bud asked as he felt the tug of the craft’s anchoring gravitex. "Why are you hanging back?"

"Professor O’Malan asked that we wait until the GenRev had completed a final orbit back to the exact position where the original ‘event’ occurred," was Tom’s response. "They want to feel confident that they’ve extracted every bit of data from the orbit parameters, though they read as unaltered."

Presently Tom announced that they could proceed with the retrieval. They both clipped on belts bearing several specialized tools that would allow them to safely link to sockets in the shell of the GenRev. Then, snapping shut their spacesuit helmets, they depressurized the tiny craft’s pilot dome and swung it open. With bursts of their suit microjets, the pair thrust off into space in the direction of what was now an electronically lifeless hulk. They slowly closed the gap, bantering relaxedly as bright Earthshine illuminated their faces from below.

Suddenly they cried out together in startled fear as a flash of blinding light erupted in space!

There was no concussion in the void, but the blaze surrounded them. Its intensity caused their transparent bubble-helmets to darken automatically, becoming effectively opaque. "
B-Bud!
" choked Tom.

"Still with you, Skipper," came the familiar radio voice. "Can’t see anything yet, though.
Jetz
!—did the satellite blow up?" The unvoiced question was clear:
was this a deliberate attack?

As his visor-dome cleared, Tom saw that the satellite was still intact and apparently undisturbed. "I don’t know what it was," Tom murmured. "Maybe the same thing that caused the GenRev to break down originally. But it seems not to have hurt us, thank goodness."

"Yeah, well—speak for yourself. My suit jets got a little screwy for a second, and now they don’t work at all. I’m afraid you’ll have to come pick me up—Dad."

Tom rotated and saw that Bud was now drifting several score yards away. The young inventor activated his jets and approached slowly, hand outstretched.

"C’mon Tom," Bud objected impatiently. "
I’m
not on any pick-up schedule. Why’re you slowing down?"

Tom was puzzled. Slowing down? Yet he did feel a slight nudge of deceleration at that.
What’s going on?
he wondered.

"Wait a sec, pal," Bud radioed suddenly. "You’re not just slacking off—I’m moving faster away from you, too." And then an edge of panic crept in. "Jetz! Tom, something’s got hold of me!
It’s dragging me off into space!"

"IF there’s something there, I sure don’t see it," Tom radioed, striving for a calming voice.

"Okay, it’s loosening up," replied Bud in relief. "But I sure felt it. It accelerated me with a yank backwards—you’ll have to catch up."

Tom gunned his microjets. Again he began to draw near—and again they both felt as if some phantom force had taken hold of them, pushing Tom gently back while pulling Bud away from him. And again, as the distance between them widened, the grasp faded away. "It’s great for the ego to be wanted," the Californian wisecracked nervously. "But if some alien has a yen for me, he’s got slippery fingers."

A hunch led Tom to check—and recheck in surprise—his suit instruments. "Good night, now I get it. We’re
repelling
each other!"

"Since when?"

Tom grinned. "No mystery. Since that flash. It’s given us both a powerful electric charge—and charges of the same polarity repel one another."

"Oh yeah?" came the skeptical comment. "I don’t feel particularly
electrocuted
."

"It’s static electricity, not a current. But how in space could it have penetrated the Tomasite and Inertite of our suit material? —Wait! Flyboy, unhook that tool belt and let it drift free." Tom did the same. Instantly both belts began to accelerate away in opposite directions! "That settles
that
. The belts have no protective coating. The flash phenomenon charged them up like capacitors. But
we’re
still our normal neutral selves."

"Maybe. But my limpid gray eyes may never be the same."

Tom snagged his chum and was quickly able to readjust and reactivate Bud’s microjet system. They resumed the satellite retrieval, and in seconds had their hands on the GenRev’s hull. "No sign of obvious damage or scorching even up close," Tom muttered. "Of course, the coating wouldn’t necessarily carbonize in a vacuum. Well, let’s wrangle her back into the Kite. Without those linkage tools it’ll be awkward, but we shouldn’t have much trouble doing it by hand."

In minutes the GenRev was safely stowed away and the Space Kite was arcing back toward Earth and Swift Enterprises. "O’Malan asked me to check it out with our special instruments before freighting it to Toronto," Tom told his pal. "I’m anxious to see what I can make of it."

The trip back was worry-free. In one of his laboratories, Tom examined the satellite with a platoon of unique detection devices as Bud Barclay hovered near Tom’s shoulder. "It’s clear that whatever ‘flashed’ us up in space is the same thing that disabled the GenRev," Tom announced at last.

"You mean it’s all charged up?" responded Bud in surprise.

"Not any more. But there are plenty of clues that the circuitry was victim to a very powerful surge of electromotive force—so powerful that it came right through the insulation and overwhelmed the suppressors. Matter of fact, the ionizing effect literally boiled the insulation materials right off the components!"

Bud’s brow knitted beneath his floppy lock of jet-black hair. "But it wasn’t some kind of heat blast, like from a laser?"

Tom shook his head. "Not a trace of external burning. Whatever heat was developed was internal, as a consequence of the electrical surge. In fact..."

Bud had learned long ago to read the signs of a dawning idea. "Is this one gonna knock me over?"

"Maybe! People can get knocked flat by lightning."

"
Lightning
?" Bud gasped. "In
space
? Don’t you need thunder clouds for lightning?"

Tom perched on the edge of a stool. "I know how fantastic it sounds. But way back before the first satellites went up—they call it the ‘pre-Sputnik era’—some scientists speculated that clouds at extreme high altitudes might develop sufficient excess charge, mainly from particle bombardment, that low-dipping satellites might get hit by lightning-like phenomena."

"Gosh—lighting from below!"

The young inventor smiled at his chum. "Actually, most lightning—that is, the visible bolts—
does
come from below, shooting upwards from the ground to the clouds. Of course, this is a very different situation. And I’m not so sure Mother Nature is the culprit, either."

"Neither am I," Bud agreed; "on general principle! Bet we find that somebody’s doing target practice with some kind of lightning-cannon."

"It could even be something similar to our own Enterprises electric weapons," mused Tom. "What makes the matter very suspicious is this, flyboy—it’s happened twice now at the same point in orbit."

"In other words, over the same spot on Earth! So where
is
that spot, Tom?"

The scientist-inventor fed the data into his computer and soon had a map on the screen. "The position wasn’t precisely the same, and if it
is
something like lightning it would’ve zigged and zagged along the way. So we’re dealing with a general area, about a hundred mile radius." The map showed a region in the Himalayas, mainly Tibet, claimed by China, but also nipping the borders of India, Nepal, and—

"
Vishnapur
!" Bud exclaimed.

"Yup! We may have some detective work to do when we rejoin the others."

The two went their separate ways for a couple hours as Tom reported to his father, to an astonished Professor O’Malan, and to Harlan Ames. "Tom, if Vishnapur—of all the lousy luck!—is tied up in this, it invalidates my earlier recommendation. The place may not be safe for the girls after all."

Tom sighed ruefully. "I’d hate to see their trip cut short."

"Well, boss, if I haven’t completely trashed my credibility, I have another recommendation."

"What?"

The former Secret Service agent looked uncharacteristically meek. "I—er—could go along with you and Bud to Vishnapur. Now before you say anything― "

"I’m not objecting― "

"—let me just point out how I could help the local police, or the royal guard, or whatever, organize themselves to accommodate the habits of Western tourists, which they’re not too familiar with, as I understand. I could― "

"Harlan, you don’t― "

"Of course Phil Radnor would be on duty here at the plant the whole time."

"Sure, I― "

"Tom," said Ames very soberly, leaning forward across his desk, "I need a vacation. I really do. It’s been—I don’t know how long. One thing after another. Li Ching, lab explosions, chameleon suits, flying starfish, pirates, voodoo dolls, that kid over in Thessaly... It starts eroding a guy’s judgment. I mean, I snapped at Munford Trent yesterday! He’s a sensitive guy. With my daughter away at school, right now is― "

Tom interrupted by leaning forward to meet the security chief mid-desk. "Harlan, won’t you
please
join us on our trip to Vishnapur?—and that’s an order!"

As the youth left Ames beaming in his office, he thought:
We forget he isn’t just steel and concrete—he’s a human being
. He felt a little ashamed.

After a late lunch prepared by Chow’s second in command Boris, Tom showed Bud the polar ray test device he had been working on. Crudely assembled, it consisted of two thick crystaline plates, upright and facing one another across a gap of nine inches or so. A shiny metal ring was embedded inside each plate.

"Want to predict what I’ll say it looks like, genius boy?" Bud invited Tom.

"A very expensive napkin holder?"

"Hey! Pretty swift."

Tom switched on the power and adjusted the controls. "Stand over there and look through the gap between the plates."

Bud complied. "Okay. I see that lightbulb you’ve got going on the other side of the lab."

He blinked in surprise. As Tom twisted the dials, the white light took on various colors, became brighter and dimmer, shrank down to an intense point, and became encircled with glowing rings of different rainbow hues. "Now watch this!" Another click, and the light disappeared completely—the gap was suffused with a hazy black shadow.

"That’s great!" Bud exulted. "Like stopping down a camera—except there’s no lens, no shutter, no camera—just empty space!"

"But what we call ‘space’ isn’t
empty
, not exactly." He told Bud to stand aside and move to a corner of the room. The athletic youth watched in gleeful amazement as a faint cone of shadow—dark light!—flashed from the gap in the device. Tom swung it across the lab wall like a flashlight beam, where it produced not light but a small circular area of moving darkness. He maneuvered the beam so it struck Bud in the face. His face, which had been brightly illuminated by the overhead lights, was suddenly wrapped in dense shadow. His features were scarcely visible.

"Jetz, who turned out the lights?"

"What do you see?"

"In the middle,
nothing
. It’s like looking from a lighted hall into a dark room."

Tom switched off the instrument. "The field produced between the plates selectively modifies the dipolar conduction and transmission characteristics of what they call
free space
. The field can be extended a ways like a beam, as you saw. In this case, I tuned the dyna-field to affect waves in the optical spectrum, but it can just as easily modulate microwaves, X-rays, infrared heat rays—you name it, the whole range of ‘polar rays.’ And the larger version that Arv Hanson is working up can do even more!"

"Fan-flukey-tastic!" chortled Bud. "Me, I can’t imagine what’s left for it to do!"

The boys turned as a door burst open. Phil Radnor, Enterprises’ stocky, red-haired assistant security chief, came striding in with a piece of paper in his hand. "Tom!" he said. "Take a look at this!"

Tom glanced at the sheet. It bore a message, hand-printed in letters that seemed to suggest that the writer was more familiar with Oriental-style writing than English:

WE HAVE PROOF THAT ONE OF YOUR VISITORS FROM VISHNAPUR IS A DEADLY SPY AND TRAITOR WHO WILL STOP AT NOTHING TO SABOTAGE THIS MISSION TO AMERICA . WE GIVE YOU THIS FRIENDLY WARNING FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY.

TOM groaned at the unwelcome development. Two space mysteries, and now another one on Earth! "Did this
friendly warning
come through the mail, Rad?"

"Yes—postmarked New York City."