Turning to Chief Slater, the CIA man added, "Turn him over to the FBI and have them take him to New York. I"ll arrange for a seat on the first plane for Brungaria."
Tom drove back thoughtfully to Enterprises. Bud was waiting in his laboratory with news.
"Your dad went from Washington to Fearing Island and has gone up to your s.p.a.ce outpost," Bud reported. "He has to do some experiments for the government project he"s working on."
The outpost was a s.p.a.ce station which Tom Swift Jr. had built 22,300 miles above the earth. It was a production factory for his famous solar batteries, and also an immensely valuable setup for s.p.a.ce research and exploration.
"Think I"ll radio Dad and let him know what"s going on," Tom decided.
"He may have some good suggestions. He usually does!"
Tom warmed up his private transmitter-receiver and beamed out a code call through the automatic scrambler. Seconds later, the loud-speaker crackled in response.
But just as the outpost operator"s voice came through, the radio set exploded in Tom"s face!
CHAPTER IX
THE CAVE MONSTER
"Skipper!" Bud cried anxiously as Tom staggered back, his hands to his face.
"I"m all right--no harm done," Tom a.s.sured his friend.
Both boys were a bit shaken by the accident, nevertheless. Chow came rushing in as Bud was brushing the fragments of debris from Tom"s clothes and examining the young inventor"s face.
"Brand my flyin" flapjacks, what happened?" Chow asked. The chef had been bringing a tray of fruit juice to the laboratory and had heard the explosion outside.
"The radio set just blew up in my face," Tom explained. "Fortunately, the equipment was transistorized mostly with printed circuits.
Otherwise," he added, "I might have been badly cut by slivers of gla.s.s from the exploding vacuum tubes."
As it was, the young inventor had suffered only a few slight scratches and a bruise on the temple from a piece of the shattered housing. Bud swabbed Tom"s injuries with antiseptic from the first-aid cabinet while Chow poured out gla.s.ses of grape juice.
"What caused it, Tom?" Bud asked as they paused to sip the fruit drink.
"Good question," Tom replied. "Frankly, I don"t know." But he was wondering if the set might have been sabotaged.
Tom was still eager to get in touch with his father and telephoned the electronics department to bring another set to his laboratory. Chow left just as the new set arrived.
Tom hooked it up quickly, donned a set of goggles, and tuned to the s.p.a.ce-station frequency. Then he picked up the microphone and stepped well back from the set, waving Bud out of range at the same time.
"Tom Swift calling Outpost!... Come in, please!"
A moment later came another explosion! _The new set had also blown up!_
"Good night!" Bud gasped in a stunned voice. "Don"t tell me that"s just a coincidence!"
Tom shrugged. "We can certainly rule out the possibility that anything was wrong with the radio itself. Every set is checked before it leaves the electronics department."
"So where does that leave us?" Bud persisted.
Tom shook his head worriedly as he took off the goggles. "Both times it seemed to happen just as the reply was coming through from the s.p.a.ce station. There is no possibility that their signal was too strong--in other words, that the explosion was caused by overloading the receiving circuits."
"Are you implying that an enemy intercepted the message and sent some sort of ray that caused the set to explode?" Bud demanded.
Tom"s face showed clearly that Bud had pinpointed the suspicion in the young inventor"s mind. "Could be."
Bud was worried by this latest development. "Skipper, suppose I hop up to the s.p.a.ce wheel and talk it over with your dad. He may be able to help us detect any enemy moves."
"Good idea, pal," Tom agreed. "The sooner the better, I"d say."
The boys exchanged a quick handshake and affectionate shoulder slaps.
Then Bud hurried out to one of the Enterprises hangars to ready a helijet for the flight to Fearing Island. This was the Swifts" rocket base, just off the Atlantic coast. From there, Bud would board one of the regular cargo shuttle rockets operating between the s.p.a.ce station and Fearing.
Tom, meanwhile, plunged back to work on his shock-wave deflector.
At ten the next morning he called in Hank Sterling and showed him a set of completed drawings.
"Hank, you did a fast job on the container for the brain," Tom began apologetically, "but you"ll really have to burn out a bearing on this one!"
Hank grinned. "I"m geared to action. Say, what do we call it, anyhow?"
he asked.
Tom grinned. "Chow told me last night this gadget looked like a fireplug under a rose trellis and I ought to call it Fireplug Rose! But I"ve given it a more dignified name--the Quakelizor, which stands for an underground quake wave deflector."
Briefly, Tom explained the various parts of his latest invention, which consisted of a hydrant-sized cylinder to be inserted into the ground, with magnetic coils near the top. A smaller hydraulic cylinder, mounted above this, was wired to a metal framework and radio transmitter.
"This setup will detect any incoming enemy shock waves," Tom said.
"We"ll need fifty of "em, so turn the job over to Swift Construction.
And have Uncle Ned put on extra shifts."
The Swift Construction Company, managed by Ned Newton, was the commercial division which ma.s.s-produced Tom Jr."s and Tom Sr."s inventions.
Information from the detector-transmitters, Tom went on, would be fed into an electronic computer at the Bureau of Mines in Washington.
The Quakelizor itself was housed in a ma.s.sive cube-shaped casting with two large spheres mounted on top. From each of its four sides jutted a hydraulic piston.
"How does it work, Tom?" Hank asked.
"Dual-control spheres on top," Tom explained, "will receive by radio signal the pulse frequency computed in Washington."
He added that inside each sphere was a "pulsemaker." This would produce changes in the pressure of the hydraulic fluid by affecting the kinetic energy of the fluid"s atoms.
The pressure changes would then be enormously magnified in the four hydraulic output drivers. When the unit was embedded in rock, underground, the huge pistons would send out counter shock waves through the earth"s crust to neutralize the enemy waves.
"Wow!" Hank Sterling was breathless at the sheer scope of the young scientist"s newest invention. "I"ll get hot on the job right away."