Victor appleton tom sw.., p.1
Victor Appleton - Tom Swift Jr 01, page 1
Tom Swift and His Flying Lab
by Victor Appleton II
THE NEW TOM SWIFT JR. ADVENTURES BY VICTOR APPLETON II
Number Title
1 Tom Swift and His Flying Lab
2 Tom Swift and His Jetmarine
3 Tom Swift and His Rocket Ship
4 Tom Swift and His Giant Robot
5 Tom Swift and His Atomic Earth Blaster
6 Tom Swift and His Outpost in Space
7 Tom Swift and His Diving Seacopter
8 Tom Swift in the Caves of Nuclear Fire
9 Tom Swift on the Phantom Satellite
10 Tom Swift and His Ultrasonic Cycloplane
11 Tom Swift and His Deep-Sea Hydrodome
12 Tom Swift in the Race to the Moon
13 Tom Swift and His Space Solartron
14 Tom Swift and His Electronic Retroscope
15 Tom Swift and His Spectromarine Selector
16 Tom Swift and the Cosmic Astronauts
17 Tom Swift and the Visitor from Planet X
18 Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung
19 Tom Swift and His Triphibian Atomicar
20 Tom Swift and His Megascope Space Prober
21 Tom Swift and the Asteroid Pirates
22 Tom Swift and His Repelatron Skyway
23 Tom Swift and His Aquatomic Tracker
24 Tom Swift and His 3-D Telejector
25 Tom Swift and His Polar-Ray Dynasphere
26 Tom Swift and His Sonic Boom Trap
27 Tom Swift and His Subocean Geotron
28 Tom Swift and the Mystery Comet
29 Tom Swift and the Captive Planetoid
30 Tom Swift and His G-Force Inverter
31 Tom Swift and His Dyna-4 Capsule
32 Tom Swift and His Cosmotron Express
33 Tom Swift and the Galaxy Ghosts
COPYRIGHT, 1954, BY
GROSSET and DUNLAP, INC.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
1 A MESSAGE FROM SPACE 1
2 SNEAK ATTACK 12
3 A SCIENTIFIC THIEF 20
4 A CALL TO DANGER 27
5 ESPIONAGE 35
6 THE CLICKING DETECTOR 46
7 SKY RACERS 51
8 MIDNIGHT GENIUS 57
9 GHOSTLY PHOTOS 66
10 A THREAT COMES TRUE 75
11 SPY HUNT , 83
12 OUTRAGEOUS RANSOM 91
13 STRATOSPHERE HOP 99
14 A BRILLIANT FORMULA 109
15 OPERATION JUNGLE 119
16 DARING PURSUIT 126
17 THE HOMING MISSILE 136
18 CAMOUFLAGE 143
19 THE SECRET LANDING FIELD 150
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
20 21 22 23 24
AN AVALANCHE
A HOSTILE WELCOME
AN EMERGENCY INVENTION
PRISONERS
CHOW’S DILEMMA
25 AN AMAZING DISCOVERY
PAGE
158 165 172 181 190 198
CHAPTER I
A MESSAGE FROM SPACE
“HOW SOON will the Flying Lab be ready for the test hop, Tom?”
“In about two weeks, Dad. I can hardly wait to take her up.”
Mr. Swift looked admiringly at the eighteen-year-old inventor. Tom Jr. resembled his father and had the same deep-set eyes, but he was slightly taller and more slender. The youth and his distinguished parent, both widely known for their scientific achievements, were headed for their experimental station, Swift Enterprises. There the Flying Lab had been built in a mammoth underground hangar.
“The atomic-powered engines should give us a speed of better than a thousand miles an hour, and the jet lifters—”
Tom was cut short by an uncanny whistling roar. An object hurtling from the sky just missed them, its turbulent backwash sprawling them on the ground, as it disappeared over the wall of Swift Enterprises. A split second later there was a tremendous thud and the earth shook.
“A bomb!” Tom shouted, jumping up.
“Or a meteor!” his father exclaimed.
By now both were running at top speed toward the private entrance to Swift Enterprises. Tom whipped an electronic key from his pocket and beamed it on the hidden mechanism. The gate flew open.
Inside the grounds there was pandemonium. Workers were racing from the cluster of buildings toward a gaping hole at the end of the airfield. Tom quickly outdistanced his father and was one of the first to reach the spot. In the earth yawned an immense crater.
“Gosh!” cried a workman. “You could fit a fire-house into that hole!”
The object that had bolted from the sky was buried too deeply to be seen, and the dirt at the edges of the pit had begun to cave in.
“What is it?” asked Hank Sterling, the chief engineer of the patternmaking division.
Tom shook his head. “I guess we’ll have to dig around it to find out. Was anybody hurt?”
“I believe not.”
Fortunately no one had been near the immediate area. Glass in several of the buildings had been broken, however, and various small articles jolted from shelves and desks.
By this time Mr. Swift had come up, and he immediately ordered a crew to start digging. Tom and Hank were so eager to learn what the object was thai they brought out the big hydraulic shovel.
An hour later all the earth had been cleared from around the missile, and a ladder was lowered into the pit. Tom hastened down.
“It’s not a natural meteor,” he decided, as he examined the strange carvings on the side of the black cigar-shaped device. “It is mechanically made and only beings of high intelligence could have worked out those mathematical symbols.”
Mr. Swift and Hank climbed down the ladder. They, too, were fascinated by the markings on the projectile.
“Do you think this was rocketed into space by creatures on another planet,” Hank asked, “and that they were trying to send a message to Earth? It might even have been meant for you Swifts.”
“If so, the meteor was launched with pin-point precision,” Tom remarked.
“Have you any idea what those symbols mean?” Hank asked.
“I believe they’re a code expressed in equations,” Mr. Swift answered.
He and Tom pulled notebooks from their pockets and began to do some figuring. After covering a page, Tom looked up, a baffled expression on his face.
“It will take more than one notebook to work this out,” he said. “It will have to wait. I want to find out if the earth tremor damaged the Flying Lab.”
He hurried up the ladder, followed by his father and Hank. The Swifts retraced their steps to a building near the private entrance. Its roof was large and flat and only a few feet above the ground. Once more Tom took the electronic key from his pocket and flicked it to another combination.
The door to the underground hangar opened. He and his father descended the long, wide stairway of burnished steel.
Before them on the underground floor stood the Flying Lab, its tremendous silver body and V-swept wings almost filling the hangar. At first glance, no damage was apparent, but Tom went methodically from section to section before he was satisfied that no harm had come to his prized ship.
Meanwhile, Mr. Swift had gone to the private office in the underground hangar, which he shared with Tom, to continue working on the mathematical puzzle which had come hurtling out of space. In this office the Swifts’ most valuable plans were kept and secret conferences were held. Tom arrived presently to report that the Flying Lab had not been damaged.
“If she weathered that earth tremor,” Mr. Swift remarked, “she certainly is a sturdy bird. You can be proud of her, Tom.”
“But even with the atomic engines and jet lifters, she’d never be able to stay in flight without your wonderful invention, Dad—the one Mother named after us.”
“Oh, you mean the Tomasite plastic,” Mr. Swift said. “Anyway, encasing the nuclear reactors with it is better than the old-type lead and concrete shields, and I believe it will absorb the radiation more effectively.”
Mr. Swift took great delight in the fact that Tom, from earliest childhood, had shown all his father’s flair for invention. As soon as the boy was old enough to study science, his father had been his teacher. As a result, Tom was known as one of the best-informed young inventors in the entire country.
Furthermore, because of his great interest in flying, Tom had become an expert pilot and had learned everything there was to know about the building of aircraft. A few months before, he had surprised his father with the idea of a flying laboratory to use in experiments.
For several years Mr. Swift had been convinced that both the ionosphere and the earth’s depths held valuable secrets which could be useful to man. When Tom had shown him plans for the Flying Lab, he had urged his son to build the mammoth ship without delay.
“Did you figure anything out of those symbols?” Tom asked his father.
“Not yet. This quadrant within a quadrant—”
Mr. Swift’s voice faded as he started further calculations. As Tom took out a pencil to work on the equation the telephone rang.
“Tom Swift Jr. speaking,” he said.
“This is the Shopton Evening Bulletin. We understand a meteor fell in your grounds. But your guards won’t let our reporter in!”
Tom smiled. The men at the gate obeyed orders under any circumstances!
“Sorry, Mr.—”
“Perkins. We must have a story.”
“I’ll give it to you,” Tom said quietly. “A huge piece of mineral buried itself in our airfield. We haven’t had time to analyze it yet. We’ll let you know later. No one was hurt and damage was slight.”
“Is that all? How about a picture?”
“We’ll take one for you.” After Tom had hung up he looked at his father, his eyes twinkling. “Shall we take the picture without the symbols showing?”
“Yes, Tom. I’d like to wait a little longer before making them public. I almost believe Hank was right about the projectile being sent to you and me to figure out.”
“Okay, Dad, we’ll wait.”
“Say, Tom, isn’t it about time you wrote to Rip Hulse about the trial flight of the Flying Lab?” Mr. Swift asked.
“I’ll do it today.”
Ripcord Hulse, an ace pilot, was a long-standing friend of the Swifts. He had seen the plans for the ship and had been promised a preview of her first flight.
Toward noon Tom was busy inspecting the landing gear of the Flying Lab when a voice boomed through the hangar.
“Well, brand my fuselage! Looks like I jest got home in time! So this is what we’re goin’ to go galli-vantin’ ‘round the world in, eh? Mighty fine, I’d say.”
Sun-bronzed Chow Winkler, the rotund, happy-go-lucky cook and steward on all Swift expeditions, stood grinning from the foot of the steps. He wore a flashy red-and-green checkered shirt and held a sombrero in one hand.
Tom leaped forward to greet the newcomer.
“Chow! Welcome back. How was your trip?”
“Fine. Ole Texas looked jest as good as it did years ago before I joined up with you. Had a great time seein* all my cowpoke friends. An’,” he added proudly, opening his jacket and fingering his shirt, “I picked up this lil number in Fort Worth.”
Tom covered his eyes with his hands.
“Ow! Those colors really dazzlel” Then he added warmly, “It’s great to see you, Chow. We’ve missed you.”
Chow, whose real name was Charles, had been a chuck-wagon cook in the Southwest for many years. He had become acquainted with Tom and his father while they were working on atomic research near a ranch at which Chow was employed at the time. It had not been long before he and Tom had become fast friends, and when the Swift expedition returned North, Chow had attached himself to the party.
“Say, a feller at the gate put this lil ole good-luck charm on my arm—an electric whatchamacallit!”
“You mean one of our electronic amulets.” Tom laughed. “Without that little bracelet, Chow, you’d have our radarscopes working overtime.”
“How come?” Chow asked.
“It sounds complicated, but it’s really simple,” Tom explained. “The little bracelet traps radar impulses and keeps them off our scopes. There’s a giant scope on top of the main building now for everyone to see, and a special one down here in the office for the underground hangar.
“So,” Tom went on, as Chow looked perplexed, “anyone who doesn’t wear an amulet causes a little dot of light to show up on one scope or the other. That’s how we can tell if a spy has sneaked in.”
“Well, your ole radar kin have the day off, far as I’m concerned.” Chow chuckled. “Jest thought I’d come ‘round an’ find out how you-all are.”
“Wait until you see what we’ve set up for you in the Flying Lab,” Tom said. “By the way, we’re calling it the Sky Queen. Our three-decker has everything, including—”
“Three-decker? You mean this here Sky Queen has three floors?” Chow leaned so far back to look up at the big ship that he almost fell over on his balding head.
“That’s right,” Tom answered. “Come on. I’ll show you around.”
He climbed a ladder through a hatch beneath the wings. Chow followed.
“This first level is partly for storage,” Tom explained as they stood inside. “We’ll keep spare equipment, experimental supplies, and luggage down here. But look back in this end. See those sliding doors to the outside? Behind the doors is our hangar. We’re going to carry two baby aircraft—a small jet plane we call the Kangaroo Kub and a jet-lifted helicopter, the Skeeter.”
Chow’s eyes widened. Then he said, “Where’s the galley? We got to eat!”
“We’ll come to it.”
Next, they went up a flight of narrow, steel-ribbed stairs and into the largest sector of the ship’s interior. Forward was the control room containing the pilot’s and copilot’s seats. Every bit of wall space was covered with dials, switches, and gadgets. Chow rubbed his eyes.
“Say, you’ll need a big crew to push an’ pull all those buttons an’ levers.”
Tom smiled. “Chow, this is so simply arranged that the Sky Queen could almost fly itself. The only men who’ll be on the ship are Dad, my friend Bud Barclay, and you and I.”
The cook, utterly amazed, shook his head.
“Where’s the laboratory itself?”
“Mid-fuselage. It’s partitioned off from the rest of the ship and is a soundproof, air-conditioned room, or series of rooms. One’s my physics lab, another’s for chemistry. Then there’s a place for experiments with animals—”
“Hold on!” Chow begged. “We goin’ to carry a zoo along?”
Tom laughed. “Some day perhaps.”
He slid back the door and switched on a light. The huge room was partitioned off into cubicles with walls shoulder high. Chow gazed in awe at the physics division with its six-foot electron microscope and X ray, ultraviolet and infrared absorption apparatus. He shook his head. “Mighty fine,” he said, “but it’s beyond me. I’ll stick to my galley. Where is it?”
Tom chuckled at the cook’s impatience as he led the way to the third deck. Forward was a comfortable windowed lounge, complete with easy chairs and a small library of scientific books and magazines. Back of this were the sleeping quarters, and in the rear was the galley. Chow surveyed the layout of modern equipment in pleased astonishment.
“Well, brand my skillet!” he said. “Will I cook up some fancy dishesl”
He was about to inspect his new quarters when Mr. Swift called up anxiously from the first deck. “Tom! Tom! Come to my office! Quick!”
Tom raced down the stairways and ladder and across the concrete floor to the office where his father stood with a smashed cathode-ray tube in his hands.
“What’s up, Dad?”
“Our radar equipment—it’s been broken!” Mr. Swift exclaimed. “And look at the time chart. An intruder was registered at 3:19 A.M.!”
“Someone without an amulet broke in here?” Tom cried incredulously.
Mr. Swift’s face was stern. “Yes. And according to the time chart on the radar, someone who was looking around for five minutes before he broke the radar apparatus. No telling how long he was here after that, nor what it was he wanted.”
“He’s not hiding aboard the Flying Lab,” Tom remarked. “I’ve just been all over her. Say, it’s funny no one reported a dot on the outdoor radarscope. Maybe the intruder’s still around!”
As Mr. Swift picked up the telephone to alert their private police, Tom rushed from the office and up the steps to the ground level. Dashing outdoors, he looked around.
By this time a number of uniformed guards were running to prearranged posts to investigate. Others were speeding away in cars so that every bit of the four-mile-square enclosure would be covered.
Tom stopped one of the guards and asked whether anything had been picked up on the master scope. The man said nothing had, and hurried away.
“The grounds are well covered,” Tom remarked to himself. “But the spare-parts warehouse—no one’s looking there!”
Tom ran to the big storage shed and hurried inside. He was just in time to see a short young man with sleek black hair turn and plunge out of a rear door. The man disappeared near some empty packing cases.
Tom raced after him. He was searching among the big crates when he heard a noise behind him. Turning, he caught a glimpse of glittering dark eyes.
Then came a crashing blow on his head. Tom sank to the ground unconscious!
CHAPTER II
SNEAK ATTACK
AS THE GUARDS fanned out over the grounds, Tom’s father hurried up the hangar steps, opened the door, and looked around. A plant policeman, running toward him, cried out excitedly:
“No one’s been caught yet, Mr. Swift, and the men found the big radarscope disconnected.”
