TOM SWIFT

RICK BRANT, shielding his brown eyes against the glare of a late afternoon sun, gazed at the glinting structure of prefabricated aluminum rising next to the Spindrift Island boat dock. A deep frown creased his youthful face. The frown had only a little to do with the sun in his eyes. He was disgruntled, discomfited, dissatisfied. In general, "dis." The feelings were vague, but definitely negative. He didn’t like having them.

Spindrift Island was his home. He wasn’t at all sure he liked having it invaded.

But no, he had to admit, that wasn’t entirely true. His being not at all sure that he liked it was not the problem. The problem was that he was absolutely sure that he did not.

"It doesn’t make sense to me," Rick mused in a voice loud enough to carry the twenty feet to the house porch. "We’re not being told everything."

The figure on the porch, reclining on a lounge in the cool shade of the overhang, didn’t stir. Nevertheless a voice issued from what might have been a posed mannequin for all its lack of visible life. "Why should they tell us anything? Much less everything."

Rick turned and trod up the wooden steps, which were old enough to groan slightly, plopping down in a rusty beach chair and leaning back against the wall of the house. "I have this insane, unreasonable idea that before we put up total strangers in our home, we should be given an explanation. Or a reason. Or an excuse. I’m easy. I’ll settle for one out of three."

"First of all," said Scotty, managing, with infinite patience and luxuriant effort, to turn his head a few centimeters in Rick’s direction, "the owner of this fair isle, the Sprindrift Scientific Foundation, has been given plenty of explanation, don’t you suppose? Your Dad isn’t exactly the mousy type who never asks questions. True?"

"True," Rick conceded. "Is there a ‘second of all’?"

"There is. Second of all, the involvement of Steve Ames and JANIG pretty much says it all. This is a classified project which the government is interested in, and they need some sort of help from Spindrift’s squad of resident geniuses." Scotty paused. "Or is it genii?"

"Geniuses, unless they come out of Aladdin’s lamp." Rick stretched, a big healthy stretch. But when bone and muscle settled back into place, the gnawing feeling was still present. "I know you’re right, Scotty. Dad’s on top of it. We’ve been given some firm fatherly counseling on the general theme of curiosity and its detrimental effect upon cats. No problem. Maybe it’s perfectly understandable that the world’s top techno-geek, with an IQ off the charts and halfway to the moon, would abandon his great big modern invention factory to hang out with us for a month or two. While all our lead scientists are off elsewhere."

"You’re forgeting one thing," Scotty objected languidly.

"What?"

"Our unique charm, our grace, our witty repartee. Famous the world over."

"If I had a large, overflowing garbage pail in my hands right now," said Rick, "it wouldn’t be in my hands right now. It would be flying toward your charming, graceful, witty head."

Scotty rolled over onto his side. "This all has a familiar ring. Didn’t you go through the same thing when the Foundation brought in the Millers and the other new scientists?"

Rick thought about that, not answering. Yes, it was true: he had a history of balking at new additions to the familiar Spindrift team, even temporary ones. It was irrational and unfair. Yet it was a deep part of being Rick Brant and wasn’t going to be eradicated any time soon. The science team was almost as much a family to him as his flesh and blood. "I know what this is," he said at last. "It’s like when a little kid is told that a new brother or sister is on the way. He gets resentful and starts sulking and acting-out, that sort of thing. I think it’s called sibling jealousy, or rivalry, or something."

"I don’t know anything about that," Scotty commented, and for a moment Rick regretted the analogy he had come up with. Scotty’s parents were long gone. He had been raised by a grandmother who had passed away during Scotty’s underage service with the Marine Corps. He had no brothers, no sisters, no known relatives at all. Rick realized that the Spindrift family wasn’t just a metaphor for Scotty—it was all he had. Any moaning-and-groaning rights belonged to Scotty, not Rick.

Scotty broke the silence. "All right, let’s get honest. It’s not entirely about strangers coming to the island. It’s about the possibility of an adventure happening, just like in the old days; and here we are, being left out of it. Sidelined. Put out to pasture. Tossed in the rubbish pile like a couple old worn-out tennies. Have I made my point?" The tanned, dark-haired ex-Marine half-rolled onto his back again, closing his eyes. "At least that’s what’s going on with me."

Rick nodded, knowing Scotty couldn’t see it. The comment, laden with metaphor though it was, had hit the target. Yes indeed.

Rick’s late teens had been filled with adventure and action, Scotty at his side. He had traveled much of the world; had even been shot up high above it as an accidental passenger aboard a rocket not intended to be manned. But more than that, he had come to respect what Scotty called Rick’s "mystery tooth" on the model of the common sweet tooth. They’d had mysteries, all right—phantom sharks, blue ghosts, wailing octopuses (or, pedantically, octopi), deadly Dutchmen… And then, suddenly, nothing at all. For years now.

The fact that this invasion was unexplained—an invasion from Shopton, New York, for gosh sake, Rick thought—was not the only issue. Rick’s mystery tooth was throbbing. There was much more going on with everyone than met the eye, and that included Rick and Scotty. He couldn’t do anything about it. Spindrift Island was being invaded whether Rick Brant approved or not.

BUT FIRST, there was The Explosion.

"You Swifts have never failed to answer the call of your country," said Mr. Gunmore. "Your grandfather made any number of contributions to the allies in World War I. I’ve looked it up—tanks, big cannons, armed blimps—"

"No doubt you mean the aerial warship," said Damon Swift dryly with an amused glance at his son. Tom Swift returned it silently from his chair on the opposite side of their shared office in the Swift Enterprises administration building.

Mr. Gunmore persisted, trying to work up some steam. "Point is, the Swift inventions played a crucial role in the allied effort. Wasn’t bad for the Swift reputation, either, hmm? And in Vietnam, in the Gulf War, in Kosovo—"

"Wait a sec, Mr. Gunmore," Tom interupted. "Aren’t you missing a war in there?"

Thrown off rhythm, Elston Gunmore stared at the young inventor.

Mr. Swift picked up the verbal ball. "World War II. Do they still call it ‘the Big One’? Quite a story, don’t you think? Grandfather Tom Swift, my son’s famous namesake, offers his services, his inventions, even the old Swift Construction Company plant and airfield, to our government and the war effort. A generous, patriotic offer which our government, in grateful recognition of his past services, turns aside."

"That’s too polite, Dad," Tom put in hotly. "They didn’t turn it aside, they threw it away."

Mr. Gunmore took in a deep breath, and nodded. His sympathy seemed genuine enough. "It was a terrible, terrible thing, gentlemen. It was pure politics, and it was wrong. They say we could have wrapped up the war a year sooner, maybe more, if the government had accepted the Swift offer."

"Grandfather had become too controversial," stated Mr. Swift. He was cool and dispassionate. For Damon Swift the hurt of this old wound had faded long ago, however sharp-edged it might still feel to his son. "He claimed to have discovered extraterrestrial life, but the fates conspired to prevent him from proving it. So he became an easy political target. The Congressional hearings amounted to a week of public defamation of the Swift name."

"But he survived like the hero he was. And your company survived and prospered, and here we are. Listen, Damon, we don’t need to dwell on the past. The clear and present danger is more than enough, don’t you think?"

Damon Swift responded with a noncommital lift of eyebrow that bade Mr. Gunmore go ahead.

"I don’t understand why you think my aquadisk prototype has military applications," Tom interjected before Gunmore could speak. "Sure, the repelatron, the silentenna, Exploron gas, the x-raser—their uses in armed conflicts are pretty obvious. But the aquadisk is basically just a really fast boat."

Gunmore broke out in a smile for the first time. "A really, really fast boat, Tom. A super-maneuverable, multi-mach surface vehicle, compact, fuelless, and—I’ll admit the importance of this element—mighty cheap to manufacture. Plus, it’s based on a new technology that no other nation has access to. Victory in war is all about having an edge, you know."

Tom’s smile in response was a sour one. "I know that, Mr. Gunmore. I’ve fought a few wars of my own. At least it feels that way!"

Danger and struggle had been a part of young Tom’s life since he first drew worldwide attention with his revolutionary Flying Lab, which had carried him into a violent conflict in South America. Since that distant day, he had fought for his life in the depths of the sea, at the South Pole, in the upper stratosphere, and in the stark vacuum of outer space. He had only recently returned from a challenging project in northern Alaska, where his quantum telesphere had sent Death on his way empty-handed one more time.

As was characteristic of the brilliant young prodigy, he had already begun planning his next invention even while finishing and perfecting his telesphere. This new invention, which he called his aqualytic amplitensor, was to be put through its paces in a small nautical test vehicle, the aquadisk.

"How does the military envision using the aquadisk?" Mr. Swift asked, leaning back in his padded chair.

"Of course our specific plans and speculations are classified," was the reply. "As a civilian working in the Department of Defense, I’m not authorized myself to know all the current blue-sky thinking. But let’s be logical and speak in generalities, shall we?"

"Let’s," said Damon Swift. His voice bore a trace of sarcasm.

"Consider the many difficulties our troops face in establishing a beachhead on foreign soil. Sure, we’ve come a tremendous way since the invasion of Normandy. We have some clever high-tech methods to move bodies off ships and subs and put them on the ground. But it’s never good enough, is it? What we need are transport vehicles that are small enough, and operate low enough, to evade enemy fire, which nowadays is guided by radar and laser. Choppers and surface-effect vehicles, like air-cushion carriers and hydrofoils, don’t cut it anymore. What we’d like to see is something along the lines of a fleet of very small surface craft, each capable of transporting a platoon-sized contingent at jet speed. Obviously the vehicles would have to be extraordinarily agile. Ideally, they should be completely enclosed, capable of being launched underwater from one of those super-sub troop carriers you’ve read about."

"But the aquadisk is only a seagoing craft," Tom objected. "It won’t have treads or wheels. Don’t you need something that’ll run right up onto the beach?"

"Sure," said Gunmore. "You get the picture. But we see the aquadisk technology in terms of its potential. Don’t worry, we’ll find a way to put legs on the thing."

Tom looked at his father. Both shrugged slightly.

"We know you’ve spoken to Admiral Krevitt," remarked Tom, naming their long-time contact in ONDAR, the Office of National Defense Applied Research. "He should have told you that, however great our patriotism, we don’t want to function as if we’re an arm of the government. It’s because of our independence, our freedom to be creative, that we’ve been able to do the things we’ve done for our country."

"I understand that, Tom."

"And we understand very well what you’re after, Mr. Gunmore," Mr. Swift said. After a quiet moment, he added: "You’ll have to give us some time to consider it."

Gunmore half-rose from his seat. "That’s all we can expect, gentlemen." He extended his hand—then jerked it back in sudden alarm as the entire office seemed to leap skyward off its foundations! Tom and his father tried to jump to their feet, but the tremendous shock and vibration cost them their balance. They both fell back into their chairs.

The picture window covering one wall cracked. Books staggered off the office shelves and onto the carpet, and several of the intricate display models—models of notable Swift inventions over the last hundred years—jiggled and danced. The replica of Tom’s needle-nosed rocket ship, the Star Spear, tipped over on its side, while the tubular structure replicating the young inventor’s space-probing megascope slammed against the side of a cabinet and fell apart in two pieces.

A deep, thudding Boom! rolled across the four-mile-square grounds of Swift Enterprises.

As the shaking subsided, Tom struggled to his feet and made his way through the scattered debris to the window.

"Dad, I see smoke!" Tom cried. "It’s coming from the underground hangar!"

With a gasp of dismay Damon Swift joined his son. Several wispy plumes of gray smoke were visible, their tails tacked to the hairline gap dividing the block-square panels that formed the ceiling of a cavernous hangar beneath the airfield. Here Tom’s Flying Lab, the Sky Queen, was berthed.

While Mr. Gunmore stood silently aside, Tom dashed to the neighboring office in the administration building, the office of Enterprises security chief Harlan Ames. Already on the phone and receiving reports, Ames glanced up at Tom and motioned him to wait. Clicking off the phone, he said, "Some kind of big blast in the underground hangar!"

"Is there a fire?"

"We don’t know yet. We can’t get in through the doors, and no one’s answering our calls."

"No!" Tom choked out.

Ames’s phone bleeped and he snatched it up. Listening for a moment, he told the caller to go ahead and handed the instrument to Tom. "It’s Dilling up in the tower. Someone’s radioing from the Queen’s cockpit!"

"H-hello, Tom?" came the relayed voice over the phone. "This is Brady Yarkis."

Recognizing the name of one of the Sky Queen’s regular maintenance technicians, Tom exclaimed, "Brady, what’s going on down there?"

"I-I’m not sure, Tom," he responded in a weak voice. "I was working in the ship’s command compartment when there was some kind of explosion that threw me off my feet. I’m sure it was right down here in the hangar! Right now, I’m looking out the command viewpane—the air is full of smoke, and I can see flames, too, over by your lab section."

"What about the others?" Tom demanded.

"There was only a small crew down here, thank the Lord, and I can make out a few guys running around, trying to get out the main personnel door. It’s not working!"

"Listen, Brady," Tom said, trying to remain calm. "Use the exterior speakers—tell everyone to lie down flat if they can, as far away from the fire as possible. The air should be better by the floor. We’ll force open the doors in just a moment. Do your best to keep them from panicking!"

"I will. But Tom—I think I see a couple guys crumpled up, not moving. One of ’em looks like Art Wiltessa!"

Tom blanched at the name of a veteran Enterprises engineer. He gave a few words of reassurance to Yarkis, then broke the connection and turned to Ames. "Harlan, we’ve got to—"

"I know," the older man broke in, his voice firm. "I’m on it. Can we activate the overhead door from outside the hangar?"

"Not yet. If there’s a fire, the rush of air could cause a blowback, especially if some of the fuel is involved. Let’s use Swiftor to force open the regular access doors."

"Perfect!" said Ames, grabbing up the phone.

Swiftor was one of Tom’s giant robots, ten-foot metal musclemen capable of adaptive learning. Their unique musculature gave them the strength of a hydraulic jack, the sheer power of a piledriver. Originally designed for work in environments inaccessible to human beings, several improved versions, including Swiftor, were now used for special construction tasks at Enterprises.

As Tom gave the telephone orders that would send Swiftor into action, his father came into the office on a run. "Tom!—Harlan!—I just took a call from Jake Aturian over at Swift Construction. They just suffered a massive explosion over there as well!"

"Great space!" Tom gasped in shocked alarm. "We’re under attack!"

"WHAT DID Aturian say, Damon?" demanded Harlan Ames.

Mr. Swift rubbed his forehead, deeply distressed. "He didn’t know all the facts yet, but it appears there was an explosion on one of the smaller runways, over where they demonstrate the Pigeon Specials. At first he thought one of the fueling trucks had blown up. But the damage to the area is much too extensive—he says at least a dozen planes are burning. And Tom—" The elder scientist’s frightened eyes met Tom’s. "Sandy was going over there today, to meet a client!"

Sandra Swift, a year younger than Tom, was his vivacious sister. A pilot trained by Tom himself, she had a part-time occupation showing the popular Pigeon Special mini-planes to potential purchasers.

"Let me try to locate Sandy," Ames urged. "Don’t assume anything—she may not have been anywhere nearby."

Tom gulped but tried to put all worries aside. As Ames began contacting the security team at Swift Construction, which was several miles away at the other end of Shopton, Tom filled in his father on the situation in the big hangar. "Hank Sterling is marching Swiftor over there now, Dad. It shouldn’t be much longer before we’ve got the doors open and the crew safe."

"Yes, we—we have to hurry," said Mr. Swift distractedly. "I’ll have the emergency medical team and airfield crash squad rush to the rampway corridor." He hastened to the desk of the Swifts’ secretary, Munford Trent, to use Trent’s telephone.

Tom trotted out of the Swifts’ office with Mr. Gunmore in tow, apologizing to the government official but hastening him into the hands of a Swift Enterprises security staffer, who would show him out. Then Tom made for a ridewalk, one of the flexible moving sidewalks that knitted together the various buildings and test sites spread across the huge Swift installation. But when he arrived at the nearest ridewalk, he stopped short in surprised dismay. It lay unmoving in the bright sunlight.

The blast must’ve put it out of whack! he thought in frustration.

Breaking into a run he headed for a small electric vehicle waiting nearby, called a nanocar. In minutes he had whirred down the sloping access tunnel that led to the main employee doors of the underground hangar. The nanocar skidded to a stop at a knot of grim men gathered before the metal door panel, the immense form of Swiftor looming over them.

"Have you tried him yet?" Tom asked Hank Sterling, Enterprises’ young chief of engineering.

"Just got here," he replied. "Since you’re here now, I’ll turn the relotrol remote over to you." He handed Tom the small, handsized remote control unit that would allow the young inventor to give instructions to the robot’s versatile electronic brain.

"Say, boss, wait!" a foghorn voice called out.

"Not now, Chow," Tom muttered, not looking up.

"Listen, boss—"

"Please, Chow, I don’t have time."

"Brand my firebell!" exclaimed the roly-poly former chuck wagon cook. "This here’s somethin’ I think you’ll want t’know, son! It’s about Bud—he’s inside with the rest of ’em!"

Tom looked up sharply, his face pale. Bud Barclay, Tom’s age, was not only his personal pilot but his closest friend. "You’re sure of that?"

"Sure as shellackin’! Weren’t more’n ten minutes ago that I saw him walkin’ toward this here tunnel. We hey’d each other, an’ he told me he ’as headin’ down t’the hangar to see a couple of his friends on the crew—you know, them guys that fuss over the plane betwixt flights. Then he went along on his way, an’ a minute later things went t’ flooey!" The old Texan rubbed his right hip, wincing. "Knocked me plumb over on t’ the ground."

Tom wasted no more time on questions. At his coded instructions Swiftor approached the metal door panel and extended his telescoping arms, grasping the doorjamb on either side with mighty, clawlike mechanical hands. Spreading his arms effortlessly, he swept the doorjamb aside like a crumpling curtain, and the immobilized sliding panel tilted inward. Coughing, gasping employees immediately surged through the opening into the corridor.

"Slowly, everybody!" warned Hank. "You’re safe now!"

Tom waited tensely, eyeing the roiling crowd for a sign of Bud. Finally the dark-haired youth appeared. He had made himself the last to escape, and was carrying Art Wiltessa in his arms. "Tom!" he called out breathlessly. "Art’s hurt! He was caught—"

"I know," Tom said. "The medics are on the way. How’s he doing?"

Bud lay Wiltessa, his limp form daubed with scarlet blood, on the floor of the corridor. "Don’t know, skipper. I couldn’t bring him around. But he’s breathing."

"Did you see what happened?"

Bud shook his head. "Not really—I was facing away. Just flash-boom, somewhere near your lab door. Could something in your lab have blown up?"

Tom frowned. "Nothing I can think of, flyboy. We’ll take a look when the fire’s out."

As the medical team arrived and began to lift Art Wiltessa into a nanocar mini-ambulance that had been driven down the tunnel, Enterprises firefighting personnel rushed forward. They wore spacesuit-like helmeted garments that were invulnerable to heat and flame and were equipped with their own air supply and inter-suit transiphones. The fire crew carried handheld devices that resembled bulky pistols with twin dish reflectors attached to each barrel.

"Great time to see if these gizmos work as well in real life as they did last week in training," said the crew leader, Jane Locke, over her suit’s external speaker. The team followed her into the great hangar, which was thick with dense smoke through which wavering flames could be dimly seen. As Tom watched through the gap in the broken door, the fire crew approached the flames and aimed their devices, which were called repelextinguishers—repelexers. Instantly the fiery tongues shriveled down, and in seconds they had been snuffed out completely.

"Man oh man!" exclaimed Chow. "When y’ve got the time, boss, be sure ’n tell me how them anti-fire six-guns work! Sure wouldn’t mind havin’ one in my holster fer the next time I set my rangetop on fire."

"It’s pretty basic, pard," said Tom, starting to relax and realizing he had spoken sharply to his old friend. "Remember how I used synchronized repelatrons to create a near-vacuum in the telespheres?—to keep ’em from blowing up in your face, as they did that one time. The repelexers use the same principle. We force the oxygen aside, and the flames die out for lack of air. Really beats the asbestalon foam we were using, doesn’t it?"

"Sure does!"

With the flames stifled, Tom judged it safe to swing aside the enormous ceiling plates overhead. Soon the smoke had been replaced by good breathable air.

But the sight that met the young inventor’s eyes was distressing. Tom’s lab was seriously damaged, and some of the hangar’s inner walls had buckled from the intense heat. The skin of the great Sky Queen, normally a gleaming silver, had been blackened.

"What a mess!" groaned Bud. "But at least the ship’s okay."

"We don’t know that yet," Tom cautioned. "I’m not so much worried by the possibility of fire damage to the hull. But the shock of the blast might have caused problems in the internal systems that won’t be obvious to the eye. We’ll have to give her a Class 5 check—and that’ll take days with a full team."

As the two youths watched, the side hatch of the Flying Lab opened, and Brady Yarkis looked out cautiously. Seeing that the blast had overturned the waiting access ladder, he lowered himself out the hatchway and dropped several yards down to the floor.

Bud came running up, followed by Tom. "Brady! You okay?" Bud called out.

"Oh, I’m fine," the man replied shakily. "The ship protected me. But what happened, Tom?"

"Good question!" was the answer.

After a preliminary look around, Tom and Bud returned to the administration building. Just as they reached the main entrance, a small car pulled up and the passenger door flew open.

"Sandy!" cried Tom and Bud together.

Tom’s sister appeared disheveled and pale, but otherwise unharmed. She hugged Tom, then Bud, and the boys noted that she was trembling.

"Oh—oh my!" she murmured. "It was terrible!"

Bud asked if she had actually seen the explosion.

"Yes," she replied. "I’m just lucky I wasn’t caught in it! I was walking toward the Special with my clients, Mr. and Mrs. Tolverman, and then one of the other prop planes, about a hundred feet further down, just—it sort of flew apart in all directions with this big noise, and we three were knocked back onto the ground."

"Fuel sprayed everywhere," continued Bob Nix, one of Jake Aturian’s assistants, the driver of the car. "Pretty soon one plane was on fire, then it blew, spraying fuel and fire all around. We’d lost fourteen planes—Specials, and a few of the HeliCommutes—before it was contained." He nodded at Sandy. "Your sister was quite the heroine, helping her clients to safety."

"They were an older couple, Tom," explained Sandy. "They were in bad shape."

"You’re a real Swift, Sandy," Bud said in admiration.

"Don’t I know it!"

Bud offered to drive Sandy back to her car in the Swift Construction Company parking lot while Tom and Nix stayed to confer with Harlan Ames and Mr. Swift, who had already been informed by telephone that Sandy was safe.

"There were no fatalities," said Damon Swift, "for which we can all be grateful. But there were a number of injuries, some of them fairly serious. Two employees at Construction were badly burned, and we’re treating some cases of smoke inhalation here in the infirmary."

"What about Art Wiltessa?" Tom asked.

"Conscious and complaining," replied Harlan Ames. "But there are signs of concussion, and maybe a dislocated shoulder. Doc Simpson is transferring Art and two others to the city hospital."

Tom frowned, standing at the broken window of the Swifts’ office and looking out over Enterprises. "We could have ended up with dozens of our people killed—including Sandy and Bud."

"What could be the motive?" demanded Bob Nix angrily.

"Not simply to destroy the Sky Queen or the hangar, obviously," mused Tom’s father. "They attacked Jake’s airfield too, at the same moment."

"I have to add a further wrinkle to the mystery, guys," said Ames. "The emergency teams at both sites carried Tom’s super-sniffers with them. It’s standard procedure now." The lean-built security chief was referring to the analytracer, a recent invention of Tom’s, which electronically detected and identified trace substances in the air or on solid surfaces. "I’ve received their reports. Nothing! No explosive chemicals, no unusual particulates, no unidentified or out-of-place materials that might have been used for a bomb casing—not a clue."

"Which leaves us exactly nowhere," declared Mr. Swift.

"Not exactly nowhere, Dad," Tom said, his fists clenched at his side in frustration. "It leaves us with a great big question. How do you make an explosion without a bomb?"

"YOU TWO are the scientific geniuses around here," commented Harlan Ames with a grim smile. "I just try to keep everyone alive. Isn’t there some sort of high-tech way to produce a blast from a distance? Maybe with one of those sci-fi ray-beams you folks like to play around with?"

Tom paused before answering, glancing at his father. Then both shook their heads. "There are ways to produce an explosive effect without using a bomb, Harlan," Tom said. "Focused subsonics could do it, for example. But every method I can think of requires some fairly substantial equipment, with a major power-load and line-of-sight transmission. You couldn’t beam it into the hangar through the walls, or through the overhead panels."

"Certainly not!" declared Damon Swift. "The hangar is lined with sandwiched layers of Tomasite-Antitec and Inertite. Both sonic and electromagnetic influences would be completely blocked."

"Besides," Tom added, "both facilities are guarded by all manner of long-range sensors that should have registered anything incoming."

"Not to mention the patrolscope setup," Harlan noted, referring to the electronic radar security system capable of detecting unregistered intruders on either Swift property. "And our conventional radar showed no aircraft in the area. But—" His expression changed as a disturbing new thought struck him. "What about transmission from a satellite, as with the ‘ghost crow’ episode?"

"Ghost crows?" Bob Nix repeated.

Tom briefly explained. While Tom was developing his giant robot at the Swfts’ nuclear research facility, the Citadel, in New Mexico, the installation had been threatened by a beam-weapon secretly mounted on a commercial satellite. As part of the plot, the device had also projected images of supernatural "crows." But regarding the case at hand, Tom could not credit the notion. "We would have detected the beam," he noted. "Besides, how could it have penetrated into the hangar?"

"Still, we can’t even guess how such a weapon might work," Mr. Swift cautioned. "It could have great penetrating power and be well beyond our detection technology."

Tom and Harlan conceded that Mr. Swift was right. The mystery remained a mystery.

Later, after verifying that Sandy had reached home safely, the young inventor went to one of his personal laboratories to proceed with work on his amplitensor invention. He spent a strenuous, distracted hour at the countertop computer, number-crunching and viewing simulations. Then, weary, it occurred to him to try to coax out further information on the double attack.

He accessed his encrypted computer journal and began to type, using a special font that he knew would be recognized.

I assume you know about the explosions at Enterprises and the Swift Construction Company. Can you tell me anything? Tom typed-in these words and waited, the cursor blinking on the screen.

For quite some time now, Tom had been in intermittent contact with a U.S. government group nicknamed Collections. This super-secret agency, unacknowledged by official channels, had assisted the young inventor during his rocket ship adventure, and on several subsequent occasions when foreign intrigue had threatened a Swift project. They seemed able to monitor even Tom’s private, protected journal entries, and usually responded almost immediately to inquiries—when they responded at all; for Collections refrained from involvement in matters outside their particular field of security interest.

To Tom’s disappointment, the cursor did not move. No new writing appeared on the screen.

Are our tax dollars at work on this incident? Tom typed after a minute. This could involve a new weapons technology that you folks might be interested in.

But there was no response, and Tom finally exited the journal file, frustrated.

As the long day drew to a close, Tom drove his father home in his electric-powered sports car. "What do you think, Dad?" he asked. "What could this ‘blast-master’ guy be after?"

"I’ve turned it over in my mind a million times," was the reply. "When I come up with a possible reason for an attack on the underground hangar, I’m stymied trying to apply it to the Construction Company airfield—and vice-versa. Other than being owned by the family, I don’t see anything that the two specific sites have in common. Aircraft, perhaps? But what could be the angle there?"

"I’ve thought of one possibility," Tom said, "and it’s one I wish I hadn’t thought of! What if the attacks were targeted not at the companies, but at Bud and Sandy?"

"In other words, two persons especially close to us."

"Exactly!" Tom declared. "It’s a terrible thought."

Tom pulled off the road and into the long, curving driveway to the two-story Swift residence, located in a semi-rural area at the edge of Shopton only minutes from the Enterprises gate. He cast a casual glance over the top of the trimmed hedges that lined the driveway—and abruptly hit the brakes! "Tom, what is it?" demanded his father.

The youth spoke tensely in a near whisper. "Something’s wrong—I’m sure of it! The front door’s standing wide open, but your car’s in its parking spot, and there’s Sandy’s too, both empty. I don’t see Mom or San outside anywhere."

"You’re right," Damon Swift agreed in a low voice. "It’s strange. Given what happened today, we can’t—" He was interrupted by Tom who suddenly grabbed his arm and pointed off to the side, the side of the driveway away from the house. At the same moment both men heard a frantic cry!

"It’s Sandy! And Mom!" Tom exclaimed in alarm. Their faces awash in sheer panic, they were running toward Tom’s car in a frenzy of blind fear. He popped the door-locks and they scrambled desperately into the two-seater as Mr. Swift and Tom tried to make room.

"Turn the car around!" Mrs. Swift cried. "We’ve got to get away!"

Tom asked no questions, but slammed his foot down on the pedal and twisted the wheel, burning rubber as he began a screeching about-face. But before the turn was half completed, the deepening twilight shadows were bleached white by a flood of light. The roar of an explosion thundered across the front lawn!

There was no time to scream. Agonized at the sight, the young inventor floored the pedal and completed the turn, scraping the hedge. In seconds he was back on the main road, arrowing toward Shopton.

Sandy and her mother were near hysteria. Tom and Mr. Swift postponed asking questions for the moment, using the car’s cellphone to call the city fire department, then the police. This accomplished, Tom swerved into a parking lot and killed the engine.

"We’re safe," he said, trying to muster an appearance of confidence and calm that was far from the way he felt inside.

"Damon—our home!" wept Anne Swift.

"Daddy—Tom—it—it was—"

"Catch your breath, Sandy," urged Mr. Swift.

"I—I’m all right." Sandy pressed her hands against her eyes. "The phone rang. I assumed it was you two, so I put it on speaker so Mom could hear too. Before I could say a word, this—this weird voice came on—saying ‘Out of the house! Now! Run!’—repeating several times, like a recording. I think I asked who it was—I can’t remember—but he didn’t identify himself. So—"

"We grabbed hold of each other and ran for the door!" Mrs. Swift gasped. "We didn’t even try to reach the cars—we ran for our lives!"

"Then we saw you turn in," concluded Sandy. "Is it—it must be the same person who set off those bombs earlier!"

"Yes," said Tom. "We’ve got to get out of the open. We’re too exposed here."

He drove to Bud’s apartment in town. The young pilot, who had gone home after leaving Sandy off at her car, came rushing down the steps as soon as Tom pulled up. "Skipper! Folks, what’s—" Seeing the looks on the faces of his good friends, he said no more, but ushered them inside and bolted the door. As Tom explained the situation, Bud was horrified—then furious and ready for combat.

"Find out who’s doing this, guys! So I can take him apart!"

"You and me both," said Tom grimly. He turned to his father. "Looks like our theory is correct, Dad. Someone’s after the people around us."

"Including people like me," Bud added. "That’s easy to figure out."

Using Bud’s phone Tom made contact with Captain Rock of the Shopton Police Department at the site of the Swift residence. "The fire’s out," he said. "Wasn’t too bad. And you’ll be glad to know your dogs are okay. Think I even saw Sandy’s bird."

"Can you tell what happened?" Tom asked.

"What happened? Something blew up, big time," Rock replied. "Could someone have planted a bomb in your living room? That’s where the blast came from."

Mr. Swift asked about the overall condition of the house. "Pretty good—if you don’t plan on using the first floor!" he responded dryly. "The walls and windows all around the living room look like they decided to take off for the four corners of the earth! Plenty of damage to the kitchen and dining room, and to the library; the staircase is leaning over like it wants to fall down. Windows broken on the two cars, too, though it looks like they’re drivable. And what’s with this thing up in the sky?"

"What?" The elder scientist was mystified. "What do you mean? A plane?"

"Oh no, not a plane, Damon," chuckled Captain Rock without a trace of humor. "If you can see the sky from where you are, go take a look."

Mr. Swift set down the telephone and headed out the door, followed by the others. They didn’t need to be told where to look. The evening sky, partly clouded, was lit up by huge glowing letters, projected onto the clouds as if from a searchlight.

TOM SWIFT, YOU STOLE MY LIFE. NOW I WILL STEAL THE LIVES OF YOUR LOVED ONES. THEN YOURS!

"Okay, folks," Bud quavered, gazing skyward with wide eyes. "I think—maybe—this is getting just a little out of hand!"

MYSTIFIED and distraught, they all rushed back inside. Bud dimmed the lights—somehow it seemed the right thing to do.

"Who would make a threat like that, Damon?" asked Anne Swift, digging deep for some courage.

Tom answered for his father. "Who wouldn’t, Mom!"

"It sounds like the work of a lunatic!" Bud growled.

Sandy nodded. "Somebody too out of it to care about cliche. I mean, there are threats—and then there’s corn!" She was well on the road to recovering her equilibrium.

"Don’t make light of it, Sandy," reproved Mr. Swift. "This ‘blast-master,’ as Tom calls him, isn’t limiting himself to making threats."

"Sorry, Daddy. What should we do?"

"First thing is get us all to a safe place," Tom stated.

Bud gave his pal a look of surprise. "Safe place? This is a pretty quiet neighborhood, Tom." Then the young pilot suddenly realized what Tom was implying. "Y-you mean—they could strike here—in my apartment building?"

"I have the feeling they can strike just about anywhere!" retorted Tom. "And whenever they want to!"

After a rapid and tense sharing of ideas, Tom and Bud drove Mr. and Mrs. Swift and Sandy to the home of Herb Greenup and his daughter Liz—family friends, but not so close that they would be likely to be considered for targeting by the enemy. From the Greenup home the Swifts conferred by telephone with Harlan Ames and his assistant Phil Radnor, who had already begun to work with the police.

"And I just got off the horn with Brenner, our FBI guy," noted Radnor. "They already had a team on the way from the local field office to investigate the earlier incidents. Now they’re really mobilizing. By the way," he added, "you probably should get in touch with George Dilling. He headed back to the plant when the media calls started flooding in about the sky message. Shopton can be kind of excitable in the face of death threats and big explosions." George Dilling was Enterprises’ reliable chief of Communications and Public Interest.

"I won’t mislead the public," declared Mr. Swift. "But the truth is, we have no idea who’s behind all this, nor is there any reason to think the threat extends to the general public. We can honestly explain that the authorities are already taking steps to deal with the situation."

"Yeah—the authorities!" Bud paced back and forth in the Greenup living room. "But there’s got to be something we can do ourselves! Look, that message is still up there. Tom, couldn’t we pinpoint the source of the projection? Maybe from the air?"

"Worth a try," muttered Tom. Bud read in his friend’s tone not only anger but fear. The two had faced many dangers together, but never had the circle of threat spread to those around them in such a terrifyingly deliberate way. Concerned for the safety of the Swifts and his friends at Enterprises, Bud suddenly realized that his own family, in San Francisco, might be on the Blast-Master’s list!

Tom arranged for Markham Wesberg, an Enterprises pilot and friend of Bud’s, to meet Tom and Bud near the Enterprises gate in the Silent Streak, Tom’s triphibian atomicar, an atom-driven prototype vehicle capable of silent, nimble travel in the air, on the road, and underwater.

"Planning to do a little air scouting, huh, guys?" asked the slender, shaggy-haired employee as he stepped out the domed super-car’s hatchlike door.

"The Streak is small enough to evade attention at this hour of twilight," Tom explained.

Tom and Bud climbed aboard, and Tom pulled the atomicar out on to the service road that crossed the undeveloped property skirting the plant. Then he activated the repelatron bank on the underside of the craft, and the Silent Streak rose gracefully upward into the near-dark sky.

"We might as well start with the area around the house," Tom said to Bud. "The projection apparatus could just as well be there as anywhere—and I have to see the condition of things with my own eyes."

Bud gulped as the Swift home came into view far below. The fire was out and the smoke had dissipated, but the damage to the first floor was ghoulishly evident in the gathering moonlight. "Good night, Tom! It’s like somebody took a big bite out of the whole middle section of the west side!"

Tom did not respond. He gazed down silently for a time, circling the atomicar. Finally he said, "Look around for something unusual, a beam, a spot of bright light—anything!" He spat out the last word with such vehemence that Bud drew back with a start.

Seeing nothing of interest, Tom expanded the circle of investigation.

"Look over there!" hissed Bud, pointing. "Something between those hills!" The youths observed a bright, blazing pinpoint of light, intense as a magnesium flare.

Tom glanced skyward. "The angle’s about right for a projection beam. Let’s come in low."

"Real low," urged Bud. "As in—under the treetops!"

Tom managed a slight smile. "That’s what this baby’s designed for, flyboy!"

The atomicar soared off a good distance, then arced down close to the ground and approached again, following the rise of the land from a few yards above it. Tall trees and foliage blocked their view of the light for a time, but Tom felt certain he had a good bearing on it.

"There!" he said, speaking in an involuntary whisper as the light appeared through a break in the trees, about a half-mile ahead. "I can make out some big equipment underneath it, too."

"Looks like it’s mounted on a truckbed," Bud commented.

Tom slowed the atomicar and descended to within a few feet of the ground, hoping to surprise whoever might be operating the projector. But he wasn’t hopeful. They probably anticipated this, he thought. I’ll bet the apparatus runs automatically.

As the Silent Streak drew near, the brilliant light abruptly winked out, leaving only a faint reddish glow. "If he starts the truck and peels out, we’ll be right on top of him!" exclaimed Bud excitedly. "And I do mean on top!"

But the bulky silhouette showed no sign of activity, even as the atomicar came to a halt twenty feet above it.

"Good thing the Streak has a tough hide!" muttered Bud nervously, leaning over to look down through the teardrop-shaped viewdome enclosing the passenger compartment. "Even if they start shooting, that dura-stuff of yours ought to—"

Bud’s words became a grunt of surprise, echoed by Tom. The two were forced down into their seats by a violent upward acceleration and the deafening thunder of an explosion. The atomicar jolted skyward, shuddering and wavering, and began to list to one side as if about to flip over! Tom struggled with the controls, righting the tiny craft while forcing it higher, putting distance between the car and the enemy below as rapidly as possible.

Finally, among the clouds over Shopton, the young inventor slowed the Streak’s panicked rise and hovered.

"Duped us!" Tom grated, furious at himself. "I should have realized that the site would be booby-trapped!"

"Don’t blame yourself, genius boy. I was as anxious to get into it with the guy as you were."

"It’s hard to hold back," agreed Tom ruefully. "But we’ve got to stay calm and think logically. This guy, whoever he is, sees himself as a master tactician, anticipating our every move. He’s not going to give us any place to hide."

Not wanting to give away their refuge at the Greenup residence, Tom flew the atomicar back to Enterprises, and the boys drove back by a circuitous route. There was no sign that Bud’s car was being followed. Now that the frightening message had disappeared from the sky, the worried citizens of Shopton had retreated to the safety of their homes. The streets of the little lakeside town were deserted—except for prowling police cars.

At the Greenup home, Tom spoke by telephone to Captain Rock, who promised to investigate the projector site, using the professional bomb squad. But Tom felt sure that the enemy had covered his tracks.

"What do you intend to do, Tom? Damon?" asked Herb Greenup as Tom set down the phone receiver. "I’m not being an alarmist, but as a public official, I have to be concerned about the security of our citizenry. What if this man starts to take out his frustrations up and down Commerce Avenue? Innocent people could be caught up in this!"

"Innocent people?" exploded Bud. "So Tom and Sandy and the rest of us aren’t?"

Mrs. Swift rested a calming hand on Bud’s arm, and he quieted himself, scowling.

At that moment the telephone, an old-fashioned type plugged into the wall, gave forth a loud ring that made everyone jump. Liz Greenup smiled at her reaction and raised the receiver to her ear.

"Hello? Hello?" She gave a puzzled shrug and moved to hang up the receiver, but Tom suddenly stretched his hand forward and plucked the receiver out of her grasp.

"Is someone there?" he asked. "Who are you trying to reach?" He assumed that if the call were intended for one of the Swifts, the caller would recognize Tom’s voice without his name being said.

A faint, hollow sound issued from the receiver, like wind blowing past the wires. Tom looked at his father with a deepening frown, patiently holding the receiver to his ear.

His patience was rewarded.

"One target has been taken." The voice was shrill, mechanical, inhuman, speaking slowly and deliberately. "You and the others are not safe where you are, not in any of the Swift properties, not with friends or family, not in any government facility." The voice paused. "Three attacks at eight eleven."

Then silence.

WHITE-FACED, his hand trembling, Tom guided the phone receiver back to its cradle and dropped it listlessly into place.

"It—it was him—wasn’t it!" breathed Sandy.

Tom nodded.

Damon Swift stared at the telephone. "But how—how could anyone have possibly—?"

Tom interrupted his father. "We talked to Captain Rock, and to Harlan and Rad. Somehow the Blast-Master was able to monitor the calls, or at least determine their point of origin."

"He’s trying to terrorize you with these warnings," declared Mr. Greenup.

His daughter nodded. "He’s terrorizing all of us."

Tom repeated the details of the call.

"‘One target has been taken’," murmured Anne Swift fearfully. "Does he mean the attack on the house?"

"Can’t be that," Bud objected. "There have been three attacks so far—four, if you count the projector site."

Tom looked at the clock on the mantle. It was eight seventeen. "He said ‘three attacks at eight eleven,’ and it was just a minute after that time when he phoned. When Rad or Harlan call in—we’d better not make any outgoing calls—they may have news."

Ten minutes later, Phil Radnor did call. The news was not good. "It’s bad," Radnor said to Mr. Swift as Tom pressed close to hear. "I’m afraid—there have been further attacks, and—a casualty!"

"No!" choked Damon Swift.

Radnor’s voice was granite-solid. "George Dilling received a short-wave call from the policia in a village called Mora Rueza, in the Tierra del Fuego region of Argentina—a tiny fishing village on the Atlantic Coast. Hardly able to find it on the map. Some pieces of a boat drifted ashore last night. The police said it looked as though it had blown apart in the water. There was a piece of luggage with a name tag attached, and some papers inside that mentioned Swift Enterprises in Shopton. That’s why he called us."

"What name?" Mr. Swift demanded.

"Ed Longstreet," said Radnor. "Tom’s cousin."

Ed Longstreet was the eldest son of Mrs. Swift’s brother Quent. A world traveler with no need to work for a living, Cousin Ed had become involved in Tom and Bud’s adventure in New Guinea, a tale recounted in Tom Swift and His Ultrasonic Cycloplane, and had again faced danger with them in turbulent Kabulistan. Tom knew he had recently undertaken a trip to South America, and had mentioned purchasing a cabin cruiser for a solo voyage around the continent’s southern tip.

As Mr. Swift repeated what Radnor had said, Mrs. Swift’s hands flew to her mouth in shock. Sandy guided her to a chair and comforted her.

"Then—no body has been recovered?" Tom’s father asked Radnor.

"No," the security man replied. "The boat fragments were too few to yield much evidence, and they were scattered over a wide area. But—you can estimate the probabilities as well as I can. And there’s more, Damon—lots more!"

Mr. Swift waited.

"Just minutes ago, we began to receive word on some more bomb attacks. Harlan is on the phone now, following up. Three explosions, more or less simultaneous—at the Citadel, on Fearing, and at the Key West installation."

"I—I—" Mr. Swift seemed to stagger back, fighting to contain his emotions. Tom squeezed his father’s forearm gently and took the receiver from his hand.

"Rad, this is Tom. Any casualties from these new attacks?"

"Some injuries—nothing too serious, it seems. But the damage was extensive. They’re powering down the main reactor at the Citadel, and Kaye’s videophone office in Key West is in ruins." The Swift Oceanic and Nautical Research Center on the island of Key West, Florida, housed one of several office-studios utilized by the Swifts’ private television system, the videophones.

But Tom was immediately more concerned about the events on Fearing Island off the Georgia coast, a federally secured facility that served as the usual launch site of Swift space efforts. "What was the damage on Fearing?"

"Two of the pilotless utility rockets were brought down on their launch pads, Tom. A Workhorse III and a Sampson."

"And the Challenger?" Tom was referring to his huge, repelatron-driven spaceship.

"No damage," Radnor replied. "Oh—I’m passing the phone to Harlan."

Ames came on the line, speaking briskly. "Tom, I know Rad’s told you what’s occurred. The United States government has now gone to a state of military alert, though we don’t know who the enemy is, or what he wants—except for what was stated in the message to you, which may be just a ruse or diversion.

"And Tom, I think the theory you mentioned to me is dead on. These latest attacks show that persons especially close to you are being targeted. Slim Davis had just landed at the Citadel with a parts shipment when the explosion struck. I know he’s a good friend of yours among the Enterprises pilots. On Fearing you have a number of friends in the astronaut team, as well as on the ground. As for the SONRC facility at Key West—"

"I know," declared Tom. "Arv is staying at the Center while on leave." After some recent harrowing and debilitating experiences while working with Tom on the Alaska project, chief model-maker and prototype developer Arvid Hanson had been given a two-week vacation in Florida to rest and recover.

"So far none of these people has been injured or killed—or at least we don’t know for certain anyone has, regarding your cousin," pronounced the security chief. "But our luck won’t hold forever, Tom. The FBI thinks you and your family, and a few others, ought to disappear from the public eye until all this gets sorted out."

"Do you agree with that, Harlan?" Tom demanded heatedly. "Are we going to let this madman force us to hide in a hole somewhere?"

Ames sighed but spoke with cool determination. "Tom, I understand how you feel. But—"

"And I’m right in the middle of the aquadisk project," Tom continued, "which the Defense Department seems to think should be a high priority. This whole business could be a plot to hold up the testing of my amplitensor device until some foreign nation, or some mercenary group, can steal a march on us!"

"I’ve thought of all that," said Ames. "We have to think of your Dad, your mother—of Sandy and Bud. Look what they’ve already done to Art Wiltessa!"

"Yes, and… to Cousin Ed. I know." Tom ached inside. "All right, your point is well taken. But where on or off Earth can we go to hide?" He repeated for Ames the content of the weird telephone warning. "I don’t know if we’d even be safe in the space outpost, or under the sea in the hydrodome. And if we ‘draw fire’ in places like that, the collateral damage won’t be minor—everyone could die!"

"Agreed," Ames declared. "Remember, Tom, you folks pay me for a reason—you pay me to think! I know I haven’t always done such a good job—no, don’t interrupt!—but now I have to ask you to trust my judgment. For the present the only defense we have is secrecy. We’ve got to get you and the others to some sort of safe hiding place, one with no known ties to you or to Enterprises. My cousin Steve, who I’m sure you remember, had a good suggestion. It’s a place to keep out of sight—but also a place where you’ll be able to continue working on your new invention, and your aquadisk boat."

"All right. I’m listening."

"It’s an island."

"An island? You mean Loonaui, in the Pacific?" This was the dedicated launch site of regular rocket travel to Enterprises’ orbiting space station.

"No," responded Harlan Ames. "Too obvious. The island Steve suggested is quite a bit closer."

He told Tom the location, and the young inventor repeated his words incredulously. "New Jersey?"

Rick and Scotty loved mysteries—especially after they were solved. And now they were immersed in mystery, wrapped up in it like an Indian blanket. The mystery sat out there in plain sight, squat and unimpressive, next to the old boat dock, between the rambling Brant house and the dirt road that led inland to the modest island farm. It might have been a shed for farm equipment, for tractors. But it wasn’t. They knew that under the shedlike aluminum structure, a great deal of Spindrift dirt had been removed—a very great deal indeed, removed and somehow disposed of unseen.

"That dug-out chamber looks to be the size of a big-box department store," Scotty remarked. Though his words suggested awe, they had a wink in them. Rick knew he was being teased. To Rick Brant anything marked Secret was like cheese to a mouse. "Now by all the laws of science and geometry, that dirt must have been stashed some place. It would have made a nice little hill. And we can use some hills here on Spindrift, to give some variety to the landscape. But no hill. Because no dirt. Where’d it get to?"

"You’re not using your imagination," was Rick’s reply. "All day long the work crews come and go in threes and fours, pretending to be outfitting the shed. But we know they’re really engaged in skullduggery—good-guy skullduggery, but skullduggery—down below. So we should consider the possibilities very carefully."

"Absolutely."

"Now what I’ve come up with is this," continued Rick. "Those workmen wear coveralls with really deep pockets. Each time they go down into the excavation, they scoop up some loose dirt until their pockets are full—not so full that they bulge visibly, but pretty full. Then at the end of the day, they innocently head back to Whiteside or Trenton or whatever, and—"

Scotty held up a warning hand. "Please don’t go on. It’s not good for my self-esteem, your solving the mystery so quickly. Besides, your solution is—well, I won’t say the work of a moron. It’s the work of a bright guy thinking like a moron."

Rick said, "If I had in my hand—"

"But you don’t. Eat your toast and stop trying to think."

They were sitting at the breakfast table in the Brant home, looking out across the island toward the shoreline. The metal shed, not much to look at but shiny and new, sat innocent in the yellow morning light. They had managed a casual inspection the Tuesday previous—casual, if one considers skulking about in the dead of night a casual act—and had wrangled the briefest of glimpses of what lay beneath: a deep, yawning pit spreading out beneath the ground, much longer than it was wide, with smooth walls that looked to be made of concrete.

The comparison that leapt into Rick’s mind was coffin. "It won’t be much use empty," he said between crunches.

"Don’t imagine."

"But they have to know that any big deliveries—scientific equipment and so forth—will cause a stir. The Wicked Ones may be watching."

"The only Wicked Ones I see around here are seated at my polished maple breakfast table," said a voice behind them. Hartson Brant pulled out a chair and sat down next to his son. "You two have punctured my conscience."

"Quite an image," Scotty commented. "Do you have a slow leak, or did the whole thing pop like a bubble?"

"The former," Dr. Brant continued. "Every day, since you wormed out of me some facts that I had no business repeating, I have wrestled with growing self-reproach. I’ve decided to handle it by spreading it around. Boys, you should be ashamed, taking advantage of an old man."

"Well, Dad, you didn’t have to say anything," noted Rick. "Besides, your moment of weakness was thoroughly human. You naturally wanted to spare your offspring mental agony."

"And take it on myself. The things a doting father goes through—good lord."

Scotty’s tone verged on the serious. "You won’t really get into any difficulties about it, will you? After all this time, Steve Ames can’t have any doubt about—"

"No, of course not." Rick’s father cut Scotty off impatiently. "But when I told him, as I was obligated to do, that I had shared a few basic facts with the family here, he was…"

"Understanding?" Rick asked hopefully.

"Yes—and irritated. Can you see his point? Whoever is behind these attacks on the Swift people is, obviously, ruthless and conscience-free. However slight the likelihood that Spindrift is being watched, it’s not impossible. Consider this, you two. We’re not the first place you’d expect to find Tom Swift et al, but we’re not dead last either. I’ve met Damon Swift now and then at scientific conferences, and there’s been correspondence over the years between our own team and theirs—come to think of it, Hobart Zircon was a paid consultant on the design of their nuclear plant, the Citadel."

Rick nodded. "I remember."

"So," Hartson Brant continued, "someone might well conclude that capturing Rick and Scotty, who get around a bit more freely than some of us, as they usually have nothing to do and do it very well indeed, would be a fine way to extract information. And the extraction process would not be pleasant."

"Never is," stated Scotty. "And I guess you’re saying that the best way to keep us from tipping the game under torture is to tell us nothing."

"I wouldn’t quite put it that way." The graying scientist frowned. When he spoke, the jocular tone was gone. "But Steve Ames might. And he wouldn’t be wrong, Scotty. Lives and nations are at stake."

Rick had to agree, though it hurt to do so. "Sure. He’s a pro. He can’t afford to worry about us. The mission is to keep the information out of enemy hands—at whatever the cost."

The three used the ensuing silence to stand. Rick cleared the table and washed off the breakfast plates. He glanced at his father now and then, who stood gazing moodily out the big-paned window. The tenor of the discussion had obviously left a sting. Got a little too serious, Rick thought.

"All right," said Hartson Brant suddenly. "I see no reason to carry the secrecy any further. You’re right, Scotty. It’s been a long time since the whispering box episode, and you two have already served as agents of this country—good ones, too."

"Good ones," Scotty said, "in that we both got back alive."

Dr. Brant looked at both young men in turn, gravely. "What would you like to know?" he asked.

Rick cleared his throat. He hadn’t expected this! "We know that Tom Swift and a few others will be staying here, to keep out of view until the bomber is captured. What happens if he isn’t captured?"

"I don’t know. Next question."

"What’ll the Swift team be working on in that underground room?"

"I don’t know that either. And?"

Rick groaned. "Dad, this isn’t funny."

The older man smiled. "No, it isn’t. And what you just said was a statement, not a question. Look, I’ve been told very little. The Swift boy is working up some sort of gizmo with national defense implications. Apparently he needs access to the open sea, which we have here in abundance. And also to scientific equipment, instruments, and so forth, which we also have—though they’re hardly in the same league as what is available at Swift Enterprises. We’re all supposed to keep our mouths shut."

Scotty raised a timid hand. "What about the dirt?"

Hartson Brant seemed to know what Scotty meant. "One of their digging machines was smuggled onto the island by the work crew. It works by vaporizing earth and rock, so very little remains. What did remain was squeezed against the walls of the chamber by one of their matter-repelling machines, creating a dense shell on all sides. Yesterday they installed their power hookups, which won’t be tied in to ours, as I gather the load is expected to be more than we can handle. And today the people start arriving."

"Thanks," said Scotty, simply but not without irony.

"And now," Brant continued, "why don’t we step over to Spindrift’s new subterranean lab and welcome our guests?"

Rick boggled. "You mean it, Dad? Just like that?"

Hartson Brant laughed. "Just like that! Let’s go."

SINCE RICK and Scotty’s unauthorized nocturnal foray, some changes had been made to the shed, changes that were obvious to anyone who, like Rick, contemplated the possibility of a replay. The weak-looking metal door—in truth it was anything but—was no longer shut on latch. It bore a nice-sized steel padlock. There was also a little sign jammed onto a bolt-head protruding from the siding nearby, crudely hand-lettered in marking pen on a ragged scrap of cardboard.

TRESPASSERS WILL BE EATEN

"Cute," muttered Scotty. "Shouldn’t there be trained alligators to go with it?"

"Mood-setting scenery," Rick pronounced. "Nothing more. Probably printed from a computer template at government expense." He expected his father to produce a key; instead, Hartson Brant gave a slight downward tug on the sign.

"See us?" he asked the thin air.

The thin air replied: "Sure do, sir." The door clicked and popped open. The padlock was just a prop.

"Pretty swift," was Rick’s comment, which Scotty rewarded with a Look.

On the other side of the door was a sort of catwalk leading to a small platform on vertical rails—an elevator. Next to the elevator, extending a few feet out over the chamber, was an open guard station with a small desk and a control panel, with microphone and TV screen. A comfortable-looking chair was occupied by an elderly man in a zippered uniform that all but shouted SECURITY.

"Boys, this is Arthur Roberts, from Swift Enterprises," said Dr. Brant. Rick and Scotty introduced themselves and shook hands.

"I suppose you’ll shoot us if we try to nose around without permission," Rick remarked. He intended the comment humorously, but Roberts gave a grave nod and patted the holster dangling from his belt.

"Sure will, young man. Won’t kill you, though. Just drop you in your tracks for a while, and maybe melt your fillings. It’s a Swift electric impulse pistol. Call it an i-gun."

Scotty whistled. "Always wanted to try one of those things. May I?" He stretched out a hand.

"Not a chance."

Floodlights had been set up in the excavated chamber, and they revealed a great gaping emptiness extending dozens of yards beyond the margins of the shed in the direction of the boat dock, crossed here and there by thick power cables with socket boxes. The cables led to a row of smallish cube-shaped units—batteries, Rick supposed. From their angle a few yards above the main ceiling of the space, they could see only the floor and part of the walls: their view of the lower room’s ceiling was blocked. Rick estimated that it lay beneath just a thin crust of ground.

There was nothing else to see. Scotty’s description of the chamber as being about the volume of a suburban superstore was hyperbole. Nevertheless, it was pretty big. A week ago it had not even existed.

Rick’s father snapped a glance at his wristwatch, then spoke to Roberts. "Everything on schedule?"

Roberts nodded. "Ahead, matter of fact. If I were you, I’d keep my eyes on the floor down there."

Rick looked at Scotty. I’d keep my eyes on the floor. Had he heard right?

The three leaned forward against the catwalk railing. The floor of the chamber looked to be about 50 feet below them, and Rick noticed for the first time that it had not been hardened like the walls. It was just loose dirt and moist Spindrift clay, smoothed over but left in its natural state. And as he watched—

A small loose clod of earth rolled lazily toward the wall, seemingly of its own accord. Then a few more stirred.

"Look at that," breathed Rick, and he heard Scotty suck in his breath, struck with more awe than he liked.

A mound of dirt, a bulge, was growing like an oversized mushroom in the middle of the floor. It rose up quickly, foot by foot, then suddenly split apart at the summit. Something shiny, slightly greenish in color, poked up through the gap. It looked like the nose of a monster gopher—a robot gopher made of metal, decked out in rows of parabolic antennae.

The thing forced its way up into the open, smoothly. It was roughly boat shaped, pointy at the prow and flat on top. And it was big; even the part already in view suggested that. Rick’s mind reached for a comparison. As long, end to end, as the wingspan of his plane the Sky Wagon, perhaps? No, longer, much longer, even just the half of it.

"Will it all fit inside?" asked Scotty.

"It doesn’t have to," replied Dr. Brant. "Just the forward half, more or less. The hatchway is at the midpoint, I’m told."

"Right. The two halves of the hull slide apart like a sleeve arrangement. I’ve read about the design." Rick nudged Scotty. "It’s called a geotron."

"I know," said the ex-Marine. "I read the tech mags, too. I’m trying to improve my vocabulary."

"Gonna ask to drive it?"

"Think they’d let me? I’m not having much luck."

The big vehicle now extended quite a ways into the chamber, poking up at a sharp angle. It stopped moving forward and settled just a bit. A crack appeared, girdling its midsection. The crack widened as the whole front-facing hull—assuming it is the front and not the rear, thought Rick—inched forward. A large rectangular hatchway was revealed in the resultant gap.

"Let’s go down," said Rick’s father, with a nod toward Roberts. The three stepped onto the elevator platform. The push of a lever smoothly lowered them to floor level.

The three Spindrifters approached the open hatchway, where three more figures stood facing them, silhouetted in the light streaming out from behind. Rick couldn’t help thinking of other famous threes: wise men, stooges, blind mice. The visitors jumped down from the hatchway; they had to duck, as the edge of the opening was tilted like the line of the geotron.

A blond young man, crewcutted and a good deal younger than Rick had expected, took the lead, extending his hand toward Hartson Brant.

"Tom Swift." The voice was friendly, perhaps a bit formal.

Dr. Brant shook hands and introduced the famous prodigy around.

"I’m very pleased to meet you, Tom," Rick said, reddening when he realized that he was gushing unexpectedly. "I’ve been looking forward to it for a long time."

"Me too, Rick."

Next came a dark-haired, muscular youth, who introduced himself as Bud Barclay.

"I recognize you from the news," Scotty remarked. "You’re the one always standing next to Tom."

Rick groaned inwardly.

"That’s me," said Bud with a smile. "I’m Tom’s best friend."

"Brand my chitlins, don’t fergit about ole Chow!" exclaimed the third visitor, big and broad and clad in exuberant western wear, including a ten-gallon hat and high-heeled cowboy boots. "Brand my Rio Grande rapids, I’m a former chuck-wagon cook and personal chef to Tom here and his pa!" He thrust forward a big hand, which Hartson Brant shook vigorously—and vice-versa. "Pleased t’ howdy ya, Doc! Brand my jumpin’ june-bugs! Anybody want some space biscuits? My other specialty’s rattlesnake stew! Which way’s the galley?"

"We just ate," said Rick. He wasn’t quite sure whether to feel amused or threatened.

"Wa-al brand my cosmotron, thet’s too bad. Mebbe later."

Four Swift employees, never introduced, now scrambled out the geotron hatchway, lugging large, curving pieces of equipment, some of metal, some of some sort of transparent crystal or, perhaps, plastic. After a number of trips back and forth, the pieces were snapped together like a child’s toy as Rick, Scotty, and Dr. Brant stood at a distance, watching in admiration. Tom Swift watched in silence; the workmen seemed to know their tasks well.

In a little over an hour a big, curious mechanism stood on the dirt floor near the battery bank. It was a transparent globe about ten feet in diameter, with an oval doorway in the side. The globe was enclosed top to bottom by an open grillwork of curving metal tubes.

"That’s your matter-beaming machine, isn’t it, Tom?" Rick asked.

"Exactly," said the youth. "We’ll be receiving all our equipment and supplies by means of this telesphere."

Rick nodded. "Safer that way."

"Absolutely. I’m certain our dastardly foe doesn’t have the ability to detect and trace the quantum field."

Scotty now walked up to Tom and Rick. "Mind if I ask a question? When your tunneling tank backs out and goes on its way, won’t it leave quite a hole? Aren’t you afraid the floor will cave in, taking the telesphere with it? And maybe a big chunk of Spindrift?"

Tom stared at Scotty, but it was Rick who answered. "You should have read those tech articles to the end, Scotty. The geotron uses a repulsion principle to push back the earth all around without messing up its natural elasticity. The sides of the hole it makes just spring back into place, pretty much."

"Couldn’t have said it better myself," was Tom’s smiling comment. And before long the principle was demonstrated. The geotron, the four workmen aboard, withdrew into the ground without turning around, leaving behind concentric ripples of rumpled earth but no visible hole.

"I need to discuss some very boring matters with Tom before I show our guests Spindrift’s natural wonders," said Dr. Brant. "If you two are getting tired of subterranean living, this would be an appropriate time to head topside."

They did. "Let’s go up to my room," said Rick in quiet tones. Scotty nodded.

They made their way in silence to Rick’s bedroom at the top of the stairs. Rick closed the door behind him, feeling Scotty’s eyes on him. When he turned, he saw that Scotty was smiling. It was one of his familiar special smiles, meaningful and slightly grim.

"Okay, agent Brant," the ex-Marine said. "Just what are we dealing with here?"

Rick held up a hand. "Wait a second. I want to check something on the internet before I make a fool of myself."

In moments he had brought up a series of news photos, mostly of Tom Swift, but also showing Bud Barclay; and one displayed a heavyset man identified as "mission chef Charles Winkler."

Rick turned to his pal. "What’s the first thing you noticed? The haircut business?"

"Yup." Scotty lowered himself down, sitting on the edge of the bed. "I’ve never seen Tom Swift with anything but short hair, usually a little ragged but still fairly short. His buddy favors longer hair—longer on top, but close-trimmed on the sides and in back, athlete style. Just like in those pictures. True?"

"True. So why do both of these fine young men have bands of pale skin on their necks, untanned areas?—as if they had longish hair for quite a while, chopped off in the last day or so?"

Scotty gave a nod of concurrence. "I’ll see your good question and raise you one. Why is it that when they speak, their lips are slightly out of sync with their voices? Not a lot. Not so much that an ordinary person would notice. But we are not ordinary people. We have keen vision to match our many other charms."

"I didn’t notice it right away." Rick ran a hand through his brown hair, forehead puckered. "I just felt that something was ‘off,’ just a little out of kilter. A feeling. That’s when I started paying more attention."

Scotty rose and paced across the room. "Vocal synthecizers."

"Super-miniaturized. Steve’s told me about them. You apply them flat on your face, like elastic bandages, then cover them over with makeup." Rick gave a snort. "Couldn’t see any makeup, but I’m sure cosmetic technology has also come quite a long ways. Thanks to Hollywood."

"And that cowboy guy!" Scotty continued. "What’s up with that? ‘Brand my cosmotron’? ‘Rattlesnake stew’? He was trying way too hard."

Rick manipulated the computer mouse. "There’s something else. I think I remember it, but let me get the quote right. –Here’s the article, an interview from just a few weeks ago. Listen, Scotty. ‘Yes, we’re calling it a telesphere. It works on a quantum principle, not at all the sort of thing you see on TV. When people call it a matter-beamer, I always correct them—it’s just plain bad science.’ " Rick looked back over his shoulder. "Did I miss the part where Tom Swift corrected me when I used the forbidden words?"

"If you did, I missed it too."

Taking a last look at the photos, Rick logged off the computer. "They resemble the people they’re supposed to be. They sound just fine, if you’re not the sort of person who notices when ventriloquists twitch their lips. But they’re as phony as that shed out there. Who are they?"

"Who are they? I have a better question," Scotty said. "Why are they?"

"DON’T MUCH look like me, boss. Leastways I shor hope it don’t." Chow cast Tom a sideways look, brow furrowed. "I’m not so all-fired fat. Am I?"

Tom managed a reassuring smile. "These guys are meant to fool the public, Chow—people who have only seen us on TV or in photos. They say pictures always make people look a little hefty, so they had to exaggerate some to keep it credible." But he himself felt a little unsure. Did he really look like this Agent Tull?

Harlan Ames had talked them into it, and Tom and his father were not inclined to argue. Before the small team assigned to be relocatedt made their appearance on Spindrift Island, three FBI agents disguised as Tom, Bud, and Chow would test the waters.

Ames had explained it carefully—twice. "Somehow the enemy knew exactly where Bud was, where Sandy was, even where you all were hiding when you went to Greenup’s place. We can’t find any bug or monitoring device; we don’t know how he’s doing it. Despite our efforts, we can’t just blithely assume that he won’t have gotten wind of your Spindrift safehouse. He might’ve already planted some explosive devices there, whatever mysterious way he manages to do that. He sees you, he sets ’em off."

"Too many unknowns," Tom had agreed.

"So if there turns out to be a ‘tripwire’ on Spindrift, we’re going to make very sure it won’t be you three who trip over it. We’ll use special agents from the Bureau. They belong to a section that uses trained actors. We’ve selected some who already resemble you three to a fair degree, and we’ll be using some disguise techniques to improve that resemblance. It helps, of course, that nobody on Spindrift has ever met any of you in the flesh."

It was all part of Harlan and Phil’s elaborate plan to protect those most endangered by their connections to Tom Swift. The Swift family, except for Tom, would stay in a rented house in Canada under assumed names. Similar arrangements had been made for the Barclays, the Longstreets, and the families of Hank Sterling, Arv Hanson, George Dilling, Slim Davis, Art Wiltessa, and Jake Aturian, as well as several others and various friends—even a woman Chow had once sought to marry, Jessee Thunder Lake of Tenderly, New Mexico. All would be guarded by FBI agents—hopefully without detection. A skeleton crew of volunteers would keep watch at Enterprises and the Swift Construction Company sites.

One case had required special attention.

"It is not that I don’t wish to avoid being exploded, Tom," Bashalli Prandit had said. "And I do appreciate that you have included my brother Moshan and his family under your cloak of protection. But what of our business, The Glass Cat? It is our living, you know. Will your secret police people see to things there as well? Will they brew the coffee and serve the sugared buns? Or will the public believe we have turned our bellies upward and gone under?" Bashalli, born in Pakistan and Tom’s customary comrade in dating, worked for her family at The Glass Cat, a coffee house in Shopton, when not studying at the nearby DuBrey Art Institute.

Phil Radnor had come up with a solution. "We’ll let it get around that you are all visiting relatives back home—for a family wedding, let’s say. We’ll put a sign on the door giving a Pakistan telephone number for emergencies. As for the money issue, I’m sure Swift Enterprises will provide some fair compensation."

Bashalli smiled. "It should work, then. But you must promise to have my rabbit friend Homer well cared for, if you do not plan to move him to a safehouse under an alias."

"We’ll take good care of him at Enterprises," chuckled Radnor.

After days of living undercover, days marked with anxiety over the likelihood of another attack, Tom, Bud, and Chow now confronted their selected replicas with a degree of skepticism.

"He wouldn’t fool my mother," Bud remarked, eyeing a young agent named Brent Oshansky.

"Fortunately, he doesn’t have to," retorted Ames. "He’ll spend a day scouting out Spindrift for anti-Barclay activities, then report back."

"Seems to me I’m doin’ pretty well," Oshansky said. "I’ve memorized the backgrounders and the bios. I’ve practiced saying jetz and genius boy and all that stuff. I’ve even got the jokes down."

"The jokes?" Bud scowled. "I don’t do jokes, kid. I make quips."

"Wa-al, yew dawnt need make no nevuhmind about me," said the third impersonator, Jim Corder. "Ah been practicin’ m’Texas talk fer days, steady. Now ah’m jest a ol’ cowhand from the Rio Grandy."

Chow shook his head in disgust. "No offense, but that there’s mighty pitiful. Sounds more like Alabama than Abilene. And what’s gonna happen if they ast ya t’cook up somethin’?"

Corder shrugged, which made his whole torso quiver. "Whoa there, dude, ah kin cook jest fine. B’sides, they’s gonna give me some o’ these hyar ready-made dinner packets that taste jest like—"

"Naw, don’t tell me no more," groaned the Texan. "I shor am glad this here’s a secret mission. My rep’tation would be deader’n Murphy’s mule."

"Whatevuh that means," muttered Corder under his breath.

Tom had one final contribution to make. He gestured toward an array of tiny electronic devices spread out on a table in front of them. "I can’t do anything about your choice of words, fellows, but these vocal synthecizers will at least give you the right tones." He explained that the units were simple adaptations of a technology he had developed long before for his televoc personal communicators, which were no longer used.

"But this is going to be open-air speaking, genius—er, Tom," Bud objected. "Won’t the bad voices coming out of their mouths be heard along with the good ones from the synthecizers?"

"Each agent will be carrying a micro-sized silentenna in his pants pocket," explained the young inventor. "It’ll have a very short range, but should do a good job of nullifying the underlying sounds of their voices when they speak." He noted that the silentennas would detect and "translate" the muscle and nerve actions of the agents’ larynxes, ensuring that only their own words would be damped-out.

"Got to admit, that there’s first rate thinkin’, boss," Chow declared.

Tom grinned. "And it would take a real first rate observer to see through it—that is, hear through it."

"Dad," Rick said quietly, "I know what we just said sounds pretty ‘out there.’ But isn’t it worth looking into? You know—‘lives and nations’ and all that?"

They were gathered in the study, early afternoon sun rebounding from the broad lawn outside and flooding through the big front windows. Rick, Scotty, and Hartson Brant had been joined by Rick’s mother. "They seem like such nice young men," she said, "the ones who call themselves Tom and Bud. And the, um, big cowboy…"

"Colorful is probably the word you want, Dear," Dr. Brant said. "If he’s a fake, though, you’d better not let him get anywhere near the kitchen."

"You didn’t know about this, did you, Dad?" Scotty called Dr. Brant Dad, by the older man’s repeated request. "I’m sure you didn’t. You wouldn’t have misled us like that. Unless you had an excellent reason."

Hartson Brant was silent for a long moment, eyes aimed in the general direction of his shoes as he sat in the study’s biggest and most-overstuffed chair. The silence gave Rick a feeling of—not anxiety, not anger, but something negative and a little sad.

Brant finally sighed. "I won’t try to squirm out of this. All I can do is ask you to accept my apologies."

"So it’s true." Rick’s words were not in the form of a question.

"Yes," his father said. "I told you I’d been feeling the pangs of conscience. My first lie to you was when I minimized Steve Ames’s reaction when I told him what I’d leaked to you. He was very stern, and justifiably so—for everyone’s good. I felt I had to promise to go along with this further attempt at concealment, the use of these three actor-agents." He explained the reasoning behind the ploy, and Rick and Scotty were mollified. Somewhat. Not much.

"So is it over now?" asked Rick. "Are we on the ‘need to know’ list yet?"

"You are. I’ll insist on it."

Scotty nudged Rick, stifling what would have been a too-sarcastic retort. "When do the real ones get here?"

"Tonight, Scotty," was the response. "Really."

"Hartson, slipping anything past these two is plain foolishness and a waste of time," declared Mrs. Brant. She leaned down and kissed her husband on the cheek. "But thank you for trying. Because what you were trying to do was to protect us."

Rick and Scotty uttered sounds of somewhat grudging agreement, exchanging glances.

Out in the open air, strolling toward the boat dock, Rick said to Scotty, "Thanks for the nudge. Dad doesn’t deserve to feel worse than he does."

Scotty nodded. "Besides, you can’t tell me it didn’t feel a little bit good, maybe more than a little bit, penetrating the disguises of professional FBI agents. Given that we turned out to be right."

Rick laughed at that. "True! It’s been a long time since we’ve solved a real mystery."

"Uh huh. And we don’t have to go rest on our laurels in the Spindrift sun, either. The big mystery is still out there."

Scotty’s comment required no answer from Rick, though he couldn’t quite suppress a nervous gulp. The mystery of the bomber was still out there, all right. And—the irresistible cliché seemed to come rushing forward with a life of its own—it was a killer.

Really.

RICK THOUGHT of them as The Real Three. They arrived in the underground lab around dinnertime, as promised: Tom Swift, Bud Barclay, and Chow Winkler. Their doubles were already gone. "I don’t blame them for not taking a moment to say goodbye," Rick had told Scotty. "I’d be embarrassed too."

"You wouldn’t have done the kind of job requiring embarrassment."

One moment the big telesphere globe was empty. The next, three somewhat vague figures were standing inside, close together. Satisfied that they hadn’t been lost in transmission, they filed out through the oval hatch.

Like his impersonator, Tom Swift was impressively young, blond hair short and a bit spiky, physique slender like a tennis player’s, but—also like a tennis player’s—suggesting muscular firmness underneath. The second to emerge, Barclay, was a shade taller and quite a bit more powerfully built, showing his muscle openly beneath broad shoulders. He also could pass easily for late teens, fresh out of high school. His hair was black, streaked on top with a trace or two of auburn, the work of the sun. A thick swept-forward lock pointed down toward a pair of gray eyes.

The man called Charles "Chow" Winkler was something else again—big-bellied, skin baked by decades of prairie sunshine, eyes crinkled in good humor when they weren’t popping with surprise, his head unleavened by hair, except for a few islanded wisps around his ears and above his collar in back. He carried a big cowboy hat in hand, and his yoked shirt, which Rick mentally named a prairie-dog’s nightmare, was a riot of improbable color.

For the second time that day, hands were shook and introductions made. "Good to meet you," said Rick, trying for a polite, civil calm.

"I’m very pleased to meet you, Rick," answered Shopton, New York’s pride and joy. "I’ve been looking forward to it for a long time."

Rick found that he was grinning.

Tom’s first thought was that these two young men, whom he had heard about for years, were older than he had expected, closer to thirty than twenty. But he quickly reigned-in his surprise. What’d I expect? he asked himself. I was just a kid when they fired that super-fast missile to the moon, and these two were already in their late teens. Scotty—who introduced himself as Don Scott—seemed at first the older of the two. But Tom soon had to revise that opinion. He was probably about the same age as Rick Brant, but something about his bearing and attitude suggested a degree of worldly wisdom not quite so evident in his pal.

Tom liked Rick at first handshake, and the feeling was mutual. Tom liked Dr. Brant as well, for he reminded him of his own father in many ways.

And everyone seemed to like Chow, though Tom could sense them struggling to know what to make of the roly-poly range cook.

Tom could sense something else equally well. Bud did not like Scotty. The pilot was not in the least impolite, and kept a pleasant smile fixed firmly between chin and nose. But Bud Barclay was an impulsive guy who couldn’t help broadcasting what he thought and how he felt—to those who knew what to look for.

"Is there really something called rattlesnake stew?" Scotty asked Chow with eyebrows raised high.

"Aw, did that empty-hat coot spout off about that?" The cowpoke grimaced in disgust. "He shoulda goed easy on it. Now I s’pose you all think I’m loco from the sun."

"No, not at all," chuckled Dr. Brant. "And if it’s one of your specialties, I hope you’ll prepare it for us some time, if you have a chance."

The Texan beamed. "Shor will! If it’s all right with your missus, I’d be more’n glad to earn my keep while I’m stayin’ here by workin’ the cook-range."

At a slight sound all eyes turned toward the telesphere. Several padded crates were now evident in the globe, along with fancy equipment in various sizes and shapes.

"So Tom, where’s the other end of this matter-beamer?" Rick asked innocently. He could feel, just feel, Scotty suppressing a laugh.

"Actually, it doesn’t take you apart and ‘beam’ you; it gives you a kind of shortcut through space," Tom replied rather more quickly—and firmly—than necessary. "At any rate, the other telesphere is in high-security surroundings at Swift Enterprises in Shopton. Quite a lot of equipment will be coming through."

"We’ll help you unload," said Hartson Brant, "then off to supper in the house." He added: "Incidentally, Tom, you have just established your identity."

"I knew who he was right along," remarked Bud.

In the Brant dining room, over what Rick’s mother called cuisine of the traditional island culture and others called baked meatloaf, the conversation turned to Tom Swift’s current project. "You say it’s a sort of speedboat?" Rick asked.

"Speed is the word," Tom replied, scooping a glob of cheese potatoes onto his china plate. "In principle the aquadisk will cut across the water like a jet."

"And it’s disk-shaped, is it?" inquired Hartson Brant. "Along the lines of your submersible, the seacopter?"

Tom shook his head. "More like this." He picked up an empty-as-yet dessert plate and tilted it up on edge, right-angled to the table top. "Because only a tiny bit of the bottom edge extends down into the water, and because its narrow cross-section faces the direction of travel, friction is reduced to a minimum."

Scotty came right to the point. "Take away your finger and that plate will just flop over flat. So what keeps your aquadisk upright?"

"She’ll have ultra-high-speed gyrostabil-izers, which we call supergyros. But I’ll bet you’re wondering why the aquadisk stays above water and doesn’t just sink down to the bottom."

"If Scotty isn’t, I sure am," Rick said. "Boats stay on the surface because their hulls displace water. The water tries to get back to where it belongs, and pushes the hull upward in sort of a squeeze-play. But I don’t see how something like that could just sit on top, like a tire on asphalt."

"What Rick’s account lacks in strict scientific terminology, it makes up for in vivid imagery," Dr. Brant noted.

"Thank goodness fer that!" Chow said. "I never can foller most o’ this science talk."

Mrs. Brant laughed demurely. "Nor I!"

"The answer is the new technology I’ll be using the boat to test out," Tom explained. "When the amplitensor is perfected—"

Tom fell silent; the entire table fell silent.

The telephone was ringing.

Mrs. Brant looked at her husband. "I wasn’t expecting a call. Were you?"

"No."

The phone rang again. And again.

"Brand my spurs, I’m gonna get it if nobody else wants to!" Chow exclaimed nervously.

"We’re being foolish." Hartson Brant rose from the table and answered the phone. He said hello, then waited, listening, perplexed. After a long moment a slight jerk of his head indicated that the caller had hung up.

He rejoined the silent table and sat down.

"He knows you’re here," Scotty said, looking at Tom.

Tom Swift looked at Dr. Brant quizically, who nodded.

"What did he say?" asked the young inventor gently.

"One word repeated several times. I think it was a recording." Brant took a sip of water. "He hung up on me too quickly—I should have asked you over to the phone, Tom. I didn’t recognize the word. Turnbull."

Bud slammed down the fork in his hand. "Turnbull!"

"But what does it mean?" asked Rick’s mother.

"Aw, ma’am, I don’t think you wanna know!" groaned Chow. "It means big trouble!"

Rick was able to make a stab at an explanation. "It was in all the papers. Robert Turnbull was a scientist who lost it—went completely schizo. Something to do with trying to wreck the Swift atomic energy plant in New Mexico."

"That’s right," Tom confirmed. "And he tried to steal one of the first of my giant robots."

"I remember now," remarked Rick’s father. "Had some kind of skull injury, didn’t he?"

"A cranial deformation," said Tom. "After he was taken into custody, he was held in a psychiatric facility. We were told he had responded well to cranial surgery and showed considerable remorse for what he had done."

"Pretty easy to fake," Bud snorted.

"If he’s in custody—?" There was no need for Scotty to finish his observation.

"I can see why this Dr. Turnbull would have a beef against you, Tom," Rick said. "And I can see—sort of—why he might want to call up to terrorize you and take credit for the attacks."

"It’s called bein’ plain crazy!" was Chow’s emphatic comment. "The owlhoot prob’ly thinks his dead twin bother is doin’ it."

"But Turnbull is in custody, as far as I know," said Tom. "I’m sure we’d have been informed if he had escaped." Rick thought how strange it was, seeing someone who appeared to be in his teens suddenly looking as if he were bearing the weight of the world unaided.

After a moment’s thought, Tom turned to Bud, who sat next to him. "I’ll use the PER to contact Harlan. He’ll check up on it."

Rick’s eyes shifted between the two of them. "The PER?"

"Private Ear Radio," Tom explained. "It uses a quantum principle. Once communication is established it becomes impossible for anyone to listen in. I don’t imagine even a brilliant mind like Turnbull’s can get around the laws of physics!"

The dinner was ruined. After they all forced down a few more bites, Dr. Brant adjourned them to the living room. "So he knows where you are," he said soberly in the general direction of the three guests. "Very bad."

"But now we know who he is," Bud declared, "and that’s something."

Tom settled back in an easy chair, but his body remained uneasy—tense and focused. "Until we learn how he’s directing and causing those attacks, we’ll be in danger wherever we are. To be honest, you folks here on Spindrift are in danger as well."

"But what can you do, Tom?" asked Mrs. Brant.

"Solve the scientific problem, somehow. If I could get a sample of his technology, I could work up a counterweapon. But because he strikes at random, there’s never a way to prepare."

Chow muttered, "Wish t’ hey we knew what he ’as gonna go after next."

Dr. Brant nodded his understanding of the problem. "You could be prepared. But who knows where he’ll strike."

"I know," said Rick Brant. "I think."

RICK BRANT could feel all eyes turn his way like searchlight beams.

"Figured it out already, huh?" was how Bud Barclay expressed his skepticism. "What took so long?"

"Let Rick talk," said Scotty quietly.

"It’s obvious, isn’t it?" Rick squirmed uncomfortably, hoping against hope that his words hadn’t come out quite as they had sounded in his ear. "I’m not bragging, just—well, it’s a fact. If this Blast-Master is as all-knowing and, um, all-reaching as he seems to be, the reason he hasn’t gone after Tom directly must be because he doesn’t want to."

"Not yet, anyway," said Tom.

"Sure—the projected message said he’d get around to you. But that means we’re fairly safe here on Spindrift. He won’t go after us here until he’s hit a few more of his targets."

"Right, that’s real reassuring," Bud grumbled. "You’re expecting logic from a lunatic."

"He’s also a scientist, and science lives on logic," Hartson Brant pointed out. "It would be second nature to him, I would think."

Scotty urged everyone to let Rick continue. Bud flashed him a sour look.

"Let’s say, anyway, that he won’t be striking here next," Rick went on. "He’s already targeted your main plants and bases, Tom: wherever he could find someone important to you who wasn’t literally by your side at the moment. Am I right?"

Tom nodded slowly. "You are, Rick. Looking back now, I don’t think the explosion of that projector truck was meant to endanger me. He was destroying evidence."

"Okay. Well, your close friends and employees and your family—even the families of persons close to you—all are in hiding. He can’t get at them."

Chow objected. "Wa-al, we’re s’posed to be in hidin’ and that shor didn’t stop him!"

"He’d pretty much have to keep tabs on me, whatever the cost," Tom pointed out. "But to give that kind of attention to everybody and his brother might make him too exposed. He mightn’t want to risk it, if he felt he could avoid it for now."

"It sounds pretty reasonable when you say it, Tom," Rick remarked with a half-smile. "At any rate, it seems to me there’s a fairly obvious place for him to strike at next, a place with major importance to the Swift family and—"

Catching on instantly, Tom half-rose from the chair in excitement. "Of course! The Swift Homestead and Learning Center!"

"What is it?" inquired Rick’s mother. "A part of Swift Enterprises?"

"No," replied the young inventor. "It’s the old house and surrounding outbuildings in Shopton where my great-grandfather Tom lived when he started his career. He lived there with his father Barton, and a housekeeper named Mrs. Baggert, and a couple others. Even after he married, he often used the converted sheds as workshop-labs, because of the privacy. Now it’s a State of New York historical monument, with various displays set up, even a few of the actual original inventions. Tours go through it most days."

"My high school class took one of those tours," Rick said. "As I remember, the place was fenced-in, and there were security guards, but it looked to me like the security was pretty minimal. To tell you the truth, I spent some time daydreaming of just how I’d go about breaking in, if I needed to."

"Rick’s that kind of guy," commented Scotty.

"Breaching security doesn’t cause Turnbull to break a sweat," declared Tom. "We’ve sure seen that! The Homestead is a mighty tempting target because of its historic importance and sentimental meaning to my family. And it’s also located right next to the Swift Construction Company!"

"Okay, maybe Rick’s hit the bullseye," Bud conceded. "So what can we do to keep Turnbull from hitting it too, in his own way?"

Tom stood up from the easy chair, rubbing his chin thoughtfully—a habit—and prowling from one end of the living room to the other. "You know," he said at last, "I think we’ve been making the wrong assumption all along."

Chow asked, "Whataya mean, boss?"

"I’m not so sure we’ve been dealing with explosions at all!"

"Genius boy, I saw a couple of those non-explosions, and felt ’em too," retorted Bud. "Don’t try to tell me it was just imagination!"

"I think Tom is trying to say that the blasts weren’t caused by explosives," Scotty put in, drawing a withering glace from Bud. "Not explosives in the usual sense—no dynamite, no blasting caps, no casings."

"That’s it, Scotty." Now that Tom could feel his brain back on the beam, he again seemed the masterful thinker of reputation. He sank back down in his chair, eyes bright. "There were no chemical or powder traces. The smoke came from the fires, and the fires could well have been a secondary effect caused by the blast-wave. Sudden concussion could easily raise the temperature of various flammable materials above their kindling point."

"Then the question is, what caused the concussion itself?" Rick’s father noted.

"One of my own inventions—the repelatron!" Tom cried animatedly. "A full-sized repelatron, such as we use for propulsion, can only be miniaturized so far. But I can imagine a super-compact single-use device—"

"Like one o’ them cheap throwaway cameras, huh?" interjected Chow.

"Yep, pardner, just like that. It could be as small as a marble, say, or the eraser on a pencil, with a cached storage capacitor to provide one huge jolt of power—just one, and then it’s dead."

"But it’s dead anyway," Rick said, "because that one jolt creates a big wave of repulsion force that blows up everything in all directions!"

"Including the device itself," added Scotty, his eyes on Bud Barclay.

Rick could tell that Bud wanted to refute the idea. "You’d need a separate antenna for each kind of material to be repelled," Bud said. "Could you really miniaturize a whole cluster of equipment like that? Tom?"

Tom grinned at his pal. "I don’t think you’d have to. The device could be tuned to affect the most common thing in the environment—atmospheric nitrogen! The resulting wave of pressure would be just as devastating as if the solid materials were being repelled directly. Sort of a cyclone in a can."

Bud shrugged, frowning. Rick asked Tom if such a device could be counteracted.

"I’m sure I could come up with a damping generator," was the reply. "And if Turnbull uses his repela-bomb at the Swift Homestead, we could have a real chance not only to prevent any destruction, but maybe to snag one of the machines for study!"

Expressing gratitude to Rick for his insight, Tom trotted out to the subsurface workroom, where he used the Private Ear radio unit to contact Harlan Ames at his safehouse in a small town near Shopton. "What a plot!" Ames exclaimed. "Even though it’s late, I’m going to get in touch with that FBI fellow in Albuquerque. I imagine I can reach him through his office."

"Sam Valdrosa? Good idea. Their field office should be keeping tabs on Robert Turnbull. I can’t wait to find out how he escaped—and why we weren’t informed."

"I’m a bit interested in that myself," Ames commented sourly. "Stay close to the PER."

It took less than twenty minutes for the security chief to beep back through. "Things are getting twisty, Tom. The Colfax County Corrections Hospital swears Turnbull is still in the locked wing just as he should be!"

Astounded, Tom was silent for a moment. "Then—the mystery caller—"

"—is full of it!" Ames snorted. "What’s his game? He’s involved in some way, obviously. He knew of the attacks as soon as they happened; even before, in the case of the attack on your home. Why feed you a load now?"

Tom confessed his bafflement, but added, "Still, Rick Brant’s idea makes good sense. I’m going to work on a nullifier device tonight. No sleep for me!"

"Nor for me. I’ve got a lot of followup work to do, and Valdrosa said he’d make the drive up to the hospital to check out Turnbull himself, first thing in the morning." He added that he would alert the State authorities in charge of the Swift Homestead. "I’m sure they’ll provide extra security, and of course they’ll close the site to the public. Do you think the Blast-Master will go ahead and attack a closed site?"

"I’m guessing he will," replied Tom. "He hasn’t been going after members of the general public, and the Homestead is still an attractive target even if it’s closed. In fact, knowing that we have an inkling of his plans may whet his appetite all the more!"

The night wore on, and on and on, for Tom Swift laboring beneath the ground to the somewhat disembodied snores of Arthur Roberts, who had a cot next to his desk. But as midnight passed on Spindrift above, two dark-clad figures crunched their way across the topside of the ground, bending low to merge with the moon-shadows.

"Where do we point that thing first, spyboy?" Scotty asked Rick, half-nodding at what looked like a camera with a very long lens tube, which Rick cradled in his arms protectively.

"Doesn’t matter," Rick replied. "The night-vision scope’ll pick up anything going on, just as long as there’s a line of sight. We’ll just pan-360, from high ground."

"The highest ground is on the west side—the cliffs by the tidal flats." Scotty started to turn westward, away from the house.

"Out for a moonlight stroll, boys?" The voice behind them spoke in normal, if sarcastic, tones, but Bud Barclay might as well have been shouting. Rick flinched in violent surprise. But Scotty only broke out in a low chuckle. "Say, whatcha got there?" Bud continued, walking up.

"My camera," Rick said. "Light-amplifying lens array."

"What’re you going after?" Bud asked. "Seascapes? Gonna shoot ol’ Scotty here doing a swan dive off the cliffs?"

"If I did that, I’d get mud in my ears," Scotty responded. "Right now the water covering the tidal flats isn’t much thicker than a woolly blanket. But don’t take my word for it. Feel free to take a dive. I’ll even help you get started—Bud."

Bud’s smile disappeared. "You’d hurt your back. And then what would Rick do?"

Rick saw a need to divert the flow of conversation. "Did we wake you? We got to talking about how the phone-caller found out that you three were here on Spindrift. He—or probably people working for him—must be keeping an eye on any number of likely safehouse possibilities. He’s out there, or he was. We thought we might catch a glimpse of him through the scope."

"Uh-huh." Bud nodded, evidently unimpressed. "You didn’t wake me—I couldn’t sleep. I had to get out in the open air. And I thought, just maybe, I might see something interesting. Nighttime on exotic Spindrift Island!" His tone softened. "I can’t just sit around while Tom’s in danger like this."

"I understand," Rick said, and Scotty gave the slightest of nods.

They walked steadily along a gravel path which p