Contents

  1 Test Flight

  2 The Road to the Airport

  3 Getting off the Ground

  4 Sabotage?

  5 Another Crash

  6 In the Hanger

  7 Suspects

  8 A Shape in the Darkness

  9 The Road Back (To the Airport)

  10 Start Your Engines

  11 Up in the Air

  1

  Test Flight

  I hadn’t expected turbulence at this low an altitude, but the way my Swift-Racer was bucking, I knew I was in for a bumpy race. I checked and rechecked my stabilizers, fired my afterburners again to make sure the fuel was reaching the engine of my rocket racers, and . . . THWACK! The joystick nearly jumped out of my grip.

  I gritted my teeth together and grasped the joystick with both hands, struggling to keep the plane under control. The clouds were racing past the canopy of my aircraft too quickly. If I didn’t get this puppy flying straight in less than a minute, it was going to be lights-out time.

  There! There’s the horizon. Level off. Reduce lift. The Swift-Racer started to behave. It wasn’t turbulence at all. It looked like it was a bad mixture of isopropyl-alcohol fuel going to my twin jet engines. Either that or the reciprocating piston pump I installed wasn’t timing correctly. The last thing I needed was to feel that buck again, but I knew a hairpin turn was up ahead. I wasn’t going to be able to come out of the turn with any speed while gliding.

  I could see the preprogrammed trajectory my racer was to follow displayed on the visor of my helmet. Like a “flight tunnel,” the blue triangles seemed to be waiting out in front of me, showing me where to bank, where to decrease elevation, and where to turn.

  And at nearly 160 miles per hour, that sharp turn was coming up fast.

  A siren went off inside the cockpit, followed by a very loud voice.

  “Swift, you punk! Are you paying attention to your fuel gauge? Now drop and give me fifty! Do you understand?”

  “Not now, Q.U.I.P,” I answered quickly, trying to keep calm. Q.U.I.P., also known as Quantum Utilizing Interactive Processor, is essentially a supercomputer that I can talk to via a chip on my wristwatch. It was one of my first forays into artificial intelligence and is always coming in handy when I need another brain. The initial concept was to create a super-intelligent personality that I could work with and would continue to learn the more we communicated. The first several prototypes were about as fun to interact with as the most boring advanced calculus professor you could think of. Don’t get me wrong: I love advanced calculus as much as the next teenage inventor, but more often than not, advanced calculus teachers have the personality of a plate of cold French fries.

  Fortunately my science teacher, Mr. Radnor, has more than enough personality to make up for most of the rest of the teaching staff at Shopton High. With a flair for the dramatic, Mr. Radnor is able to bring any topic to life. One semester, to explain photosynthesis and the effect sunlight has on plants, Mr. Radnor transplanted a dozen grapevines into the ground outside the science lab. When the grapes finally began growing, the vines were crawling into the lab windows. At the end of the semester, after we had picked all the grapes, he rolled up his pants’ legs, washed his feet, and stomped on them in a wooden vat, just like they used to do in Italy to make wine. The juice was good, but the memory of him ankle deep in purple Concord grapes was even sweeter.

  So when it came time to give Q.U.I.P. a personality, Mr. Radnor came immediately to mind. And since that time, I’ve toyed with various other personalities and accents to enhance the interactive experience.

  From Cowboy mode to Sherlock Holmes mode to Arnold Schwarzenegger mode to my best friend Bud Barclay mode, even Bugs Bunny’s Brooklyn accent—whenever I get bored, I just change the personality of the supercomputer. And right now I was regretting that I had left it on “Staff Sergeant.” I took one hand off the joystick, clicked a button on the wrist device, and turned Q.U.I.P. off.

  But the siren continued. Dang it! That was the last thing I needed.

  The turn was coming up quick. Now or never. I gave the Swift-Racer all the fuel in her tanks and slammed the joystick into my left thigh to take the turn.

  I never knew what hit me!

  To my left a gash of flames tore through the metal skin of my rocket racer. The buck of the racer was so violent this time that my visor and helmet shook off. I was flying blind.

  The explosion washed over the cockpit with such a fury that it was several moments before I was able to blink the flash out of my eyes. The instruments were going nuts! Elevation: plummeting. Fuel: nonexistent. Pitch: crazy.

  Then I saw it. The left wing was hanging on by a scrap of metal. The blast tore through the hull of the racer, shredding the left engine rocket. All this, and my last drops of fuel were pouring out in yellow and red shrieks of fire from what was left of the engine.

  “Dude.” Bud Barclay’s voice came on over the cockpit’s intercom.

  I hit Q.U.I.P. again with my hand. I must have made a mistake and switched to Bud Barclay mode instead of turning it off. Bud may be my best friend in the whole world, but the last thing I wanted to hear was his voice in my ear as my aircraft was quickly losing altitude while traveling 160 miles per hour.

  “Dude.” His voice again.

  I tried to ignore it. Tried to get control of the joystick, which was jumping like a cricket on a hot rock. Tried to peer through the smoke. Tried, tried, tried.

  “Dude!” he said even louder. “You’re toast.”

  The instrument panel lit up brighter than Chinatown at Chinese New Year.

  Maybe with a little patented Swift luck, I might chance into a gust of wind, or catch an updraft.

  No luck. The ground was coming up faster than even I anticipated. I was picking up speed.

  I knew the next thing I would see was the blacktop and then nothing.

  “Tom!” Bud shouted.

  With the prospect of plunging into the earth at over 160 miles per hour, I tore my hand from the joystick and punched at the canopy of my racer. Game over.

  No noise. No anything.

  I sat for a moment in my virtual-reality flight simulator and caught my breath. I tapped my wrist, turning Q.U.I.P. on.

  “What happened?” I exhaled.

  “You died,” Q.U.I.P. responded. Its voice was back to normal, in Regular Guy mode.

  “How?” I asked, slightly perturbed.

  “You crashed.”

  I was losing my patience with this glorified wristwatch. I didn’t regret inventing it, although perhaps I shouldn’t have given it so much intelligence that it could have a laugh at my expense.

  “Would you like to try again?” Q.U.I.P. asked.

  “No,” I replied. “I try to keep from dying more than once a day.”

  “That’s a sound policy, flyboy,” Bud interjected over the loudspeaker.

  I removed the helmet and visor that had fallen to my feet during the “flight” and hoisted myself up out of the simulator’s seat, rubbing my head where it had hit the cockpit’s canopy. I walked out to find both Bud and my other best friend, Yolanda, rewatching my fiery death on their plasma-screen monitors.

  “How’d those new shocks work out in the simulator?” Bud asked. “Lifelike enough for you?”

  “Perhaps you’d like to go a round or two with them,” I said. It was supposed to be funnier than it sounded, but I was still a little shaken from the race in the simulator.

  With his feet propped up on the desk and his hands behind his head, Bud Barclay looked like an unfurled marionette at rest. In geometric terms, Bud is a collection of right angles for shoulders and elbows, two long and skinny tubes for legs, and a slender rectangle for a chest, topped by a buckyball for a head. The buckyball is also known as a 60-carbon atom buckminsterfullerene molecule. It was named after Buckminster Fuller, the creator of the geodesic dome, like Epcot Center at Walt Disney World. Fuller was an inventor who wanted to use science for the betterment of mankind, and a hero of mine.

  Bud ran his fingers through his curly black hair and smiled.

  “Look,” he said. “Look here.” He pointed at the plasma monitor. “Here’s where your stabilizer-thingies kinda gave out.”

  Stabilizer-thingies! Bud’s my head mechanic for the upcoming Junior Rocket Rally and he still didn’t know the names of the parts of my aircraft! Book knowledge he has, common sense he has, a talent for getting to the bottom of things he has, but science is not his strong suit. I suppose I could have found a more qualified head mechanic, but I never could have found someone I trusted more. And with all the rumors over the Internet of possible sabotage at the Junior Rocket Rally, I felt I needed someone in my corner who wasn’t a question mark.

  Swift Enterprises has been bedeviled by antitechnology groups ever since my dad created the company, before I was born. The worst is TRB—The Road Back. They are so committed to returning the world back to its “natural state” that they will stop at nothing to achieve their goal. And it seems the more inventions we bring to the marketplace, the more they want to shut us down. But they’ve thrown everything they’ve had at us in the past and nothing’s worked yet. My dad’s motto is to never give in to their backward demands. Still, a dozen times a year they try to gum up Swift Enterprises with computer viruses. And the last thing I needed now was for my rocket racer’s onboard computer to be crippled by a virus.

  And that’s where Yolanda Aponte came in. You wouldn’t know it from her runner’s build and her long hair, but on the inside, Yo is an übergeek. Nothing pleases her more than writing code, rewiring motherboards, and repairing CPUs. She can spot a computer virus a mile away and disable it before it does its damage. She is also becoming quite handy with a wrench. More than once when Bud wasn’t here, she could be found underneath the Swift-Racer, tweaking the fuel intake valve.

  “You know,” she said, clicking the top of her pen, “your S-Racer was in first place—”

  “Before you crashed to your death, that is,” Bud interrupted, holding up his right hand for a high five.

  Yolanda stared at him.

  “Yo, don’t leave me hangin’,” he mock-pleaded.

  I shook off their shenanigans to go examine the real S-Racer.

  “Swift, Thomas Jr.,” I announced as I approached the door leading out of my laboratory.

  “Will you be returning to the laboratory again this evening, Tom Swift?” the voice-enhanced security system called Lab-Sec asked from a speaker above the door.

  “Not tonight,” I answered. “But Bud and Yo are still here.”

  “Affirmative, Tom Swift,” the pleasant-sounding female voice replied after a moment. “Yolanda Aponte is currently in the computer room accessing aeronautical flight design information from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology database via a satellite dish connection courtesy of a NASA security code.” The security program paused as it accessed the whereabouts of Bud. “Bud Barclay is watching the Comedy Channel on television.”

  I rolled my eyes and exhaled. That would be Bud, always goofing off.

  “Do me a favor, Lab-Sec. Change the channel he’s watching to that Giants of Applied Mathematics show I recorded last week.”

  I waited a moment, and—like clock work—I heard Bud’s booming voice: “Swift!”

  Smiling, I turned toward the security system again.

  “Lab-Sec, commence identification.”

  At once a retractable metal arm folded out of the wall near the door with a special retina scanner on it. I opened my eyes wide, and the light swept across my face.

  “Confirmed,” Lab-Sec said.

  I then held out my open palm, and another metal arm reached from the wall with a small pencil-eraser-size temperature and body sweat chemical composition gauge on the end. It touched directly in the center of my hand. And after a moment of “reading” my palm, it retracted.

  “Confirmed.” A pause. “Tom Swift?”

  “Yes, Lab-Sec?”

  “Your temperature is higher than normal. Do you feel unwell?”

  “No. I just died a few minutes ago in the flight simulator. I guess that raised my heart rate and temperature a few degrees.”

  “I’m sorry to hear you died, Tom Swift,” Lab-Sec responded with no sincerity whatsoever. I had never intended the voice-enhanced security system to have a personality like Q.U.I.P.’s and so it was never able to learn either pathos or humor.

  “Thank you, Lab-Sec.”

  “Favorite color?”

  “Pistachio,” I said. This was my attempt at humor. If someone had been able to trick the security system getting into the laboratory by somehow duplicating my physical components, they would never be able to get out. Because, try as they might to answer this question, they could never come up with the final key. You see, pistachio is my favorite ice cream flavor. It’s a trick question. It doesn’t really make any sense. And most people are going to think that all inventors are logical to a fault.

  “Confirmed,” Lab-Sec said, and the door before me opened.

  The lights in the corridor that connect my laboratory to our family’s house snapped on. It is a five-hundred-foot passageway from the laboratory that I had designed and installed in the hill behind the house so that I could work late at night and not have to ride my bike back home in the dark from Swift Enterprises on the edge of town. That was before I got my driver’s license. But it still made sense to use it. I could roll out of bed in the middle of the night if I had a Eureka! moment and needed to sketch out a new invention. I passed through the door.

  “Thanks, Lab-Sec.”

  “You’re welcome, Tom Swift.”

  By the time I reached the garage, I had worked out a more appropriate isopropyl-alcohol fuel-burn ratio in conjunction with the speed the pistons were firing. It was a minor modification I could incorporate into the aircraft when we brought the rocket-powered Swift-Racer to the skytrack next week for time trials.

  “Garage. Lights on,” I said to the cognitive “smart house” technology my father and I wired into the house to obey our verbal commands. The light went on.

  I walked over to where the S-Racer sat, its shiny wings peeking out from underneath a light brown cover. The metal was cold to my touch.

  After the disaster in the flight simulator, I was more than a little apprehensive to get up in the air and fly against three other competitors for real. But I shook off the worries and decided that the best course of action would be to get some sleep and attack any problems in the morning with a clear head.

  Then I felt the soft body of my sister Sandy’s cat against my ankles.

  “Hi, Emma,” I said, bending over to pet it. I’m more of a dog person, but I do admit Emma is a friendly cat and a good pet. “How did you get in here?”

  I saw the side door was open. “Come on, Emma. It’s too warm a night to be in this stuffy garage.” I picked up the cat and placed her outside. She meowed and scurried beneath a bush. I closed the door and made a mental note to wire the garage for security. We’d never had any problems with people sneaking into the house before, but I figured it couldn’t hurt. I returned to the S-Racer. Nothing looked out of place.

  “Garage. Lights out.”

  I stood for a moment in the darkness, feeling the coolness of the plane against my fingertips. Tomorrow was the maiden flight. I was essentially going to be strapping myself into a cockpit fixed on top of two powerful rockets fed by a highly volatile kerosene type fuel and praying for dear life that I could control the thing.

  Should be interesting.

  2

  The Road to the Airport

  Bud and I decided it was too nice a day not to have the top down on the Swift Speedster. Unfortunately Yolanda and my kid sister, Sandy, didn’t see it that way.

  “Tom!” they both shouted as I hit the button that retracts the roof. Instantly their hair took flight, blowing every which way but the direction they tried to smooth it. Yolanda reached into the knapsack she carried with her everywhere. It held her personal Swift-tronics laptop computer and a few other items. She pulled out a baseball cap and put it over her wavy dark hair. Time and again she complained that her nearly black hair was as easy to manage as an unstable free radical in organic chemistry.

  She took off a thin black rubber gasket that she wore as a bracelet and handed it to my sister. Sandy took it, grabbed her blond mane, and tied it up. Yolanda had already returned her attention to the Rocket Rally flight manual.

  “If I get bugs in my teeth . . . ,” Sandy shouted over the road noise.

  “It might be an improvement,” I shot back. Bud laughed with me. Kind of a guys versus girls thing.

  “Hey, that’s mature!” she said, and flicked me in the ear.

  For just an instant I thought of turning up the radio and drowning her out. That really would have driven her nuts. Instead I replied coolly, “Would you like it if I turned around and went home? I’m sure I could find someone else for my rally pit crew.”

  I readjusted the mirror and saw her slouch back into her seat. She was steaming, but knew she had better not answer back in case I wasn’t bluffing. Sandy had begged for weeks to be a member of my crew and I resisted the notion. Why? I guess because she always wants to be a part of what I’m doing. But, despite being an annoying younger sister at times, she does have some redeeming qualities. Take for example her ability to perform almost any type of mathematical equation in her head. I may have inherited Dad’s love of inventing, but she got his computational smarts.

  She gets her photographic memory from Mom. Together they try to stump each other with the most arcane trivia imaginable. Like the time they fought over who was the fourth person to reach the top of Mount Everest. Who knows this kind of stuff? My kid sister.

  Needless to say, they were both correct. It was two men from the same climbing expedition.

 

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