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

housewife in an apron—and pearl earrings?
    On old TV reruns.
    "At least the town isn’t in black and white," he joked with himself.
    The shop door placard said OPEN. But he decided real men didn’t enter women’s dress shops, even to ask what town—or what state —he was in.
    Glancing along the row of buildings—most of them small and modest—he wandered up to the drug store next in line. It was a chain drugstore, though he recognized the chain name only vaguely. Hadn’t they gone out of business when he was a little boy? The windows were plastered with hand-scrawled signs for sunglasses and aspirin and candy bars. He read the prices twice, boggling. "Man, I’ll say it’s a sale!" Bud muttered. Was there really such a thing as nickel candy?
    He stepped on the grooved rubber pad, and the doors swung open with a whoosh. Air conditioning wafted over his face. He could hear the canned shoppers’ music now. Reassuring signs. He cranked up his charm. It would be embarrassing, asking "Where in space am I?" But he could play the scene as a half-joke. And buy some candy.
    A few more steps and realization. The piped music was all there was to the sounds of life in the store. He pivoted in place, scanning like radar. Rex-All was like the street. Plenty of things. No people.
    "Hello?" he called out timidly. Was there a pushbell somewhere, for service? To wake up a dozing salesclerk, a checkout girl—anyone? Because so far there was no one.
    There were two checkout counters. He marveled at the cash registers. They were mechanical, manual. No power cable. More to the point, no pricecode scanner. It seemed that, incredibly, the checkout clerks actually had to read the individual price tags and punch in the numbers!
    "If I were a certain type of guy," Bud said aloud, "I’d ring open the cash drawer and—" But, of course, he wasn’t. Still, that Rrrring ! would bring someone running from somewhere.
    Wouldn’t it?
    "Hello!" he called out again, now more demandingly. He wanted to sound like someone capable of trouble. "Customer, guys!" He imagined everyone in a side room knotted in front of a small portable TV. And then he imagined the sort of national event that might have hastened them there...
    Nothing stirred but the background music. It was lush with strings. No beat to it.
    The young flyer ran a finger along the counter, half expecting to scrape up a cake of dust. But his finger was clean. The floor tiles—tiles, not a carpet—were also clean, and buffed, a dull ivory color with black speckles. It reminded him of the floor of a service station restroom. He had known such floors.
    He looked overhead. Long fluorescent tubes, flickering just a bit now and then. Now he could distinguish their characteristic hum behind the music. It made him feel impatient, even—he didn’t like to think it—nervous. Or worried. Or maybe—afraid.
    He wandered down the rows of shelves, aisle after aisle, well stocked and utterly tidy and clean. It gave him a strange, unnamed feeling to see the items. Nothing was electronic. Everything was new, but nothing was modern . Even the muted color schemes seemed like something from the days when his father was a child, as he had seen in old snapshots. But the toys— there the colors were bright and gaudy. Jack-In-The-Boxes, plastic guns, dolls. Board games he had seen stacked in the Barclay garage since long-ago days. Baseball bats—wooden. Wooden!
    The little-girl dolls were dressed in frilly garments. They can’t all be Alice in Wonderland , he thought wryly. There were no colors to the faces other than blushing white. Where were the action figures? The only thing promising action was the pull-string on a doll named Chatty Cathy. The only boy dolls were clowns.
    He stared at a set of faux-China for a promised tea party, a tiny one. At something called Mister Mechano.
    There was a wooden rocking horse. An inflated, round-sided figure called "Mr. Bobo" stood by himself at the end of the aisle,