Tom Swift and His Triphibian Atomicar (13 page)

Tom shook his head in frustration. "But
why?
" The question lingered through the delicious, exotic dinner and long after, as the little troop of Americans strolled the neon-illuminated boulevard of Central Shirabad.

The Americans noted that the women of Kabulistan attired themselves in a variety of styles. There were those almost completely covered up in their traditional black
chadors
or
burkhas
, and others who wore a colorful scarf on their heads. "They are honoring the cultural tradition of the
hijab
," Ed explained. But many women went about with their heads uncovered, in the modern European manner.

As they stopped at the edge of a crowded plaza, Tom noticed one young woman, wearing a simple headscarf, staring hard at them. He suddenly stiffened as the woman began to stalk toward them at a determined pace.

Arv Hanson saw her too. "Fellas, she doesn’t look like a ray of sunshine for our dreary lives. Maybe we should move on."

"Good night, she could have a dagger!" Bud gulped.

I was too late to turn tail! The Kabulistani took three more big steps in Ed Longstreet’s direction, raised a hand, and slapped him a loud and furious
whap!
across the face! Then she turned smartly and stalked back into the thick of the crowd.

Ed stood with his hand on his cheek.

"Friend of yours?" Tom asked dryly.

"Not at present, it seems." The traveler rubbed his face. The others guffawed.

"Wa-aal, Ed boy, lookit ’er this way," said Chow when his laughs had run down a bit. "It’s a sight better to get your head
slapped
than blame
cut off!
"

"Please!" Ed protested. "Don’t give her any ideas!"

As they approached the corner of the street where Ed’s hotel was located, he nodded at the book under his arm, which he had carefully rewrapped. "Guess my big find wasn’t much use to us after all, but it
is
valuable in and of itself. I’ll have the hotel put it in their security safe until I’m ready to ship it home to the U.S."

He bade them goodnight. Bud called after him, "Watch your head!"

They wandered further away from the corner, discussing whether to call it a night or continue their tour.

Suddenly they heard a commotion behind them—voices, shouts, shoes running on pavement.

"Sumpin’ goin’ on?" asked Chow.

A well-dressed man—a business sort, with an Italian look later matched by an accent—suddenly came sprinting around the corner. He saw Tom’s group and began to gesture frantically! "You! You, come!
Your friend!
"

Bud was first off the mark, Tom almost on his heels. They took the corner around which Cousin Ed had vanished a minute before, and saw an excited crowd milling about ahead, near the entrance to Ed’s hotel.

On the sidewalk in their midst lay a still form—Ed Longstreet. Blood rushed from a crescent gash on the side of his head, on his right temple.

Tom was relieved to note his cousin’s eyelashes twitching as consciousness flickered back into place.

And the young inventor noticed something else, too. The book,
Travels in Remotest Araby
, was nowhere to be seen!

"ALL I KNOW is that I glimpsed someone rushing my way out of the street—a man this time, by the way," stated Ed Longstreet, an ambulance ride and doctor visit behind him, and a few stitches stinging in his head. "Hit me with something."

"Something blunt, fortunately," said Tom. "Then he grabbed your book and ran. The police say they could get nothing useful from the onlookers."

"But that Kazar feller made all sorts o’ promises to move heaven n’ Earth," Chow reported. "Which my Texas good sense tells me is jest more noise."

"And all for what? For nothing!" Ed declared in disgust. "The book won’t even lead you to the mine. Sacred Simoleons!—it’s just
literature
."

"But he might not know that," Tom pointed out. "And of course, you may just have been the victim of an ordinary street mugger. He might not have had any idea what was in that package."

"Well," said Ed indignantly, "he could have asked!"

Though Ed’s injuries were not too serious, he needed a few days of quiet recuperation, and at Tom’s urging he chose to take them aboard the
Sky Queen
with the others.

The mystery, ever more convoluted, weighed upon them all. "Book, book, who’s got the book?" muttered Bud. "Good books, bad books, fake books, real books—even books we’re not allowed to read!"

A new day confronted Tom with the inescapable fact that there was work to be done. It couldn’t
all
be fun and cranial injuries. The young Mission Chief laid out a plan of action. Arv would stay in Shirabad that day to see about recruiting local workmen for the project. Meanwhile, Tom and the others would take off in the
Sky Queen
for a survey flight over the region of the mountain-girded country that was the target of the Provard Group’s development project. "We’ll also land at the workers’ encampment they’ve already set up," Tom explained to Slim Davis, the pilot for the jaunt. "I’ll give you the coordinates Provard provided."

Soon they were winging across the rugged interior, cruising slowly at a moderate altitude. The steppes and plateaus were almost barren, but there were pasture lands and farm villages on the upward slopes, watered by melting snows from the peaks. They skirted the mountains, looming ever mightier and more forbidding, along slopes clad in a greenish-brown stubble of camel grass. As they traveled higher, leaving the flat settled areas far behind, the uplands became more fertile. Dense shrubbery and wooded patches appeared.

"No big towns," Bud commented. "No highways, no railroad tracks, no nothing."

"But in some places the actual population is fairly large, though it doesn’t show from the air," said Tom thoughtfully. "These people are very poor, Bud, at least by our standards.
They
are why we’re here."

Before long even the rarefied traces of human habitation had disappeared. Spread out below them was a strange, forbidding region, a harsh topography Tom had never seen before. Long, low hillocks and narrow ridges with razorback spines radiated from the bases of block-sided mountains. These narrow features were separated from one another by deep gashes that were narrower still, virtual cracks in the ground, their floors deep in shadow.

Tom consulted a detailed map, and broke out in a disbelieving chuckle. "Might have known!" he said to Bud and Chow. "This area is called the
Turq’ha Nur
—the place Wayne said the Assassins cult is supposed to be hiding."

"You surprised, boss? I already got my ol’ sixgun all oiled an’ ready!" Chow snorted.

"I wonder what the name means?—probably Keep Out!" Bud speculated.

"Let’s see." Using one of the Enterprises videophone satellites as a relay, Tom accessed the Internet and found a website discussing the origins of geographical terms. "In the local dialect, Turq’ha Nur means ‘The Sharp Talons’. ‘
The name is attributed to the talon- or claw-like appearance of the elongated ridge features’
."

Chow stated, "Boys—I cain’t say it sounds friendly."

"The region sure isn’t friendly to overflight surveying by the
Sky Queen
," Tom noted. "If we’re going to map out the local resources effectively, we’ll have to get down between those canyon walls."

"The atomicar?" suggested Slim.

"Let’s give the cycloplane a try first," Tom decided.

Soon a portion of the underside of the hovering Flying Lab slid downward, and Tom’s streamlined ultrasonic cycloplane zoomed away into the upper air, riding the rapidly spinning cylinders that provided its lift in the place of wings or rotor-blades. The
SwiftStorm
dropped close to the plateau-like top of one of the mountains, then slowly worked its way down into a ridge-walled canyon.

The zig-zagging fissure was several hundred feet deep in many places, its walls drawing together quickly as they descended from the upper opening, which became a jagged slot of blue sky high above. Presently an alarm sounded.

"That’s the cybertron," Tom told his black-haired copilot, "telling us we can’t go any lower. The canyon walls are starting to distort the ultrasonic air flow."

Bud nodded and craned his neck to see as far down as he could manage. "Good night, we’re still a few stories off the bottom! Is that good enough, Tom?"

The young inventor returned a shrug. "We might be able to live with it. It depends on how much ground we can cover in forward motion—and how fast." Unfortunately, disappointment loomed up almost right away. The canyon not only narrowed unpredictably, but made strange, sharp turns right and left, which the cycloplane could only manage at a snail’s pace. Finally Tom gave up and sent the craft humming skyward.

"This is no good," he pronounced. "And this crack doesn’t look to be any worse than the rest of them. If we’re going to really survey the Tulq’ha Nur― "

"It’ll be in your triphibian atomicar!" Bud finished with a subdued cheer.

They flew back aboard the Flying Lab and traded the cycloplane for the much smaller and nimbler
Silent Streak
. In minutes they had touched down on the relatively flat bottom of the same canyon they had been following before.

"Now
this
is what I call
exploring!
" exulted Bud as the atomicar sped along effortlessly on its magnetically suspended wheels. "No pith helmets, no surly camels, no sun in your eyes. Just atomic electricity and contour seats."

"Not to mention air conditioning and glare–free headlights," Tom laughingly continued. The vehicle’s electronic lamps illuminated the canyon ahead of them in a crisp, diamond-bright glow.

Allowing the cybertron to guide them robotically, Tom made a check of several instruments he had installed in the
Silent Streak
for the special needs of the Kabulistan trip. "The penetradar shows an interesting water table configuration down beneath us," he reported. "I’m beginning to see how volcanism and water erosion worked together to form these weird features. The valleys just beyond these hills are arid and uninhabited right now, but an efficient irrigation system could easily be created using deep wells."

"Any sign of—oh, let me pick something at random—
rubies?
"

"Sorry, flyboy," Tom chuckled. "Wrong kind of dirt—so far."

Tom periodically activated the pressure-cushion repelatron bank and floated the atomicar up to the top of the canyon, where he was able to contact the
Sky Queen
. "Glad things are going so well," Slim Davis said. "Will you be breaking off and heading back to us soon? I assume you want to reach that camp before sundown."

"Give us another forty minutes," answered Tom. "The map says this canyon ends in a wide valley—sort of a walled plain—a few miles ahead. I’d like to take some readings there; then we’ll call it a day."

Presently the canyon widened out as the tops of the ridges enclosing it angled lower. An abrupt turn, and the
Silent Streak
was engulfed in late afternoon sunshine. Before them was an oval-shaped valley several miles long. Its desolate floor was relatively flat, cupped between high looming mountains. In the distance they could make out the glint of sun upon thready waterfalls that descended into pools that fed a webwork of shallow, rock-rimmed creeks. The creeks in turn fed a small lake at the center of the plain.

The two boys started out across the valley plain, the atomicar raising a plume of dust in its wake. "I don’t want to take to the air, because some of our detector instruments need to stay close to ground level," Tom explained.

"Skipper, what’s that over there?" Bud was pointing toward a rust-colored bulk rising out of the arid terrain a ways to their left. Tom steered close. Then, curious, he elevated the vehicle to twenty feet so as to fly over the object. "It’s a tank," he pronounced. "At least, all that’s left of one. It’s been pretty much stripped to the bone, and rust and weather have done the rest."

They now became aware of other, similar masses here and there around them. "What in the world is a tank battalion doing out here?" Bud asked in surprise.

"I’d say they’re Soviet tanks left behind in the collapse of the Afghanistan occupation, decades ago."

Tom landed the atomicar and they resumed their drive across the eerie, silent plain—for at first the exterior microphones detected nothing but the sigh of the wind.

Suddenly the boys were startled by the sound of thundering hoofbeats from the cabin speakers. They gaped in surprise as two fierce-looking hill tribesmen came galloping over a low rise on horseback, as if they had been concealing themselves. The turbaned, baggy-trousered riders were shouting and brandishing long glittering spears.

Bang!... Bang!... Bang!

To Tom and Bud’s horror, a band of the same fierce-looking horsemen, this time armed with modern, powerful-looking rifles, came charging around the same rise. Riding at a gallop, they closed the distance to the
Streak
in a matter of seconds!

Instantly Tom fed power to the electromotors. The scarlet-trimmed car shot forward like a puma, acceleration throwing the youths back into their seats. Then it became airborne for a moment—a leaping puma! The tribesmen seemed startled by the sudden move, rearing off in two directions, which allowed Tom and Bud to cut through the middle and put some space behind them. Spears hurtled through the air at the car, futilely.

"Okay—now we can relax!" grinned Bud, easing back. But Tom wasn’t so sure!

The atomicar’s flying speed was far more limited than its ground speed, due to its manner of forward propulsion, but it seemed they had safely outdistanced their pursuers. Tom warily brought the
Streak
down to the ground again and they surged forward. It instantly became clear that they had been tricked! Rifle reports began to pop fiercely to the rear, and spurts of sand and dust jetted up on either side. "They’re getting closer!" Bud exclaimed, staring at the cybertron’s radar output. "How can that
be?
Can’t you get this bucket going any faster?"