Tom Swift and His Cosmotron Express by Victor Appleton II Read Free Book Online Page A

ongoing stuff."
    "In other words," Tom interrupted, "your personal journal."
    "Yeah, an audio journal—writing makes me nervous. Anyway, this voice, a man’s, seemed to know a lot about what we were working on at Wicko, and what I was working on, even... what I was doing at that exact moment , behind closed doors. Spooky!"
    Tom nodded, edging away from all pretense. "Sure is. Our security team can’t figure out how it’s done. They—he—gets into my personal journal on a secure server that’s isolated from the Net."
    "Maybe it’s the same guy," nodded Langley. "I call him Answerman—Antsy. I call this office he works for ‘Information’. Like over the phone. Get it?
    "Antsy tells me about stuff, gives warnings. Of course we’re just grunt workers at Wickliffe compared to Shopton’s great big adventure factory. We just do work , not exploits . But now and then, when somethin’ major is going down—Black Cobra on the loose or whatever—Antsy has something to say to me."
    Tom was trying to hide his astonishment. For all the many times he had been in touch with Collections and the Taxman, it had never occurred to him that others might also be receiving warnings and advice! Pete seemed to read the look behind Tom’s face. "You didn’t know. Not a clue. He comes across like a personal friend; looks like he has more than one buddy."
    "Whoever he really is."
    "Yeah."
    "He sent you this drawing?"
    "Ohhh no." He took out another sheet and plopped it down. "He sent us this . Now this one ought to look really familiar."
    Tom was silent for a moment. "This is the image captured by the Fearing radar system."
    "No, this is the image captured by Information from the Fearing radar system. Doesn’t seem to be anything they can’t get into."
    Tom studied it keenly. "But it’s much more detailed, almost like a real optical photo. They must have tapped into the raw feed—pulled out more data and enhanced the result."
    "Uh-huh. Now, retro-boy—nngh, Tom —compare this ripped-from-reality image to the other one, the drawing. Note all the little details, the fin-vanes along the side edge, these indentations on the front. Identical! Your Fire Fury is the realization of this drawing.
    " We made this drawing, Tom! It’s a product of Wickliffe Labs! "
    Shopton’s young inventor studied the pair. "Yes. I see that. Are you saying your source sent you the enhanced radar image to let you know—"
    Langley gave a fierce nod. "We’ve been messed with!
    "Let me bend the law a little and give you the backstory. Wickliffe is something like the third-level subcontractor on a project that originated somewhere up high—Defense Department by way of the Air Force by way of a major contractor—on down to us. They called it part of their long-term ASP development program."
    "ASP," Tom repeated. "AeroSpacePlane."
    "Which us grownups know is all about ultrahigh-mach bombers—stealth hyperjets that can duck in and out of orbit. Or ideally, tech at its highest, superspeed down in the air, at treetop level."
    "They wanted you to produce a prototype?"
    Pete shook his head. "Nope, way short of that. They parceled out the project all over the place—a security thing, I guess. Enterprises probably worked on some part of it without knowing what it was for."
    "Maybe."
    "We were supposed to develop the basic aeroform shape, the design of the fuselage. Munson Wickliffe handed it over to our aerospace division, Faber. This drawing—this is the final rendering of what they came up with. Nothing was ever constructed. All on paper—pixels, actually. Windtunnel testing by computer. You know.
    "When Wickliffe died, things got a little chaotic for awhile. Before we could pursue the project further, the whole thing was cancelled. We were paid off and sworn to secrecy. But our work wasn’t destroyed, just locked away under tight security. A load of info about Viper Spirit still exists at Wicko."
    " Viper Spirit ," Tom murmured. "We called it the Fire Fury