“Pretty clever,” Tom said grimly.
Ames agreed. “This definitely proves someone’s out to get you, skipper.
What’s more, he’s watching every move you make-ready to strike any time you let down your guard.”
Tom promised to be careful.
“In the meantime,” Ames added, “I’m doubling the security guards around here.”
Before leaving Harlan Ames’s office, Tom asked if there had been any further word on Gaspard and the helium-machine explosion in Paris.
“No. Gaspard was still in the hospital, last I heard. There seems to be a news blackout on the whole business.”
Deep in thought, Tom hopped into his car and drove to his private laboratory.
He was baffled and angry at the attempts to injure him. Who was behind the cunning plots? And why?
The Swifts and their revolutionary scientific inventions had often been targets for scheming criminals and subversive agents. Recently, in his triphibian atomicar, Tom had fought for his life against deadly enemies while on a difficult engineering mission in the Middle East. In both ANOTHER AMBUSH? 37
outer space and under the sea, the young scientist had faced heavy odds in his restless urge for new achievements.
But in the past, his enemies had been after some valuable prize-often one of Tom’s own inventions. This time their motive was a total mystery. Heaving a sigh, Tom gave up trying to solve the puzzle for the present and strode into his lab.
“Too much to do to spend time worrying,” Tom thought, settling down at his workbench.
He soon was engrossed in the problems of his space telescope. To obtain a televised likeness of a distant body, he would have to transmit a concentrated radio beam through trackless reaches of space. But how could he do this when the radio energy kept scattering itself in constantly expanding waves, like ripples spreading outward in a pond?
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