Chapter 3 Tom Swift and His Talking Pictures by Victor Appleton
SUSPICIONS
Tom Swift looked at Dr. Layton. The medical man had paused in his departure on hearing the telephone bell and the ensuing talk.
“Doctor,” began Tom, “I don’t want to disobey your advice, but I’ve simply got to talk to Ned’s father. Something may have happened. I’m beginning to get worried. There may be more at the bottom of this than just an accidental explosion in my laboratory.”
“I’d rather you stayed in bed,” said the physician. “You oughtn’t to move around so soon after such a shock. Can’t you move the telephone in here?”
“I’ll get an extension wire that I have in my room and plug it in,” offered Mr. Swift, and while Mrs. Baggert was telling Mr. Newton that Tom would soon speak to him, Mr. Swift, with the help of Eradicate, quickly had an extension telephone rigged up at Tom’s bedside. Then the young inventor talked to the father of his business manager.
“Are you sure, Mr. Newton, that Ned isn’t in the house, sleeping his head off?” was Tom’s first question.
“No, he isn’t here,” was the worried answer. “When he didn’t come down to breakfast we didn’t think anything of it at first, as he was going to be at your place late, he said, and we wanted to let him get as much rest as he could.
“But when we looked into his room a little while ago to see how he was sleeping, he wasn’t there. His mother said that she hadn’t heard him come in during the night, but even then we weren’t alarmed. We thought he had spent the night with you, as he so often does.”
“No,” Tom said slowly, “Ned isn’t here. He left my laboratory somewhere around midnight and I thought he was going straight home. But wait a minute!” Tom exclaimed as a new idea came to him. “I just happened to think. He might have gone to see Miss Morton and have stayed there all night, being too tired to pull up and head for home.”
Ned Newton was engaged to Miss Morton and, more than once after calling there and finding himself stormbound, he had been persuaded by her parents to remain over night.
“I think you’ll find him there,” suggested Tom, though in his heart he remembered that Ned had said it was too late to go to see Helen. Besides, he had had no positive engagement with her. “Call up the Mortons,” was Tom’s final suggestion.
“I will,” agreed Mr. Newton. “Thanks.”
Tom had no sooner finished his breakfast, following the departure of Dr. Layton, than the extension telephone rang again, and once more Mr. Newton was on the line.
“Ned wasn’t at Helen’s,” the father of the mysteriously missing young man reported. “Oh, Tom, what do you think could have happened?”
The young inventor was at a loss for an answer. Rapidly he reviewed the situation in his mind. Ned had left the laboratory, he was sure of that—or, wait a moment, was he? He had not seen Ned go out, but had taken it for granted that such had occurred. Then Tom had puzzled a bit over his latest invention before starting for his house. Then had come the explosion and——
Perhaps Ned had not left the laboratory. He may have gone to one of the private rooms and turned in there. Tom kept two bedrooms in this building for the use of himself and his manager when they were working late at night and did not want to disturb the main household. That might be it. Ned might be asleep in the laboratory.
“Wait a few minutes, Mr. Newton,” Tom advised over the wire. “I have just thought of something. It is barely possible that Ned didn’t start for home after all last night. He isn’t at our house, but he may be in the laboratory. I’ll send out and have a search made. I’ll call you up in a few minutes.”
“All right, Tom. But what’s this I’ve heard about a fire at your place last night?”
“Oh, there was a little blaze—it didn’t amount to anything,” was the reply. Tom said nothing about the explosion. He wanted to minimize the damage, and he believed what had been told him, that it really did not amount to much.
“Koku,” he called to the giant, “you and Rad hurry out to my laboratory and look for Mr. Newton. He may be in one of the bedrooms, asleep.”
“Asleep, Tom, after that explosion?” exclaimed Mr. Swift incredulously.
The telephone receiver had been hung back on the hook, so Mr. Newton heard none of this talk.
“It doesn’t seem possible,” Tom had to admit to his father; “but still I can’t account for Ned’s disappearance in any other way. He was dead tired and he may have slept through the fire and explosion. We’ll soon find out. I wish I could go and take a look for myself.”
“No, you stay here!” his father ordered. “Obey the doctor’s advice. Koku and Rad will find Ned if he’s to be found.”
The giant and negro came back soon, to report that there was no sign of Ned in the laboratory.
“Perhaps he may have returned home by this time,” suggested Mr. Swift. “Better call up and find out.”
“There is just a bare possibility—” said Tom musingly, as he reached for the ’phone, “there is just a bare chance that Ned took the midnight train for New York to get the selenium.”
“Took the midnight train to get selenium!” exclaimed Mr. Swift. “What do you mean?”
“Well, I needed some more sensitive selenium for my—for my—new experiment,” Tom said, knowing his father would understand he was speaking of the talking-picture machine. “Ned knew about it and planned to go after it to-day. When he left me last night he may have decided suddenly to keep right on to New York. I think I’ll tell his father that.”
“Do you really believe it, Tom?”
“No, Dad, I don’t. But I don’t want Mr. Newton to give up hope until I can get on the job myself and help hunt for Ned. Even at that there is a bare chance he did go to New York. I’ll suggest that to his father.”
Mr. Newton received this ray of hope gratefully and Tom was glad he had thought of it, though he knew it was only a shadow. If Ned really had taken the midnight train, which was possible, there ought to come a message from him soon reporting on the selenium matter. Also, Ned, being a home-loving young man, would naturally be expected to send word to his family about his return.
“It will only hold matters back for a short time at best,” said Tom to his father. “But I didn’t imagine my laboratory was burned enough to destroy the bedrooms. Do you think there is much more damage, Jackson?”
“Not to your laboratory,” was the reassuring reply. “You see, after the explosion the flames shot up at the back before we knew it, and the draft sucked them in through the bedroom windows. So the upper part of the place was worse burned than the lower. But Ned Newton was not in there.”
“I’m glad of that,” Tom said.
He was beginning to feel the strain of what he had gone through, and he was glad when, a little later, Mary Nestor and her father motored over to see him.
Mr. Nestor had some time before taken a long trip North for his health, a trip that had greatly improved his condition.
“Oh, Tom, what happened?” exclaimed Mary when she saw him in bed, all bandaged up.
“That’s what I’d like to know,” he answered, with a smile. “It was like a premature Fourth of July celebration.”
“Are you much hurt?” the girl faltered.
“Nothing more than shock and scratches,” Tom answered. “I’ll be up and around in another day.”
However, it was three days before Dr. Layton would allow Tom to get out of bed. Meanwhile nothing had been heard from Ned Newton. He had not gone to New York, that was evident, unless something had happened to him there, and he was not around Shopton, the town on Lake Carlopa where the Swifts’ large plant was located.
“It’s mighty queer,” said the worried Mr. Newton, when Tom was forced to admit that his New York theory was useless. “Where could he be keeping himself?”
“I can’t imagine,” Tom said. He was much broken up over the disappearance of his chum. He knew Ned well enough to know that he was not staying away from choice, though Tom did not communicate his suspicions to Mr. Newton.
As soon as Tom was able, he went out to the laboratory. The scene of ruin on the lower floor was not so bad as he had feared, but the back and upper part of the laboratory was pretty well burned away. Then Tom had the improvised nailed-up door removed so he might enter the room where he had set up his talking-picture machine.
“I hope it’s all right,” the young inventor murmured as he approached the apparatus. “They said it was, after the fire and explosion, but——”
He gave a cry of dismay as he saw that, though the main part of the marvelous new machine was intact, the force of the explosion had wrecked the delicate mechanism that he depended on to prevent any but authorized owners of the apparatus from using it. Tom’s secret invention was badly damaged. In addition, all the new radio tubes, of a kind never before used, had been shattered by the blast.
“This sure is tough luck!” murmured Tom Swift. “This knocks me out! The fire wasn’t so bad, but the explosion—whew! This certainly is tough! But I’ll work double time and soon have it in shape again, and better than ever. Luckily, I have duplicate parts of that secret check apparatus, and I can get new tubes, though it will take time.”
“You’d better go slow, Tom,” advised his father, who had come into the partly wrecked private room with his son. “First thing you know, you’ll blow yourself to pieces with these experiments of yours.”
“It was no experiment of mine, Dad, that caused the explosion here!” said Tom decidedly.
“It wasn’t?”
“No. All my wires were in good shape. It was some outside force that did the damage. I believe some one planted an infernal machine in here, Dad!”
“You do, Tom? Whom do you suspect?”
“I—I hardly know what to say,” was the slow answer. “But I have one man in mind. Where’s Clark?” he asked suddenly, naming a young workman who was much in Tom’s confidence.
“I’ll send him to you,” Mr. Swift offered. “What’s the matter, Tom? What are you going to have Clark do?”
“Some detective work,” was the low answer.