TOM SWIFT

AND HIS

3-D TELEJECTOR

BY VICTOR APPLETON II

CHAPTER 1

THE PEG-LEGGED GHOST

"HOW would you girls like to visit a haunted house?" asked Tom Swift as Bud Barclay’s red convertible sped through the late evening darkness. Leaning forward from the back seat, his blue eyes sparkled with excitement.

Tom’s sister Sandra, a pretty blond girl, turned slightly to glance back suspiciously at her famous brother. "Are you kidding?"

"No. You’ve heard me speak of Dr. Grimsey?"

"That new scientist you mentioned, the one you and Daddy just hired at Enterprises?"

Tom nodded. "The house he rented came complete with a housemate from the Great Beyond! I’d like to drop in."

The dark-haired girl in the back seat next to Tom spoke up. "Grimsey—already, a creepy name. What is his field, Thomas? Exorcism?" asked Bashalli Prandit dryly.

"Parapsychology," Tom said in reply. "The scientific study of ESP and other ‘paranormal’ phenomena. Including ghosts and hauntings!"

Bud Barclay chuckled. "You should hear the stories he tells about that place! One night he beard boots clumping outside his room. He jumped out of bed and glimpsed the figure of a dead sea captain who used to own the house. Then it disappeared right before his eyes!"

"Oo-ooo!" Bash shivered—a mocking shiver. "Where is this sanctuary for spooks?"

"It’s the old Gullbracken House, up on the ridge overlooking Lake Carlopa," Tom said.

Sandy was unconvinced, but gave a tentative nod. "I know, that big gloomy old house you can see from Rickman Dunes. Remember, Bashi?" Bashalli nodded.

"Another night," Bud went on, "Dr. Grimsey was awakened by clammy fingers touching his face. There was Pegleg the Ghost bending over him! And it wasn’t fingers, it was seaweed hanging down from his head!"

"Oh, stop it!" commanded Sandy. "You’ll scare Bashalli."

"What nonsense," retorted the Pakistani. "I am very comfortable with ‘ghosts,’ for I know they do not exist. All such things, just hoaxes and rumors, or tricks of the eye."

Tom shrugged. "Then I take it you wouldn’t be interested."

"I did not say that," she replied defensively.

"You’re giving us goose bumps!" Sandy declared with a frown of only half-disbelief. "But let’s go see the place, anyhow. Shouldn’t we call first, though?"

"The guy’s not home," Bud said, slowing to turn the car around away from Shopton, where they had wiled the evening that had now turned to starry, moonless night. "He’s been out of town for a few days—gave me the house keys and asked me to feed his birds. When he told me the story, he said he wouldn’t mind if I spent the night there to see for myself."

Bashalli asked, "And just what is the story? Who is this sailor-man supposed to be?"

"No one really knows," answered Tom soberly. "Dr. Grimsey did a little research, though, at the library. Supposedly he was an old sea captain, back in the early 19th century when Shopton was just a little crossroads village—a suspected slaver and latter-day pirate. Seems he kept people chained up in the attic, and killed anyone who threatened to talk. Then one day..." The youth paused. "One day he just disappeared. Never seen again."

"Except for one thing," added Bud. "On his bed was a black char-mark, the size and shape of a man!"

Tense silence followed, dark as the night but starless and moonless. Bash eyed Tom suspiciously, but kept her thoughts close.

Paralleling the lakeshore, the convertible presently turned off onto a dirt road which wound upward onto the low ridge that framed the lake road on the inland side. Soon a house loomed ahead against the night sky. It was an old frame building, two stories, with a high gabled roof. Slats of light shone through the shuttered windows of the ground floor, but the second story was only a silhouette, slightly paled by the reflection from Lake Carlopa. Bud parked and the four young people got out.

Unlocking the heavy wooden door, Bud led his friends into the parlor, switching on some additional lamps. Yet even in bright light the room seemed strange and half-hidden—to the girls at least, though Bud maintained his usual joking commentary. "Come on," urged the youthful San Franciscan, "I’ll show you the big aviary on the back porch."

Bashalli’s eyes narrowed. She glanced toward Sandy and said, "No doubt these bright boys have set up their spook show back there to thrill and chill us."

"We’ll wait here," pronounced Sandy smugly, giving Tom and Bud a dismissive wave.

"Okay, San. But..." The young inventor’s voice trailed off into a slight frown. "Stay here in the parlor. It might not be safe, wandering around in the dark."

"We shall be quite fine," Bashalli declared, "even deprived of our brave protectors."

Left alone, the girls made a closer inspection of the room. The walls were covered with dark-patterned paper, and red-plush drapes hung at the windows. The lamps and fixtures were modern, but most of the furniture was massive and old fashioned.

"What a dreary place!" Sandy murmured. "It smells musty in here, doesn’t it? Like it’s all been closed up for a hundred years."

"Part of the effects. Please do not say the scent reminds you of seaweed."

"Imagine being alone here on one of those ‘dark and stormy’ nights!"

Bashalli sniffed haughtily. "But Americans enjoy being frightened. Your movies are all about fear and danger."

"Uh-huh. And what are Pakistan movies about?"

"We watch American movies."

They could hear Tom and Bud talking at the back side of the house, and the occasional twitter of a bird.

Suddenly Bash looked up, toward the high ceiling. "What was—?"

"What?" Sandy gulped.

"A sound up above."

"Above in the—in the attic?"

"‘Above’ is where attics usually are, Sandra. —there!"

Sandy had heard it too. A scraping sound and the creak of a single footfall. And then one more sound. Thunk! Like a wooden peg-leg against a floor!

"T-Tom? Bud?" Sandy called out with false calm. "Are—er—you all right?"

"Sure, just feeding the birds," came a pair of voices from the porch—definitely not the attic.

A grandfather clock ticked loudly in the silence; but the silence seemed to be becoming louder than the sound. Suddenly Bashalli gave a stifled gasp and pointed with a quivering hand.

"Sandy! Look!"

The yawning mouth of the old fireplace, dark and empty a moment before, had taken on a faint, wavering phosphorescence. In a moment it had coalesced into the form of flames licking at the edges of the darkness—silent flames without a crackle and without heat.

"Obviously—just a gas log—don’t you think?" murmured Bash in the faintest of voices. "Surely on a timer."

Wide-eyed, Sandy could not answer. And then her eyes grew wider.

A weird shape, like a twist of smoke, had materialized in front of the fireplace! Expanding and growing more solid, it coalesced into the figure of a peg-legged man in a brass-buttoned coat with a sea captain’s hat pulled low over his eyes. He was drenched and dripping, and seaweed clung to his clothes! As he stepped forward, he stretched out a clawlike hand in the direction of the girls. His head seemed to become luminous, as if from an inner flame, revealing his skull and a black shadow around two glowing eyes!

The girls watched, frozen with terror.

"H-h-he’s dripping wet," Bash whispered, "but he’s not leaving any tracks on the carpet!"

Sandy summoned courage from somewhere. "He just can’t be a ghost!" she insisted. "This is just something Tom and Bud have rigged up." Yet even as she spoke she was well aware that she could still hear the boys talking and moving about half a house away.

Gathering all her nerve, Sandy got up and approached the specter, circling warily.

"Sandra, no!" protested Bashalli.

Sandy reached out to touch the otherworldly intruder—but her hand went through his body!

Reduced to quaint stereotypes the girls screamed and flew into each other’s arms. They were clinging in panic as Tom and Bud came rushing into the parlor.

"What’s wrong?" Tom inquired. "What happened?"

"W-w-we just saw the ghost!" Bash quavered. "Sandy tried to touch—it!"

Bud stared at them, then looked around. "Stop joking—there’s no one here but us."

The apparitions, ghostly fire and ghostly sailor, had vanished!

Sandy was about to speak when she saw smiles twitching at the boys’ lips. As her expression changed Tom and Bud burst into laughter.

"Of all the mean tricks!" Sandy exclaimed in disgust. "They’ve been playing a joke on us, Bashi!"

"But—but how? I know we saw it!" Bewildered, the pretty Pakistani turned to Tom Swift, eyes flashing. "I must say, for someone dead he was most lifelike. One of your silly robots, Thomas?"

The young scientist-inventor reddened. "Didn’t mean to scare you two all that much, Bash."

"It was pretty much my idea," Bud confessed.

Sandy conceded a smile, good-naturedly, at the sheepish expressions on the boys’ faces. "Okay, whatever. Brother dear, you’ve had your fun. Now explain."

The young inventor was still chuckling. "What you’ve just seen," he announced, "is a demonstration of the new invention I’m working on—a three-dimensional television system."

"We might have known, Sandra," pronounced Bashalli. "Television is as good a source of anxiety as movies."

"Television?" Sandy wrinkled her forehead. "But the spook we saw wasn’t on a screen—it was walking right through the room!"

"Exactly, because my system doesn’t need a screen." Tom walked over and pulled aside some draperies. Concealed behind them was a boxlike device about four feet high, studded with tuning knobs and dials. A short latticework antenna on an adjustable base was mounted on the top of the chassis. "This telejector, as I call it, projects 3-D images right into the room. You were actually watching a digital video recording which I switched on by remote control from Dr. Grimsey’s porch." He added that he had similarly switched on a sound player set up in the room overhead to provide an eerie atmosphere.

"Then the ‘ghost’ we saw was really just—well, just light?" Bashalli asked in amazement.

"Not quite, although I hope to achieve that later," Tom said. "The images were formed from a chemical mist which Bud sprayed into the air earlier tonight, before he swung by to pick us up. The tiny globules are slightly buoyant and much too small and diffuse to be seen in dim light like this."

"An electronic field gimmick keeps them in place in the air," Bud noted. "Same sort of deal Tom uses on his skywriting machine."

Bash nodded. "Ah! That very atmospheric musty smell."

Tom continued, "When the phase-tuned microwave beams from the telejector strike the mist particles, it makes them glow at the point in the air where the energy load exceeds the absorption threshold of the particles."

Sandy nodded. "But it wasn’t like a TV image," she objected. "It was in 3-D—I walked partly around it."

"That’s the main idea," Tom replied. "The beam paints a sort of glowing 3-D ‘shell’ in midair while dimming-down the background." He added that the phony "sea captain" was actually an Enterprises employee, Sam Barker, in a rented costume. "We recorded him this morning, using another part of my new system."

"He’ll be glad to hear he has a future in acting," Bud gibed.

"I suppose this was a historic moment in science, even if Sandy was almost scared out of her lovely blond hair," Bashalli commented. "Will your new 3-D system be used for home television, Tom?"

The young inventor smiled modestly. "It will eventually, I hope, but it’s not perfected yet. This version can handle individual objects that appear fairly close to the viewer, but not scenery, or images of varying distance. It’s hard to deal with parallax and perspective, you know."

"Isn’t it though."

Bud produced refreshments from the kitchen. The four sat on the sofas and chatted for a time. Then Sandy glanced across the room.

"Oh, good—I was going to ask you to show us the ghost again."

The hazy, glowing image stood indistinctly in a dark corner of the room, arms extended toward them.

Tom stood. "But—I switched off the machine." He turned toward Bud. "Flyboy, is this another one of your pranks? Like you did that time with the robot?"

Bud shook his head vigorously. "Don’t know anything about it. Maybe you accidentally bumped the remote."

"No," Tom stated, puzzled. "It’s still in the other room."

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

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

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

Then, suddenly, it dissolved into air.

The four exchanged glances, reactions mixed.

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 2

SPACE INTRUDER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It’s all pretty puzzling, son."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Goldstone doesn’t think it’s reflecting any light from outside sources," was the response. "What we see is some sort of natural luminance, perhaps from a radioactive process."

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

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

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

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

"I’ll check the settings."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 3

FALSE PRETENSES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh?"

"My farewell to your counterpart was rather—less than warm."

Upon the death of its founder, Wickliffe Laboratories of Thessaly had passed into the hands of a brilliant scientist-technician with a national reputation. Peter Langley was a few spare years older than Tom Swift, but the media liked to call him "America’s other young inventor," and had encouraged what some thought was a spirit of rivalry between the two. Tom was well aware that Langley had been displeased by the loss of a key employee to nearby Shopton.

Hank Sterling broke into the conversation. "Looks like we’re doing well on the reconstruction of the Mighty Eye, Tom," he called down from the antenna work platform up above. "We could be up and running by tomorrow."

"I imagine the Green Orb will still be out there," Tom laughed. "But as for me, I think I’ll break for lunch and check things out over in the office. I should think about getting back to work on the telejector."

In the office in the administration building he shared with his father, Tom sorted through the various messages handed him by Trent, their secretary. One name caught his eye immediately. Well, whattaya know! he thought. We were just talking about you, Pete!

Tom called the number on the note, which he recognized as Pete Langley’s private line. The CEO-scientist himself answered the buzz.

"Hi, Pete. This is Tom Swift returning your call."

"Tom." There was a moment of cool hesitation—a chill in the air—and then a silence that felt oddly prolonged. "Got a busy afternoon going?"

"Well—er—"

"Too busy to drop by a competitor?"

Tom decided business diplomacy was the better part of valor. "I can break away. Do I get a clue as to what’s up?"

Again, silence. Langley ignored the question. "Would three o’clock work? My office?"

"Fine."

Tom puzzled over the matter in the air, flying to Thessaly in one of Enterprises’ Pigeon Special miniplanes. But puzzlement came to nothing by the time Tom found himself setting down on the Wickliffe Labs airfield.

In the management office building Tom approached Langley’s receptionist. "Would you tell him I’m here, Sue?"

"Oh, I didn’t realize—"

"Pete’s expecting me."

The young woman disappeared into the office behind her, returning in a moment to wave Tom in.

Pete Langley, thinly handsome and dark-haired, stood next to his desk with hand extended. "Hi, Swiftola."

They shook hands and sat down facing one another. There was a moment of silence—and then a few more.

"Pete, is something wrong?" asked the blond young inventor.

"That’s what I was about to ask you," replied the black-haired young inventor.

"Excuse me?"

Langley shrugged. "You dropped by unannounced. Some problem?"

"I—I don’t get it," Tom responded in surprise. "When you called me to come over—"

"I called you? Come on, guy."

It became evident that the call Tom’s office had received had not originated with Pete Langley! "Don’t know the first thing about it. And you say you called back—and spoke to me? Weird city. I’ve been here all day. No incoming on my private number. Sure you punched the keys right?"

Tom pulled the crumpled note from his pocket and read the number off. Langley snorted. "There’s the prob, bob. I don’t use that number anymore. Wick still owns it, but it doesn’t link to anything right now."

Tom could see that his counterpart, who also had deep-set blue eyes, was as baffled as he was. "This is embarrassing, Pete," said Tom. "But I can’t understand how it could have happened. It was this number I called, and I recognized your voice."

"Yeah, well, voice-mimicry technology is cutting-edge these days. No news to you—you folks have your televoc system. Which we plan to make obsolete as soon as we can." Langley laughed, and Tom joined in pleasantly. "Let’s back-burner it, Swiftorini."

"I’m just sorry to interrupt your day. I’m sure you’re as busy as I am."

"Busier. But as a matter of fact, I was thinking about giving you a call. We need to do a little out-hashing, Tom."

"Excuse me?"

"To clear the air. About you-know-himsey."

Tom got the idea. "Dr. Grimsey."

"Shoot me, but I don’t like the idea of you and your Dad raiding our staff."

The youth reddened. "Is that really what you think, Pete? Enterprises doesn’t use unethical methods, any more than you do. The man approached us out of the blue. It was completely unexpected."

"No inducements, hmm. No playing up the usual damages that these scientific egos like to collect? ‘Oh, those mean guys at Wickliffe!’ The guy’s a prima donna, Tomsky-omsky."

Tom stood abruptly. "I’d rather not discuss our employees behind their backs, Pete."

Langley also rose to his feet. "Oooh, don’t go away mad, budnik. I’d like you to say-hey to one of our own new hires."

The executive stepped out of the office for a minute as Tom waited, fuming. Whatever was going on at Wickliffe Labs—he didn’t like it!

The door swung open. Peter Langley entered with a smirk on his face. The smirk was followed by an attractive young woman in shark-sharp business attire.

She threw Tom a bland, somehow challenging smile. "Hello, Tom. Long time. Well, maybe not so long. Surprised to see me?"

Tom’s youthful face bore a frown of steel.

"Very!"

CHAPTER 4

AN UNEXPECTED BACKLASH

IT WAS obvious that Pete Langley was enjoying greatly his supposed rival’s discomfiture. "Amelia’s one of the nation’s top attorneys in high-tech matters," he remarked. "Commercial patents—you know. Given our expansion goals here at Wickie, she’s a perfect fit."

"Call me a nice piece," added the woman in question, "of the puzzle."

Amelia Foger, Esq., had briefly worked in the Swift Enterprises legal office. She had resigned in anger, certain that the Swifts were prejudiced against her because of her great-uncle Andy Foger, who had made himself a persistent problem for the first Tom Swift, Tom’s great-grandfather.

"I didn’t realize you were working for Pete, Amy," Tom said.

"As shown by your red, white, and blue face, Tom."

"Say now, don’t take it personal, kiddoo," smarmed Langley. "I mean—she approached us."

"I won’t interrupt your confab, boys," Amelia said. "But Tom, Pete wanted me to mention one little thing to an old friend. I won’t call it advice. I don’t give free advice. Unprofessional.

"Our mutual friend Dr. Grimsey worked here for quite a few years on some—well, let’s call them projects of significance. Computer-like he may be, but we can’t quite delete his memory. I know you’ll bear in mind the need to tread carefully in dealing with possible proprietary information of value to this company. We’re obligated to protect our interests."

"If you or Pete have any such concerns, Amy," Tom snapped, "I’m sure you still have Willis Rodellin’s number in our legal department."

"Hmm. I might. Somewhere."

Langley accompanied his counterpart’s stalk out to the airfield and the Pigeon Special. "I love these little miniplanes your Construction affiliate cranks out," he remarked. He added: "But you know, I was thinking... I have a little free advice for you, even if Amy doesn’t."

Tom looked at him levelly. "What?"

"Check out the plane carefully before you take off. See, look at it this way—you got an elaborately staged bogus call that brought you here to Wickliffe in a plane. So why? I have this slogan: the consequence is the cause. Maybe the call was to get you here in order to plant a bomb or something in your plane. Happens to people like us—right? Think of that?"

"Yes."

"What do you think of my slogan?"

"Nothing so far."

After a thorough look-over, Tom flew the plane back to Enterprises, fuming. He talked to himself—and was glad there were only a few clouds to catch his words.

Narrating the story to his father, he concluded with, "So Amy Foger is involved in all this!"

Damon Swift nodded, a certain kind of faint smile on his face. "Yes, ‘involved’ may be the word exactly. She and Pete may be seeing one another on a personal basis. Pete Langley is unmarried, and Amelia wouldn’t care anyway, I’d wager. Miss Foger strikes me as rather ambitious."

Tom plunked himself down behind his desk. "I’m mainly interested in the business of the fake call. Dad, whoever I reached has obviously set up some gimmick to intercept and divert calls—either at our end or at Pete’s end."

"Yet it may not be the work of an enemy, son. Pete Langley is a driven young man with big responsibilities and the same sort of big, powerful imagination as yours. In situations like that, minds like that can develop—problems."

"You think he’s having a breakdown of some kind?"

"Nothing that dramatic, necessarily. But it’s clear you’ve been on his mind. He was thinking of calling you over, wasn’t he? Perhaps he did place, and answer, those calls himself, using the dead line."

"And blocked out the memory of doing so." Tom shrugged. "Maybe. Sometimes when I get into some problem, I guess I do lose touch with things around me. So I’m told."

His father chuckled affectionately. "We’re all blessed with a wonderful auxiliary mechanism in our skulls called our brain. It’s more than willing to take things over when necessary, when the mind decides to step out for a while."

Tom discussed the matter with Harlan Ames in the plant security office next door, then called Willis Rodellin to keep him on top of things. Finally, restless, he drove over to the observatory to see what progress had been made by Hank and Dr. Grimsey in repairing the megascope.

Hank was all smiles. "Boss, Edmund here is a Godsend! Believe it or not, we’re ready for some serious testing."

Delighted, Tom exclaimed, "Great! Dr. Grimsey, I can’t thank you enough."

"Oh pshaw!" the older man grinned. "Let’s take a look around the solar system, shall we?"

They actuated the Mighty Eye and made the antenna’s aiming motors hum. In moments they were looking down on Fearing Island, the Enterprises space-launch facility off the coast of Georgia, with Tom’s huge repelatron-powered spaceship Challenger looming like a fantastic gyroscope over its launch pad. Next came a view of the glittering, elegantly rotating space outpost; and then, kinking and curving the invisible microwave helix-tube that upheld the viewpoint terminus, the three took a look at the far side of the moon.

"Electrifying!" murmured Grimsey. "This, Tom boy, is what one might call a scientific turn-on!" The man was that old.

"No reason not to make up for lost time," Tom said. He adjusted the megascope system to send the imaging point toward the Green Orb, which was now considerably closer to the Earth, although still above the plane of the ecliptic.

As the beam readjusted at light-speed, Tom asked his companions if they had determined what had caused the space prober’s disastrous burnout. "If you mean the ultimate, original cause, Skipper, we haven’t doped that out. Best guess is that the circuit supercooling system failed at some unidentified weak spot."

"But we’ve checked that element quite thoroughly now," Dr. Grimsey assured Tom. "Thank goodness your translimator machine provides a ready source of liquid helium." This invention of Tom’s made modifications in the molecular state constants of gases and liquids, easily converting gaseous helium to its supercold liquid form.

The megascope console signaled that the beam terminus had established a position near the Green Orb. "Of course, near in this case means a distance of a few thousand miles. Let’s get a good look, then swoop in." Tom worked the dials of the console as the greenish disk appeared in the center of the screen.

Again it struck Tom how eerie and half-real the Green Orb seemed to the eye. Its pale green hue was again extraordinarily faint and gloomy, its curving edges strangely elusive.

"No sign of that turbulence effect you mentioned," Hank remarked.

"Let’s see if we can get inside the ‘green curtain’," Tom said with excited determination. He caused the viewpoint to move forward quickly, and the disk swelled up with a jump to fill the screen.

Suddenly, instantly, the image wavered and sparkled. "Good night, I guess you spoke too soon, Hank," Tom groaned. The Orb was again lighting up before their eyes! From this closer point of view, it was clear that whatever the body of the Orb was made of, it was in a state of agitation.

They watched in bemused silence for several minutes, not advancing the imaging point any further. "I’m no astronomer," noted Grimsey, squinting at the screen, "but I’ve surely never run across a planetary sight like that. The gaseous envelope seems to be granular, composed of little clouds or motes." The small, glowing elements seemed to be swirling about wildly.

Tom nodded at the monitor screen. "The effect must be magneto-hydro-dynamic in nature—clumps of cold plasma, which can form itself into twisted strands." He indicated a bank of waggling meters on the control panel. "The megascope is fighting to hold off decoherence in the quantum matrix at the beam terminal. And yet," he went on in a mystified tone, "the space station reported no emissions in any part of the spectrum, nothing that could cause decoherence."

Suddenly the high-definition viewscreen flared a brilliant neon-green—and went black.

"Oh no," Tom moaned. "It’s happened again—complete system failure!"

Hank and Dr. Grimsey keenly scrutinized the meter readouts. "The limiters and contra-surgers contained it this time," Hank reported, "but it’s the same thing as before. Some kind of powerful energy pulse flooding through the transmitter rings and shorting out the anti-inverse-square-wave generator."

"A mind-blower of a name!" Grimsey commented. "The megascope is completely knocked dead, I’m afraid. Shall we commence repair?"

Tom shook his head. "Don’t worry about it now. We need to get at the source. I’m sure we’re all thinking the same thing as to the cause of this."

"Pretty obvious," declared Hank Sterling. "It’s the Orb!"

"My former employer has some little saying about causes and consequences," mused Dr. Grimsey. "Judging by the consequence, I would say the asteroid, or cloud—whatever it is—has issues with being probed."

"I’ll say!" Tom agreed. "The megascope conveys its image data instantaneously once the terminus is established, so we saw the glow effect and the turbulence in real time. Then some seconds later the ‘recoil’ pulse wrecked the scope."

Sterling nodded. "Which implies it came back to Earth from space along the microwave tube."

"A reaction set off by the presence of the beam terminal—the mere presence." The young inventor’s blue eyes glinted at the trace of a scientific mystery. "As we all know, the megascope conveyor beam stops at the terminus. It gets cut off by fractal phase inversion and never touches the object under observation."

"And so one must ask, how could this celestial body react to something that has no contact with it in the first place?" wondered Grimsey. "As if, somehow, it is reacting to our purpose, not the actuality."

"No point speculating, fellows," Tom replied. "Let’s set aside these Earth-based instrumental studies and pay a visit to the Orb!"

Hank responded excitedly, "In the Challenger?"

"What else?" Tom laughed. "Starting with you and I, we can put together a crew in no time. Bud’s due back from his delivery flight in a couple hours, and Chow’s always rarin’ to go." The youth explained to Dr. Grimsey that Chow Winkler, a crusty, colorful former chuck wagon cook, was a welcome member of most Swift expeditions. "He’s our executive chef, but he’s had plenty of space-flight experience. Which—er—reminds me, Dr. Grimsey..."

The man smiled through his bush of beard. "Oh yes, I know. I’m not quite ‘space worthy’ as of yet. But I’m content to keep my feet on the ground."

Bud and Chow were thrilled to hear of the new expedition. "Brand my comet belt!" whooped the rotund westerner. "Fer all the blame trouble we get into out there, it’s all sure a sight t’ see! Don’t mind losin’ some o’ my personal gravity, neither," he added, with a thump somewhere near his deeply buried waistline.

"What exactly do you plan to do, genius boy?" inquired Bud. "Will we be landing on the Orb?"

"It doesn’t look like there’s anything to land on," replied Tom. "It’s just some kind of thin, nebulous mass without a solid surface—it may even be hard to see when we’re up close, like a mist." The youthful astronaut explained that the Challenger would fly past the object at a distance of a few hundred miles, staying clear of its hazy perimeter and making observations at long range. "I’m going to install some sampling devices and test instruments on a couple of the Donkeys and send them out from the ship’s vehicular hangar. They’ll pass right through the body of the Orb, taking readings along the way, and then they’ll rendezvous with the ship further along." The Repelatron Donkeys were small mobile platforms designed for personnel transport outside the spaceship. Tom had recently constructed a set of new ones with enhanced remote control features.

Enterprises’ three-decker Flying Lab, the famous Sky Queen, roared southward toward Fearing Island at dawn the next morning. Her yawning passengers included Hank Sterling and another veteran of space travel, Bill Bennings.

"So it’s just the five of us, then?" asked Bill.

Tom responded, "One more. Dad suggested I take along Aciema Musa, who’s part of the visiting astrophysics team doing a research study at Fearing right now. I met her the other week."

"Aster-physics, huh?" Chow looked dubious. "Guess that sounds like sumpin’ to do with space, anyhow."

Hank laughed. "Cowpoke, those folks study all kinds of wild and woolly phenomena, from neutron stars to cosmology—the creation of the universe!"

"She’s an expert on magneto-hydro-dynamics," Tom added. "She’s studied Alfven wave propagation in interstellar plasmas. It might have a lot to do with the Green Orb."

"Take yer word on thet one," declared Chow. "But son, I’ll tell ya one thing. From what you said, that there Orb doesn’t care to give away her secrets—and she jest might fight like a dang wildcat to keep ’em! I hope we’re all up to it."

"So do I, pardner," said Tom quietly. He wondered: And what happens if we aren’t?

CHAPTER 5

PHANTOMS IN FLIGHT

ON THE invisible stilts of its repulsion-force thrust system, the great spacecraft rode its encircling rail-rings through a pastel sky at 6:11 AM.

"Shall I call you Captain Swift, Tom?" asked Aciema Musa.

Tom looked up from the element-scanning readouts on the main panel. "Maybe—if we sell the TV series," he laughed. "But till then, I’m just Tom."

"How long before we arrive at the Orb?"

"At our constant 1-G acceleration—we won’t start decelerating until we’ve completed the flyby—it’ll be an eight hour jump, approximately."

"What! Eight hours in space? How’ll we pass the time?" Bud gibed from the copilot’s seat.

"Never thought about that," muttered Chow, standing behind them, gazing out at the brilliant stars through the control deck’s pair of rectangular picture-window viewports. "Eight hours. Time fer two snacks and a gosh-honest lunch!"

As the cook clomped off to take the interdeck elevator to his galley, Tom told Bud and Aciema: "Actually, Hank and I have a great way to wile away the time—composing a message to transmit to the Space Friends. Maybe we can get some answers from the scientists even before we try probing through that green glow."

"Early word sounds like a great idea," Bud agreed with nervous enthusiasm. Tom knew his best friend was recalling a recent incident, in which a warning from the extraterrestrials had prevented the Challenger’s destruction by an undetectable threat.

"I also have some work to do," said Aciema. "I’m interested in determining in advance what sort of readings we might expect if the object really does turn out to be a plasma phenomenon. It’ll help us in sorting through the readings."

"Then good luck to both of us!"

Tom joined Hank Sterling in the communications compartment down below and set to work on the difficult problem of formulating a clear message in the mathematical symbols of the space beings. "Even with a copy of your Space Dictionary in the computer, it’s never less than a big challenge," Hank declared.

"Sure is," Tom nodded. "For all the times we’ve done this, there’s always a new wrinkle. Any misunderstandings can really throw off the message and make the answer useless."

"If they answer—which they don’t always."

Hours fled as they labored, with Tom occasionally checking with Bud in the control cabin above them. Finally Tom said: "We might as well go with this version."

He had written a translation of the outgoing message below the cluster of weird symbols and hieroglyphs.

TOM SWIFT TO SPACE FRIENDS . WE ARE TRAVELING IN OUR VEHICLE TO OBJECT THAT HAS ENTERED THE SOLAR SYSTEM.

Here Tom inserted various parameters indicating the orbit of the Green Orb, its size, and the hue of its emitted light in terms of frequency.

DO YOU HAVE INFORMATION REGARDING THE NATURE OF THIS OBJECT THAT WOULD ASSIST OUR OBSERVATIONS?

"Oughta work, Skipper," Hank stated.

Tom transmitted the code string through the imaging oscilloscope and out into the void over the Challenger’s powerful deep-space antenna. A lengthy wait followed. "We may not get an answer until we’ve already passed the Orb," Tom grumbled. "Maybe not until we get back home."

Yet a few minutes later an answer arrived from space—an answer that answered nothing.

TO TOM SWIFT . WE ARE FRIENDS . WE HAVE NO DATA ON THE PHENOMENON SPECIFIED.

"Hmph! Some help they are!" complained Hank.

"‘No data’," Tom repeated musingly. "I wonder..." He had the receiving system print out the original, untranslated symbols transmitted by the alien beings and pored over them intently.

Hank asked, "Looking for something, Tom?"

"Not exactly." The young inventor looked up at the engineer. "I just wondered to what extent the Dictionary was translating an especially ambiguous symbol-set. Maybe it’s me, but the way the translation puts it almost suggests they have no knowledge at all of the Green Orb."

"You mean nada? They might not even know it exists?" Hank snorted. "Those guys are on top of just about everything going on in space."

"True. But the Orb is a very strange sort of object. Dad and I think the Space Friends conceptualize the physical world in a very different way from humans—and their modes of sense perception seem entirely different as well."

"Well—you’re right," conceded the square-jawed engineer. "They understand light in terms of geometrical relationships and electromagnetic frequencies. But they don’t seem to grasp what a picture is."

"Images are basic to us, to our sort of brains, but a different species may not—"

Suddenly Tom and Hank were startled from their chairs by a shrill cry from the corridor.

Bolting into the corridor they found Chow in a state of quivering panic. "Terrible! Oh my prairie stars! The whole blame galley’s goin’ up!"

Tom grabbed his older friend’s thick arm, trying to calm him. "Chow!—your galley? But—" Tom had noticed immediately that there was no hint of smoke in the air, nor had the automatic alarms gone off.

Chow shook off Tom’s hand roughly. "I’m tellin’ you, it’s all burnin’ like a torch! Th’ micro oven, th’ induction stovetop, the ceiling up above—fire ever’place y’ look!"

Hank had taken a few steps down the passage, which brought him in sight of the open galley door and the compartment beyond. He paused, then glanced back with a puzzled expression. "What fire, Chow? I don’t see anything."

"You gone gosht-durn blind?" The ex-Texan stomped past Hank, waving an arm. But then his barreling bulk slowed to a stop.

"See, cowpoke? Everything’s fine," said Hank in a soothing tone. "Something scare you?"

Chow was bewildered. "I—but I—"

"Tell us what you saw," urged Tom gently.

"Wh-what I saw?" Chow rubbed a hand across his bulging eyes. "I guess—I guess I saw somethin’ that wasn’t rightly there, that’s what! I ’as mixin’ up lunch on the counter, and when I turned back toward the oven, there was fire everywhere, all over the place. Figgered I ’as gonna be burnt up like a marshmeller on a stick!"

Tom asked if Chow had felt any heat, or smelled any smoke. "Wa-aal—now that you mention it, son—no. Guess not. But it shor did look lively enough."

"I’ll bet it did," Tom nodded. "In space our senses can play tricks on us."

But Chow looked scornful. "I wudden in space, I ’as in my galley. Think whatcher want. If it wasn’t fire, it shor was a reezernable fact-simulee!"

As the bulky man clomped away, Tom and Hank exchanged shrugging glances.

Hank returned to the communications room. Tom remained in the corridor and used the ship intercom to connect to Bill Bennings, who was busy in the vehicular hangar making final preparations for the launch of the Repelatron Donkey probes. "It’s going fine down here, Tom," he reported. "The things’ll run like watches, if... I haven’t made any mistakes."

There was something in Bill’s tone that prompted the young inventor to ask if he’d run into any problems. "No, no. I was just a little distracted. Queasy stomach. Came on all of a sudden."

"We have meds in the infirmary if you need any."

"Sure, I know. But it’s just a little irritating. I drove out to Lakewillow a couple nights back and had some Hungarian food—guess it didn’t set too well."

A half-idea seemed to be tugging the sleeve of Tom Swift’s agile mind. But—what? "Bill, if you don’t mind telling me... Did you see something down there? Or thought you did?"

The silence seemed too long. "Sometimes I pay for my adventurous eating. I guess everything connects up in the body. Doesn’t it? You feel something, you see something..."

"What did you see?"

"It was nothing, Tom. I’ll be okay."

Tom walked toward the elevator, his steps dragging. Whatever Bennings had glimpsed was far from nothing. Tom could tell that it had startled him—even frightened him. And in the end Bill had decided, as Chow had, that it hadn’t been real. Chow... Bill... How come I can’t think of whatever it is I’m thinking about? he wondered.

In the Challenger’s small crew lounge the Shoptonian found Aciema Musa standing at a viewport, staring out moodily at the stars. Seeing Tom, she nodded and said, "You do a lot of mathematical calculation in your inventing work, don’t you?"

Tom smiled. "I let other people—and our computers—handle the math whenever I can get away with it. I guess I’m more an ‘idea man,’ if you see what I mean."

"Oh, of course," she nodded. "Concepts and intuition. You think in pictures, not numbers."

"Why do you ask? Did you run into a problem?"

"Not a problem. Not precisely."

"Tell me, won’t you?"

She turned at looked at him for a moment, her expression thoughtful. "All right. If you want.

"Tom, some kinds of complex problems are handled like what they call double-entry bookkeeping. You might have two or more distinct series of partial solutions running, and you don’t know until quite a ways down the road whether you’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere. Pardon the poetry."

"I see what you mean."

"I was doing that sort of complex figuring—MHD is like that. Whenever I start I have a kind of dread in my stomach that I’ll struggle all the way to the end just to discover I made a mistake near the beginning. Sometimes you can worry so much about the possibility of error that your distraction causes the very thing you were worried about."

"I know. Is that what happened?"

Brow creased, Aciema looked away. "I reached the end, and my ‘accounts’ didn’t ‘balance.’ There it was on the monitor, the unwanted number, blinking at me. I’ve just spent the last half-hour trying like the dickens to find the false step. I just plain couldn’t see any mistake, anywhere."

"Sometimes that’s the way a problem is," Tom said ruefully. "You just can’t see it—not while you’re fretting over it, anyway. I think problems must evolve chameleon powers for survival!"

"No, you don’t understand," the astrophysicist bluntly pronounced. "The problem is, there was no problem!"

The youth stared. "You’re right. I don’t understand."

"I must’ve looked at the set of resultants a hundred times while backtracking. There’s no doubt in my mind, none, that my final figures didn’t correlate. But when I checked the last time, they did!"

"Okay, but maybe one of the things you tried in recalculating—"

"I didn’t recalculate," she said quietly. "I was only trying to find where I’d gone wrong. Once that happens, reworking the figures is trivial. I made no changes. But the final numbers suddenly weren’t the numbers I’d been seeing all along. It was driving me nuts. All that time, I felt like I just wanted to zoom back home and crawl into bed." She turned back to the viewport. "And that’s what’s on my mind, Tom."

He joined her at the viewport, silent. Numbers that weren’t there, Tom said in his mind. A fire that wasn’t there. A fleck of dull green was visible in the far distance. And—the little orb that isn’t there.

Suddenly worried, Tom called up to Bud. "Everything okay up there, flyboy?"

"Sure."

"Would you do an eyeball check on the air sensors and the circulators?"

Bud reported in a moment that all seemed normal. "Something going on?"

"Yes," Tom replied. "What, I don’t know. But at least it’s not some problem with the air."

The young space pilot elevatored to the control deck and stood beside his friend. Bud glanced up at him curiously. "All the times you tell me about your inventions—and now you’re clamming up on me."

Tom laughed. "Let me com Hank first. Maybe we’ll have even more to talk about."

The young inventor asked Hank if he had had any unusual experiences since they had parted.

"Unusual, Skipper? Like what happened to Chow?"

"Anything that struck you as a bit off."

"I suppose what happened a few minutes ago counts as ‘off,’ even if it didn’t amount to anything. I was working at the translation computer. I guess my attention wandered a little—all those darn words and numbers can make a guy feel drowsy."

"Did you nod off?"

"I didn’t think so. Maybe I did, for just a second. I thought I saw..." Tom waited. "It was as if I’d glimpsed something out of the corner of my eye."

"Something that bothered you." It was not a question.

"Yes. It did. It was the face of my son. It couldn’t have lasted more than a tick, but that’s how I remember it."

"Did it—he—say anything?"

"No. But something about the expression was... sad. More than that, actually. It’s hard to talk about it, but it seemed as if he were reacting to something awful that had happened."

Tom ventured a guess, gently. "Such as the loss of his father?"

"That’s how it struck me. All I could think of, for a moment, was how badly I needed to be back there to comfort him. But it’s no big deal, really. All in a split second, like something you barely glimpse that memory reconstructs. When I looked hard, there was nothing there." Hank hesitated. "Which, of course, is just like it was with Chow’s galley fire."

Tom switched off the intercom, sucking in and letting out tense breath. "That’s everyone, except you and me, Bud. We’re seeing things—not just random things, but things with personal meaning. It’s as if—"

Looking over, he broke off the thought. Bud was sitting in his contoured chair, rigid and white-faced. The black-haired youth was staring hard, not at his friend, but forward, out the huge, broad viewpane.

He spoke in a rasp. "T-Tom..."

Tom followed Bud’s gaze. His throat went dry. "I see it."

"See... what?"

"Her."

She was a little girl, perhaps eight, perhaps nine. Very petite. Her long hair was a dullish blond. She wore a blousy top over faded jeans. She was looking at Tom.

From the other side of the Tomaquartz pane.

"Sh-she doesn’t have a spacesuit," Bud whispered. "She’s just floating out there."

"No," murmured Tom, his heart thudding. "Not floating—standing! Standing on empty space."

The little girl was gazing intently, desperately, into Tom’s eyes. Her expression was pleading. Her lips were moving.

And she was gone.

CHAPTER 6

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE

THE BOYS’ fearful gazes met only blackness and stars—and a spark of green.

Bud could barely squeeze the words out. "We couldn’t have—"

"We did!" Tom brusquely declared. "We both saw her. I read her lips, Bud, just as I did before."

"With the ghost. So—"

"She was repeating it over and over. ‘Tom, don’t be scared. Don’t go away. Hurry.’ "

"Right," said Bud, abruptly sarcastic. "Because the time is near. Jetz! Why can’t they manage to come right out and say what’s on their minds?"

"They?" Tom dropped down into the chair next to Bud. "They who?"

Bud snorted, casting a look that went with it. "Uh-huh. ‘They who?’ Isn’t it obvious what’s going on? There are people on the Green Orb—and they’re messin’ with our minds!"

Without much conviction, Tom shook his head. "Nothing’s obvious, flyboy. There’s nothing there for people to be on. The Orb isn’t a solid body. It’s barely anything at all—mostly light, as far as we can tell."

"Fine. Then what’s happening to us?—by sheer coincidence as we get nearer that big glowing nothing out there!"

"I don’t know what’s happening to us. But I’m sure it started before this, back home."

"You mean the pirate ghost?"

"More than that. I told you about my phantom phone call. We’re not just seeing things."

Bud’s fortitude made a comeback. "And we’re not turning tail."

"Absolutely not." Tom added with a grim chuckle: "I’d sooner let my crewcut grow out than give up now!"

Another hour passed. There were no further weird incidents.

The small crew gathered on the control deck. A feeling of tension gripped everyone when the Green Orb finally came into view as a something, not just a vague spot of light. And yet there was no great difference. Its diffuse, yellowish-green halo gave it the look of a soft ball of cotton batting, dim and hard to see even against the velvet black of space. Minute by minute, the mysterious object loomed larger.

"Time to launch the Donkeys, if we’re sticking to the plan. Are we, Skipper?" Hank asked.

Tom nodded his head. "No change."

He conned the flight dials and swiveled the central cabin-cube of the Challenger on its upper and lower pivots, squarely facing their target. Then he took control of the two Repelatron Donkeys and opened the wide hatchway of the vehicular hangar. In seconds the small, disk-shaped platforms darted past the viewport and on into space, becoming silhouettes against the glow of the Orb, then vanishing specks.

A minute passed. Another.

"Are we close enough for any readings?" asked Aciema Musa.

"We should be," Tom stated. "But we’re not getting anything more than before. Even the LRGM—the gravity-variance mapper—is drawing a blank."

"Say now," Chow burst out suddenly. "There’s sure somethin’ going on out there."

It was the same violent disturbance as before. Though the visible disk was still too small with distance to show any agitation, the Orb had lit up with an intense glow. As it increased, the compartment shone with its greenish brilliance!

"Wh-what in tarnation’s goin’ on?" Chow gulped.

Aciema asked Tom: "Could it be an effect of our repelatron beams?"

"The trons aren’t aimed at the Orb—we can’t get a telespectrometer reading to calibrate them. I’ve been using other bodies for thrust and steering."

Bud looked nervous as the light painted a greenish pallor over his face. "Then what’s making it light up?"

"I think it’s reacting to the Repelatron Donkeys."

"But you just said—"

"Not to the repelatrons on the Donkeys, Bud. The Orb is reacting to their presence. The same sort of thing happened when we sent the megascope terminal close to it. But the Challenger is well insulated against any sort of energy discharge it might toss our way," Tom added reassuringly.

Throughout the flight Tom had kept contact with his father in Shopton by means of the Private-Ear Radio. Now he began to PER back a report of the flyby maneuver and the launch of the two instrument probes. "And you say the instruments are still failing to detect anything?" asked Mr. Swift.

"Just the glow, Dad. At least we’ll be able to profile the luminance figures as they increase."

"Perhaps you’ll be able to get something more when the probes pass through the corona into the body of the Orb. Such as it is."

"Hope so. Penetration in four minutes."

Tom broke contact, turning his keen eyes toward the board readouts. Absorbed, Tom failed to notice his crewmates’ silence.

Suddenly movement caught Tom’s eye. Bud slumped forward against the instrument panel, inert. The copilot was unconscious—dead to the world!

"Bud!—Help him, Hank!" Tom looked around frantically and gasped in dismay. Chow had sunk to the floor, where Aciema Musa lay already. Hank and Bill Bennings were leaning against the bulkhead, eyes closed, on the verge of collapse—and even as Tom watched, they slid down to the deck.

Tom switched the quantum cartridge of the PER to connect to mission control on Fearing Island. "Tom to base! Something’s happening to the crew!" he radioed desperately. "D-don’t know what’s wrong... They... they’ve passed out!... And I..."

Tom’s eyes felt heavy, leaden. An overpowering drowsiness enveloped him. He fought to stay awake, then suddenly sagged in the pilot’s seat!

Silent and helpless, the Challenger hurtled toward the Green Orb!

At the tracking center on Fearing Island, flight chief Amos Quezada and his crew waited tensely. "Base to Tom! Come in, please! Fearing calling Challenger! Can you read us?" Again and again Quezada spoke into his headset mike.

The tracking technicians sat at their monitoring consoles in anxious suspense. "Tom must have blacked out, too!" an aide murmured to Quezada.

"He must have. Switch the PER cartridge, Leo. I need to bring Damon Swift into this."

Tom’s father received the word from Fearing Island with perplexed dread. "How is this possible, Amos? Do you still have the ship on deep tracking?"

"We sure do," was the response. "Of course we can’t make anything of that Orb momma on radar. But going by the last figures from the outpost’s telescopes, they should be making their flyby right now."

"What’s the separation?"

"About three hundred miles at the near point."

Mr. Swift turned to the broad-shouldered young man sitting across from him in the Swifts’ office. Arvid Hanson was Enterprises’ ingenious maker of design models and prototypes. The talented engineer and technician had often joined Tom’s expeditions. "Arv, this is a very serious situation."

"They’ve blacked out, but it seems the ship is still all right."

"That’s not the issue," declared the elder scientist. "They were maintaining constant 1-G acceleration since leaving Earth orbit. Tom didn’t plan on turnover until further along, after passing the Orb. The Challenger’s guidance computer would continue with the instructions in place, automatically reorienting the repelatron radiators to continue the specified acceleration."

"Then she’ll—"

Damon Swift’s expression was dark with fear. "She’ll keep piling on velocity. The spaceship will exit the solar system before we have a chance to get up there for a rescue!"

Hanson nodded sharply. "A rescue with what? We don’t have any craft that could catch her now—not to mention later!"

Mr. Swift rubbed his eyes. "We can’t give up. They may regain consciousness. But if not—!" An idea struck, suddenly. "Hanson, do you know of any way we could establish some sort of long-range control of the ship? Override the board?"

"No way I know. Man, we can’t even see what’s happening until the megascope is up and running again. And yet..."

"Something?"

"There’s another possibility!"

Meanwhile, a deathlike silence reigned in the Challenger’s flight compartment. The near pass behind it, the ship retreated soundlessly from the Green Orb with no living hand at the controls.

Minutes later, Tom stirred in his pilot’s seat. He felt as if a whining dentist’s drill were at work in his brain, piercing through thick layers of fog. The drill changed to a buzz saw, then to a wildly shrieking banshee as fire trucks raced toward him, sirens wide open. Wh-what kind of fire is that? he wondered. It’s green! A giant alarm clock exploded and kept on shrilling insanely.

Tom jolted awake with a painful effort. "Those crazy noises!" he mumbled weakly. Then he realized the sounds were coming over the Private-Ear Radio—high-pitched squeals, buzzing, and raucous beeps!

Struggling upright, Tom grabbed the mike. "Challenger to base!" he exclaimed hoarsely. "Can you read me?"

Amos Quezada’s relieved voice had cheering in the background. "Challenger, we read you—loud and clear! Are you all right, Skipper? Status nom?"

"I—I guess so... My head’s cottony. But what was that racket on the PER? Someone jamming our frequency?—no, that’s impossible."

Tom could hear Quezada chuckle. "I’ll take creds for this one. We were just trying to shake you awake with sound, every wild mix the techs could come up with. So—you blacked out? What about the others aboard—are they okay, too?"

Tom glanced around. His five crewmates were moving groggily. They seemed to be fighting to regain consciousness as if they, too, had been roused by the piercing radio noises. But their heavy-lidded eyes looked ready to close again.

Tom shook himself as he felt the same drowsiness as before dulling his brain. "Over for now, Fearing," he mumbled into the microphone. "Some k-kind of influence is coming from the Orb. We’d b-better clear out of here p-p-pronto!"

Lead-fingered, Tom fumbled at the controls, desperate to set a course back to base. But his eyes widened in disbelief as they focused on the locator-calculator, the Spacelane Brain. "What in the cosmos—! We’re already starting to loop back!"

Another bizarre mystery! Had the Orb somehow grabbed hold of the ship? Or had Tom made the changes himself—and forgotten, just as Pete Langley had blanked out his telephone call?

Brain still fogged, the young space captain reversed repelatron thrust and corrected course. Then he sagged against his seat belt as the Challenger veered from its trajectory, now slowing with a 1-G deceleration. The Orb had again become a distant speck, but it would be hours before the Challenger’s arc began to point them Earthward.

Unknowing, Tom fell back into a semiconscious state. Twenty minutes later the astronaut team began to fully revive—Tom and Bud first, then Hank Sterling, Bennings, Aciema, and finally Chow.

"What did—what did it do to us?" Bud wanted to know.

"Something made us pass out," Tom replied. "We were in a state of induced sleep."

Still heaped on the deck, Chow Winkler gazed up at Aciema Musa, who was nursing a bruise on her arm. "Sorry, ma’am. Didn’t know where I ’as fallin’ to. Does it hurt?"

"No," she replied. "Then again, the feeling hasn’t started coming back."

Tom checked the rest of the crew. All were now fully revived, and injuries from their unexpected collapses seemed minor. "We’re heading back to base," Tom reported to Fearing. "There was an unexplained deviation from trajectory, but I have the ship under control now."

"Not unexplained to me, Challenger," came Quezada’s rejoinder. "Call it human muscle power at work!"

"But Amos—how in the world did you get her to start course reversal?"

"Well now, Tom, I’d suggest to take a closer look at your board—and send that question Arv Hanson’s way!"

Over the PER link Arv reported with a laugh, "Oh, I was a clever little engineer. We needed to try slowing you before you went zooming off toward Andromeda, but we couldn’t change the settings on the big repelatrons. And suddenly I remembered the Donkeys."

"The two I launched?" asked Tom—who suddenly remembered that he needed to rendezvous with them to recover whatever samples they had taken from the Orb.

"No, Skipper, the four remaining ones locked in their cradles in the vehicular hangar." Hanson reminded Tom that the new Donkeys had been designed for remote-control operation as needed. "We used the magnifying antenna here at Enterprises to send them a sequence of instructions—basically to swivel their radiators every which way until each one locked onto Venus. I had transmitted the spectronic frequency data; all they needed was to detect a push back."

"And you used that to slow and steer the ship?"

"The position of Venus was approximately right. Four mini-repelatrons against all those big ones, still firin’ away—kind of an unequal tug-of-war."

"A tug-of-war in reverse! But it was enough to make a difference."

Mr. Swift cut in. "Ultimately, we could have forced you into a circle. But it would have taken days."

"It was a great plan," Tom said. "Now I’ll retrieve the two probes—see you tomorrow, back home."

There were further surprises in store. "We can’t find the probes," Hank reported. "I’ve been scanning the general area their programmed trajectories should have taken them to. But there’s nothing there."

"What about the signals from the instruments?"

"Dead silent, Tom."

"Could they have crashed into the Orb?" Bud speculated. "Maybe it’s not as empty inside that glow as you thought!"

Tom didn’t answer his friend, but turned to the control board and made some adjustments. After a moment he said: "We are getting some signal. But it’s pulsating rapidly."

"What do you mean?" asked Hank.

"Look at the oscilloscope. A fraction of a second of signal—then a much longer interruption. Aciema, could some sort of MHD effect cause periodic blanking like that?"

"If so, I’m not familiar with it. Still, an electromagnetic interaction could explain why the Donkeys are so far off course."

But the answer was less dramatic—yet strange. "Good night!" gaped Bud as he stared into the depths through the viewport. "Look at ’em go!"

"Spinnin’ like blame space lariats," was Chow’s description.

"Tumbling head over heels," Tom said. "Why is why we couldn’t get a steady signal from them."

Mused Aciema, "I know of nothing that could cause a phenomenon like this, Tom. And you say they’re almost at right angles to their planned trajectories?"

"It’s like they bounced off some kind of force field, don’t you think?" Bud speculated.

Tom grinned at the notion. "You mean something along the lines of, ‘Raise the shields—enemy Donkeys approaching’ ?" The young inventor waggled his head. "At the speed they were moving, hitting some kind of barrier wouldn’t have bounced them, it would have smashed them to transistors. It looks to me like they were deflected by a powerful, concentrated force—almost refracted, like light through a prism."

"If the force was unequally distributed, it would cause torque," observed Hank. "Rotation or tumbling, in other words."

Careful pushes from the Challenger’s repelatrons slowed the tumble of the probes and allowed Tom to regain remote control of their propulsion units. He was finally able to maneuver them into their cradles in the hangar-hold.

The great ship had many hours of outward travel yet ahead as it decelerated, and then the inbound leg of the journey, on which they stayed well away from the Green Orb. There were no further strange incidents, and at last Tom was back in Shopton, in bed. He fell asleep quickly, and his sleep was deep. In the morning he was certain he had dreamed—yet could remember nothing of them.

"Have you any idea what caused you to black out, Tom?" inquired his mother at breakfast.

"Just a guess, Mom, but I’d say there’s something about the Orb’s electromagnetic emanations when it gets ‘agitated’ that induces unconsciousness," Tom said.

"Uh-huh—a self-defense instinct at work!" was Sandy’s quick opinion. "I’ll bet the Jolly Green Orb is a big green space brain!"

"Maybe, sweetheart," said Mr. Swift with a smile. "But there’s no need to take a flying leap toward a science-fiction scenario. A more reasonable hypothesis is that this is a purely natural reaction to the near-approach of energy sources, such as the megascope beams or the slight secondary resonance produced by the linear fields of the repelatrons."

"And there’s nothing mysterious about electromagnetic brain stimulation, Sandy," Tom elaborated. "Brain researchers have found it’s possible to put people to sleep by electrically stimulating the basal forebrain—and doctors have used electrical anesthesia, too."

"Exactly," said Damon Swift. "We ourselves have dealt with it, you know—the pulsator weapon that we confronted when you were developing your jetmarine, son. The protective device you invented then might also protect you from this effect."

"I’m anxious to look over the recordings from the Donkeys," Tom stated, "and whatever their samplers captured. That’ll answer a lot of questions. And then maybe I can get back to work!"

Sandy looked at her older brother in surprise. "Poking around in this Orb thing isn’t work?"

"I believe he means his current invention," smiled Damon Swift. "The 3-D telejector."

"And," Tom said abruptly, "it may turn out that the telejector project will be important to the other one—to making sense out of the Green Orb!"

CHAPTER 7

DOPPELGANGER

"I’M AFRAID I don’t understand, Dear," responded Mrs. Swift. "How could they be connected?"

"It just sort’ve came to me, Mom, all of a sudden," Tom said thoughtfully. "Maybe I’m off base, but...

"We’ve been treating the Orb as a normal solid object—like an asteroid or a gas cloud. Yet after the flyby it looks less like that than ever. I’m wondering if it might be some kind of light phenomenon!"

"Some kind of projection?" asked Mr. Swift, puzzled.

"No, not exactly. It still may not be anything deliberate, involving someone’s technology—it could be something purely natural that the universe turns out now and then. But it could have the properties of an image, not an ordinary physical object. If that’s true, the only way to gain detailed data about it might be to use a camera system to capture a full 3-D range of wavefront information—and reproduce it for study in the same form."

"But Tomonomo," Sandy objected, "can you get close enough to take 3-D pictures like that without getting knocked out?"

"I won’t have to, if my idea pans out," was the cryptic reply. Inquiry fell silent. The Swift family respected Tom’s usual wish to let his inner intuitions cook before pouring out their product.

At Enterprises Tom spent time studying the data captured by the Repelatron Donkeys during their interrupted probe—time wasted, as it developed. "Good night," he groaned in Hank Sterling’s direction. "All that effort for nothing!"

Hank gave a rueful nod. "Nothing in the sampling reservoirs but a nice vacuum."

"And no recorded readings from the instruments. Whatever affected our consciousness, it wasn’t an electromagnetic pulsation effect after all."

"Well, I guess we do know one thing, Tom," the engineer pointed out. "It’s easy to tell exactly when the Donkeys started tumbling, and where they were."

"True. It happened just at the outer fringes of the halo—the part we can detect optically, at any rate. And that’s something."

"Yeah—really something!"

Unable to proceed further with the mystery, Tom turned to another. In his electronics lab, he resumed his postponed work with his 3-D telejector. Arvid Hanson’s assistant Linda Ming assisted him. "So Arv’s taking a sick day? Doesn’t happen too often."

"Oh, you know these Swedes," she replied. "Hardy stock. He woke up with a head cold, he said." She took a curious look at the electronics equipment on Tom’s workbench. "But this is the sorta thing that would perk him up, I’ll bet."

"Me too."

Since before the fateful night at the Gullbracken House that seemed to have begun the recent series of peculiar events, the young inventor had been trying to solve some difficult problems with his telejector by exploring a new approach. The experimental version, crudely assembled, took the form of three parallel columns of metal rings, the array mounted as a unit over a swivel-base. "These look like micro-mini versions of your megascope antenna," Linda remarked.

"The new telejector uses some of the principles of the megascope, but in reverse," confirmed the blond-haired youth. "In the megascope, the distant beam terminal registers the light waves passing through it and reproduces the wavefronts at the other end, here on Earth, for viewing on the screen. The notion behind the this improved telejector is to create a remote emitter-point that generates light, replicating the wavefront forms—called Fourier patterns—as a hologram does. As the point sweeps back and forth a thousand times a second, the luminous patterns are ‘painted’ in space, and the eye interprets the output as a three-dimensional image."

"And there’s your 3-D TV program," she nodded. "An invisible hologram!"

"By eliminating the need for a cloud of absorptive droplets to act as my screen, the system becomes a great deal more practical for standard use," added Tom as he labored over a circuit. "But theory is one thing, Linda—practice is another. I need your help on some of the miniaturization angles."

"That’s what I’m paid for, chief." As she assisted him, she asked further questions. "One thing you haven’t mentioned. Won’t you need some sort of special TV camera to pick up the lightwave information in the first place?"

"Sure will—and it’s already testing out fine. Look."

Tom pointed. For the first time Linda noticed a small box mounted on the lab wall. Attached to the front of the chassis was a vertical cylinder covered like a gemstone with regular facets set at various angles. "I’ve mounted a half-dozen of my holoceivers at different places on the walls. You need inputs from several directions for the system to work."

"Makes sense. They don’t look much like TV cameras."

"They work on a different principle," he explained. "Like the megascope, they use a vector-resolving quantum matrix to ‘read’ the wavefronts. But I don’t extend it out into space. The holoceivers work with the photons that enter the isolator prism—the cylindrical lens, if you want to think of it that way."

Tom and Linda worked for hours to make the new system produce a bright enough output to be visible in normal light. Repeated tests showed exciting progress, realistic 3-D images seeming to float in midair in front of the triple antennas.

Amidst their concerted work, Chow and his lunch cart had been sent away twice. But the third attempt by Tom and Linda was sternly rebuffed. "Not another word!" he huffed. "It’s more’n halfway t’ dinner, an’ you two kin take time fer a simple sandwich an’ some fixins."

Tom smiled and wiped his brow. "Guess you’re right, pardner." He gave Linda Ming a sly nod, and she also smiled. Chow’s visit had been anticipated—and prepared for.

Chow handed off the sandwiches and ladeled out some rich potato salad as well. As he turned and began to clomp off, Linda suddenly called out:

"Whoa now, Texan! Is that another ghost?"

Chow whirled with big eyes. "Hunh? Where?"

Linda and Tom were pointing upward—above the cook’s head! He rolled back his shoulders and looked up. With a fearful gulp he staggered backwards and nearly stumbled over his Texas boots.

It took a moment for Chow’s prairie eyes to make sense of what he was seeing. "B-b-brand my ec-ec-ecter-plazzum! The blame thing’s upside down—walkin’ on th’ ceilin’!"

The eerie figure was big and round and semi-transparent. Though its feet were out of view, it did seem to be walking, without a sound. "It—it don’t have a head!" whispered Chow.

"No—it doesn’t have hair," Tom corrected him. "You’re seeing the top of his head."

The figure stretched out an arm. In his hand was a phantom sandwich! "Now wait a blame second!" Chow snapped. "I never heard o’ food havin’ ghosts." He lowered his gaze to Tom and Linda. His eyes were full of suspicion. "Yep, another one o’ them tricks. That there’s me, iddnit!"

His watchers had dissolved into laughter. "In the flesh—er, kind of," chortled Tom. "We recorded you with my 3-D camera system when you came in, and that’s the playback."

"How do you like seeing the top of your head in 3-D?" asked Linda joshingly. "I think it’s very manly, cowboy."

"Ya do?—aaah, more jokin’!" But he laughed too.

The phone bleeped with an internal call.

"Hi Doc," Tom said into the receiver.

"Tom, I thought I should let you know of something," said Doc Simpson, a strain in his voice. "Maybe it’s nothing, but—it has to do with Arv Hanson."

"Arv?"

Linda Ming looked over in surprise as Tom repeated the name.

"He called me about an hour ago from home—told me he was running a high fever. I’ve called him twice in the last few minutes. He doesn’t answer!"

CHAPTER 8

WEIRD WARNINGS

TOM was instantly concerned—Doc Simpson was not the type to panic. But with a glance at Linda Ming, he responded calmly. "Couldn’t he have just stepped out?—maybe to the drugstore?"

"I called his drugstore just now, Tom. The druggist is a friend of mine. He knows Hanson very well, but says he hasn’t been by today. Look," Doc went on, "I don’t mean to alarm you. When Arv first told me his symptoms this morning, it sounded rather more severe than a headcold, but I didn’t think too much of it—he’s a healthy guy. But now—"

"Okay," Tom said. "No harm in checking it out. Keep calling him, won’t you? Bud’s in Shopton this afternoon—I’ll ask him to drop by."

"That’d be wise, I think."

Bud promised to stop by Hanson’s small lakeside home. After a tense wait, Tom’s cellphone beeped.

"He didn’t answer the front door, but his car was in the driveway, so I went around back," Bud reported.

"The back door was unlocked?"

"It is now. Pal, he was lying on his sofa, too weak to speak—he could barely move! Drenched in sweat!"

Tom gasped in quiet dismay. "He should go to an emergency room, Bud!"

"I’ve already called an ambulance. I think I hear the siren now." Bud assured Tom that he would follow Arv to the local hospital, Shopton Memorial, and call back when he had an update.

"Call Doc," Tom urged. "He may want to speak to the attending physician."

Too concerned to resume work, Tom headed for his office in the administration building, promising to call Linda and Chow as soon as he received word on Arv’s condition.

Word arrived in half a long hour. "He seems to be doing fine now," Doc reported. "They tell me the fever is under control, heart and pulse rate strong. He’s pretty weak, but I talked to him for a minute."

"Do you know what he came down with?"

"I’m afraid not. You know, people develop these mysterious fever spikes every now and then, and by the time we medics get into it there isn’t much left to see. We call it things like ‘24 hour flu’. Translation: who knows? There are all sorts of viruses drifting around our crowded world, Skipper. Most are harmless, fortunately, but the body still has to deal with them."

Tom was relieved, but asked: "Do you think he’s contagious?"

"Like I said—who knows? But as a doctor I can’t justify any isolation measures at this point. Bed rest, obviously, until he’s back to his robust Swedish self. I’ll take a look at his lab results and bloodwork."

Tom spoke to his father, who was passing through on the way to a meeting, then tried to collect his thoughts. "I guess writing up the telejector test data will clear my mind," he muttered to himself.

His accessed his personal scientific journal on his personal computer. As always, he did so with a slight twinge of anticipation. And sometimes, as on this occasion, the twinge was rewarded.

YOU GUESSED IT

ITS GOOD OLD ME

CHECK YOUR HOME VOICEMAIL

FOR AN IMPORTANT LETTER

Tom didn’t bother puzzling over the non sequitur. The cryptic comments had a familiar tone. On several occasions Tom had communicated in this way with a severely secret agency of the U. S. government which he had come to refer to as Collections. On matters of world affairs and espionage activity—no longer the sole province of governments—they seemed to know a great deal that few had a right or reason to know. And that included how to cut in on Tom’s protected and encrypted computer system.

"Back from vacation?" Tom typed, hoping his sarcasm came through clearly. "We could have used your help in dealing with the sunken tanker."

SEEMS YOU DID OKAY ON YOUR OWN

STILL BREATHING I TRUST

I HAVE INFO FOR YOU

SORRY

WE DONT DO ORBS

THIS IS ABOUT THAT TANKER

Tom was intrigued but wary. The recent foundering of a supertanker, the Centurion, had prompted Tom to use his aquatomic tracker to seek its subocean location. It developed that the ship had been converted to a hidden underwater base run by a European scientist named Vaxilis who was attempting to extract a valuable substance from the sea bottom. Captured, Tom and Bud had managed to escape the base. Later Tom had been informed by the CIA that the ship had been flooded, drowning Vaxilis and his followers to the last man.

That had seemed the final word. Could there be more? "Is Vaxilis alive?" he typed.

NO

STILL DEAD

AH BUT WAIT

WASNT THERE SOMETHING ABOUT

HIS MAKING A LAST MINUTE SWITCH

TO A NEW PATRON?

BETRAY A FINE DICTATORSHIP

LIKE KRANJOVIA?

WHAT A JERK

THE NEW IMPROVED PATRON

SNAKEMAN

Tom felt a choking sensation as he typed, fingers trembling. The snakeman! "Li Ching is dead!"

YOU FORGOT THE QUESTION MARK

THIS ONE IS NOT STILL DEAD

Comrade-General Li Ching, an expatriot Chinese national, had become known to the world intelligence community as the Black Cobra. A chillingly conscience-free master strategist who traded in technological secrets, he had pursued Tom murderously, and had nearly exterminated the scientific community on tiny Nestria. "How could he have escaped the disintegration of his spacecraft?"

THE BIG BLOWUP WAS FAKED

NICE SPECIAL EFFECTS

THURSTONS MEN FOUND EVIDENCE

IN THE TANKER THAT VAXILIS

WAS UPGRADING VILLAINS

WHICH IS WHY

A KRANJOVIAN PATRIOT ABOARD

SCUTTLED THE WHOLE THING

COURSE NOT

ALREADY EMBARRASSED

GETTING HELP FROM A KID

LOOKS BAD AT BUDGET TIME

IS THAT A CUE?

The young inventor knew what would come next—the catchphrase that had given Collections, and Tom’s contact the Taxman—their colorful monikers.

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK

There would be nothing more from the Taxman. Not that day.

Apparently Tom was to check his home voicemail for an important letter. "Makes no sense," he told himself; "which fits in well with everything else!"

Only a few trusted individuals had been given the youth’s residential number. It rarely held any unexpected news. But this time—it did. "Hi, Tom—recognize my voice? This is Eldrich Oldmother, still using the name, yep. Look, I picked up a little something over my higher-plane mental radio. I think you’ll be interested, my friend. Seven tonight, that burger joint on the lake’s recreation pier. Should be safe enough for a quick meet. In’n out, eh?"

Tom clicked off his handset. It’s a wonder I ever have time to do any inventing, he thought wryly. I’ll have to ask Pete Langley how he handles it.

At 7:10 the young inventor was sitting at a woodless table, sharing french fries with a gray-haired man who had once been well known as a prophet. "Man, am I ever glad we folded the church," declared Oldmother. "The old head’s a lot clearer without that Informatics stuff."

"Clear enough to pick up one of your psychic messages, I take it."

"Naturally. Once you’re up on the higher plane, you’re attuned to the universe for life. Nowadays, though," he went on soberly, "it’s not such a good thing, being known as a psychic. That’s one of our subjects here, friend."

Tom’s eyebrows arrowed up. "What do you mean?"

"You don’t read Mind-Body-Spirit Times? Big article last week."

"My subscription’s lapsed."

"Bad timing. This could have to do with both of us, Tom—if what I found on my bedside notepad this morning is the warning I think it is."

"A warning?" Tom regarded the man skeptically. Though Oldmother had proven himself a source of accurate information during Tom’s exploit with the visitor from Planet X, Tom had never been entirely sure how to regard the ex-prophet’s claims of psychic powers.

Oldmother leaned forward over the table. "It’s a warning to me, and to you as well—I sense it. It consisted of a single letter. Q!"

CHAPTER 9

A PHANTOM AND A PHONY

TOM found himself smiling into the gravely serious face of Eldrich Oldmother. "I guess that explains a mysterious message I received this afternoon from my own unearthly contact—about a ‘letter’ waiting for me. So what’s ‘Q’ supposed to signify?"

Oldmother shrugged eloquently and took a moment to examine a fry. "Crinkle cut, Tom. A metaphor for life.

"You remember how it works, don’t you? I don’t read minds or foresee the future. It’s a kind of subliminal clairvoyance, bubbling up out of my subconscious depths in symbolic form. I wrote it on the pad in my sleep. That’s why I have that notebook next to the bed at all times. I don’t know what would happen if my pen went dry."

"I’d suggest getting a roller-ball marker," commented the young inventor dryly. "So is ‘Q’ the first letter of a word? What starts with Q? Quantum? Quark? Quip?"

"You’d take this more seriously if you knew what’s been happening," Oldmother retorted brusquely. "A lot of people with The Gift think that green weenie up in the sky is a sign from high beings."

"End times, maybe?"

"Scoff scoff. Now try this on: for months now, well known psychic types the world over have gone missing!"

Now Tom was more serious. "Are you saying they’ve been kidnapped, sir?"

"I’m telling you, no one knows where they are. No ransom demands, so signs of violent abduction. Not even a UFO sighting. But it’s happened in France, England, Romania, Russia, Thailand—and four guys have disappeared here in the U. S.!"

"The police—"

The man looked contemptuous. "Right. The police. ‘I’d like to report a missing mindreader, officer.’ They’d tell me to consult a Ouija board.

"Like I said, there are no signs of a crime. Far as I know, spouses and friends haven’t raised much fuss yet. Most of these people are loner types. They meditate, go off in the woods—vision-quest stuff. But you can see why I’m a little nervous, Tom. I’m a biggie."

"That’s true, Mr. Oldmother," Tom agreed. "But what does this have to do with me—and ‘Q’? It’s a symbol used in electronics and pressure dynamics, but I don’t see any connection to either of us."

The older man rubbed hand over fist. "I can’t explain how these brain-signals of mine work. But as I looked at that letter on the paper, it was as if I half-remembered something. Whatever it stands for, it’s about something that has power. I was being warned to watch my backside, and I had the impression you were also a target in some way."

"I’ve run up against some other odd incidents lately," admitted Tom thoughtfully. "Some of them happened in space, near the Green Orb—which is a pretty eerie object in itself. But other things have happened here on Earth." He smiled slightly. "Even a sort of ghost."

"Don’t expect me to tie it all together. I’m just the telephone, you know, not the answer machine. But after I drive off tonight I plan to spend a few months way out of sight. Until this thing stops." He added bluntly: "Maybe you should do the same, Tom."

As Tom drove home, he thought: maybe I should. Knowing all along that he wouldn’t.

Late the following morning the Swifts’ receptionist and secretary, Munford Trent, flustered his way into the office a few steps behind an unexpected visitor who evidently cared little about being expected. "Morning, Swiftosphere," said Peter Langley with tight-faced courtesy.

"Tom, he just—"

"It’s all right, Trent," said the young inventor, rising from his office chair. "Pete’s always welcome here at Enterprises."

"Very flattering," pronounced the Other Young Inventor as he dropped into a chair. "Back atcha. But don’t wear out the invite. Come see me in person."

Tom nodded, puzzled. "Er—sure."

"And if you have jokes to play, make ’em funny, not irritating. Best to keep ’em light on the jerk factor. Agreed?"

"Absolutely. Now tell me what we’re talking about, Pete."

The young man leaned back, frowning. "I’m just saying direct to your 50’s-retro crewcut, don’t rub in the 3-D TV thing. You’re ahead of me—fine, acknowledged. Over and out. Remind me too much and I might get the impression you’re distracting me deliberato. To keep me from catching up? Consequence, cause. Easy bacon."

Tom kept his gaze level. His voice became cool. "I’ve pretty much had it with having to guess what people are talking about. Tell me what’s on your mind, or go play somewhere else."

Langley nodded. "Clarity. That’s a good thing. Okay. My subject of reference: your 3-D stunt at Wicko around, oh, two hours back."

"I don’t know anything about it."

"No?" The inventor stared at his younger counterpart, then shrugged. "Eyeballs say: maybe you don’t. Hard to believe, though. Everybody in the industry knows you’re near to coming up with a free-floating hologram projector. And as you know, so’m I. What should I think when I see a demonstration in my office?"

Tom began to grasp the situation. "You saw a projected image?"

"A very striking image—you!"

How much should Tom tell his visitor? "Pete, over the last week, I’ve seen things like that too. I don’t know what’s causing them or what’s behind them. If you don’t mind telling me—what exactly did you see?"

Langley seemed to accept what Tom was saying. He spoke less confrontively, more thoughtfully. "I looked up from my notes and saw Tom Swift standing on the other side of the office in all his blue-striped glory. You were staring a hole in my forehead. Then you raised an arm and pointed up at the ceiling. And then, hey, he’s gone!"

"No sound?"

"No. Funny expression on your face."

The image of the apparition outside the Challenger’s viewport rose in Tom’s mind’s eye. "A pleading expression?"

"You could call it that. Pleading and pointing. Opera soaperama. Amy—uh, Miz Foger—thinks we should look at it as something... what’s that word? Actionable. Because it might suggest Edmund Grimsey’s been passing along a few techno secrets lifted from his work on my holophotowave TV system.

"But if you say you had nothing to do with it..." He stood up with a shrug. "Glad we had time to chat. One young inventor to another."

As Langley turned to leave, Tom’s words followed him out: "Best regards to Miss Foger."

"Yeah."

After reflecting for a time, Tom stepped next door into Harlan Ames’s office. The security chief listened intently as Tom described this latest infestation of phantoms. "Couldn’t it be someone in Langley’s own work force playing a prank? With his own gizmo, maybe?"

"If so, some employee has made progress Pete himself doesn’t know about. And listen to this, Harlan." He recounted his fast-food conclave with Eldrich Oldmother.

"I see," nodded the former Secret Service man. "More of that ESP stuff—or maybe Oldmother and Langley share the same mental disorder."

"But as you know, I’ve seen these things too," Tom pointed out. "And what about the disappearance of all those psychics? Have you run across any reports of that?"

Ames gave one of his rare chuckles. "Yes indeed—in a little squib on the Interpol website under the heading, Humor in The News! But I’ll see what I can dig out for you, boss."

"Thanks. You know... there’s a name that ought to get a mention at this point."

"The abruptly undead Li Ching." He gave Tom a sober look. "Have you considered that your ‘Taxman’ contact might be fabricating the story? We both know these supersecret types have multiple agendas going on at the same time. They’re not above misleading us deliberately."

The suggestion was disturbing, but Tom could not disregard it. Was he being used? For what?

Tom worked through the afternoon in his lab, trying to improve the new telejector with the help of Dr. Grimsey and Hank Sterling. He decided not to mention to Grimsey the innuendos against him by Langley and Amelia Foger.

Ignoring the clock, Tom worked on after his assistants had left him alone. It was almost six o’clock when Bud Barclay came bursting into the laboratory, wearing a white shirt, sport coat, and slacks. "Hey, genius boy! Don’t tell me you forgot our double date?"

Tom looked at Bud blankly, then gave a sheepish grin. "Well, now that you mention it..."

Bud shot his chum a humorously stern look. "I understand. I mean it has been half a day since I called you about it. Oh well," he went on, "at least it’s the late show."

The young inventor washed and changed clothes in the one-room apartment adjoining his main lab, which Tom had learned to keep well-stocked with "emergency garb" of all kinds.

The boys picked up Sandy and Bashalli and drove to the Colonial Inn Dinner Theatre for dinner. The girls and Bud blithely refused to tell Tom precisely what form the evening’s entertainment would take.

"Perhaps not as creepy as that phony ghost you inflicted upon us the other night," declared Bash. "Yet there is a common theme."

"But as I said before," Sandy added with a giggle, "Tom should find it very appropriate, with that oversized Swift brain of his."

They entered through an unmarked rear entrance. After an over-lengthy encounter with the customary microscopic dinner, printed programs were distributed to the tables. They proclaimed gaudily:

LUNARIO

"A mind reader!" Tom chuckled as he turned the pages. "I can’t get away from all this ‘psychic phenomena’."

Bud winked. "Listen, if the Great Lunario expects to read Tom Swift’s mind, he’d better know calculus and computer language!"

"He’s good!" Sandy insisted. "He’s been on TV!"

"Real TV?" asked Tom.

"Cable TV," Bashalli responded. "Local. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t good."

Soon after the disappearance of the rolling salad bar, the houselights dimmed, the live house orchestra started to play, and the curtains parted in a puff of backlit fog.

To tinkling Oriental music, the Amazing Lunario came on stage. He wore elegant evening clothes and a silk turban studded with a large emerald. "A turban! My! I feel as though I were transported home to Pakistan," remarked Bash dryly. To Tom the green-glowing gem had other associations.

An attractive young woman in a long, gold-sequined gown accompanied Lunario, assisting as he performed several feats of stage magic. Then he invited two persons from the audience to blindfold him. A black felt pad was laid over his eyes and tightly bound in place with a scarf.

"My assistant will now pass out cards on which to write any question you wish to ask me," Lunario announced. "Please raise your hand and she will