Appleton, Victor – Tom Swift Jr 21 – And the Asteroid Pirates

dark-haired security chief, leaped out with a warning look at Tom.

“Better stay back, skipper!” he called. “This may be the killer!”

“I doubt if he’s in any shape to be dangerous now!” Tom replied.

The driver, visible through the shattered windshield of the car, lay slumped over the steering wheel. Blood streamed from a scalp wound.

“The gate’s buckled and the crash wrecked the opening mechanism,” said Phil Radnor, Ames’s blond, chunky assistant. “We’ll have to go out through the gatehouse.”

By the time they reached the car, a high-powered blue coupe, the gate guards already were extricating the driver from the wreckage. To Tom’s and Bud’s surprise, he was a young Oriental.

Two carloads of state troopers, lead by Captain Rock, arrived just as Doc Simpson, Enterprises’ young medic, began his examination of the victim.

“That’s our man, all right,” said Captain Rock after a quick look. The unconscious Oriental had been placed on a blanket on the ground. “How badly is he hurt?”

“Pretty seriously, I’m afraid,” the doctor said. “He stopped a bullet and he may have a concussion.” The medic pointed to a nasty-looking wound in the victim’s left side.

Captain Rock nodded grimly. “We were told

THE GATE-CRASHER 25

he’s an escaped mental patient. The hospital guards who were chasing this fellow must have winged him.”

A hasty check of the man’s pockets produced no identification except a driver’s license. It had been issued the year before in the name of “John Tsu” at a New York City address.

At that moment a screaming siren heralded the arrival of an ambulance. After a quick consultation with Doc Simpson, the intern and the ambulance driver transferred the young Oriental to a stretcher and he was whisked off to the Shopton Hospital. Radnor and a State Police sergeant rode along.