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
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 3
2 TOM SWIFT AND HIS FLYING LAB
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
A MESSAGE FROM SPACE 3
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
4 TOM SWIFT AND HIS FLYING LAB
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, Dadthe 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 A MESSAGE FROM SPACE 5
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!”
6 TOM SWIFT AND HIS FLYING LAB
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.”
A MESSAGE FROM SPACE 7
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.”