Tom Swift and The Visitor from Planet X - II Appleton Victor (best novels for teenagers .txt) 📗

late that afternoon.

Mr. Swift greeted his son warmly at the airfield. Tom had refrained from radioing the news to Enterprises after the hijacking and the missile attempt. Any such message, Tom feared, might be picked up by the enemy and bring on another attack. But the young inventor had telephoned his father immediately after calling Washington.

Now Mr. Swift threw his arm affectionately around the lanky youth. "You look pretty well bushed, son. Why not hustle home and call it a day? That goes for the rest of you, too," he added to Bud, Chow, and the others. "You've just risked your lives and the strain is bound to tell."

Tom urged his companions to comply. "But I'm sticking right here," the young inventor told his father. "I want to be on hand the minute Exman contacts us."

Bud insisted upon staying with his pal. The two boys ate a quiet supper in Tom's private laboratory and finally lay down on cots in the adjoining apartment. But first Tom posted a night operator to watch the electronic brain.

"Wake me up the second that alarm bell goes off," he ordered.

"Okay, skipper," the radioman promised.

No message arrived to disturb the boys' rest. Tom felt a pang of worry as he dressed the next morning, and then relieved the man on duty at the decoder. Had the Brungarians somehow outwitted him? Surely Exman should have reported by this time!

"Relax, pal," Bud urged. "Our space chum's hardly had time to learn any secrets yet. Besides, those Brungarian scientists are probably giving him the once-over with all sorts of electronic doodads. Why risk sending a message till he has something important to tell us?"

"That's true," Tom admitted.

Chow brought in breakfast. "You jest tie into these vittles, boss, an' stop frettin'," the cook said soothingly. "I reckon Ole Think Box won't let us down."

Tom sniffed the appetizing aroma of flapjacks and sausages. "Guess you're right, Chow," he said with a chuckle.

As the boys ate hungrily, Tom's thoughts turned back to the problem of how to equip Exman with senses. He talked the project over with Bud. Most of his ideas were too technical for Bud to follow, but he listened attentively. He knew the young inventor found it helpful to have a "sounding board" for his ideas.

"Too bad I didn't have time to tackle the job before Exman was kidnaped," Tom mused. "Think how much more he could learn with 'eyes' and 'ears'!"

"Stop crabbing," Bud joked. "Isn't an electronic spy with a brain like Einstein's good enough?"

Mr. Swift arrived at the laboratory an hour or so later. He found Tom setting up an experiment with a glass sphere to which were affixed six powerful electromagnets. Two shiny electrodes, with cables attached to their outer ends, had also been molded into the glass. Bud was looking on, wide-eyed.

Tom explained to his father that he had blown the sphere himself, following a formula adapted from the quartz glass used for view panels in his space and undersea craft.

"What's it for, son?" Mr. Swift asked, after studying the setup curiously.

"Don't laugh, Dad, but I'm trying to produce a brain of pure energy. A substitute for Exman, so we can go ahead with our sensing experiments."

Mr. Swift reacted with keen interest and offered to help. "But remember, son," he cautioned, "at best you can only hope to produce an ersatz brain energy—which will be vastly different from the real thing. Don't forget, Tom, the mind of a human being or any thinking inhabitant of our universe is based on a divine soul. No scientist must ever delude himself into thinking he can copy the work of our Creator."

"I know that, Dad," Tom said soberly. "Man's work will always be a crude groping, compared to the miracles of Nature. All I'm hoping to come up with here is a sort of stimulus-response unit that we can use for testing any sensing apparatus we devise."

The two scientists plunged into work. First, a bank of delicate gauges was assembled to record precisely every electrical reaction that took place inside the sphere. Then Tom threw a switch, shooting a powerful bolt of current across the electrodes. The field strength of the electromagnets, controlled by rheostats, instantly shaped the charge into a glowing ball of fire!

"Wow! A real hothead!" Bud wisecracked, trying to hide his excitement.

Tom grinned as he twirled several knobs and checked the gauges. The slightest variation in field strength triggered an instant response from the ball of energy. Mr. Swift tried exposing it to radio and repelatron waves. Each time the gauges showed a sensitive reaction.

"Looks as if we're in business, Dad!" Tom said jubilantly.

Bud left soon afterward as the two Swifts buckled down to work on the problem of perfecting an apparatus to simulate the human senses. Each concentrated on a different line of approach.

At noon they broke off briefly for a lunch wheeled in by Chow. Then silence settled again over the laboratory.

Tom had rigged up a jointed, clawlike mechanical arrangement with sensitive diaphragms in its "finger tips." The diaphragms were connected to a transistorized circuit designed to modulate the field current to the electromagnets.

Suddenly the young inventor looked up at his father with a glow of triumph.

"Dad, I just got a reaction to my sense-of-touch experiment!"

CHAPTER XVII AN URGENT WARNING

Mr. Swift looked on eagerly as Tom explained and demonstrated his touch apparatus. By moving a pantograph control, Tom was able to manipulate the claws like a hand with fingers. Whenever they touched any material, the brain gauges instantly registered an electrical reaction inside the sphere.

The swing of a voltmeter needle showed how firmly the substance resisted the claw's touch, thus indicating its hardness or softness.

"With a computer device, such as we planted in Exman," Tom went on, "the brain would also be able to assimilate the textural pattern of any substance."

"Wonderful, son!" Mr. Swift exclaimed. "I hope I can do as well with this artificial sense of sight I'm working on."

Another hour went by before Mr. Swift was ready to test his own arrangement.

"You've probably heard of the experiments conducted with blind persons," he told Tom. "By stimulating the right part of their brain with a lead from a cathode-ray-tube device, an awareness of light and dark can be restored."

Tom nodded.

"Well, I'm using the same principle," Mr. Swift went on, "but with a sort of television camera scanning setup."

He asked Tom to draw the drapes and shut off the room lights, throwing the laboratory into complete darkness, except for the weirdly glowing "brain" in the glass sphere. Then Mr. Swift shone a flashlight at the scanner. The brain responded by glowing more brightly itself!

Next, after the drapes were opened again and the overhead fluorescent lights switched on, Mr. Swift painted a pattern of black-and-white stripes on a large piece of cardboard. He held this up to the scanner.

Visible ripples of brightness and less-brightness passed through the glowing ball of energy inside the sphere. It was reproducing the striped pattern!

"Dad, that's amazing!" Tom said with real admiration.

Mr. Swift shook his head. "Pretty crude, I'm afraid. The brain energy by itself can't take the place of a picture tube in a TV receiver. What we need is an analog computer to sum up the scanning pattern picked up by the camera tube and then pass this information along in code form."

Before Tom could comment, the alarm bell rang on the electronic brain. The Swifts dropped everything and rushed to the machine.

"Wonder if it's Exman?" Tom exclaimed.

The answer was quickly revealed as the keys began punching out the incoming message on tape. At the same time, a flow of strange mathematical symbols flashed, one after another, on the lighted oscilloscope screen mounted above the keyboard.

Tom and his father read the tape as it unreeled.

SPACE BEINGS TO SWIFTS. REQUEST INFORMATION ON PROGRESS AND RESULTS OF ENERGY SENT TO YOUR PLANET.

After a quick consultation with his father, Tom beamed out the reply:

WE ARE PLEASED WITH RESULTS SO FAR. FURTHER EXPERIMENTS NOW GOING ON. REQUEST VISIT TO CONTINUE LONGER THAN TWENTY-ONE DAYS AS PLANNED.

Hopefully the Swifts stood by the machine. Would their space friends agree? As the minutes went by without a response coming through, father and son exchanged anxious glances.

"They've got to let Exman stay, Dad!" Tom said.

Mr. Swift nodded. "I'm afraid, though, the space beings have decided otherwise. They—"

He was interrupted by the ringing of the alarm bell. "Message, Dad!" Tom said tersely.

A moment later they were overjoyed to see three words appear on the tape:

VISIT EXTENSION GRANTED.

Relieved, the two scientists went back to work on their sensing experiments. Twenty minutes later the signal bell rang again on the electronic brain.

"This time it must be Exman!" Tom cried.

The unreeling tape quickly bore out his guess.

EXMAN TO SWIFTS. TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR EARTHQUAKE UNDER HIGH LOYALTY.

"What!" Tom stared at the tape, his brow creased in a puzzled frown. "That 'twenty-four-hour earthquake' bit must mean he's warning us that a quake will occur in twenty-four hours. But what about the rest of it?"

"Hmm... 'Under high loyalty.'" Mr. Swift was as baffled as Tom. He studied the message for several minutes. It seemed highly unlikely that the electronic brain had made an error in decoding. Any new or untranslatable symbol caused a red light to flash on the machine.

"I think the only thing we can do is signal Exman and ask for a clarification, Tom," Mr. Swift decided at last.

Tom agreed. He beamed out a hasty code signal:

EXPLAIN MESSAGE.

Seconds later came Exman's reply. It was identical with the first message:

TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR EARTHQUAKE UNDER HIGH LOYALTY.

(Tom Jr. and Tom Sr. read a message from Exman) Tom and Mr. Swift stared at each other anxiously.

"Good night, Dad! This is horrible!" Tom exclaimed. "Exman sends us ample warning of a disaster and we're stymied!"

"Hi! What's going on, you two?" asked a merry voice. "More heavy thinking?"

Sandy Swift stood smiling in the doorway. The smile gave way to a look of concern as Tom explained the crisis.

"How dreadful!" Sandy gasped. "We must figure out what it means!... Wait a minute!"

Tom looked at her expectantly. "Got an idea, Sis?"

"Well..." The pretty, blond teen-ager hesitated. "You don't suppose Exman might have been translating some foreign words with a meaning similar to 'high loyalty'? For instance, high loyalty could mean 'good faith.' I know that in Latin 'good faith' would be bona fide."

"Sandy! You've guessed it!" Tom crossed the room in a single bound, gave his sister a quick hug, and whirled her around. "Exman must mean the Bona Fide Submarine Building Corporation! He didn't dare risk telling us the exact translation."

"Of course!" Mr. Swift was equally jubilant. But his face was grave as he added, "The company's located on the West Coast close to the San Andreas fault. Tom, a quake in that area could be devastating!"

"You're right, Dad," the young inventor replied. "I'll call Dr. Miles and Bernt Ahlgren at once!"

The telephone conversation that followed was grim with tension. Both government men begged Tom to take personal charge of the quake-deflection measures. Dr. Miles pointed out that tremors along the fault might trigger off a chain of quakes amounting to a national disaster.

After a hasty discussion, Tom agreed that he should station himself at the Colorado site, rather than at the West Coast Quakelizor installation. This would give him broader scope for damping out shock waves across the continent.

"I'll fly out immediately!" the young inventor promised.

Ahlgren, meanwhile, would flash orders to the Bona Fide Company and to civilian officials to have the entire area evacuated as soon as possible.

Hasty preparations were made for Tom's departure. He telephoned the airfield to have a jet plane with lifters readied for take-off. He also