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“A foreigner!” she shouted, backing toward the house. “Where did you come from? No car, no horse”
Still talking, she gathered her children about her and slammed the door. Bud smiled wryly despite his failure, then turned and trudged back to the helicopter. As soon as he and Hanson boarded the Sky Queen, Bud radioed to the airfield dispatcher that Fritz Manuel had escaped. The dispatcher promised to notify the police at once.
Tom asked Bud to take over while he went to speak to the passengers again.
He wanted to tell them the plans for landing.
As Bud switched on the mike in order to receive landing directions from the airfield tower, he called to Tom, “Want me to use the elevator, Captain, or go down the spiral staircase?”
Inasmuch as there was an adequate runway, Tom thought it advisable not to reveal the fact that the Flying Lab had jet lifters.
“Staircase, Lieutenant,” he answered, “and watch the bottom step!”
As the Sky Queen came to a stop in front of the small administration building, it was immediately surrounded by a crowd of onlookers. Tom thought they were only curious to see the huge, new-type ship, but he soon learned that several of them were newspaper reporters.
“Wheech one of you ees Mr. Tom Swift?” asked one as Tom and Bud stepped from the plane.
Tom acknowledged that he was, and at once the men demanded a story about the rescue of the group
132 TOM SWIFT AND HIS FLYING LAB
adrift in the Pacific. It was not until each survivor had been questioned that the reporters turned again to Tom and congratulated him on his magnificent ship.
Though Tom would have preferred that no pictures be taken of the Sky Queen, cameras were clicking busily. He tried to dodge the photographers, but this, too, proved to be impossible. Finally he called a halt.
“The planes from your countrythey are so powerful,” one of the reporters spoke up. “How beeg and speedy can you make them?”
Tom smiled. “Speedy enough to take all you fellows to Mars and leave you there!”
Then he excused himself and went into the building to inquire about Fritz Manuel. As he had feared, the police report was negative.
Though Tom was eager to continue his trip, he decided to lay over for a while to see if he could get in touch with his father. It seemed strange that Mr. Swift had not sent any word to the Flying Lab as he had promised to do.
Tom put in a long-distance call to the capital of Bapcho, asking for the president’s office. After a seemingly interminable wait, he was finally connected.
“This is Tom Swift Jr.,” he announced himself in Spanish. “Is my father Tom Swift Sr. there?”
The reply was totally unsatisfactory. Mr. Swift, with two other men, had called on the president, but at the moment the president did not know his whereabouts.
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133
“Perhaps you will find him at his hotel, the Plaza Lolita,” the man suggested.
Tom phoned the hotel, but the desk clerk said that he did not know where the famous Mr. Swift might be found. He had not been seen for over twenty-four hours.
“Didn’t my father leave a message of any kind?” Tom asked worriedly.
“No.”
“Are the other men who were with him there?”
“No. They flew back to Washington this morning.”
“And my father? Did he check out?”
“One moment, please.” Tom could hear muffled voices, then the clerk returned. “A friend of Mr. Swift paid his bill and took his bag.”
Tom’s heart sank. He started to tell the clerk his suspicions concerning his father’s absence, but just then the connection was broken, and Tom’s efforts to have it restored met with failure.
After a moment’s thought, Tom decided to call his mother. Perhaps she had heard from Mr. Swift.
“Sorry, Seiior, it will take two hours to put your call through to Shopton, U.S.A.,” the operator told him.
Discouraged, Tom returned to the plane. He determined to try short wave as soon as he was airborne again.
Bud was in the copilot’s seat, listening to a local broadcast. When Tom revealed his misgivings about his father, Bud was inclined to take a cheerful attitude about the matter.
134 TOM SWIFT AND HIS FLYING LAB
“Buck up, Tom. You know how your father is. He probably came across something in Bapcho that gave him an idea for an invention, and he went off to see about it.”
Tom conceded that there might be logic in Bud’s idea, but he reminded his friend that Bapcho was not too safe a place for a Swift to be. It was just possible that through a ruse the Verano rebels had captured his father.
“At this very minute, Bud, they may be torturing Dad along with John Roberts and the other scientists! We must find out!”
Bud stared at his friend. “If that’s true, we’d better hit the sky road to Verano!”
The rest of the crew was summoned. After a discussion it was agreed that if the scientists were being held, they were probably in the vicinity of the suspected uranium deposits.
Tom consulted his maps, then took off, setting a straight course for the mountain which according to the Indian legend contained radioactive material.
He flew high enough to avoid the soaring peaks and possible detection by their enemies.
Meanwhile, Hanson tried to contact the Swift home, then the Enterprises plant by short wave. His efforts were futile and finally he gave it up.
“Bud,” Tom said an hour later, “take over, will you? And cut down our speed. I want to try out the Damonscope.”
Going into the multichambered laboratory with Hanson, Tom led the way down the central corridor to an ultramodern darkroom. The compact photo-DARING PURSUIT 135
graphic laboratory was equipped with large and small cameras, wall-sized enlargers, a photostat machine, and a microfilm outfit.
Tom slid open a drawer and pulled out the special roll of film which he had made for the camera. After inserting it into the Damonscope, Tom hurried to the lower deck of the Sky Queen and fitted the lens into an aperture built just for this purpose. Five minutes later the film had been activated and automatically developed. When he removed the contents, the inventor gave a shout.
“Hanson! Look at these pictures!”
CHAPTER XVII
THE HOMING MISSILE
“WOW!” Tom cried. “The mountains that we just flew over must be made of pure uranium.”
Hanson laughed excitedly. “It’s terrific, all right.”
The film from the Damonscope was entirely covered with huge black blotches.
In contrast to the tiny, infrequent markings the camera had picked up before, this latest find would indicate the presence of tremendous deposits of exceptionally active ore.
“It must be practically solid down there,” Tom exclaimed.
He grabbed the intercom and told Bud.
“Bank and retrace your course,” he said. “I want the exact latitude and longitude of the mountain we just crossed.”
Hanson acted as navigator while Tom inserted more film in the Damonscope.
Five negatives were wasted before they duplicated the heavily blotched one.
Then Tom called out:
“Where are we, Hanson?”
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THE HOMING MISSILE 137
“Above the northeast corner of Verano.”
“We’re in rebel country,” Tom said. “Now our real work begins.”
Everyone was acutely aware of the dangers that lay ahead. The intercoms became silent as Bud circled the area awaiting instructions. Tom went forward and the boys discussed the possibility of landing.
“It doesn’t look good,” Bud remarked, gazing down at the panorama of peaks.
“Not a level area anywhere.”
“There’s no use landing too far away from that uranium,” Tom replied. “We’d never be able to trek back to it on foot over this terrain.”
Bud circled again, skimming a snow-capped mountaintop.
“There’s a place to landright between the uranium deposit and that low peakl” cried Tom. “Before we go down, I want to try getting in touch with Shopton first and see if there’s any news about Dad.”
Tom clicked on his short-wave radiotelephone which was beamed to both his office and home. “I was thinking Dad might have met some scientist who had a solution to Hello. Hello, Mother! … Yes. This is great getting through to you… . We’re fine… . Have you heard from Dad? … No? … Don’t worry.
I’ll find him… . I’ve
been busy… . Everyone at home okay? … Yes, j__”
Tom hung up as static eliminated further conversation. Turning to Bud, he told him that his concern about his dad was mounting. Although the older 138 TOM SWIFT AND HIS FLYING LAB
scientist sometimes lost track of time when he was working on a problem, one thing he never failed to do was to keep in touch with his family if he could.
“I’m sure Dad’s in trouble,” Tom declared. “I’m going to get in touch with Bapcho’s president again and ask him to start a police search.”