Suddenly the Sky Queen braked in mid-air as the pilot exerted control on the jet lifters. For a second the big ship hung motionless, then eased to the ground.
“They’re going to capture us!” Tom muttered to his companion, who was too shaken by his fall to run.
Then a voice cried out, “Hold on!”
Turning, they saw Arvid Hanson jump to the ground. And from the pilot’s window a familiar face grinned at them.
“Bud!” Tom cried.
The copilot joined Hanson. Together, they rushed 174 TOM SWIFT AND HIS FLYING LAB
over to their friends and slashed the ropes that bound their wrists.
“You’re alive, thank goodness!” Tom cried. “But how? What? The landslide?”
Bud gave his friend a tight smile. “It missed us, Tom. Say, let’s get out of here. Tell you about it in the plane.”
Tom and Chow followed the others inside. The hatch slammed shut and Bud threw power into the lifters. When the Flying Lab was high in the sky, away from danger, stories were exchanged.
“We just missed being buried under that second slide,” Hanson related. “Bud and I ran for cover and met in a cave. We watched you up in the shipsay, how did you happen to get away?”
Briefly, Tom told of the attack on Chow and their fortunate move toward the plane for medical aid just before the slide started.
“To get to where you landed, Tom,” Bud took up the story, “we had to do a lot of climbing. When we saw those two savages capture you, we were too far away to help, so we went for the ship andwell, you know the rest. We really scared those Indians when we buzzed them.”
“I reckon I ought to thank you,” Chow commented. “But you sure frightened me an’ that burro. I thought that plane was goin’ to land right on my back!”
“It’s broad enough for a landing field, at that,” Bud said jokingly. Then in a serious tone of voice he asked: “Where do we go from here?”
“We don’t want to get too far away,” Hanson
AN EMERGENCY INVENTION 175
replied. “But we don’t want to stay so close that our enemies down there know where we are.”
“Let’s scout around a bit,” Tom proposed.
As they cruised over the general area, Tom went on an inspection trip of the Sky Queen to see if anything had been damaged by the sudden ascents.
Reaching the place where the Damonscope was installed, he stopped short at the strange sight before his eyes. The microfilm had been dislodged from the camerawhich turned on automatically during a flightand was lying in a tangled mass on the deck.
“It’s completely black!” Tom murmured excitedly, picking up some of the film to be sure it had been developed. “Not a thing on it but a picture of radioactive ore! That landslide must have opened up a gigantic deposit!”
The inventor was so elated he ran back to report his findings to the others.
Bud gave a cheering shout and added with a grin: “Those dynamiters did us a really big favor.”
“And themselves too,” Tom commented. “We mustn’t let them take command.”
He was eager to set down at once and get samples of the ore, but Hanson laid a restraining hand on his friend.
“Some folks don’t know when to give up,” he said, “and you’re one of them.
You’ve had a strenuous day, Tom. Why not leave the ore until tomorrow and get a little shut-eye before you start on your rescue mission?”
“You’re right,” Tom conceded. “Dad and the others come first.”
176 TOM SWIFT AND HIS FLYING LAB
As they reached their chosen landing spot, Bud became wary of setting down the mammoth ship in the narrow space. He asked Tom if he would prefer taking over the controls.
“I think you can do it, Bud,” Tom replied. “Just be careful of the walls of that gorge. It’ll be a tight squeeze.”
They all held their breaths while Bud skillfully maneuvered the Sky Queen down into the narrow cleft and deposited the plane smoothly and effortlessly at the bottom.
“That was right purty flyin’,” Chow said as they stepped out onto the flat floor of the canyon.
“It sure was,” Tom agreed. “Now if I hadn’t lost that camouflage cover, we’d really be hidden.” He squinted up at the narrow opening to the sky.
“Yes,” Hanson agreed meditatively. “But even without it, a rebel plane would still have to fly exactly overhead to spot us.”
Chow, remembering the landslide and what had caused it, glanced at the high rocky walls and shivered. “One lil ole charge o’ dynamite up there an’ we’d be buried so deep they wouldn’t find us till the next century. I jest don’t feel comfortable down here in this hole, all unpertected. Why don’t we paint the Sky Queen fancy colors like these rocks? Then our enemies won’t see us.”
The other three stared at him.
“You’ve got something there!” Tom cried. “We have all kinds of paint in the storeroom.”
Chow went to get several cans of reddish brown, green, gray, and purple paint, very much like the
AN EMERGENCY INVENTION 177
natural colors of the canyon walls and floor. All four of the party went to work with a will, each using a separate color. Tom and Bud slapped huge strokes on the upper side of the wings, while the others painted the cabin and fuselage. When they finished, the inventor surveyed the work from his high perch.
“No one can see this plane now unless he climbs down here and looks at it,”
he remarked.
Chow had disappeared before the job was finished, and as Tom made his remark, the cook summoned the others to supper. During the meal, the young inventor was quiet. Bud, knowing that his friend’s reticence meant that he was coping with a problem, asked:
“What’s hatching, Cap?”
Tom smiled. “I’m trying to invent an imaginary aerial so we can get through to Shopton or the Bapcho capital. It’s worth the chance of being detected,” Tom added grimly.
“I don’t see how you can do it, Tom,” Hanson said quietly.
“There’s one possibility,” the young inventor continued. “Do all of you see those stars at the far end of the canyon, where it opens toward the Pacific?
I’m going to beam a message out there and trust that some ship will pick it up.”
“Sounds okay,” Bud said. “But you don’t have enough power to keep it from being jammed.”
“Maybe we do,” Tom replied.
After supper Tom went right to work. He hooked in one of the Sky Queen s jet engines to energize a jerry-rigged directional-beam transmitter.
178 TOM SWIFT AND HIS FLYING LAB
“I hope, with this extra power,” he explained to the others, “to beam my message straight up and over the Andes. Some operator somewhere should pick it up and relay it to Shopton.”
“Won’t the rebels jam this message, too?” Bud asked.
“There’ll be enough juice to get it through, I think,” Tom replied.
Within an hour he had perfected the experiment and was sending with his strong, improvised outfit.
“This is as crazy as using a steam locomotive to heat a hotel,” Bud said, grinning.
When Tom finished transmitting, he flipped on the receiver. Only garbled sounds poured out. Chow, LO hide his disappointment, announced he was going to the galley.
“That’s a hopeless mess!” Bud exclaimed as the static continued.
“Perhaps,” Tom replied, “but I have an idea. It seems to me that there’s a chance we could decipher something out of the blur we’re getting. It’s worth trying.”
The inventor started a tape recorder and picked up the garbled sounds for about three minutes. He then played it back, over and over again. The result was an unintelligible jargon interspersed with staccato noises like those of a trip hammer.
“No go,” said Bud.
“Unless,” Tom murmured, “I can erase the interference overtones and leave just the voice I want to hear.”
“It’s over my head.”
AN EMERGENCY INVENTION 179
“Suppose you had a piece of paper with a message written on it,” said Tom, “and someone scribbled all over the sheet so you couldn’t read the words. If you wanted to see the message badly enough, you’d erase all the scribbling.”
While talking, Tom had taken the tape to his differential harmonic analyzer and turned on the light. He was now studying the many series of angular graphs which showed up.
“The one with the middle-range vibrations,” he said, pointing, “is a man’s voice.”
Carefully the inventor lacquered over the other graphs. As soon as it dried, he ran the tape through the transcribing machine. The sound of one voice came clear and distinct. Tom grinned at Bud, who grabbed up the intercom to the kitchen and shouted to Chow:
“We got through! The commander of the U.S.S. Garner picked up our message and is rebeaming it to a weather ship off the coast here.”