Appleton, Victor – Tom Swift Jr 25 – And His Polar Ray Dynasphere

CONTENTS

1 Space Crash

2 Accidental Blackout

3 The Bronze Buddha

4 A Martian Mystery

5 A Hair-Raising Experiment

6 The Saffron Clue

7 The Goddess Of Doom

8 A Royal Welcome

9 The Poison Lake

10 Sky Show

11 Flight into Danger

12 Tiger Hunt

13 Deadly Quills

14 The Kidnapped Satellite

15 Rocket Chase

16 The Lake Monster

17 Kali’s Secret

18 Hidden Lair

19 Rocket Roost

20 Planet Prize

CHAPTER I

SPACE CRASH

The intercom in the astronomy wing of the Swifts’ space outpost buzzed like an angry hornet. A lanky blond youth with crew-cut hair and steel-blue eyes turned away from an electronic console to answer the call. “Tom Swift here.”

“An unidentified spacecraft is approaching!” came the excited voice of Ken Horton, commander of the outpost. “It’s on a collision course!”

“Have you challenged it over the radio?” “We’ve tried, but we get no response.” Husky, dark-haired Bud Barclay saw the startled look on his chum’s face as Tom left the intercom. “What’s wrong, pal?”

Tom relayed the frightening news. Then the young inventor quickly trained a small optical telescope in the direction Ken had indicated and brought the image into focus.

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“Good night!” Tom muttered. “That thing must be out of controll Look, Bud!”

A weird, needle-nosed rocket ship, with a pale yellow hull and a high, vertical tail fin, was hurtling straight toward them.

Tom darted back to the intercom. “Sound a general alarm, Ken! Muster all hands in the hub!” Then he and Bud dashed through the long observatory toward the central compartment.

The outpost in space, orbiting 22,300 miles above the earth, was shaped like a gigantic twelve-spoked wheel. Tom had designed the station as a factory, where his solar-charged batteries could be exposed to the sun’s unshielded rays.

Each spoke served a separate purpose. One was equipped for space medical research; another was the crew’s living quarters; from a third, radio and TV broadcasts were relayed to earth.

Out of each spoke, the crew poured into the central hub. White-faced, they watched the mysterious rocket ship streaking closer and closer on the television monitor.

Ken Horton, a slender young man with dark, close-cropped hair, barked out a command. “Check all compartment doors. Make sure they’re sealed! If that ship crashes into the station, an air loss could wipe us out!”

“Are you still trying to contact it?” Tom asked, glancing at the radioman who was seated just behind Horton in the central control booth.

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Ken nodded grimly. “Pete’s been calling over a broad band of frequencies.

No answer!”

“The crew could have bailed out,” Tom said. “Or passed out-from space sickness.”

Another thought crossed Tom’s mind. The strange craft might be robot-controlled! Perhaps deliberately launched by some enemy in a fiendish attack against the space outpost!

“Our meteorite repelatron may help,” Tom said. This invention, which beamed out a repulsion ray, was designed to ward off swarms of micrometeorites. The beam was not powerful enough to repel a spaceship coming at such tremendous speed, but it might lessen the impact.

There was no time to don space suits. The hurtling craft loomed larger and larger on the monitor screen. In seconds it would crash into the outpost!

“Brace yourselves!” Tom yelled.

For a split second the craft veered away, but then headed once more for the station. With an earsplitting din of rending metal, the rocket ship plowed into and through the rim of the space wheel! The hoop spun furiously, flinging the crew about like puppets. Stunned, the men were flattened against the compartment’s outer bulkhead by the pull of centrifugal force.

Tom clawed his way toward the master control panel. Small reaction jets had been mounted on the wheel after an earlier mishap. He managed to 4 POLAR-RAY DYNASPHERE

trigger several bursts which slowly braked the wheel to a halt.

“Pete, call Fearing Island!” Tom ordered.

The transmitter was dead, apparently jarred out of commission by the crash.

But after minutes of frenzied checking, the trouble was repaired and Tom spoke to the Swifts’ rocket base. He directed that the unknown rocket craft be tracked and that his own spaceship, the Challenger, be flown up to the space outpost at once.

“Wilco, skipper!” the base operator responded.

While two space medics gave first aid to several of the crew, Tom and Horton surveyed the damage. Three spokes had been smashed and would have to remain sealed off. One was the astronomical observatory.

“Tough break,” Horton commented gloomily. “We might have been able to keep the ship in sight by telescope. Our radar got knocked out, too, so the station’s practically blind.”

“There goes my experiment,” Tom said wryly to Bud. The two boys had arrived at the outpost on one of the regular cargo shuttle rockets from Fearing Island. Tom had come to test a new electrostatic-field device in a space environment.

“Did you have time to learn anything?” Bud asked the young inventor.

Tom shrugged. “A little. I was using my new gadget as a wave trap or antenna to capture light of

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a single wave length from certain stars so I could study their red shift.”

“Red shift?” Bud winked at Ken. “What’s that -a new Russian football play?”

Tom chuckled. “No, a shift in wave length tells us whether a star is moving toward or away from the sun.”

Tom talked with his injured crewmen until the Challenger arrived an hour later. This mighty spaceship, in which Tom had outraced foreign cosmonauts to the moon, looked like a huge silver cube caged within circular rails. The rails were tracks for wheeling the ship’s repelatron force-ray radiators in any direction to drive the Challenger on a specific course.

By this time, a repair crew had retrieved Tom’s electrostatic-field device from the astronomy spoke and loaded it into the Challenger. Wearing space suits, Tom and Bud boarded the craft.

Hank Sterling, the rugged, blond chief engineer and trouble-shooter of Swift Enterprises, greeted the boys in the ship’s flight compartment.

“Any clues yet on the crash, skipper?”

Tom shook his head. “It’s a total mystery, Hank, but I’m suspicious it was no accident.”

Lights flashed on the element-selector panel as Tom took over the controls.

Repulsion beams from the ship’s repelatrons speared outward to earth and moon, hurling the Challenger forward by reaction. As usual, Bud acted as copilot.

He was

SPACE CRASH 7

a flier and astronaut from California, who, like Tom, was eighteen.

“Challenger to Fearing,” called Tom at the controls. “Give me the latest on that rocket ship.”

“Bad news,” reported George Billing, the Swifts’ radio chief. “The ship was moving very erratically in a western orbit. Our Pacific tracking station lost contact.

But computers indicate that the rocket ship might be descending toward a landing somewhere in Asia.”

“Okay. Order all stations to remain alert.”

Tom brought the Challenger down to ten thousand miles altitude and steered it at meteor speed across the Pacific and Asia. The crew kept a constant lookout by radar, television, and Tom’s megascope space prober. There was no sign of the mysterious rocket craft.

At last they headed home to Fearing Island. This strip of land off the Atlantic coast had once been a barren waste of sand dunes and scrubgrass. Now it was a tightly guarded complex of rocket-launching areas and workshops, with fuel tankers and undersea craft berthed at the island’s docks.

At Fearing the astronauts debarked, then flew back to Swift Enterprises on the mainland, near the town of Shopton. At this walled four-mile-square experimental station, Tom Swift Jr. and his scientist father worked on their fabulous inventions.

Tom Sr.-a lean, athletic man with keen blue

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eyes and close-cropped graying hair-listened to his son’s report in the spacious office which they shared in the Main Building.

“Could the rocket ship have burned up in the atmosphere?” Mr. Swift asked.

“It’s possible. But it also may have landed at some Asiatic base.”

Mr. Swift frowned thoughtfully. “Well, check it out carefully, Tom. Meanwhile, I must fly to Washington tomorrow morning for an urgent conference.”

“What about, Dad?” Tom asked eagerly.

The elder scientist said the conference had to do with a probe rocket which the government space agency had fired some time earlier to orbit Mars, but that he had been given no other information. “While I’m gone,” Mr. Swift added, “I’d like you to take over my lecture to our latest group of student engineers.”

“Okay, Dad. But I don’t know how I’ll do as a teacher.”

“I’m sure you’ll keep your students interested,” Mr. Swift replied with a twinkle, “even if you don’t speak Vishnapurian!”

Swift Enterprises had recently started its own small-scale foreign aid program. Able young scientists from new and underdeveloped countries were being trained in the latest research techniques. The current group had come from Vishnapur, a

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tiny state north of India, in the foothills of the Himalayas.

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