Tom swift and the Captive Planetoid (17 page)

Doc shrugged. “Yes, I imagine
she’d
know.” The physician rubbed his eyes, and Tom said:

“You look a little jet-lagged, Doc. Recline the seat and get some shut-eye. I’m fine to drive.”

“Okay,” said Doc. “If you get
u’umat
-ed, I’m sure the crash will wake me up.”

Simpson’s drowsy rest became sleep, with appropriate sound effects. When he finally awoke and sat upright, he stretched—and frowned suddenly. “Tom, look at the sun. Why are we still heading northeast? Shouldn’t we have looped back by now?”

“Oh, we did, for a considerable distance,” replied the young inventor blandly. “This little road just meanders a lot.”

But the furrow in Simpson’s brow only deepened. He had the strong feeling that Tom’s explanation was untrue! “It must wander quite a bit. Let me take a look at that map Niras drew.”

Tom suddenly turned a fierce look on his friend. “Look, Doc—just relax. I know what I’m doing, and—I’m in charge. Please don’t argue with me.”

Doc was stunned by Tom’s reaction! “Skipper, are you sure—”

“I’m fine!” snapped Tom. “I shouldn’t have made such a big deal of that bee sting. You yourself said it was nothing.”

“But I wasn’t even talking about...” The medico stopped himself. “Sorry, Tom. I don’t mean to interfere with your plans.”

“Good.”

“I mean—a guy who can find his way through outer space can surely—”

“Feel free to go back to sleep, Doc.” So Doc said no more about their route. Or where it might lead. But his thoughts were heavy.

Darkness had fallen when they suddenly surmounted a rise, and Doc gasped at the sight in front of them. They had reached the eastern coast of the island—the Indian Ocean! “Tom, why—”

“Please, Doc. I’m just taking the scenic route.” The youth added calmly: “We might as well get the most from our company time in Madagascar.”

“Yes. Perhaps so...”

Tom briefly consulted some notes on the reverse side of the map, notes in his own handwriting. Doc caught a glimpse of them—the words seemed scrawled in a wavering, loopy way that made them all but impossible to read in a glance. Even Tom was frowning as he squinted at them. Doc thought with concern:
He’s just not himself!

They turned onto a coastal highway and headed further north.
But Tom doesn’t even glance to the right, at the ocean
, Doc noticed.
I don’t need medical training for a diagnosis of “something is wrong!
”

Was it a sign of the
u’umat
phenomenon?

Abruptly Tom slowed the car, then swerved onto a small paved drive angling toward the beachfront. “Is—is this where we’ll be spending the night?” His young boss made no reply.

A high adobe wall suddenly loomed up. The road continued on to the left, but Tom turned off the road to the right. He carefully maneuvered the car among dense shrubbery, then killed the engine. “Well!” muttered Simpson nervously. “I gather we’ll walk from—” He was startled into silence as Tom held a finger to his lips—and smiled. His mouth moved, and Doc lip-read:
play along
. Then Tom added aloud: “
Shsssh
!”

Doc followed Tom, silent, along the base of the wall, the perimeter of
something
. Hunched over, they took advantage of whatever cover was provided by underbrush. They seemed to be working their way toward the shoreline.

Tom suddenly halted and flashed Doc a grin. “Okay,” he said in casual tones, “there’s the Magnifico up ahead. I’m sure ready for dinner.” He followed his strange
non sequitur
with a wink.

Now Doc understood.
Good grief!
he thought.
Tom’s got some kind of listening device on him! The enemy can hear everything we say!

But
was
it an electronic bug?—or some kind of psychic eavesdropping from one of Talmadge’s “higher beings?”

Tom seemed to be gazing, vaguely, out toward the trees, which were only black silhouettes. His eyes had squinted down to slits. He moved purposefully, yet like a man watching something that Doc couldn’t see, something that Tom didn’t dare take his eyes from. But Doc’s eyes watched the young inventor’s hands as they drew a compact object from his pants pocket. It was a circular case with a small stub protruding from it. A reeled tape measure?

Without looking down, Tom knelt and somehow fastened the stub to a tree root. Then, back to the wall, Tom tossed the round casing high up, backwards over his shoulder. It arced over the top of the wall, tape unreeling all the way, and they heard it thud to the ground on the other side.

Tom now stepped backwards. Bumping against the tape, he fumbled behind his back with his hands. Doc made a sound of surprise—the “tape” had suddenly morphed into a sort of chain of large, interlinked ovals.

Transifoil
, Tom mouthed Doc’s way. And then he jerked a thumb that said: up we go!

The strip had turned rigid and could be climbed like a ladder, the oval “rungs” just broader than the soles of their shoes. Somehow it seemed to have attached itself to the top of the wall. It was stable and didn’t slide sideways as they put their weight on it.

Doc knew enough about secret-agenting to keep low as he scraped over the top of the wall, following his friend, who was operating by finger-touch, his eyes shut tight. They dropped to the ground.

Doc Simpson couldn’t help a sharp intake of breath. Before them, in the slivered new moonlight, was a huge structure. It resembled a series of round canvas tents, overlapping and connected, each one as large as a circus bigtop!

A scruffy sound caused Doc to look down. Without looking, Tom’s heel was gouging a word in the soft ground.

DESH ZAI

Doc felt ashamed to have been slow on the uptake. Tom had brought them to Zai’s Madagascar compound, his home when he wasn’t out at sea on the
Apocalypso
.
We’re going to break in
, he concluded.
Tom wants to find—probably anything he can find.

And then the doctor realized why the young scientist-inventor had been positioning his body to face away from whatever he was doing. The bugging device was also a camera!

Doc sensed what Tom wanted him to do. Looping a finger around Tom’s belt, Doc guided Tom as the young inventor walked backwards. They edged closer to the nearest side of the tent.

It developed that the “tent” was not a tent after all, but a solid structure of ordinary building materials designed in imitation of a tent, with roofs that draped down from sharp points in the manner of a canvas top supported by a tentpole. There were ordinary, if rather ornate, doors and windows. The effect was somehow Oriental, exotic, extravagant.

Weighing his words, Doc whispered “So how?” in his friend’s ear. In reply Tom gestured vaguely toward a small, round window, dark inside, risking only a brief glance. Backwardly approaching the window, the young inventor took from his pocket some kind of midget tool. Evidently he had packed well!

Tom finally had to turn and face the window squarely. Working fast, Tom pressed his device, evidently a cutting tool, against the window frame and slowly worked it around the circumference. Suddenly the round pane tilted and fell out heavily into four waiting hands.

In moments the pair had scrambled into a dark room. Tom could no longer avoid speaking aloud. “I’m sure he’s got servants and guards all over, even though he’s away on his yacht. We only have minutes before the Watchful Eye dopes out where we are and what we’re doing and alerts his men here.”

“Are you armed?”

“Too hard to conceal. You’d have said something. Stick close—I want to find evidence, maybe an office or even a lab. The surveillance monitor must be where Zai is, but they probably constructed it here.” As if by his own “inspiration,” Tom seemed to receive Doc’s thoughts. “Yeah—making it up on the fly. But we
have
to get some clue as to how to stop the Ninth Light! Otherwise
Bud
could be the next victim of
u’umat
!”

Bud!

After listening for any human sounds, and not finding any, they scurried across the floor, hands outstretched for wall and door. They found a door. Tom pulled it open. They took three steps into a darkened hallway.

Light—soft, dignified lamplight from ornate sconces on the hall walls—suddenly flooded over them. In front of the two was a small, dark featured man in a white silk suit. Beyond were three tall and burly men with ominous gunbelts, staring impassively at Tom and Doc.

“Good evening,” said the little man in an accented voice. “May I show you to your rooms, Mr. Swift, Dr. Simpson?”

TOM was cool—and dry. “I take it we were expected.”

“Oh yes, certainly sir,” the little man answered politely. “There was perhaps some uncertainty as to your time of arrival. Please do accept our apologies for not having shown you to the door. We permit no defect in hospitality here.”

“That’s nice,” muttered Doc. “Then again, those three goons behind you don’t seem hospitable, offhand.”

“Perhaps Mr. Zai’s hospitality is
enforced
,” offered Tom with narrowed eyes.

The man smiled, eyes twinkling. “Please regard it as an honor guard for distinguished guests.”

The convoy marched Tom and Doc to separate bedrooms in two different wings, well appointed, comfortable, and lockable from the outside. Before closing Tom’s door, the little man said: “My name, sir, is Binarz Sharim. I am, one might say, the head of the household staff. It is my pleasant duty to make your stay a comfortable one. I have taken the liberty of setting a warm dinner at your dining table over by the desk. You and Dr. Simpson will do us the honor of joining Mr. Zai at the breakfast table, seven thirty? Attire is quite informal, sir.”

“Mr. Zai is
here
?”

Sharim smiled noncommittally. “Do lift the telephone by your bed should you require anything.”

“Including an antidote to whatever you’ve salted into the dinner?”

“Please, Mr. Swift, you may dine and repose without anxiety. It is my honor to say that the Master is most enthused at the prospect of tomorrow’s breakfast conversation.”

Sharim left. Tom eyed the dinner.
Well
, he decided at last,
I suppose if they’d wanted us dead, they’d have shot us as prowlers right away.
So he ate, and then slept. Over his brief life he had become accustomed to dangerous situations and unusual surroundings.

In the morning obsequious servants—probably armed—provided Tom with a crisply pressed outfit and took his Shopton clothing away. “Planning to burn it?” the youth asked. “The hidden locator beacon is explosive.” But if the servants understood English, they understood even better not to talk.

Presently a servant guided Tom to a small anteroom, where he was reunited with Doc and Mr. Sharim. “Did you try the food, Skipper?”

Tom shrugged. “If it was laced with voodoo juice, it added a nice flavor.”

“We thought you might wish to try the supper cuisine of Mr. Zai’s homeland,” said Sharim.

“Gureshpal?” ventured Tom.

“Bangladesh, sir.”

The Americans were guided to a decorous double-door of polished mahogany. With a gentle push Sharim threw open both doors and ushered them forward with a bow.

Dominating the room, lit brightly by the morning sun on the ocean, was a man who made Tom think of Alice’s Caterpillar atop his toadstool, hookah and all. But the toadstool was the man’s body. The “caterpillar” was the man’s
head
.

He was the most astoundingly obese human being Tom Swift and Doc Simpson had ever seen. A hill of flesh!

The man’s head, a multichinned bulge protruding from the hole in a flowing, patterned tunic, nodded slightly as he drew a puff from his hookah. “I am Mr. Desh Zai,” uttered the head faintly, dwarfed by the body that spread wide beneath it in the shape of a broad-based cone. “I welcome you to my home, gentlemen, and my breakfast.” A swerve of his slitted eyes indicated a breakfast table a few yards away, set for two. “As your host, I am ashamed to admit that I cannot join you at my own table. For you see, I cannot move from my throne, nor reach the great distance with my arms; the distance, you see, from my upper body to anywhere else. What is not already in my hands is as far as Paradise. If you don’t object, I shall continue to suck up my liquid nutrition through this tube. It is quite delicious, by the way.”

The Americans took their seats. “Mr. Zai, you’re treating us very well,” remarked Tom, “given that we entered your estate without your consent.”

Zai couldn’t gesture, but made some slight motion of an arm, hidden from view beneath his tentlike tunic of white hemp. “A good friend needs no invitation to become a guest.”

“Is that a saying from the Ninth Light?” inquired Tom with a front of politeness.

“Is it not from the Christian bible? I have always assumed so.”

“Mr. Zai,” began Simpson abruptly, “the fact that you’ve been—”

Zai interrupted as if Doc hadn’t spoken. “Tell me, Doctor, what do you think of this physique of mine? Do you consider a man with a height of five feet and eight inches, with a maximum circumference of some nineteen feet and four inches, as determined by the finest instruments available to professional land surveyors, to be medically overweight?”

Simpson gaped. “Uh... wh-
what
?”

“You may speak frankly, sir. I have many fine doctors among my retinue, virtually a private clinic. They have a habit of hinting at the desirability of an effort at weight reduction. I patiently explain, repeatedly, that it is the custom of the Bose family that he who is designated at birth to be its chieftain, its sultan—he is subject to one great rule. He must never marry. No imported family, no offspring, shall contest or adulterate the inheritance of the Boses. And perhaps you will understand that when one is denied the natural pleasures of life and love, one has little left but the pleasures of the table; which are considerable. Ah, but yet,” he added, “what irony that I cannot actually make use of ‘the table.’ Nor a bed, gentlemen, not for a great many years. I am merely rotated, somewhat; tilted back in my harness when I wish to sleep.”