Bugs turned on the speaker. The sound was a sort of metallic click-click. He looked at me hopelessly. My return look was blank.
“I know what it is.”
We both turned and stared at the little old lady. She kept right on knitting.
“Sure you do, Grandma,” Bugs humored her.
“Listen, Junior, don’t call me ‘Grandma.’ I’ve been meaning to tell you. I don’t like it.”
“Sorry, Gra—- Sorry.”
“Turn that thing off,” she ordered him.
Bugs hesitated a moment, then shrugged and did as she said.
“Now close your eyes. Both of you.”
We closed our eyes.
Click-click!
We both opened our eyes—-wide. Bugs’s jaw was hanging down around his scrawny collarbone.
“What...? How...?”
The old lady held up her knitting and did something with the needles. Click-click!
“The recorder picked up the sound when I was talking to Tom before,” Bugs realized. “But how come only once? You were knitting all the time we were on the phone.”
“Because I only do this when I come to the end of a row.” She showed us. Click-click.
Bugs went back to his equipment and put on his earphones. Fifteen minutes or so passed, and then he removed them. “Bermuda,” he said. “And then New York. From there to Memphis, and that’s the first tandem he seized.” He opened a drawer and took out a book of maps. “The call was made from somewhere south of Memphis.” He found Memphis on one of the maps, drew two lines down from it, and then a third one, forming a triangle. He shaded in a narrow area on either side of the base of the triangle. “The call came from this area here. In Mississippi.”
“That covers about twenty miles,” I realized. “Can’t you pinpoint it?”
“I could if I could dial into the Memphis exchange. But Tom’s put the kibosh on that. The only way now is to go to the area. With all the other phones out, I should be able to pick up Tom with my sonar equipment.”
“Suppose he’s off the phone now?”
“He won’t be. To pull off Operation Silence, he has to keep his phone in use.”
We moved fast. Bugs packed up the necessary equipment, and we hightailed it across the border to the El Paso airport. There I put the little old lady in a cab, thanked her one last time for saving my life.
“Good-bye,” I said. “I hope Henry gets better.”
“Poor Henry-— I try to keep him ‘regular’ . . . but boys just don’t listen to their mothers these days.”
Then I made arrangements to rent a plane to fly Bugs and me to Memphis.
A hungry pilot snapped at the generous offer I made him and gassed up his little Beechcraft. It was a slow night, and the airport tower gave us immediate clearance. Ninety minutes from the time we’d left Juarez, we were in the air and on our way.
Listening to Bugs talk to the pilot, I realized he knew a lot about airplanes. When I commented on it, Bugs told me he had his pilot’s license. That gave me an idea.
“Are you checked out on ’copters?” I asked Bugs. “And could your equipment pick up Swift’s phone from the air?” The answer to both questions was affirmative. We had the pilot radio ahead and arrange for a helicopter rental. It was all gassed up, ready and waiting when we landed in Memphis.
The two of us took off again, with Bugs at the stick. He told me what to do with the sonar equipment, and I soon had it operating. We were over the fertile cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta when it blipped for the first time.
Bugs brought the whirlybird down and we hedgehopped the area. The white cotton rippled eerily in the moonlight. Following the blips, we zeroed in on the small town of Drew in Sunflower County.
“There it is!” Bugs pointed out an isolated cabin sitting all by itself on an abandoned cotton patch a few miles south of Drew. The land around it wasn’t white like the cotton fields, but rather a gray-brown tangle of overgrown weeds and briers with here and there a ragged tufting of cotton bolls struggling to survive.
I studied the terrain. “Drop me over there.” I pointed just beyond a scraggly clump of trees and underbrush about a quarter-mile past the cabin. “I can sneak up on the place from there.”
A few moments later I was on the ground watching the ’copter turn back toward Memphis. When it was out of sight, I started for the cabin. With luck, I hoped to catch Tom Swift by surprise. Instead, it was he who surprised me. Just as I slid around the corner of the cabin, pistol held at the ready, intending to kick in the front door and take the blind man unaware, I felt the hard steel nose of a revolver jammed into my spine.
“Hold it right there.”
I held it right there while his other hand reached around me to take my pistol. Then he prodded me with the revolver, and I moved in lockstep with him. We walked up a couple of steps to the porch and entered the cabin. He shut the door behind us.
It was pitch-black inside. Why not? Tom Swift was blind. He had no need of lights. And he sure as hell wasn’t worried about inconveniencing me.
He pushed me into a chair, drew another up alongside it, and sat down beside me. The gun rested on my shoulder, the cold nose nuzzling the cartilage just under my right ear. He struck a match and lit his pipe.
In the short-lived glare I got a look at Tom Swift for the first time. He fit the description Putnam had passed along to me: about thirty years old, average height and build, sandy hair. He was wearing a corduroy shirt and denim pants. Also dark glasses, which seemed incongruous in the darkness. The match went out, and my nose picked up the rich aroma of Borkum Riff.
“You’re Steve Victor. Right?” He spoke.
“Yeah. How did you guess?”
“I asked the computer what action might be taken to counteract my infiltration of it. You were the answer.”
His voice came from behind the glow of his pipe. “The ’copter was dumb,” he remarked. “My hearing is sharp as a razor. It was easy to peg where you set down. And then it was duck soup to pick a spot you’d have to walk past and nab you.”
“And now that you have?”
“We just sit here and wait for morning. By morning phase three will be unstoppable.”
“Suppose I don’t feel like waiting for morning?”
“Then I’ll have to kill you. I don’t want to do that. I’m pretty squeamish. I’ve never killed anybody before.” Tom Swift sighed. “But don’t make the mistake of thinking that because I’m blind you can outmaneuver me. If you make me shoot, there’s no way I can miss.” He tapped the gun lightly against my noggin, emphasizing the point. “If necessary, I could kill you from across the room,” he added. “I’m a crack shot. Just the sound of your breathing is all I’d need to know.”
It was an unpleasant subject, and I changed it.
“Tell me about phase three,” I suggested.
“Why not? You’ll know by morning anyway. Everybody will. The whole world.” He puffed on his pipe. “I guess I should start at the beginning.”
Only a technological genius could have thought of that approach!
“This planet Earth is in a helluva mess,” he began. “And it’s the fault of people — all people everywhere. But the people have leaders. They’ve always had leaders. And these leaders initiate programs and carry them out and manipulate like crazy so the people will accept them. So, in fact, it’s these leaders who are responsible for the mess. Now, who are these leaders?”
I stared blankly at the pipe smoke swirling around the ember glowing in the darkness.
“I’ll tell you who!” Tom Swift answered his own question. “The sighted! Down through the ages, the sighted have always run this world. They run it now. And they’ll run it tomorrow — if there is a tomorrow. However, what they’ve done with it proves that the sighted are the blindest people of all! No blind man ever aimed a missile! No blind man ever drilled an off-shore oil well! No blind man ever set up a system of apartheid or milked an underdeveloped country of its resources! Sighted men did those things! Sighted men have brought us to the point we’re at today! And if we let them, sighted men will destroy the planet Earth!”