THE TOM SWIFT INVENTION ADVENTURES
 
 TOM SWIFT
AND HIS MEGASCOPE
SPACE PROBER
 
 BY VICTOR APPLETON II
 

"TOM! Someone has stolen your invention!" gasped Bud Barclay as he scanned a news story on the front page of the Shopton Evening Bulletin through the plastic cover of its streetside rack. Tom Swift, a crewcut blond youth who was Bud’s closest friend, looked over in astonishment.

"Stolen my invention?" Tom echoed. "Which one?"

The pretty darkhaired girl standing next to Tom also looked over. "Yes, Bud, you must be specific. Tom has ever so many inventions to steal, you know."

The last member of the strolling foursome, Tom’s blond younger sister Sandra, giggled at her friend Bashalli’s ironic remark. "What is the latest one anyway? I’ve sort’ve lost track."

"Your new machine for fooling around with molecules, Tom!" Bud continued with a humorously rankled look at the two girls. "Look, here it is on the front page."

Tom approached and leaned down to study the article. "Hmm! Well..." Dropping in some coins he pulled the newspaper from its rack and began to read, flipping to an inside page as the others waited expectantly.

"What does the headline say?" Sandy asked Bud.

"Something like, French Scientist Goes Swift One Better With Matter Machine," was Bud’s reply. He added disgustedly: "Pretty typical potstirring from our pal Perkins." Dan Perkins, editor of the Bulletin, had long had a somewhat strained relationship with Tom Swift Enterprises, where Tom and his father developed their renowned inventions. He had proven himself quick to report the advances and discoveries of Enterprises’ presumed "competitors."

Tom read the story with growing excitement, commenting aloud for the benefit of the others. It stated that Roland Galaspain, a French engineer, had developed a revolutionary method of manipulating certain of the fundamental properties of matter. Details of his invention were not given, but a demonstration would take place Monday of the following week in Paris, to which scientists from all over the world were being invited.

Bud pointed. "No details—but that photo sure shows a gizmo like the one you were showing me just yesterday! And the basic idea sounds like the same deal!"

"Quite a coincidence," Tom murmured.

"Coincidence my hat!" snorted the blackhaired flyer angrily. "You perfected the same kind of machine just a few days ago, skipper!"

"Bud does have a point," Bashalli said softly. "When lightning strikes twice, you have to wonder about it. And run for cover."

Tom nodded. "I know. But lightning sometimes does strike twice, guys, and this Galaspain fellow might have thought it up himself. But I’ll ask Harlan what he thinks when I come in to work tomorrow." Harlan Ames, a former member of the Secret Service and the chief security officer at Enterprises, had dealt with many instances of theft and espionage at the highsecurity Swift installation.

The four friends were taking a relaxed stroll down Shopton’s Commerce Avenue. They had just taken in an early-evening movie and were headed toward a restaurant down the block. In the distance they could see the reflections of the setting sun on Lake Carlopa.

"This is enough to spoil a person’s dinner," Sandy grumbled. "Bud and Tom finally manage to work us into their labors-of-Hercules schedule, and now this."

Bud broke the mood with a sudden grin. "Don’t fret, ladies—I still have an appetite."

Tom’s sleep was troubled by questions that night. He drove to work early the next morning, waiting in the spacious office he shared with his father for Ames, who had the adjacent office, to arrive. Soon he was engaged in spelling out the story as the lean older man listened attentively across his desk.

"I read the story myself, yesterday," Ames stated. "But I didn’t think a whole lot about it. You say the man’s invention resembles your own?"

Tom nodded. "Very much. Of course it’s true that the science dictates the engineering on things like this. But the photo shows certain details that strike a little to close to home."

"All right. But just what is this new invention? What does it do?"

"I call it a matter translimator." Tom smiled at the wry expression on Ames’s face as he encountered yet another opaquelynamed Tom Swift invention. "The ‘lim’ part comes from ‘sublimate’—the phenomenon of solids turning directly to gas without a liquid phase."

"Like with dry ice?"

"Uhhuh." The young inventor explained that he had devised a scientific means of changing the state of matter without heating or cooling, or altering the ambient pressure. "In other words, a piece of metal could be liquified without melting it, or water could be turned to ice without freezing it. It uses a variation on the matterlens technology we developed for the space solartron."

"I see. Now, boss, tell me how such a thing would be valuable enough to be bait for a thief."

For a moment Tom was quiet and thoughtful. "Harlan, I pretty much work up these inventions for the fun and the science—plus the personal challenge. But ultimately the translimator could have all sorts of applications in materials engineering. If we could find a way to stabilize what it produces—right now ‘solid helium’ lasts about three nanoseconds outside the receiving chamber before falling apart!—all sorts of unexpected supertechnologies could come over the horizon."

"All right, then," said Ames crisply. "So in the long run it has tremendous potential. The supposed ‘inventor’ could peddle it to any number of manufacturers."

"Yes, or perhaps lease it out in some way and collect fees."

"Which leads to the next all-too-obvious question, my friend. If the French version is stolen, how did they do it?" The security chief looked grim. "Where’s the leak?"

Tom shrugged. "I’ve gone over and over the whole thing in my mind. I just don’t see how it’s possible. This isn’t a case where some rogue employee could be acting as a spy. I’ve never allowed the blueprints or guidemodels out of my sight. At night it’s all locked away in the security cabinets."

"Which only unlocks for someone with Tom Swift’s DNA. And of course, the patrolscope radar system should reveal any intruders on the plant grounds. It had better after all the money you folks spent improving it since the last time it let us down!"

Tom laughed. "Right. But despite all precautions our thief might have stolen one of the improved deactivator amulets. Or come up with a bootleg version despite all our copydefeat gimmicks."

"Let’s try another tack. What about tapping one of your computers?—remotely, maybe."

"Not possible. I haven’t put anything about the translimator in my daily journal, since we know that isn’t completely secure. I haven’t used a server or network of any kind, internal or external."

"Then what about the physical hard drive on your lab computer?" Ames speculated. "You do a lot of computer-assisted design. You must save your work."

"Sure. But I save it all directly to a removable hyperdensity chip, which goes in the secure cabinet like everything else." Tom pointed out that even the very slight radiopulses caused by his keyboard strokes and mouse movements—which conceivably could be electronically monitored from a distance—would be blocked by the special coating of the lab’s walls.

"Okay, Tom. You’ve convinced me."

"Yeah," Tom responded ruefully. "And you know what, Harlan? I’m convinced that I’m wrong!"

Troubled and uncertain, Tom left the administration building and hopped into a nanocar, one of Enterprises’ electric micro-jeeps. Seeing Bud on one of the moving ridewalks, Tom invited his pal to join him. When they reached a modernistic glasswalled building of striking design, Tom braked to a halt. Inside was his private design laboratory, crammed with the latest in research equipment. This was where the matter translimator had been worked out, and where the prototype model Tom had demonstrated to Bud—constructed within its secure walls—had been thoroughly tested, then immediately dismantled.

"Guess I should have used the underground lab," Tom fretted. "But it’s set up for testing, not design work."

"I take it you think there might be something to my suspicions—now," remarked Bud with raised eyebrows and a hint of friendly irony.

The boys sprinted to the lab, where Tom beamed an electronic key at its reinforced door. The door swung open and Tom approached the row of safelike security cabinets, built directly into the thick wall. He touched the DNA-reader pad next to one of them, and its covering panel slid aside. "Pal, if something’s missing, you’ll have to scrape me up from the floor!" Tom muttered to Bud.

Tom hastily ruffled through a sheaf of blueprints, sketches, and printed data sheets. He picked up several of the oblong data chips and readoff their classification index numbers. At last he sighed with relief.

"Nothing missing," be announced.

Bud, a tall muscular youth who, like Tom, appeared no older than 18, glared at the mass of papers. Then he shook his head, unconvinced. "Then mystery isn’t solved, Tom—it’s worse! I still think there’s something fishy about that guy coming up with the same invention! And I know you do too."

Securing the cabinet, Tom gazed off into blank space, a worried expression on his face. "I’ll admit I’d like to have a look at Galaspain’s machine."

Bud snapped his fingers. "Hey! Wait a minute! Didn’t that news story say scientists from all over the world were being invited to Galaspain’s demonstration? So that includes you. Right?"

"But Dad and I haven’t received an invitation."

Bud thumped his fist angrily on the laboratory workbench. "There’s your answer, pal. Tom and Damon Swift are two of America’s most famous scientists. I mean, genius boy, you’re practically a brand name! If anyone rated invitations, you both did—which proves Frenchy wasn’t taking any chances on being found out!" Tom conceded the point, and Bud continued stubbornly, "If Galaspain stole your idea, I intend to find out."

Tom looked quizzically at his friend. "That’s great, flyboy. So how? It looks to me like we’ve hit a dead end."

The young flyer grinned back. "Dead end? No such thing! I’ve already put a plan together. I’ll contact the guy for an invitation to his big show and hop over to Paris. And don’t think I won’t fire plenty of questions at him! It’ll make him nervous. Maybe he’ll panic and confess the whole thing right in front of the news cameras."

As Tom looked on skeptically, Bud picked up a pad and roughed out an ecablegram to be sent to Galaspain. It read:

Tom burst into laughter. "What, no Ph.D. after your name, President Barclay?"

Nothing more was said. But unbeknownst to Tom and his father, Bud did send a message to the French scientist, having found a contact address on the Internet. He stated that he would like to bring the famous Swifts to the demonstration. During the next two days, Bud checked his home computer frequently. But no reply from France was received. Lotta nerve, he grumbled to himself, blowing off a message from Tom Swift’s best friend!

Saturday evening, as the Swifts were enjoying a week end at home, Bud dropped in for a brief visit. He discussed the Galaspain mystery with Tom and his father in the den. "It does seem odd," admitted Mr. Swift, to whom Tom bore a striking resemblance.

Bud now told them about his emailed message. "Galaspain paid no attention. What’s more, I called ten different people around the country from Rafe Franzenberg’s list—outstanding American scientists, all of them—and not one of them has received word one from the guy."

"Evidently he doesn’t trust anyone from our country," said Mr. Swift soberly. "One wonders why, hmm? But national pride plays its role in science, as in everything else. We’ve been on both sides of it at Enterprises."

As Bud started to comment, Tom interrupted him by suddenly bolting to his feet from his chair. "Good night! I just realized—"

Mr. Swift looked alarmed. "What is it, son? What’s wrong?"

"I—I think I’m the cause of the information leak," replied the young inventor. A stricken expression had settled on his young face. "And if I’m right, Galaspain and the others at that demonstration are in terrible danger!"

STARTLED into silence, Bud and Mr. Swift waited for Tom to continue. The youth ran a nervous hand through his spiky crewcut. "When I tested my original design," Tom explained, "a few bugs showed up, pretty serious ones. Dad, you remember how I had to redesign the register."

"Yes. You said the carbon bonds were flash-vaporizing."

"Right, producing unmanageable back-pressure in the chamber."

"So?" Bud put in with a puzzled look.

"I redesigned that feature of my machine and had Arv Hanson work up a second prototype, the one you saw the other day, Bud," Tom replied. "But Galaspain may not know that." The youthful inventor added excitedly, "Unless he perfected the register himself, the machine may blow up!"

Bud gave a low whistle. Mr. Swift’s expression was grave and thoughtful.

"But what’s this bit about you having leaked the plans to Galaspain?" asked Bud.

"I completely forgot. When I was trying to solve the problem, I asked Dr. Roggarson to look over the specs and blueprints."

"Irv Roggarson?" repeated Tom’s father. "But he’s—"

"Up at the space outpost," Tom concluded, referring to Swift Enterprises’ space station orbiting 22,300 above the equator. "I transmitted the materials up to him over the high-baud lasercom!"

Damon Swift shook his head. "Let’s take a breather for a second. Irv Roggarson himself is surely above suspicion. Are you suggesting that someone tapped into the laser communications beam? Tell me how that’s possible, Tom. You have a tight beam a few inches in diameter linking Enterprises and the outpost for no more than a few seconds. A spy would have had to position himself precisely in the way—invisibly, as he went undetected—then intercept the beam, record the signal content, and then retransmit it along its way. All in a matter of moments!"

"I’m not saying I know how it was done," admitted Tom. "But there’s the weak link we’ve been looking for. The question right now is, should I warn Galaspain, Dad? Maybe try to stop the demonstration?"

The elder scientist again shook his head. "Frankly, I’m afraid there’s nothing you can do. If you tried to stop Galaspain, he and the authorities might construe it to mean you’re calling him a thief."

"Which would be true," Bud noted wryly.

The young inventor looked resigned. "But Dad’s right, Bud. It would complicate getting him to act on the warning, because he would be afraid that acting on it would come across as admitting the accusation," said Tom. "And yet we have to do something. We can’t just let the man blow himself up!"

Bud shrugged with a look that told Tom he understood—but didn’t entirely agree.

After some thought Tom called Harlan Ames and asked him to use some of his contacts in government to allow Tom to pass along a message that would appear to have a degree of official sanction behind it. He worded the message carefully, politely mentioning his own work in a "similar area of research," and noting the problem that had cropped up.

All of Sunday passed by. There was no response back from France. "He’s a wellknown engineer," pronounced Mr. Swift. "He may have been able to correct the problem using your input, though he doesn’t choose to acknowledge it."

Tom said with worry in his voice, "Let’s hope he knows what he’s doing."

The demonstration in Paris was scheduled for six o’clock Monday morning, which would be one A.M. in Shopton, New York. Bud and the Swift family planned to watch the proceedings on television. Despite the shadow over the event, Sandy was delighted when she heard of the late night gathering. "A TV party! Wonderful!" she announced with a giggle. "I’ll ask Bashi over to share the popcorn."

Sunday evening Bud brought Bashalli over to the Swifts’ home in his convertible. Mrs. Swift, a slim and pretty woman, welcomed the guests warmly. After one of her delicious chicken dinners and dessert provided by Bashalli, the young people played music and videos, danced, and chatted until the time for the demonstration approached.

"Will we be receiving the picture direct from France?" asked Bashalli as Tom switched on the living room’s big, elaborate TV screen.

Tom nodded. "That’s right, Bash. Via our outpost in space." The space station not only engaged in research and in manufacturing work, but was also used for relaying high-definition television signals from point to point around the world. "We’ll be getting a simultaneous audio stream from news sources on the Net, too. The Paris broadcasts wouldn’t be in English, of course."

"Inconsiderate of them," stated Bashalli, a native of Pakistan, with a smile.

The Paris network—evidently a channel devoted to science and technology—came into focus on the screen. From the audio setup came: "We bring you now onthespot web coverage of an important news event, direct from Galaspain Laboratories in Paris." As the commentator talked about the machine and its potential industrial significance, the TV camera panned across the device itself. The picture briefly zoomed in on Galaspain, a hawkfaced man with spectacles and a ragged, dark mustache. The engineer made a brief speech in French, pointing out the features of his invention.

"That phony!" Bud gritted. "His machine looks just like yours, Tom!"

His friend was too absorbed to comment. The whole group, now including Mr. and Mrs. Swift, watched the screen closely as the engineer threw a switch to start his machine in operation.

The audio announcer spoke softly, as if narrating a crucial golf match. "We’re informed the machine has performed well in small-scale testing, but today we’re promised something dramatic that hasn’t been tried before. We’ll see the result any minute now."

Galaspain watched smugly, strutting about the room and occasionally checking a valve or dial. There were murmurs of appreciation from his onscreen audience—men and women in white scientific coats, business persons, media techs.

Suddenly there came a loud explosion! As the picture quivered on the screen, Tom shot his father an anguished look. When the image settled into focus again, the demonstration hall was in turmoil, filling with a haze of white smoke and echoing with the shouts and groans of the injured. The horrified viewers in the Swift living room saw that the mattercontrol machine had blown apart. Some parts of the wreckage flickered with sparks or flames. Debris was scattered about and a number of people, including Galaspain, had been knocked off their feet.

The reporting announcer was beside himself with the thrill of fresh catastrophe. "You heard it, folks! Something has gone tragically wrong!" he shouted above the screams of the audience. "That blast you heard was the machine blowing up! And what a blast it was."

"You tried, Tom," said Mrs. Swift comfortingly. "This wasn’t your fault." Her son could only nod, with a shrug of regret and lingering shock. Bud put a hand on his shoulder.

Later in the day the media were reporting the grim effects of the explosive malfunction. Several members of the audience had been rushed to the nearest hospital in serious condition. And there was one fatality. Standing closest to the machine, Roland Galaspain had borne the full force of the blast.

"I wonder if this is the end of it," Tom murmured.

"It never is," Bud declared. "Someone was behind it, skipper, and we’re sure to hear from him again."

Tom spent the afternoon making triply sure he had solved the destructive problem in the translimator. At eight o’clock he and Bud left the plant to catch a late snack together before going their separate ways.

He still feels like it’s his fault, Bud thought, looking on with concern at the bronzehued twoseater in front of him.

The narrow highway into the main part of town ducked through the lightly wooded area that skirted Shopton. Suddenly Bud’s musings on his chum and the mystery were interrupted as he saw Tom’s car veer wildly into the opposite lane, tires screeching.

"Hey! Watch it, pal!" Bud gasped. Had Tom fallen asleep at the wheel—or blacked out?

For a moment it looked as though Tom had brought his car under control, and Bud breathed a sigh of relief. But the next instant Tom’s car shot off toward the shoulder of the road, teetered on the edge of the ditch that ran alongside, spraying gravel—and then turned over!

Bud, thoroughly alarmed, slammed on the brakes of his own car and swerved the convertible toward the side of the road. As the wheels screeched to a skidding stop, and he leapt right over the door like a pole-vaulter, Bud caught a momentary glimpse of a figure darting off among the trees and underbrush. Could he have had anything to do with Tom’s accident?

Can’t waste time on him, Bud thought.

Bud turned toward the ditch and scrambled down the sloping shoulder. Tom’s sportscar rested propped up on its side, wheels still spinning, headlights still beaming. A hopeful sign! But how the heck can I get him free? the young flyer worried. The passenger side of the car was pressed against the ground, and the other was level with the top of Bud’s head, the door handle well out of reach!

"Okay now—this is a thinking challenge," he muttered to himself frantically. "What would Tom do?"

As a thought struck him, he ran to one of the roadside trees. Using all his strength, the exfootballer ripped down a thick, sturdy bough and dragged it back to Tom’s car, propping it up at a sharp angle between ground and underside.

Bud began to rock the car, and it began to slip and tilt. Abruptly it overbalanced and fell against the bough full force, just as Bud had hoped. The bough bent, splintered, and gave way—but it had managed to cushion the car’s fall, preventing a jolt that might have caused Tom further injury.

Bud managed to lunge through the shattered driver’s window to kill the power, then knelt beside it in a frenzy of fear. The young inventor was slumped inside, not moving.

"Tom! Tom!" Bud cried out, testing the door handle.

To Bud’s immense relief, his pal moved and opened his eyes. "Ohh!" Tom said and rubbed his forehead dazedly.

"You’ll be all right," Bud said hopefully.

"Yes, I’m all right—I guess," Tom murmured. "Just shaken up. The anticrash system kept me in my seat at first, until it cut out." The youth was referring to an automatic protective mechanism he had first developed for his most recent invention, his triphibian atomicar. The setup used his force-ray repelatron in place of the usual safety straps. "Guess the impact jarred something loose... You know, I really should embed the control circuitry in—"

"Yep, you really are all right, genius boy!" Bud commented with a relieved grin. He made sure his friend had suffered no broken bones or other serious injury, then helped Tom to his feet. The young inventor’s face was only slightly bruised, and his bluestriped t-shirt had come through the ordeal unscathed. "It was just the sudden stop that acted as my knockout punch," said Tom.

"What happened to your car?" Bud asked with a puzzled frown. "I mean, before it kissed the ground!"

"Search me. The car went out of control all of a sudden," Tom said. "Wouldn’t seem to answer the wheel. Weird. I’ll check right now."

"I don’t think so," Bud retorted as Tom started toward the dented sports car. "What I think is, you’re going straight to sickbay and let Doc Simpson do the checking up. He said he’d be working late."

Overriding Tom’s rueful protests, Bud guided him up to the red convertible and helped him inside. Then, taking his own place at the wheel, Bud sped back to Swift Enterprises, contacting Simpson on his cellphone. They passed through the main gate and pulled up outside the plant’s infirmary.

Dr. Simpson, the young medic of Enterprises, eyed Tom with a look of comic dismay as the two boys entered his office. "Good grief, skipper!" he said, seeing Tom’s visible scrapes and bruises. "You have a lab accident?"

Bud grinned. "No. He was just doing a somersault with his car. Kind of late in the day to start cutting up, wouldn’t you say, Doc?"

Doc Simpson laughed. "Sure is. Anyway, I’m the one who’s supposed to do the cutting up around here." He reached for a medical kit.

"Well, don’t start on me." Tom chuckled. "We don’t need exploratory surgery to tell me I’m just a little shaken up."

The physician examined Tom carefully and treated a few slight cuts, but said that otherwise he found the patient uninjured. Nevertheless, he ordered Tom to rest for an hour or two on a cot in one of the treatment rooms.

"Listen, I can’t stay here," Tom argued as he put on his t-shirt. "I have to find out what went wrong with that car."

"It’ll wait," Doc insisted, shepherding Tom into a treatment room. "In the meantime, you stretch out on this cot."

"Relax," Bud told his pal. "I’ll go see about your car."

When Tom tried to object, Doc Simpson added persuasively, "We’re saving you for the last play of the fourth quarter, Tom Swift!"

"I’ll even leave you with something to chew over," offered Bud. He told Tom about the fleeing figure he had seen briefly in the headlights of his car.

"I saw someone too," responded the patient, "just before I lost control. In fact I saw a little more than you did, chum. It was a woman, carrying something in her hand."

"Like a gun?"

"No, bigger and bulkier. It looked more like a camera—but I only got a glimpse. No way I could identify the woman."

Tom lay down with a humorous grumble while Bud hurried off to the big garage and maintenance shop which housed Enterprises’ fleet of trucks and jeeps. Soon a wrecker was on its way with Al Roster, one of the mechanics working the night shift, at the wheel and Bud beside him.

When they arrived at the scene of the accident, Al said, "Wow! Tom was lucky!"

Tom’s car was hoisted out of the ditch with the tow crane. The mechanic checked the steering system but could find nothing wrong. Other than the broken windows the only apparent damages were some deep fender dents and a few body scratches.

"Sure the boss didn’t black out or something?" the mechanic asked.

"Get real, Al!" Bud said scornfully. "Even if Tom’s brain was only hitting on half the cylinders, it’d still rev faster than most do at full choke."

Al shrugged. "I thank you, Bud, for explaining that to me in language I understand. Okay, we’ll take the car back to the shop and tear it down. But t’tell you the truth," he went on, "I figure there couldn’t be anything out of kilter, the way Tom takes care of this baby."

Bud scowled. "Yeah. Guess you’re right, Al. We’ve been following the wrong trail."

Without explaining his last remark, Bud rode back to Enterprises, hurrying off to talk to Tom after thanking the mechanic. The two boys discussed the problem over trays of a late supper brought in by a nurse. Tom had already bathed and changed into a fresh bluestriped t-shirt from his office closet.

"You know, Bud, I’ve been thinking," he mused. "Some kind of ray could have been used on my car—a ray which temporarily froze the steering linkages or something. We’ve dealt with beamweapons before. And that would explain the thing the woman was carrying."

"That’s the scientific part of the mystery, pal," Bud declared warmly, "and that’s your specialty. You can go wild checking out the car—tomorrow!"

"I think we’d better tell Harlan," Tom said grimly.

"Tomorrow!"

Tom chuckled at Bud’s stern expression. "Right, flyboy—tomorrow!"

The next morning the two met at the office of the security chief, Tom having ridden to work with his father. Ames became alarmed, in his stoic way, upon hearing the boys’ story. Picking up the telephone, Ames called Shopton police headquarters. Captain Rock, an old friend of the Swifts, promised to meet them immediately at the scene of the accident.

Shortly after Tom and his two companions arrived, a police car pulled up alongside. The officer listened to an account of what had happened, then turned to Bud.

"What did this figure you saw running away look like?"

"I caught only an eyeblink’s worth," Bud said. "Just somebody slight and thin, dressed in rough clothes. She was sort of crouched over as she darted off into the brush. My impression is she’s darkhaired, a short hairdo."

The sergeant who had accompanied Rock made a note of this. Then Harlan Ames asked, "Can either of you point out exactly where she went?"

Tom shook his head, but Bud answered, "I think so." He led the way toward the spot where the stranger had disappeared into the woods. The trees grew close together near the road, then thinned into a marshy area of low ground. Suddenly Ames gave a cry of excitement and pointed to a series of footprints in the soft muck.

"That’s her trail, I’ll bet!" Bud exclaimed.

Captain Rock bent to examine them and frowned. "Pretty wide shoe prints for a woman," he stated. "Then again, she might have worn hunter’s boots over her own dainty shoes."

"Looks to me like we have more than one set of footprints," Ames declared.

"I agree. Look at ’em!—as many as four people, seems to me." The group followed the trail for a few minutes, but as the ground sloped upward and became more rocky, the prints disappeared.

Meanwhile, Tom had hung back as he pursued a theory of his own. He was hoping to find some scientific clues to the method used in disabling his car. A path of trampled underbrush showed the stranger’s movements before she had fled. "She waited here," he muttered to himself. "But how could she have known to expect me in the first place?"

Tom followed the trail from the edge of the woods to a single huge oak tree standing close to the roadside. Good place to lie in wait, he thought—and then his eyes widened in excitement!

The others were returning, and Tom beckoned excitedly. "Come here and take a look at this."

They examined what Tom had discovered—some odd, dark patches on the bark of the tree trunk. "What is it, Tom?" asked Bud. "Scorch marks?"

"It looks a lot like charring from heat," the young inventor replied. "But something else can also cause that effect. Namely intense cold!"

The sergeant gulped and Captain Rock repeated the word skeptically. "Cold?"

"What’s your theory, skipper?" Ames asked.

"It’s not exactly a theory yet," responded Tom. "Let’s just call it Swift’s Conjecture." He explained that some features of the markings were too sharply delimited for radiant heat effects. "And also, look at this." He rubbed a finger along the wood at the surface of one of the patches. The wood seemed to disintegrate into a rain of white, ashy powder. "I can tell it isn’t ordinary wood ash, but something more like an instantaneous freeze-dry phenomenon. It may be our lady sniper used a kind of electromagnetic ray projector to ‘freeze’—literally!—some crucial part of the steering mechanism. These marks could be accidental coldburns from the ray beam, if that’s what we should call it."

Harlan Ames nodded. "Just about the right height."

"But who was the dirty ratgirl?" Bud growled. "And why is she out to get you? Think it has something to do with the theft of your plans?"

Tom shrugged ruefully. "Wish I could tell you, chum. My crystal ball is a bit clouded."

Both Rock and Harlan Ames promised to check out every possible lead. Tom, meanwhile, decided to put the whole matter from his mind and turn his thoughts to perfecting his matter translimator. "But that invention doesn’t really need much more basic work," he told himself wryly as he rode back to the plant. "I’d better come up with something new to think about pretty quick—to keep the ol’ Swift brain on the level!"

At home that evening, the family supper was interrupted by the soft ring of the telephone. Mr. Swift, being closest, answered. Tom, Sandy, and Mrs. Swift saw a look of excitement flash over his face as he took the message.

"Thank you, Colonel. We’ll be there, of course," Damon Swift said, just before hanging up.

"It must be something important," commented Tom’s mother. "It’s not just anyone who knows our private number."

"Long distance?" Tom asked.

"Yes, son, from Washington. Swifts one and all, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has just invited Tom and myself to attend a meeting tomorrow morning to discuss a manned government space probe to Venus!"

"Venus? My goodness!" Sandy leapt to her feet.

Tom’s eyes lit up with thrilled interest as he and his father exchanged glances. Tom had wanted a new challenge—and here was one bigger than he had dreamed!

THE next day Tom ate a hurried breakfast, kissed his mother and Sandy goodbye, and drove to the plant with his father. Both shared a feeling of stifled excitement. If the Swifts were assigned the manned space flight to Venus, it would be the most daring venture they had ever undertaken!

"Of course, the trip itself won’t be a problem," Tom remarked. We’ve already traveled to the doorstep of Venus in the Challenger." The Challenger was Tom’s huge repelatrondriven spaceship in which he had crossed interplanetary space to the vicinity of Earth’s cloud-shrouded neighbor, an adventure recounted in Tom Swift and His Space Solartron.

"The real challenge will arise if a landing is contemplated," commented Mr. Swift.

"I’ll say! Heat, pressure, a sulfurous atmosphere—we’ll have to come up with an entirely new sort of lander craft, and exploration suits that’ll be more like deep-diver suits."

As they drove through the private executive gate, Damon Swift said, "I wonder why Col. Jessup made a point of asking us to bring Bud along to the meeting?"

"Probably because he’s known as my copilot and overall crony in adventure," speculated Tom. "Guess they’d prefer to brief us both at the same time."

Bud met them on the Enterprises airfield, eager for the trip ahead. A small commuter jet, manufactured by Enterprises’ Shopton affiliate the Swift Construction Company, stood ready for takeoff on the runway.

Bud handled the controls. "Venus!" he whooped in excitement. "Man, this is going to be more fun than flying a monkey to the moon!—which we’ve already done, anyway."

Within half an hour they were landing in Washington. A car awaited to take them to NASA headquarters near the national mall.

Dr. Lars Norstrom, a lean man with Vikingblond hair, greeted them warmly. "Good to see you again Damon, Tom. Thanks for coming on such short notice." Dr. Norstrom, project coordinator of the national manned space flight program, was an old friend of the Swifts.

"We’re happy you called on us," said Mr. Swift. "This is Bud Barclay."

Dr. Norstrom beamed at the young flier as he shook his hand. "Of course. Delighted to meet you, Bud. We’re particularly eager to have you at this meeting."

Bud and the Swifts were somewhat mystified at the man’s last remark but made no comment. Norstrom led them to a conference room. Another NASA official awaited them there, Col. Scott Jessup, the former NASA astronaut now in charge of astronaut training.

Two other men were present as well—John Clarke and Arnold Franklin, the president and the chief engineer of the AstroDynamics Corporation, well known from their televised testimony before various Congressional committees.

Clarke flashed a friendly smile—in fact, he and his companion were all smiles—as he and the guests from Shopton shook hands. "Always a pleasure to see America’s greatest space pioneers again."

This is strange, Tom thought. Why are these guys here?

Using an electronic presentation screen, Norstrom outlined the details of the planned Venus flight. There would be no descent to the surface after all, but rather a lengthy and extensive study of the planet from a low orbit. "We have a distinguished team of scientists already selected. Of course we had to limit the roster to those who were physically able to endure the round trip—more than a year in space altogether."

"More than a year?" repeated Mr. Swift in surprise. "Our spaceship already made the journey across in a matter of—" He stopped as he and Tom were suddenly hit by an unexpected realization.

"You see, gentlemen," continued Norstrom, "we’ll be using an Astrodyne8 booster for the launch from Canaveral. We also like the space vehicle they’ve come up with."

Tom was thunderstruck, however much he tried not to show it on his face. The Astrodyne was a huge rocket manufactured by AstroDynamics that had been used for some years to boost satellites into space. Though the rocket was well engineered and reliable, Tom considered it inferior in thrust and refinements to the Swifts’ rockets—and frankly outdated.

"I... I see. Then the contract’s already been awarded?" Mr. Swift asked.

Norstrom nodded. He appeared embarrassed. "Yes. Now I realize this comes as something of a surprise to you, Damon. For various reasons we think AstroDynamics is the way to go for this particular job."

Now Col. Jessup spoke up. His tone was witheringly sarcastic. "That’s great diplomacy, Lars, but the Swifts deserve to know what’s really behind the decision. Boys, it’s politics, all politics. To put it bluntly, the Astrodyne is pretty nearly down for the count, but it just happens that the state in which it’s manufactured has quite a few electoral votes in play in the next national election. Also true of the state in which the manned craft, the Highroad, is being made."

"In other words," pronounced Tom impulsively, "NASA has to play ball with key congressmen if it wants to show up well in the next budget bill."

"What a smart son you have, Damon," snorted Col. Jessup.

"At any rate, the decision is made and final," huffed John Clarke, no longer quite so friendly. "The contracts are signed."

Arnold Franklin spoke, trying to make peace. "You’ll appreciate the Highroad when you get to know her. Very advanced. Nuclear powered, with a thrust system using a bank of mega-kick lasers to drive it along."

Tom Swift was intrigued in spite of himself. "Lasers? I know it’s been on the drawing board for years—direct reaction thrust from high-energy photon emission—"

"Perfected in secret as part of the SDI space weaponry program."

"I’m sure Tom and I are duly impressed," said Mr. Swift, "and I congratulate the two of you for your accomplishment. Now please tell us why we’re here."

Dr. Norstrom nodded at Clarke. "Our problem now," said Clarke, "is getting an experienced astronaut for mission pilot. Of course nowadays that means someone from Swift Enterprises. Tom here would be our first choice, but we know he’s too busy—always is. Therefore we’d like to borrow Bud Barclay."

Bud drew in a long breath. He was completely flabbergasted by the offer! Tom, too, was left speechless.

Mr. Swift smiled and looked understandingly at the young flier. "Bud, it’s up to you."

Tom quickly mastered his own disappointment and said gamely, "It’s a terrific challenge, pal! And it’s about time you had your chance to stand in the spotlight."

Bud gulped uncomfortably. "I—I don’t know what to say. I’d like to think it over, sir."

"Take as long as you need," said Dr. Norstrom.

"Just as long as you say yes," added Jessup sourly.

Mr. Swift glanced at his watch. "Suppose we three talk it over at lunch," he suggested. "Bud has the final word, of course."

The others were agreeable, and the meeting adjourned for a twohour break. As they ate lunch at a hotel restaurant, Bud and the Swifts discussed the situation. "Frankly, I’d rather not take the job," Bud bluntly declared. "I don’t want this. Sure, it’s exciting, but I consider myself a Swift man—first, last, and always."

Tom grinned at him. It wasn’t easy to do. "Thanks, pal. I’m glad you feel that way, but you can’t let it stop you. You’ll still be a ‘Swift man’ no matter what, and this would be an honor—a chance for you to be called ‘skipper’ on the greatest space flight so far."

"Tom’s right," added Mr. Swift. "You know how much we appreciate your loyalty, but an active space program is in our nation’s interest, and it mustn’t rest entirely on the shoulders of Swift Enterprises."

"You’re the man of the hour, flyboy," said Tom with a nudge.

Bud beamed excitedly. "Then—I think I’ll give my folks a call!" By the time lunch was over, he had agreed to accept AstroDynamics’ offer. His decision brought smiles and handshakes that afternoon at NASA headquarters.

"We picked you because you’re a space flight veteran, but you’ll still need a good deal of specialized training for this mission. We’ll expect you in Florida next Thursday, Bud," Clarke told him, "to begin your test work and general indoctrination."

Added Col. Jessup: "You can expect to sweat a lot, kid."

"I’ve already started!"

Back aboard the jet, an uneasy, thoughtful quiet had replaced the momentary surge of enthusiasm. Tom took the controls. The others could see that he was still feeling the sting of Enterprises’ not having been given a chance to compete in the Venus project. After taking off, Tom swung in a large arc until he was ten miles up and a hundred miles from shore.

"I think I’ll wring this crate out a bit before we land," he announced. "I’m feeling like a little exercise."

Bud grinned. "I’m always up for that. Let ’er rip, sky-skipper!" He knew this was Tom’s way of getting the Venus project out of his mind—as well as the prospect of spending many months without his close friend at his side.

"Aerobatics?" Mr. Swift inquired, as he and Bud pulled their safety belts tighter. "Take it easy though, son—your old man can only handle so many G’s!"

Looking grimly determined, Tom lowered the nose of the jet to gain speed. As he eased steadily back on the control stick, the horizon gradually dropped below the nose of the aircraft. Only blue sky could be seen as Tom passed over the top of a perfect loop. The occupants felt the acceleration G force mount steadily to almost three times their own weight.

Tom did a roll, first to the right, then to the left. "Corkscrew maneuver," he remarked.

Diving for speed again, he pulled the stick back and to the right, causing the plane to roll in a vertical climb. "Not bad," Bud said jokingly. "Not bad."

Tom halfrolled the jetcraft upside down, arcing to pin the occupants in their seats as sea and sky exchanged places. But as he attempted to recover right-side-up, Tom’s face muscles tensed suddenly.

"What’s wrong?" Mr. Swift questioned.

"The control stick! I can’t move it!" The craft continued to zoom along upside down, in a great rollercoaster curve—that ended in the ocean!

TOM STRAINED to free the stick. It would not budge. "The boosters in the control system must be jammed!"

"How about the booster-release lever?" asked Bud tensely.

Tom reached for a lever to his left and pulled it hard. He tried to move the stick. "No good! The release doesn’t work, either!"

"The air speed is increasing," Mr. Swift warned. The plane had entered a fullon inverted dive.

Tom continued to struggle with the control stick but had no success. He desperately worked a hand-operated hydraulic pump, but he could not regain pressure. "I’ll try the trim controls."

He reached to his left where two dials were located. One of them read: ailerontrim control. He turned it slowly. The plane shuddered slightly, then started to respond.

"We’re rolling out!" Mr. Swift cried.

Tom continued to adjust the ailerontrim control. But as the jet began to shift out of its upsidedown stance, the blue ocean drawing near as it tilted sideways over their heads, Bud suddenly gripped his friend’s forearm. "No—no more. Shift her back, about halfway. You’ve got to turn the arc into a full loop. Go, Tom!"

The young inventor understood instantly. Again the jet was inverted, but not completely. Tom played the trim controls against the slipstream, knowing that any moment they could stall out and begin to plunge beyond all hope of recovery.

The watery horizon seemed to lower in front of them as the forces drove the blood from their heads. For the slightest terrible instant they nosed straight down—down seemingly in front of them like a wall! Then the moment was past. The cockeyed loop was completed. They were top-side-up once again.

"Yeah!" Bud cheered. But Tom cautioned him: "We’re not out of this yet!"

"Have you any control at all?" Mr. Swift asked his son.

"I have rudder control, but I still can’t directly raise or lower the nose. We can make Enterprises, but as for a landing—! I’m going to try to use the elevator-trim control to bring us in. It’ll be tricky, but it’s worth a try."

"You can do it, pal," said Bud quietly.

Tom skillfully adjusted the trim controls. He managed to turn the plane toward Shopton, then tuned the cockpit radio. "Swift Enterprises tower," he called. "This is Tom Swift, SCC-R19. Mayday!"

The radio receiver crackled and a voice emerged from the speaker. "Swift tower. We copy, Tom! What’s the sitch?"

"Aileron and elevator controls inoperative. I’m one hundred fifty miles due east. Going to attempt a landing using trim controls!"

"Copy that." There was a pause. "Tom Swift, you are cleared for an emergency landing on eastwest runway 5. Winds northwest at onesix. We have you on radar lock. We’ll have a crash team standing by!"

Upstate New York fled beneath them, and presently Lake Carlopa appeared ahead. Tom maneuvered the aircraft east of Enterprises’ huge landing field. He then turned west in order to line up with the landing runway.

They could almost hear the sirens blaring.

"Swift tower, this is Tom on final approach!"

Tom reduced power slightly for a descent. "We’ll have to come in faster than normal to keep the trim controls effective." Tom adjusted the elevatortrimcontrol dial constantly as the plane eased downward and approached the landing end of the runway. He increased power momentarily, reduced it again, then turned the trim control to nearly full noseup position. The plane responded slowly and flared out about fifteen feet above the runway.

"Hold on!" Tom ordered.

"We’re holding!" gulped Bud in a whisper.

A wing dipped. Tom adjusted the ailerontrim control. The plane gradually leveled out. Then the nose began to lower again. He turned the elevatortrim dial to full noseup and increased power slightly. The jetcraft seemed to hang in the air for a splitsecond, then dropped hard and fast onto the runway surface. The tires screeched! Tom cut power completely. The plane skittered along the tarmac at frightful speed.

"We’re almost out of runway!" Mr. Swift murmured.

Tom applied brakes harder and harder. Just short of the boundary, the craft finally stopped, bowed forward, and fell back.

Bud mopped his pale forehead, then pumped Tom’s hand in silent gratitude.

Mr. Swift patted his son quietly on the back. "Well done," he said. "Masterful flying, Tom."

"Tom—and Bud," the youth retorted, thinking: Bud—soon to be off in space far far away.

The three climbed out and Tom immediately started tracing the cause of the trouble. As emergency vehicles roared up, Tom was pointing at the underhull of the fuselage. A dark oval discoloration stood out against the silver white.

"More of the cold-scorching?" Bud asked, crouching down next to Tom.

Tom nodded. "Worse, too. The beam affected the fuselage coating as it penetrated. And right here—"

"I know," said the youthful pilot. "Those smart-metal servoflexor rods of yours. I’ll bet we’ll find a pile of metal flakes when we open her up."

Tom snorted. "Flyboy, we can open her up right now!" He poked a finger into the discolored patch—and the metal shattered like a thin piecrust.

"This couldn’t have happened more than seconds before the stick froze up," declared Tom, as puzzled as he was angry. "That means they must have been in a boat down below, zapping us just as we banked over for that last loop. Some kind of speedboat, probably—they tailed us in parallel as best they could. They’d hardly have been able to keep pace, but the device must work over quite a distance, miles apparently, with a precise focused aim like a laser beam."

Mr. Swift had broken away from directing the emergency crew long enough to overhear Tom’s remark. "But the question remains, what tipped them off to our trip?"

Tom shrugged. "For all we know they have operatives ready for action in every big city on the Atlantic coast!"

"Right—‘evil operators are standing by’!" Bud snorted.

That evening Sandy was thrilled when she learned that Bud was going on the Venus probe project. "This calls for a farewell celebration!" she decided implacably.

"Dear, if I might make a suggestion," said Mrs. Swift, "why not combine your farewell party with the welcome home party for the Sterlings?"

Hank Sterling, Enterprises’ young chief engineer and a close friend of the Swifts and Bud Barclay, had just flown back to Shopton from a long vacation trip to South America with his wife and children. With their usual aplomb, Sandy and Bashalli had already taken charge of planning a celebratory gala at Range View Inn in the hills on the far side of Lake Carlopa. "Mother, what a wonderful idea!" Sandy bubbled. "Tomonomo, why don’t you come up with ideas like this?"

Tom grinned. "Sorry, San. Guess I’m just not the imaginative type."

The event had been scheduled for the day before Bud was to report to Cape Canaveral. Range View Inn, isolated among the pines, catered to hikers and flying enthusiasts. The inn maintained its own small flying field on level ground nearby.

The appointed day arrived. Mr. and Mrs. Sterling, Tom’s parents, and the many other guests decided to take the drive up to enjoy the scenery. Bud Barclay’s parents, and his mucholder sister and brother, had flown in from San Francisco and would be driving up by rented car.

Tom, Bud, Bashalli, and Sandy decided to fly. They whooshed off from the Enterprises airfield in a small jet-assisted helicopter called the Skeeter Two. In a handful of minutes the jetrocopter had crossed Lake Carlopa with Sandy, a trained and certified pilot, at the controls.

"Is it my imagination, Sandra, or are you taking us on a rather circuitous route?" inquired Bashalli. "Surely the point of air travel is to proceed along a straight line?"

Sandy answered, "This is what Big Brother asked me to do. For safety."

"The raygunners seem to know right away where we’re going and what we’re doing," Tom pointed out. "But unless they can read minds, they can’t anticipate a random flightpath."

Bud leaned forward. "Of course, they could go for the bottom line and just blow up the Inn."

"Troublesome passengers will be ejected, Budworth," sniffed Bash daintily. "We might have flown more stylishly in your Silent Streak atomicar, Thomas. But it is only built for two."

"We’re planning a four-seat model."

"Alas for intimacy."

"And besides, Bashi, that big dome doesn’t give much privacy anyway, down on lover’s lane," teased Sandy.

"So true. Alas for romance as well."

Tom chuckled. "I guess it looks like science and technology are going to cause the death of romance."

"Believe me, Thomas," said the pretty darkhaired Pakistani, "I have found that these days, romance can not even get started."

The jetrocopter landed at the Inn, stately and quaint next to a small tumbling stream whose banks were strewn with wild flowers. "Parking lot’s packed. Never knew I was so popular," Bud observed with a wink. "Well—I guess Hank has a few friends, too."

Inside Bud was greeted with warm applause, as were Hank and Lauren Sterling. And soon the various relatives arrived, to handshakes, hugs, and kisses.

"Now tell me, Sandra," said Bud’s mother with a mischievous smile, "Aren’t you just a little worried about Bud’s making a play for Venus?"

"Why should I be, Mrs. Barclay?" Sandy replied impishly. "With all that time on my hands I’ll find myself a new steady with a classic profile, like Mars."

Bud pretended to be shocked. "What, suddenly I’m your steady? I thought we were just a couple of pals who danced together!"

"Don’t be too sure of him, sis," Tom joked. "His heart belongs to a rocket ship."

"Not the Astrodyne-8, or that flashlight-powered sky buggy they’ve planned for me," Bud said disgustedly. "Lemme tell ya, folks, the Swifts’ Challenger can fly rings around both of ’em!"

Dinner was still an hour away, and the clock on the wall said: Mingle. Tom found himself talking to Hank Sterling about his recent adventures in Kabulistan with the triphibian atomicar.

"And now this freezeray stuff," clucked Tom’s chief engineer sympathetically. "Skipper, you’re the one who needs a vacation!"

"Maybe so," responded the young scientist-inventor. Then his voice took on a thoughtful, dreamy tone that all his friends knew very well. "But the usual drama has accomplished one thing, Hank—an idea for a new invention. If my approach pans out, it’ll protect us from having our communications tapped into by lady ray-gun wielders, or anyone else."

Sterling whistled jokingly. "I can see you’re going to put me right back to work! So what is it, some kind of new signal-coder?"

Tom shook his head. "Nope. Try this on for size—a communications device that no one in the world can possibly listen in on—ever!"

HANK STERLING nodded, and his expression revealed that he was intrigued—and startled! "That’s quite a statement, Tom. Of course we’re always coming up with new methods to keep disreputable types from listening in on us. But for each step we take, they take another. And they have bigger feet!"

Tom joined his friend in laughter. "If you want a thumbnail explanation, Hank, here it is. I have a wild sort of idea to use the principle of quantum entanglement to link together a pair of communications devices in a way that, in a certain sense, annihilates the distance between them! In effect, it’ll be like speaking right into the other person’s ear—and I think you’ll agree that in a case like that, there’s just no room to insert any kind of bug or surveillance device."

"Sounds good to me!" grinned the young engineer. "I’ve read a little about what they call ‘quantum cryptography’. But look, Tom, I’ve always understood that using the quantum principle for basic communications was just plain impossible. Someone give you permission to break the laws of physics?"

"Not break them. But just maybe there’s a way to outsmart them!"

Before Tom could elaborate, a big gravelly bellow filled the room with: "Food’s up an’ waitin’, folks! First course on the table!"

The bellower, Chow Winkler, master of the dinner, was an old and colorful friend of the Swifts. As executive chef, he was a fixture at Swift Enterprises. In his simple and straight-forward way the former chuck wagon cook from Texas had saved the day—and the bacon—more than once while traveling with his beloved young "pardners" Tom and Bud.

The Swifts, Barclays, and Sterlings, joined by Bashalli Prandit and her brother and sisterinlaw, sat at the head table of honor. There was a place there for Chow as well, but the excitable cook spent most of his time up on his pudgy bowlegs dealing with dinner, and keeping a wary eye on his assistant Boris. "Cain’t trust that fancypants Russian t’do things right proper," he grumbled to Tom.

During the dinner Hank showed a video of the sights he and his family had seen, and Tom took the microphone to briefly describe Bud’s planned voyage and the scientific accomplishments it aimed at. When he mentioned the Highroad spacecraft and its builder, there was a low muttering throughout the room.

There was a break between the end of the main course and Chow’s elaborate dessert. Dancing filled the time. The younger crowd danced to a jazzfusion combo Tom had brought in. The older guests were more strongly motivated by a rock band, the antique sounds of a quarter century past.

"Listen to that noise!" Sandy murmured to Bashalli. "What is it with that generation?"

"All a matter of when one grows up, Sandra," Bash commented. "But it is surely hard to take, having to watch all that jerking and wiggling by our elders—it seems to me rather indecent."

Chow, standing nearby, overheard. "Wa-aal now, that there bangin’ and strummin’ ain’t so bad, and it sure gives your folks some exercise. But I sure couldn’t jump around like that."

"What ever happened to the foxtrot?" asked Bud.

After dessert, applause for Chow and Boris, and more dancing, the four friends were about to leave when the Inn’s visitor’s concierge handed Tom a folded note with his name scribbled on the outside. He opened it and read:

The warning note was unsigned. Without betraying his reaction, Tom folded the paper again, stuffed it into his pocket, and turned to Bud.

"Let’s go wash up, flyboy, before we start home. Excuse us, girls?"

"Yes," Sandy answered. "We young ladies prefer associating with washed-up men."

Bud had guessed instantly that something was up. In the washroom Tom took out the note and showed it to him. Bud’s face flamed with anger as he read the message. "Those jerkfaces!" he cried. "They must have hid somewhere in the woods watching the Inn and seen us come down on the field."

Tom gave a grim nod. "I doubt they tried to defeat the alarm system and plant a bomb aboard. More than likely they’re in position to use the freeze-beam on the chopper as we take off."

"The handheld one, you suppose?"

"Maybe. But they could have the long-range model, the one they used on the jet, positioned somewhere on higher ground."

"Yeah, to zap us as we gain altitude. Skipper, I don’t know who sent this, but after what happened to your car I wouldn’t take a chance!"

Tom did not underrate the danger, but pointed out, "It doesn’t make any sense to plan on downing us—but warn us beforehand. This note may have been written by some crank and might have no connection with that road ambush or the attack on the jet."

"Could be," conceded Bud. "Tell you one thing, though. I’m looking forward to visiting Venus. But I’d really prefer doing it alive!"

The two scouted up Harlan Ames, who had attended the event with his daughter Dodie. "What does the event manager say? The fellow who brought you the note?"

"He said he found the note on the front counter by the entrance after he’d stepped away for a few minutes," explained Tom. "As you see, it had my name on it. No one saw who put it there."

"It could have been one of the employees of the Inn," the security chief speculated, "possibly someone planted in the work staff to spy on you during the event. I’ll investigate, run fingerprints and so on. But meanwhile, boss, what do you plan to do? Hitch a ride back?"

Tom smiled with determination. "Why not try to draw them out? Don’t worry, Harlan. Bud and I have dreamed up one of our daring plans!"

Presently Tom and Bud strolled over to the Inn’s airfield with Mrs. and Mrs. Barclay and Bud’s sister and brother. Tom appeared—to any watcher—to be showing them the Skeeter, walking completely around it very slowly, trying to glance casually at the underside of the fuselage, as Bud hung back at the copilot’s hatch.

"Okay," said Tom in tones that were just loud enough, "no burn marks. Hop in, flyboy."

As the Barclay family backed away, Tom and Bud vaulted into their seats. It took all of three seconds to start the overhead blades whirling, a few more to catapult the Skeeter upward and forward with a quick burst of jet power. In a split instant they had hurtled across the airstrip and into the groove of the Inn’s access road, keeping low beneath the treetops as they paralleled the road from an altitude of a mere two yards.

"Looks like we’ve got it wired, genius boy!" exulted Bud. "They can’t see the chopper for the trees!"

"It was a risk," Tom admitted, "but a calculated one. If they’d planned to use their big beamer—it would almost have to be fairly big, I’d think, to have hit our jet miles high—they’d position it on higher elevation a mile or two off. And at that angle the pines will block it until we get close to the lake."

"Okay. But why couldn’t they just pick us off over the lake?"

"They could—but they didn’t when we flew over on the way. There could be some sort of clue in the fact that they haven’t used the long-range model in, or near, Shopton. Maybe the device produces some sort of signal burst as it discharges, something that bright boys like us could detect."

"Maybe," agreed Bud. "But there’s a good way for them to eliminate that problem—dump the bright boys in Lake Carlopa!"

After a brief but tense airhop the Skeeter landed back at Enterprises without incident, and Tom called the cell number of Markham Wesberg, a plant employee. He had agreed to drive Sandy and Bashalli back to the Swift residence in his van, which the girls had entered in a concealed way. "Everybody safe at home," he reported. "Wow, chief—thanks for making me a part of your adventure!"

Bud sat in Tom’s lab, regarding his chum with a grave expression as the young scientist-inventor clicked the telephone off "What have you gotten yourself tangled up in this time, Tom? Not that I’m worried that you won’t be able to handle it, but—you know."

"I know," said Tom, giving Bud’s shoulder a squeeze, thinking: But—you wish you were going to be here to see how I do it.

Bud spent the night at the Swifts’, rising at dawn to meet his chartered jet at the Shopton Airport. Though excited at the prospect ahead, the young pilot seemed subdued at parting from Tom and the familiar surroundings of Swift Enterprises. Tom, too, was keenly aware of a pang of sadness. After sharing so many adventures on their daring space voyages, he would not be with his pal on this new cruise into the unknown.

"Let me know what you find under that cloud cover up on Venus, rocket boy," Tom said, trying to sound cheerful—and not choke up.

"Oh, I will. Telling the whole story’ll give me something to look forward to. And as a matter of fact—" Bud’s face brightened. "By the time I’m done with training, I’ll bet you’ll have that new radio gizmo up and running! Give me one of the units and we can talk from one end of space to the other!"

"I promise, Bud. When you lift off, you’ll have one of my parallelophones in your space locker."

Bud winced comically. "What-o-phone? Man, let’s just call it a Private-Ear Radio, okay?"

"Okay." The word hurt Tom as he said it.

Bud glanced at his wristwatch, a gift from his best pal. "Time to get goin’." He paused at the door, then said quietly: "It won’t be half so much fun without you along, skipper... genius boy." Giving Tom a playful but half-hearted poke in the ribs, Bud strode off abruptly.

Deep in thought, Tom breakfasted quietly, then hopped into his car, newly repaired, and drove to his private laboratory at Enterprises. He was baffled and angry at the attempts to injure him. Who was behind the bizarre hightech attacks? And why?

The Swifts and their revolutionary scientific inventions had often been targets for scheming criminals and subversive agents. Recently, with Bud at his side, Tom had fought for his life against deadly enemies while on a difficult engineering mission in the Middle East. In outer space and under the sea, and everyplace in between, the young scientist-inventor had faced heavy odds in his restless urge for new achievements. And the dangers were never to him alone.

Heaving a sigh, Tom gave up trying to solve the puzzle for the present and strode into his lab. "Too much to do to spend time worrying," he muttered restlessly, settling down at his workbench in front of his design computer and circuitry emulator. "If we’re to have any rest from these guys, it may depend on getting the communicator done—the ‘Private-Ear Radio’."

Tom was hoursdeep in work when he was interrupted by a call from George Dilling, the plant’s chief of communications. "I just took a call from Congressman Van Arkyn, Tom."

"Right, the head of the subcommittee that deals with Enterprises. What did he want?"

"He asks you to go down to the teleconference room—something big." Dilling added: "Just you, no one else in the room. He made that very clear. He’ll link through from D.C. in about fifteen."

Mystified, Tom hurried to the company’s advanced communications setup, which projected video images of the conferees as if they were all seated together around a table.

An image swam into focus in the darkness across from the young prodigy. "Hello, Tom," said Van Arkyn, an avuncular type in his later 60’s.

Tom nodded politely. "Hello, Congressman." He turned his gaze to the second figure in the circle of light, seated next to the congressman—and his eyebrows flew up in astonishment!

"ASA PIKE!" Tom exclaimed. "You’re the last person I expected to see!"

When Tom had been preparing for his first trip into space, an unknown enemy had endangered his plans. Following a lead, he and Bud had traveled to a coastal town where they recruited a local man, Asa Pike, to assist them. Yet later events suggested that Pike was much more than what he seemed, and in the end he had vanished without a trace—leaving a broad hint that he was an agent of a deepcover U.S. security agency which called itself "Collections".

The suncraggy older man returned a smile. "What’s that, son? Asa Pike? Never heard of th’ feller. Friend o’ yours?"

Tom grinned. "He turned out to be a very good friend!"

"Well then, good f’ him."

Tom used the signature phrase of the Collections group. "Are our tax dollars still at work?"

Pike’s eyes twinkled. "Always are, don’t ye think?"

"Let’s not worry about introductions," stated Congressman Van Arkyn. "Something of grave import has come up, Tom, and this gentleman is in the best position to tell you about it."

Tom nodded, waiting. "Say there, young man, I hear you’ve been havin’ a speck of trouble lately," said the man Tom persisted in calling Asa Pike. "Problems with your car? Jet plane, too?"

"I’m not surprised that you folks know about it," was Tom’s reply. "Can you tell me who’s behind it?"

"Who? Enemies, I’d say. A gang o’ scrowlywogs who have a nice business stealing blueprints and th’ like, and puttin’ them up t’auction, so t’ speak."

"Such as my translimator plans?"

"Plucked ’em right out of your laser beam."

"But how could they manage such a thing?" Tom demanded incredulously.

"Same way they been keepin’ an eye on you, Tom," Pike replied. "And that happens t’be why we’re speakin’ here right now."

"They stole a completed prototype from the Defense Department," interjected Van Arkyn. "It’s something vital to national security, and at large in the world it’s extremely dangerous."

"A weapon of some kind?" Tom asked, thinking of the ray device.

But Asa Pike should his head. "Nope, young feller. Not in the way you’re athinkin’. It’s a flying remote-control spy drone, t’ put it plain. They call it—your gov’mint likes nicknames too, y’know!—the Eyeballer." He held up a piece of paper before the camera lens. "Here’s a rough sketch, fer you and anybody else who might be cuttin’ in on us."

The object in the picture was shaped something like a starfish, with a disklike center. "This sketch shows it top view. Can’t show you the side, because they ain’t no side, Tom. It’s about as thin as a playin’ card! Stealth sort o’ thing, they call it. Hard to pick up on radar."

"I understand," Tom said. "Like the stealth bomber. How big is it?"

Pike grinned. "Oh, let’s see now. About this big, I’d say." He held up a hand, fingers spread.

"Good grief!" gasped the young inventor. "The miniaturization must be—"

"You can see why the Pentagon is most anxious to have it back in our possession," declared the congressman. "The prototype itself, the plans and any copies of them, and the perpetrators."

"Of course!" said Tom. "Who are the suspects?"

"Not so sure," said Pike. "Not so sure as we’d care to tell you what we’re thinking, that is."

"Are you saying this device has something to do with the attacks on me?"

"Purt sure on that one," Asa Pike confirmed. "See now, one thing about the Eyeballer is how fast she moves—about Mach Four! Gets there from cruise speed in jest a handful of seconds. So one day, let’s say, they have it flying up over Swift Enterprises, watching who’s coming and going, eyeing—fer example—Tom Swift’s little bronze car as it goes atoolin’ down the road. Mighty nice if you want t’ set up an ambush.

"Or mebbe you keep an eye on the communication antennas and that laser dojiggy up on the roof, waitin’ to see when she fires up. Always have t’ send out a few test pulses before y’start in with the message, am I right? Which gives the Eyeballer plenty o’ time to zip on into line, catch the ray, then send it on agin almost b’fore you know it."

"The perfect spy machine," pronounced Tom. "They must have had it trail the jet the other day, all the way to Washington."

"Say!—must have at that. So, they do what they can t’spy on where you go for your meeting, and then when you leave they fly it out underneath you and shoot that freezer thingy o’ theirs—stolen from th’ Germans, if you want t’know—right up your belly."

"Then they don’t have a tight-focus long range model after all," Tom muttered. "They just get up close with a miniature model, hand held or mounted on the Eyeballer. But why wouldn’t they have used the drone yesterday to attack the jetrocopter? The trees wouldn’t have blocked something like that."

Pike winked conspiratorially. "Now that, son, is what I’d call a very good question. Almost makes ye wonder if somethin’ else was agoin’ on with that note you got."

"Do you know the answer?"

"Nope. Lots else, as you kin see. Not that’n, though."

Van Arkyn said, "The Eyeballer is coated with that antidetection sheathing you Swifts came up with, and has holograph emulators—like little TV screens, they say—all over its surface, causing it to blend in with the background like a chameleon. We built it, but haven’t a clue as to how to detect it out in the field. We’re hoping you can solve it, Tom."

Thinking of the size and importance of the challenge, Tom let out a deep breath. "I’ll try, but I’ll need to know more of the details—how it’s propelled, its power source, and so on."

"When you return to your office, you’ll find that a special courier has deposited blueprints in your safe," the congressman stated.

"Stand t’reason these gabbers have listened t’ everything we’ve jest said," noted Pike calmly. "No matter—they’d be plain idjits not to guess from the getgo that we’d come to Tom Swift with this. Good chance they’ll pull the Eyeballer away from your factory now, fer safety. But I’m a-guessin’ that won’t stop ye, not likely. Hmm?"

"Good to see you again, Asa."

The man grinned as Congressman Van Arkyn moved to switch off the teleconference camera. "Good t’see you again, boy. For th’ fust time, o’ course."

Tom returned to his office and found the blueprints, unlabeled, in his codelocked safe. "Trent, did anyone enter the office in the last hour?"

"Not a one, Tom," replied Munford Trent, the two Swifts’ secretary. "And I’ve been here all day."

Tom chuckled to himself in near disbelief. Good night, those blueprints might have been in the safe for days! "I don’t know why we bother with an alarm system around here," he muttered, hastily adding: "Don’t worry, Trent. You’re not at fault."

To limber up his mind for the new problem, the young inventor decided to resume work on the old one—the Private-Ear Radio.

Tom was soon covering sheet after sheet of paper with diagrams and lengthy computations. "Quantum-level signaling!" he said to himself. "Seems like Mother Nature doesn’t want us humans to figure out how to do it. But maybe she’ll reward me if I play it clever."

Satisfied at last that he was on the right track, Tom plunged into the job of electronic construction, anxious to begin testing his new approach. A tangled assembly of nanoscaled microcomponents and wiring gradually took shape on his workbench. He switched on the crude device and began to note down the readings on several monitor instruments, making various changes to the power and output characteristics as he went along.

A bellowing foghorn voice suddenly shattered the young inventor’s concentration. "Tom! Great gravy, I know yuh’re in there!"

"Come on in, Chow. I unlocked the door."

He looked up as a rolypoly figure came clomping into the laboratory with a clatter of highheeled cowboy boots. As usual, Chow was sporting a gaudy shirt, with a ten-gallon hat perched atop his bald dome. Oddly, his leathery sun-bronzed face looked pale.

"What in thunderation’s goin’ on around here?" Chow gasped. "Flyin’ soup, talkin’ pots an’ pans—that I kin take, boss. But now I got fireworks poppin’ in my galley!"

With his mind still on his work, Tom stared at the quivering cowpoke. "Fireworks! Chow, what are you talking about?"

Chow grabbed him by the arm. "Boss, you git yer blame blue-stripe t-shirt on over t’ the galley and see for yourself!" the cook begged. "Brand my space spinach, it’s plumb spooky! Either the galley’s got itself a ghost, or that buddy o’ yours is playin’ some kind o’ joke on us all the way from Cape Car-neeval!"

Tom and Chow ran down the corridor to the private kitchen that adjoined the exTexan’s apartment. At the cook’s request, he had been installed near Tom’s main lab-workshop so he could "whomp up" special meals for his young boss whenever Tom was hard at work on a new invention—which often meant many an overlooked mealtime.

In the doorway of the kitchen the young inventor halted in amazement. Tiny explosions of hissing vapor were popping out across the whole length of the room, each one making a noisy report like a small firecracker! The ghostly stuff seemed to be materializing out of nowhere!

"Good night! You weren’t kidding, pardner!" Tom gasped. "Spectral fireworks!"

"SPECTERAL? Like ghosts? You mean spooks is causin’ it?" Chow gulped, turning paler than ever. "Don’t b’lieve in ghosts, m’self. But I sure don’t like ’em!"

"Well, I don’t really mean that, exactly—but it certainly does look spooky." Tom shook his head in total bafflement.

The "fireworks" were dancing not only in midair, but also along the top of the range, the cabinets, and tile wall surfaces. Tom noticed that the vapor explosions appeared to be spaced equal distances apart in long rows that curved across the room. As an explanation suddenly occurred to him, the young inventor burst into laughter.

"Brand my rocket docker! What’s so allfired funny?" Chow demanded, suspicious that Tom might have been playing a joke on him after all.

"Relax, oldtimer," Tom said. "I think I know what’s causing it. Just wait here a second."

The chef looked none too comfortable at the prospect of being left alone with such ghostly goingson going on. But he waited obediently with bulging eyes while Tom dashed back to his laboratory. When the young inventor returned a few moments later, the fireworks had vanished!

Chow looked relieved but mystified. "What in tarnation did you do, Tom?"

"Just switched off my dual spacewave oscillators. I was using them to see how the wavechain affected the obverse-state matrix in my parallelophone."

Chow gave his friend a sour frown. "Well now! That sure explains it, don’t it!"

With a laugh Tom explained that the spacewaves—oscillations in the fabric of spacetime that were the basis of his repelatron and several other inventions—were being generated at two separate sources. "The waves from either antenna aren’t tuned to affect us, but it seems that at such a low frequency intense focused heat is produced at the nodal points where the two chains cross, which I didn’t expect. This causes the water vapor in the air—and of course there’s quite a lot here in the kitchen—to turn to steam and popoff like a firecracker."

"That so?" Chow mopped his forehead with his huge red bandanna. "Jest plain ol’ steam, eh? Sure glad to hear it, son! But now, what was that other thing you said? Something about a telly-phone?"

"Bud calls it a Private-Ear Radio," responded Tom. "It uses quantum-entangled correlations to—" He stopped himself. "Sorry Chow. Quantum stuff is hard for anyone to grasp. I guess my explanation wouldn’t be very interesting to you." But then a new expression crossed Tom’s face. "Though actually... if you wouldn’t mind too much, pardner, I—I’d sort’ve like trying to spell it out to you."

Chow suddenly understood. "Why sure, sure! You go right ahead, son. I’ll jest sit myself down on this stool."

"Thanks. All right, then." Tom drew his thoughts together. Hadn’t he been looking for new challenges? Explaining quantum physics to Chow Winkler would be his greatest challenge yet! "The quantum level of matter involves what matter does at its smallest scale, the scale of the subatomic particles that atoms are made of. At that level, ordinary rules that we take for granted, commonsense sorts of things, don’t always apply. Which really isn’t surprising. After all, the ordinary rules come from what we see around us, and—"

"And ya cain’t see them atoms an’ suchlike."

"Right. Now... you know how a coin has two sides, heads or tails."

"Sure do. Seen a few of ’em."

"And if you saw a penny lying on a table headsup, you wouldn’t have to turn it over to tell what’s on the other side."

Chow nodded thoughtfully. "N’body’s that stupid. If’n it’s heads on top, it’s gotta be tails on the bottom."

"Yes. And that’s an example of how two things—a ‘head’ face and a ‘tail’ face—can be tangled up with one another, so to speak. Turn one face upwards, and the other one has to turn downwards."

"Yup. Ya might call it two sides o’ the same coin."

The young inventor smiled. "Well, there are things at the quantum level that act the same way. If a certain process emits two particles and sends them flying off in different directions, there might be only two possible states each one of them can be in—‘heads or tails’—and between the two there can only be one of each."

Chow snapped a pair of pudgy fingers. "I get what yer drivin’ at. If you catch one of them particools and it’s one way, you know th’ other one has t’be the other way!"

"Pardner, that’s it exactly!" Tom congratulated him. "But now we get to the weird part—in fact they even call it quantum weirdness sometimes."

"All ears, son. Cain’t be as weird as thet spooky steam."

"Don’t be too sure! Because what many experiments have shown, over about a century, is that while the two particles are moving along their separate ways, each one exists in both states at the same time! They call it superposition, alternate possibilities coexisting. As if you had a coin that was both heads-and-tails on one side and both heads-and-tails on the other."

"Coin like that wouldn’t be much use if’n ya flipped it to decide somethin’."

"But actually it would work out after all, Chow. Because if you ‘flipped’ the ‘coin’ and looked at it—which in the case of the particles means interacting with them in some way that shows which of the two states one or the other particle is in—you’d always see either ‘heads’ or ‘tails’. Never both."

The cook nodded. "So it’s like this, boss. It’s like a coin rollin’ on its edge. While it’s rollin’ along, it hasn’t made up its mind whether t’be up on one side or t’other. It’s both. But when you flick it over, then you get jest a head or jest a tail fer sure."

"Okay, but the weirdest thing is this: when you interact with Particle A where you are, in a way that could tell you which one of the two states it’s in, Particle B takes on the other state instantly—even if it happens to be a billion miles away!"

"Now son," said Chow with a look that was polite but slightly condescending, "what’s so blame strange about that?"

Tom was brought up short by Chow’s comment! "You don’t think it violates common sense for something happening here to cause a change in something instantly, no matter how far away it is? I mean—it could be in another galaxy!"

Chow gave his head a shake. "Wa-aal now, Tom, yew jest think on it. Ain’t you sayin’ these two little bits are jest two sides of the same thing, like the two sides of a coin? And one thing is one thing. If you push on a pencil, you don’t have t’wait a while afore the end of it starts in writin’. Does it right away, whole thing at once."

"But—there are two distinct particles—"

"Uhhuh, sure, jest like they’s two sides to a penny, diff’rent from each other. Son, the only thing special is that the two sides is put in diff’rent places out in space. Peeculiar, sure enough, but that don’t make ’em really two things. Still jest two sides o’ one thing. Stands t’ reason thet if you make the one yer flippin’ with yer hand fall heads down, the other one’ll turn tails up at the same time. If that there’s been botherin’ you, Tom, ole Chow says to jest relax."

Pleased but thoroughly amazed, Tom put a hand on his friend’s wide and sloping shoulder and gave it a squeeze of sheer admiration. "Charles Ollaho Winkler, you just resolved the major metaphysical debate of modern science!"

Chow shrugged. "Thet’s right nice, but it sure wudden much of a dee-bate. But now what’s all this got to do with a phone?"

"The rest of it’s the easy part," replied the young inventor with a chuckle. "Basically, the device creates two sets of these paired counterpart particles, or ‘counterparticles’, holding each bunch of ‘halves’ suspended in separate cartridges—think of them as tanks, or particle-reservoirs. You then plug the cartridges into two communicator units. When you speak into one, the sound patterns of your voice are ‘translated’ into variations in a sort of scanning beam, which interacts with some of the particles in the cartridge in a way that causes them to collapse into one or the other of their possible states. And when that happens, the corresponding particles in the other cartridge instantly take on the same overall pattern, duplicating the shape of the original sound pattern."

"Like a picture negative, hmm?"

"In a way. And then we read it off, and translate the patterns back into sound." Tom added that each use of the Private-Ear unit would render inert a portion of the available particles. "Each particle is ‘one use only’. But remember, they’re supersmall, and the number of particles in a cartridge is enormous. It’ll last quite a while."

"Wa-aal, sounds mighty nice t’ these old ears," pronounced the westerner. "Now that wasn’t so hard, was it, Tom? I gotta get goin’ now. But I shor did like this here little conversation."

As Chow left, Tom could only shake his head in wonderment. Well, he boggled inwardly, it was just a simplified analogy!

Tom worked steadily on his invention in the days that followed, thinking also of the problem of the stolen spy drone. And at the same time, in the back of his mind, he had already begun to toy with a further application of the basic quantum principle—a breakthrough even more revolutionary!

In his personal notebook he scribbled down three words—megascope space prober.

Late one afternoon, Tom was surprised and delighted when Bud dropped by the lab. "Got a couple days off," he explained, "so I choppered over to Fearing Island and grabbed the next jet to Shopton." Fearing was the tiny islet off the coast of Georgia where the Enterprises spaceport was based.

The young inventor gave his pal a warm bearhug. He sensed that Bud was feeling downcast, with something on his mind. But when Tom told the story of how Chow had somehow grasped quantum weirdness without batting an eye, Bud burst out laughing, his good humor restored for the moment.

As they chatted Tom proceeded to hook up a system of tubing from a helium cryostat to one of the two communicator units he was testing. "What’s that for?" Bud asked.

"The matrix ‘readers’ will be scanning such delicate pattern variations that they have to be bathed in liquid helium, to cut down the waste noise in the circuit almost to zero."

"Like you did in your electronic retroscope," the young flier remarked. "I suppose you can get all the helium you want from your hydrodome wells under the ocean."

Tom nodded. "Benefits of ownership! And when I want to liquify it, I use the new translimator in a two-step process, allowing solid helium—which is like a metal—to absorb the heat energy from the room-temperature liquid I created in a separate chamber."

"Jetz, solid helium!"

"Unfortunately, it’s only stable, for any length of time, inside the chamber."

Bud’s expression suddenly darkened. "Yeah. I’m starting to think I may be that way too, genius boy—temporarily stable. And my chamber’s close to springing a leak!"

"Now that doesn’t sound so good, flyboy," responded Tom with concern, pulling up a lab stool to sit down next to him. "What’s going on? A problem with the Venus project?"

"You might say that. Tom, I’m thinking of resigning as pilot!"

"RESIGNING?" Tom stared at Bud. "Are you serious?"

"Serious as I’ve ever been," Bud declared as a slight smile flicked across his young face. "Which isn’t saying much, I guess."

"But why?" Tom persisted. "You’ll be the pilot of the first expedition to really study another planet close up! Don’t you realize this is an honor?"

Bud’s answer was a stubborn shrug. He seemed to be groping for words to express whatever was troubling him.

"Bud, it’s not only an honor, it’s a government request," Tom went on. "This isn’t just a private job you’re doing for AstroDynamics. It’s a project undertaken in our nation’s interest!"

"You don’t need to slather it on thick, chum. I know all that. I know about the ‘honor’." Bud squirmed uncomfortably on his stool.

"Then what’s your problem?

"My socalled copilot, that’s what!" Bud blurted out in exasperation. "The guy’s an absolute pain!"

Tom shifted his own lanky frame, his forehead wrinkling thoughtfully. He knew Bud was no quitter. If trouble had developed between him and his copilot, it must be near the battling stage for Bud even to think of resigning.

"What’s this guy’s name?" Tom asked.

"Chester Holbrook—but you’re supposed to call him Chippy, if you can believe that. He was a Navy pilot."

"Never heard of him."

"I wish I hadn’t," Bud retorted. "He’s young, but a real hardnosed type. Worse than what’shisname who went with us on the earth blaster trip—Hal Voorhees."

"Does he know his stuff?"

"Sure, he’s a good enough rookie rocketeer," Bud admitted. "He’s done a lot of tuneup flights down at Canaveral. But what a pest to work with! He bugs me practically every hour, on the hour!"

Holbrook’s usual tactics, Bud said, were to criticize, subtly, his handling of the controls during checkout procedures or simulated flight routines. He was constantly offering suggestions which Bud felt were mainly intended to rattle him—perhaps to the point of his making some mistake which might disqualify him as pilot for the Venus flight, allowing Holbrook to replace him.

"Another stunt he likes to pull," Bud went on, "is to throw a lot of needling questions at me whenever we have a skull session with Clarke or Franklin."

"What sort of questions?" Tom asked.

Bud answered irritably, "Oh, about the photon drive units and stuff like that. He was familiar with the design of the Highroad right from the start, mainly because he has an uncle on the Board of Directors of AstroDynamics! Real coincidence, huh? So Chippy knows it backwards, whereas I’m still pulling all-nighters to catch up. His idea, of course, is to show me up and make me look silly in front of the big brass."

Bud snarled as he went on, clenching his fist and confessing that he and Holbrook had almost come to blows the day before. "I—I think that incident had a little to do with Col. Jessup giving me this two-day vacation."

Tom watched uneasily as his muscular friend stood up and began to pace back and forth. He had rarely seen easygoing Bud Barclay this upset. "What’s behind Holbrook’s attitude?" Tom finally asked.

"He’s jealous. What else?" Bud snapped. "He thinks we’re fighting over our places in the history books. But Tom, I couldn’t care less about that stuff! I just—I just don’t want to let you and Enterprises down by washing out."

Tom got up to throw an arm around Bud’s broad shoulders. "Listen up, pal," he said quietly, "I can see you’re up against a tough problem, all right. That’s the way human problems are. But it could get better with time. You can’t just chuck it all."

Bud sighed unhappily. "I sure don’t want to, but I just don’t see any other way out."

"Look at it this way," Tom said. "Which one of you is better qualified to wrangle that space crate, with all those people’s lives depending on you? You or Chippy Holbrook?"

Bud looked embarrassed. "I’ve asked myself that question a hundred times. Holbrook’s a competent astronaut, but he’s never been outside Earth orbit. Besides, he strikes me as a bit highstrung, you know?"

"In other words—?" Tom’s eyebrows lifted quizzically.

"Okay Tom, I’ll say it. I honestly think I’m a better bet."

"So do I!" Tom clapped his friend on the back. "Holbrook can’t help feeling a little natural competitiveness. But there may be something more, too. You’re the great Bud Barclay, space explorer, Tom Swift’s best friend! He may think you’re the one who’s getting the red carpet treatment at NASA."

"Guess I never thought of it that way." Bud’s grim expression slowly relaxed. "You’re right. I’m not gonna let that fresh kid shove aside a real space veteran!"

Suddenly both boys jumped back with startled shouts as a cloud of white steam burst from the top of one of the radio housings! A deadly chill seemed to sweep through the laboratory.

"Ggood grief! What happened?" Bud gasped, his teeth chattering. Table tops, file cabinets, and laboratory equipment quickly became rimmed with frost. The two youths shivered violently as Tom rushed to shut off the flow of helium to the communicator unit.

"I just broke Newton’s law of gravity!" Tom said with awe.

"Please. Don’t joke a jokester."

"It’s no joke; it’s a fact." Tom explained that the filler neck connection in the base of the radio had fractured. The liquid helium had instantly crawled upward inside the radio housing in order to escape. "There’s a name for it. Liquid helium in a supercooled condition is what’s called a ‘superfluid’. It’s the only substance in the world that can drag itself upward all by itself!"

"Man, now I’ve heard everything," Bud laughed. "Better watch it, Tom. You’ll be a marked man if this Newton guy finds out you broke his law!"

Bud had dinner at the plant, catching up on things with Chow and his many other friends. He finally left to join Sandy and Bashalli at The Glass Cat, the Shopton coffeehouse where the young Pakistani worked when not attending art school.

Next morning Chow appeared at Tom’s lab door, which the young inventor had absentmindedly left ajar. Barely glancing up from his work, Tom said, "What’s up, Chow? Not time for lunch, is it?"

"At 9:30? Not likely! Naw, jest somethin’ they delivered—left it outside my galley by mistake." The sun-leathered cook jerked a thumb toward the corridor. "Some kinda gas tank, I reckon. Got it right outside."

"Oh, yes, I ordered some extra helium in case I want to use it," said Tom, eyes fixed on a meter. "Bring it in, won’t you, pard?"

Chow hurried through the door, then returned wheeling an orange-banded tank on a hand truck.

"Where do you want ’er, boss?"

"Over there by the wall for now, thanks," Tom murmured. "Better leave it on the truck so I can move it later."

The Texan parked his heavy load but seemed reluctant to leave. He stood staring at the tank for a moment scratching his double chin, then cleared his throat loudly.

"Ahem! Brand my spectroscope," he mused aloud, "that sure is a purty orange color—jest like my shirt."

"Hm?" Tom glanced up. "Oh, you mean the orange color on the tank. That shows it contains helium. Different colors are used for different gases," he added.

"Oh, so that’s what it’s fer, huh?" The grizzled westerner sounded faintly disappointed.

Tom looked at him, puzzled. Suddenly a great light dawned. "Hey! Where’d you get that great little number you’re wearing, cowpoke?" he exclaimed.

"Whatzat? You mean this li’l old thing?" Chow’s fondness for loud haberdashery, especially in shirts, was a standing joke around Enterprises. It was a whim that gave the cook endless pleasure. He boasted that he owned the choicest wardrobe of cowboy shirts east of the Pecos, and his closet contained a peacocklike assortment in every color of the rainbow—and a few colors the rainbow never knew about!

But the present number topped them all, Tom thought, almost wincing at the glare in the lab lamps. The shirt was not only a dazzling tangerine orange in color—it was trimmed in glittery sequins! "Kinda eyecatchin’ at that, doncha think?" Chow beamed. "I picked it up fer only a fraction of its value."

"It was a steal, all right," Tom agreed politely, thinking with an inward chuckle that Chow had been the victim at any price!

Catching something in his boss’s tone, the cook gave Tom a dark look. "I could get you one jest like it, boss, next time I go by the store," Chow offered.

"Oh, well, don’t bother." Tom added hastily: "I mean, I wouldn’t want to cut in on your—uniqueness, pardner."

Chow smiled a bit sourly as he turned to leave. "Yoo-nique-ness, huh. Now thet’s one I never woulda thought of."

Tom had made some shortrange tests of his Private-Ear Radio, with promising results. Now to try for distance, he thought. And then his thoughts added: And if it’s distance I’m after, why skimp on it?

After some planning, Tom rang up Hank Sterling in the engineering shop. "Hi, Hank. I’ve got a notion to put my quantum communicator to a real test."

"What do you have in mind?"

"Well, how’d you feel about a little jaunt to the moon?"

Hank burst out laughing. "Little jaunt? Fine! When do we leave for Fearing?"

"There’s no need for that," replied Tom. "I thought we’d take the Space Kite, now that it’s hangared here at Enterprises. Round trip to Luna—back in time for dinner!"

The Space Kite was a remarkable vehicle, a midget two-person spacecraft driven aloft by the steady wind of cosmic particles streaming through space from all directions—even up through the body of the earth itself.

Tom had the vehicle prepped and made ready, its oval cabin dome gleaming in the sunlight in front of the fivesided cosmic reactor that turned the cosmic particles into propulsive force. Tom and Hank sat side by side, and the young inventor adjusted the walls of the reactor cells to bring them into play. The Space Kite lifted off from the Enterprises airfield, gaining speed and altitude smoothly, if very slowly.

The sky around them darkened and became starry as they left the atmosphere behind and sped moonward through the void of space.

"If you’ll keep an eye on those readouts, Hank, I’ll make the first test," Tom said presently. He lifted the Private-Ear Radio—about the size and shape of an oldfashioned walkietalkie—to his mouth. "Swift to Hanson! Can you hear me, Arv?"

A crystalclear answer came back instantly. "Sure can, boss! ‘What hath God wrought!’," the modelmaker quoted.

After checking various figures, Tom pronounced himself satisfied. "Talk to you in 173 minutes, Earthling," Tom radioed.

"Roger! You and Sterling can spend the time on something useful—talk over that ‘window on the universe’ idea of yours!"

As Tom switched off the PER, Hank gave him a quizzical smile. "What’s the Big Swede talking about, Tom? A new project?"

"An idea for an invention," replied Tom excitedly. "If you thought my quantum communicator pushed the physics envelope, wait’ll you hear about this! I’ve been assured that my inventions are violating Einstein’s Theory of Relativity!"

The youthful prodigy explained that he had suddenly been struck by the notion that some of the quantum techniques employed by the PER to convey sound could also be used to transmit lightwave information—visible images. "The megascope is kind of an electronic super-telescope, Hank. Instead of a lens, an invisible ‘cloud,’ or sensor-node, of quantum-entangled particles would be established far off in space, carried there by a microwave beam. As light passes through the node, it will ‘collapse’ the superposed states of the particles in a way that corresponds to its wavefront pattern. The pattern will be instantly replicated in the device on Earth, and a computer will use it to produce an image on a monitor screen."

"Like putting a TV camera in space, anywhere you want it," mused the engineer, eyes bright. "What a fantastic thought!"

The two were so absorbed in discussing the details of the megascope space prober that they lost track of time. They were startled when a beep announced that they were drawing near the midpoint of their journey. Tom adjusted the craft’s gravitex stabilizer and eased the reactor alignment lever forward to begin decelerating from the Space Kite’s constant 1-G acceleration.

Dead ahead, in the viewpane dome, the moon loomed larger and larger. Soon they could make out its craters and jagged peaks with startling clearness, the brilliant wash of unhindered sunlight starkly outlined in unyielding black shadow. About fifty miles short of a landing, Tom swiveled the gravity-concentrator and eased the Space Kite into a low orbit.

"Right on the button," Hank said with a glance at his watch. "Boy, what a sweet flight!"

"I’m afraid it’s already becoming a routine commute," Tom chuckled. At the appointed time, Tom activated the PER unit. To his thrilled delight, Arv again responded with no gap in time.

"This is great," enthused Arv. "Normally there’d be a noticeable lag in responding at your distance—about two seconds total. But not now! Tom, it’s as if you were standing here in the lab next to me."

Tom shot Sterling a happy glance. "Thanks, Arv. Now we’ll put the whole moon in between us and see what happens."

As Tom clicked off, Hank chortled: "Take that, Einstein!"

The Space Kite began to round the moon. The crystalline blue earth seemed to descend toward the lunar horizon and finally dipped behind it.

Tom tried the PER. Again—perfection!

Hank Sterling whistled. "Hard to believe how your signal goes right through all that rock."

"What signal?" grinned Tom. "As explained by noted philosopher Chow Winkler, there aren’t really two units but one—even with a couple hundred thousand miles and a great big rock between the speakers!"

Before Hank could comment he was startlingly interrupted as the PER set developed a shrill whistling noise. Wincing, Tom hastily adjusted the speaker controls, but the whistling seemed to be growing louder.

"A little static in your no-signal?" gibed Hank.

"It’s nothing to do with the quantum link," declared Tom. "Some sort of induction must be affecting the sound-reproduction circuitry directly. I’ll have to switch off the speaker."

"What could be causing it, skipper? An enemy?"

"Or a heavenly body on the loose," Tom stated grimly.

HANK STERLING was startled by Tom’s cool remark! He wondered fleetingly if the young inventor had meant it as a joke. But Tom’s face was deadly serious. The eyes of the astronaut darted to the space radarscope on the instrument panel.

"Look at this" he murmured quietly.

A fine faint line of light seemed to be tracing itself on the screen. Was an object streaking toward them? A meteor? A missile perhaps? The radar scan gave a bright picture of the nearer heavens, but its scale was not designed for an accurate pickup of smaller phenomena at a great distance.

"Why is it so faint and fuzzed-out?" Hank wondered aloud.

The two could make out nothing unusual through the dome. But something seemed to be approaching them! The young inventor’s brain was frantically weighing the odds against them, two lone crewmen in a tiny ship. Should he race for earth? Or try circling for cover beyond the moon’s further rim?

But then the two cried out as a brilliant flash of silverblue light flooded the cabin!

The flare was gone in an instant, but left Tom and Hank dazzled, momentarily unable to read the instruments. Were they under fire from a marauder in space?

Tom’s vision cleared, and he strained to study the radar monitor. "Whatever it was is gone," he pronounced.

"Right! Mainly because it blew up!"

But Tom Swift shook his head. "There was an explosion all right. But I’m not so sure it was the object itself, whatever it was. Look at these readings."

Hank gulped. "High-energy radiation—hot stuff! We’d be fried in here if it weren’t for the Inertite coating!"

"But the triangulation focus isn’t even close to the last position of the radar bogie," Tom pointed out. "Yet there has to be a connection. If a spacecraft set off the blast remotely, it could have ducked behind the horizon while we were getting our eyes back." After a moment, though, he reconsidered somewhat, admitting that what they had witnessed might have been some unknown natural phenomenon. "Hank, that radiation profile almost suggests a matter-antimatter collision—from two masses smaller than a pea! It’s not impossible."

"Know what I say, skipper?" Hank muttered wanly. "I say, Earth, here we come!"

As they orbited out from behind the moon, Tom reported the incident to Enterprises by means of the Space Kite’s conventional radiocom. There was no further danger during the three-hour return trip—nor any clue to the mystery in space.

Back safely in Shopton, the Private-Ear Radio having proven its worth, Tom’s work continued apace. After refining the PER console and adding a message-alert beeper, Tom sent Bud one of the units as promised, and Bud used it to call back to tell his friend that the AstroDynamics officials had given him permission to take it with him on the mission.

"How’s your pal Chippy?" Tom asked.

"Obnoxious, and getting really good at it! But I’ve learned to ignore him. Let the Chippys fall where they may!"

Bud asked if Tom had made any progress in the matter of the Eyeballer drone or the freezeray ambushers. "Nope, flyboy," was the rueful reply. "And I guess I’m afraid to admit to myself that I don’t have even a sliver of an idea as to how to proceed. I’m afraid Asa Pike’s confidence may have been misplaced."

"Never! Hey, don’t tell me I need to give you a pep talk! Just wait, Tom—when you start playing around with your megascope, your Swiftonian brain’ll probably unleash a whole flood of new ideas."

"I sure hope so."

Thinking about Bud’s encouraging suggestion, Tom decided to concentrate on developing the basic components of the megascope into a testable form. "I’ll need to start out with a ‘quiet’ multiplier circuit. That’s for sure," he told himself.

After two hours of benchwork, Chow having just brought a snack to fortify him, the young inventor wheeled the tank of helium Chow had delivered over to his workbench and began to draw off some of the gas into a smaller compression tank, which he would take to the lab room nearby where Arv Hanson had constructed a working model of the improved and redesigned translimator.

Suddenly there was a clatter of cowboy boots down the corridor, and Chow let out a bellowing cry: "Boss! Tom! Run for yer life!"

"What’s he up to now?" Tom muttered, striding up to the lab door and throwing it open just as the exTexan came running up.

Then Tom was catapulted into the corridor as a terrific explosion shook the laboratory!

The concussion from the blast bowled Tom and Chow over. The cook had given his boss a hard tug, and as Chow rocked backwards Tom sailed right over him as if jet propelled and banged his head against the opposite wall.

"Tom! Son, are you all right? Say somethin’!"

Chow’s voice seemed muffled, as if he were shouting through layers of cotton batting. Tom rolled over and shook his head, trying to clear his brain.

"That mean you’re not all right?" demanded Chow frantically.

"I’m—I—just let me catch my breath." In a moment Tom struggled up, with Chow helping him. "How about you, pardner? The blast hit you too!"

"Naw, barely touched me. You were standin’