Tom Swift and His Dyna-4 Capsule by Victor Appleton II Read Free Book Online

where are you?"
    There was a bad disconnect between eye and ear. He was sprawled on a street, in friendly sunlight, near the line down the middle. It extended off for blocks. Cars were neatly parked along the curbs, next to sidewalks, next to storefronts. Trees spread up and over from the neat square gaps in the walk, in spaces of dirt reserved for them. Telephone lines crossed above in sagging arches, from T-poles, from rooftops. There were streetlights on fluted columns, dignified and old-fashioned, with hanging globes. At the end of the block, a stoplight changed from red to green. The sky was pale blue, cloudless but a bit fuzzy, not a morning after all but a mild and dry middle of a day.
    But there was no sound. No car rumbles, no squeal of brakes, no chirping birds, no scuff of shoes against the walkways. Babies did not cry. Dogs did not bark.
    Silence.
    Bud looked at his arm and saw a pinprick of red. "Injected me with something," he murmured. Maybe one of Rose Reb’s psych meds , he thought. Had it made him deaf?
    But no. He could hear his own voice, his fingernails against the pavement.
    The problem was not him. The problem was the world.
    Nothing moved but the stoplight.
    He struggled onto his feet, woozily. There were no cars rolling down the street. Only parked cars. No one was getting into or out of those cars. No one was gunning an ignition. The cars were empty. The sidewalks were empty.
    There were no people.
    "Well," he said aloud, "there’s me ." He added: "I hope there’s me."
    Bud Barclay wasn’t the sort of person to say, Am I dreaming? He knew he wasn’t dreaming. A drug may have knocked him out, but now he was wide awake.
    How long had he been out? "Long enough for it to turn day," he reasoned. Long enough to ship him here—to a sleepy town for late sleepers, or something like it. But how many days? More than one? Several? Had he been forced, chemically, to unremember a week’s worth of events?
    He took a step. It wasn’t as difficult as he had feared. He was doing okay. Muscle boy , he thought. Then: high school athlete . That phrase led him to an unwanted memory of Rose Reb. What had her lunatic fiance done to her?
    He trudged dully onto the sidewalk. Not that it mattered on that lifeless street with no traffic. " After all, I’ve been just lying in the middle of it for a while. " Maybe a long while.
    He still wore the same clothes; he was dressed for a casual, if tense, dinner. They were wrinkled and stale. But not on me long enough to cross over to majorly disgusting, he thought. He felt black stubble on his chin. He checked his pocket, surprised to find that he still had his wallet, his cell, his keys, his cash, even his random change, just as he had counted it into his palm in the motel room. He absently flicked a finger against the watch on his wrist. Funny kind of mugging , he thought. But of course, it wasn’t a mugging . It was a jealous lover on a skateboard taking out a rival. "And having fun doing it." He envisioned Gar Baxx snickering somewhere nearby, out of sight. Hilarious. Electrocute your opponent, drug him, dump him in some sleeping half-dead town out in central nowhere. Bud remembered reading of a college guy who had returned to his dorm room to find that someone had constructed a compact car inside it...
    It’s like a hazing , he thought. Except—this is a frat I really don’t want to join.
    He flipped open the cellphone. Nothing.
NO SERVICE
    Figures , he thought. Was there still such a thing as a public pay phone?
    He was standing next to a glass window. The shop was called Verna’s Today . Inside the window were mannequins modeling women’s dresses. He stood regarding their waxen expressions, their pastel-shaded outfits. Something gnawed at his mind. At last it came forth: he hadn’t seen clothing like that in a long time. A long time. Old-fashioned skirts, old-fashioned blouses. Jetz ! he thought, that one’s wearing an apron! When had he last seen a young