Tom Swift and His Triphibian Atomicar (11 page)

"Well, clear it up quick!" the man commented brusquely. "Let’s have no misunderstandings. This is big business. Want to know something?
Life itself is big business.
Go home and write that down."

As Tom left the building, he thought to himself:
Good night, I’m just glad I didn’t bring up Rosso Freegler! Isosceles’d throw me through his plate glass window!

But now there was a new mystery—a hoax! Was Gabe Knorff behind it?

It took a good long while for Harlan Ames, intrigued and alarmed, to put Tom in touch with the peripatetic photographer. "
Gaggo
, Tom, this is unbelievable!" he exclaimed. "I—man, I don’t know what to say!"

"I’m not blaming you, Gabe," Tom assured him. "But what can you tell me?"

"Not a whole lot more than I already have. I was called on my cell in Socorro by someone office-y who said I should hold the line for Milton Isosceles. I knew the man’s name, of course. So a voice comes on, makes the offer, sets out all the details, and clicks off."

"Were you ever paid?"

"Sure was. He did as he said and transferred my payment directly into my poor little bank account." Knorff’s voice sounded as if it were scratching its head. "He’d given me a return number—said it was his private line, direct. I never had to use it, though. And of course I have the e-mail address I sent the digital photos to."

Tom wasn’t completely dismayed. "A couple clues, anyway. I’ll hand you off to Harlan—he’ll take down the info and see what he can come up with."

"But what’s up with all this, Tom? Have I been duped by a spy ring or something?"

"Maybe," said Tom. "You know, Gabe—you journalists
are
supposed to verify your sources. Right?"

"I’m not a journalist, Tom. I’m a
photo
-journalist."

Ames and his assistant Phil Radnor pursued Knorff’s meager clues. But when the security chief strode into the Swifts’ office at the end of a long day, he had few answers. "Here it is, guys," he told the two. "The e-mail account was one of those ‘you can’t find me’ temporary online mailboxes that anyone can set up, no questions asked. The telephone number was also a come-and-go, according to the private phone service that created it. It was disconnected immediately after Knorff’s photos were received, apparently."

Mr. Swift asked, "All right, but can’t we follow the money? If these things were paid for by cash, the fellow would have been seen—if by check, identification would have been required, surely."

"So it must have been by credit card," Tom deduced. "Only way to do it."

"That’s right, Agent Swift. Online transactions. The card number is assigned to― " Ames pulled a note from his shirt pocket. "A Mr. Helmut Moorg of Suenneburg, Germany. Except, of course, Mr. Helmut Moorg, traveling businessman, claims very convincingly to know nothing about it. Putting it all together, Rad and I think someone picked Mr. Moorg’s pocket, made a quick scan of the card with some portable device, and then slipped card and wallet back into the guy’s pants without being detected. Two minutes tops."

"The work of an expert," stated Damon Swift. "Do we have an idea where this took place?"

Harlan Ames smiled grimly. "Ohhh yes. For the last few weeks our traveler happens to have been visiting Shirabad—capital of Kabulistan."

Tom slammed a fist down on his desk. "Then this stuff has nothing to do with the atomicar or an Enterprises invention. It must be tied in with the ruby mine business."

"And thus," his father pointed out, "with such shadowy characters as the gold-toothed smoke-bomb planter, the would-be ruby thief—Mirza?—and very possibly Nurhan Flambo!"

"Uh-huh," agreed Tom Swift. "And taking all that into consideration, it just may be that the
real
target of all this has been Cousin Ed!
He’s
the one who purchased the rubies and found that telltale book." He continued, speculating that the gold-toothed man had kept tabs on Ed in Shopton, and had alerted Mirza, a crony, upon determining that Ed had flown to New Mexico. "Though where Gabe’s photos fit in—that one I can’t guess."

"Your instincts are usually pretty solid, Tom," Ames commented; "although so far I can’t put the pieces together any better than you can. But I’ll get in touch with Longstreet in Kabulistan and give him a head’s-up. He could be in real danger."

"He sure could, Harlan," said the young inventor worriedly. "Especially if he tries to use the clues in that book to search around for the lost mine."

Soon after, as Tom prepared to follow his father home for supper, the old book,
Travels in Remotest Araby
, seemed to occupy his mind. Mr. Swift had brought the book to Enterprises for Ames to look through; now it sat lifeless on his desk. As Bud walked in, he found his chum leafing through it curiously.

"Looking for fingerprints, Tom?"

The youth shrugged. "I’m not sure
what
I’m looking for. There’s something about this book... Do you suppose the purpose of that bomb scare at the airport was to give someone time to rifle through Ed’s luggage—maybe to steal the book?"

"Well," said Bud, "if that was the idea, it didn’t pan out."

Tom stared at his friend silently, frowning. Abruptly he motioned for Bud to follow him. Carrying the book, Tom made his way downstairs and across the grounds with a determined stride, heading for the plant’s main photographic laboratory. Inside the lab, the young inventor headed for one of his more recent inventions, a boxlike console on adjustable support struts that resembled an unorthodox television camera. "I get it!" Bud exclaimed. "You’re gonna retroscope it!"

Tom’s electronic retroscope camera had the astounding ability to photographically roll back the sands of time, allowing the operator to view, in reproduction, the original surface of long-eroded objects. But as Tom set the book on a counter in front of the retroscope’s tubular lens, he shook his head negatively. "The camera doesn’t work well on cellulose material like paper, flyboy. Besides, this book hasn’t been exposed to centuries of cosmic rays."

"Then why― "

"The master time dial. I suddenly have an urge to measure the book’s age." Tom adjusted the device’s various settings, then activated the age-scanning mechanism, which used a different process from that of the image restorer.

Watching over Tom’s T-shirted shoulder, Bud gasped in surprise. "
Hey!
It’s only― "

"Right," gritted Tom. "Despite its appearance, the darn thing is only a couple months old at most.
It’s a fake!
" Tom realized that the replica must have been treated chemically and exposed to low heat and various radiations to simulate its dry, yellowed, aged condition. "Mr. Gold-Tooth didn’t fail after all, Bud. The whole idea was to switch the original book with this copy."

"But why? To sell the original?"

"That’s possible," Tom conceded as he switched off the retroscope. "But then why bother planting an elaborate copy in its place? Why not just snatch and sneak away?"

Suddenly Bud clamped a strong hand on Tom’s arm. "Got it! Taking the original was secondary. The main purpose was to give Ed a substitute version
with false clues about the lost mine!
"

Tom leapt up from his lab stool and rewarded his chum with a bearhug. "That
must
be it!"

Bud managed a look that was immodestly modest. "Nothing to it, really."

That evening Tom was relieved when he was finally able to contact his cousin by telephone. "Sorry not to have responded to Ames’s message right away, cuz. I’ve been spending some time sightseeing Shirabad—before commercial interests and fast-food stands take it over completely. Fascinating, romantic stuff—exotic Persia, the silk road, all that."

"I’m glad you didn’t go charging off after the Amir’s Mine!"

Ed chuckled. "Oh, I’ve lain in bed looking over the copies we made of that one chapter. Phony though it may be, it’s good reading! Say," he continued, "that man you were mimicking the other day—Wayne?"

"Simon Wayne? What about him?"

"Maybe nothing, Tom, but I think I saw him today, here in Shirabad! At least it was some blustery-looking guy in a suit matching your description—handlebar mustache and all."

Tom was intrigued. "It could well have been Mr. Wayne. Kabulistan is where he does a lot of business on behalf of Europa Fabrikant."

"I didn’t speak. But if I see the man again, I will," Ed promised.

Before ending the call, Tom told his cousin about the big Enterprises project about to start up in Kabulistan. "We’ll be flying into Shirabad in the
Sky Queen
day after tomorrow. Provard’s people want me to meet with the group’s engineering team, which they’ve already deployed to a camp in the wilderness."

"Then I’ll see you and Bud at the hotel. Unless I run across a few lost rubies and decide to do some
real
traveling!" Ed joked.

The next two days were spent in feverish activity. As an additional step, Tom had decided to make undertake a quick survey trip while in Kabulistan to familiarize himself with the country.
And who knows?—clues to the ruby mine mystery could turn up anywhere!
he thought with a smile.

Supplies were ordered and loaded aboard the
Queen
. Besides Bud and Chow Winkler, Tom chose Arv Hanson and his and Bud’s friend Slim Davis to accompany him on the flight. An accomplished pilot, Tom knew Slim could take charge of the Flying Lab while Tom and Bud were off scouting about.

Shortly before boarding, Slim approached Tom and said, "Hey, Skipper, I see you’ve loaded your new atomicar into the hangar-hold. Don’t you plan to remove the
SwiftStorm
?"

"Nope," was the reply. "There’s room for both, and I don’t want to put all our flying eggs in one aerial basket."

Slim nodded wisely. Then he said: "
Excuse
me?"

Tom laughed. "Sorry! All I mean is, the
Silent Streak
hasn’t yet had a real shakedown in rough, geologically varied terrain of the Kabulistan sort. For all I know, ground temp variations could cause freak air pockets, and so on. If something unexpected starts to act up, I’d like to have the cycloplane available as a backup."

"Now
that
makes sense."

Finally jet-lifting away, the Flying Lab streaked over the Atlantic Ocean to Europe and the Middle East. Then carefully skirting Iran, which had denied passage permission to the great skyship, they crossed the central plateau and Eastern Persian Highlands to wartorn Afghanistan and its new little brother Kabulistan.

Its capital city of Shirabad lay spread out along the sloping floor of a mountain valley. Sunlight twinkled from its whitewashed buildings and tile-domed mosques.

"Sure don’t look like much of a airport fer us t’ land on," Chow grumbled with his customary prairie
joie de vivre
.

Bud agreed. "Looks as though they just finished hacking it out with a bulldozer."

In spite of the field’s size and indifferently paved runways, a surprising number of planes were clustered on it. At a signal from the tower, the
Sky Queen
touched down on its jet lifters in a corner of the facility that appeared unfinished.

"What’s this—a welcoming committee?" Hanson murmured to Tom as the travelers clomped down the craft’s extensible boarding ramp.

Tom felt a twinge of alarm. A number of soldiers, in ill-fitting khaki uniforms and armed with rifles, had come rushing out of the main airport building toward them. Before Tom and his friends knew what was happening, the soldiers were grabbing them roughly.

"Hey, watch it!" cried Slim.

"Oh no you goldurned
don’t
, buckaroo!" Chow bellowed, lashing out at a young soldier who laid hands on him.

A rifle butt whacked the chef on the side of his head, and Chow exploded. In a moment a wild melee had broken out!

ENRAGED by the blow dealt to Chow, Tom and his friends fought back vigorously, punching and elbowing right and left. The soldiers, meanwhile, milled about in a tight tangle, swinging their rifles with hoarse, angry shouts.

Arv’s beefy fists sent one man sprawling, while Tom doubled up a wild-eyed sergeant with a right to the solar plexus. Slim almost went down with his forehead bloodied by a slashing rifle butt. Chow, dazed but angrier than ever, sailed into Slim’s assailant like a fiery-eyed gamecock. As for Bud Barclay—the impulsive ex-footballer was everywhere at once.

With a sickening feeling Tom suddenly realized that the whole project might be ruined before they had scarcely glimpsed the host country they had come to help! "
Everybody hold it! Stop!
" he shouted frantically.

After repeated pleas and gestures, Tom finally managed to calm the combatants. "No sense starting a war the minute we land," he pointed out to his companions. "Besides, we can’t take on their whole army. Let’s go along peaceably and find out what this is all about."

Reluctantly the others followed his example and allowed themselves to be taken in charge. The soldiers promptly herded the visitors aboard a waiting truck.

The man who had struck Chow glared at him like a fierce hawk. But the words out of his mouth were: "You—you fight good!"

The westerner nodded. "You too, son. Hope my head didn’t dent yer gun."

The soldier looked over the butt of his rifle. "No. Okay."

The five were driven to an Army barracks not far from the airport. A colonel with a jet black mustache glanced up and glowered fiercely as they were marched into his office. "Ah, yes! Prisoners!" he said in English with a heavy accent. He stood up stiffly and strutted up to Tom. "Tom Swift. So! Now you surely will say,
What is the meaning of this outrage!
"

"What’s the m― " Tom began. Then he changed course. "What’s the
matter
with you?" he demanded, stepping up boldly to meet his captor. "We land here on a technical mission to help your country, and your soldiers attack us without cause!"

The colonel stared at Tom in surprise. Then he stroked his mustache and sneered like a melodrama villain. "Technical mission! That, of course, is your story. Unfortunately for you, we have already been—how do you say?—
tipped over
that you are dangerous enemy spies."