“Missiles!” Tom gasped. “Who’s firing them?”
He rushed toward the laboratory door. But halfway there, a strange drowsiness came over him.
“Wh-what’s happening to me?” he thought frantically. His limbs were so weak he could hardly move.
He rubbed his hands across his eyes and staggered another step or two.
Then his legs gave way and he sank to the floor, unconscious!
All over the rocket base, the same thing was happening. Crewmen and technicians, as well as Bud and the two girls at the tracking center, slumped and fell, as if fast asleep!
Automatic alarm sirens wailed across the island. A strange cargo plane was approaching! Even with the control-tower personnel knocked out, the 40 THE RACE TO THE MOON
landing-forcer system worked and the cargo jet was taken under automatic control.
Blazing floodlights stabbed the sky and locked on the cargo jet as it swooped down for a landing. Figures clad in space suits stepped out of the mystery aircraft onto the island’s airfield.
One of them, evidently the leader, turned to the others.
“Now go for the electronic brain,” he ordered, “and any other of Tom Swift’s inventions that you can pick up in twenty minutes!”
CHAPTER V
TOM’S PRISONER
EVERYTHING went like clockwork as the raiders commandeered jeeps and trucks, and fanned out over the island. Three of the space-suited figures seized Tom’s newest electronic brain and hauled it back to their waiting aircraft. Others began a systematic search through every building on the base, scooping up whatever instruments or devices caught their eyes.
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