“But,” she said with tears streaming down her cheeks, “you didn’t even go to high school and still got your money on your eighteenth birthday!”
Tom did not want to get into the finer details, but it was true that the boys of the extended family got their money on completion of high school, or the equivalent, and reached their eighteenth birthday. It was money to allow them to attend college and start a family, not as a reward for completing any specific point of education. Bartle had set the female age at thirty because that was the point where some women became widows and he wanted them to not be a public burden.
He gently pushed her away and held her at arm’s length, looking into her eyes. “I’m going to tell you something I promised myself I wouldn’t ever do until you turn thirty, and maybe not then, but that money I got? I never planned on it and never needed it. I already had over five million dollars in the bank from my patents, so I put the entire check into a special account with your name on it. When I got mine the amount was almost one-point-two million bucks. With the interest you have been getting since you turned seventeen, now going on nine years, I believe that account is worth one-point-six million dollars.”
Sandy had nearly stopped breathing she was so frightened what her brother was telling her would turn out to be some big joke on her. She looked in his eyes and saw only honesty.
“Really?” she squeaked out.
Tom nodded. “Yeah, San. Really. I didn’t need the money and still don’t, but I knew someday you’d realize what you did, what you lost out on, and hate yourself or me or mom and dad for not getting your share.”
“It’s not my money,” she whispered. “It’s yours.”
Now, Tom shook his head. “My name has not been associated with that account all these years. You are the primary account holder with mom as your next of kin if you have some horrible accident. Even she doesn’t know about it. But, now you do. I do have to tell you I can’t change the terms of when you get the money. You and Bud will need to wait a little more than four years but it will be yours. I just hope you understand it is something to not go out and blow; it is something for your futures, and any family you have at some point.”
Sandy Swift felt as though she’d been punched in the stomach and was about to discover she was growing up. No longer a teenage girl, even though she still felt that young, she had a notion that this was the turning point in her life.
She put her arms around her brother’s neck and pulled him to her in a hug.
“I love you, Tom. Not for this, even though it is wonderful of you, but because you’ve been the dream brother any girl could ever want. Thank you.” She warmly kissed his cheek.
“Just do me one favor,” he requested. “Don’t tell Bud that I did this or told you about it. You are married to a proud guy and I don’t ever want him feeling like he isn’t your main income man. When it happens, tell him it is from a delayed gift from Grandpa George and that I got one as well. If he asks I’ll smile and say how unexpected it was. Okay?”
She nodded and kissed him again on the cheek, this time much longer. “Yes, Tomonomo. I promise.”
* * * * *
The second round of building underwater domes for growing of foods in places that had no more useable land was well underway. The same British agency represented by a man named Jameson Carr was spearheading worldwide development and all Tom had to do was make the occasional visit to the various Enterprises’ departments involve in making it happen.
The ladies of the Uniforms department, under the management of Marjorie Morning-Eagle—known as the Major, affectionately, by many—had one three-dome set behind them so this next one, only two domes interconnected, was going to be a breeze for them.
A few interior changes were needed but Tom knew everybody was on board with those and there would be no delays. Each seven-hundred by six-hundred by three-hundred foot tall structure, and all the interior terraces, could grow as much food as any sixteen acre plot on dry land and give three complete crop cycles per year.
With that now mostly off his plate, and actually bringing in some income for all of Enterprises’ work, Tom was satisfied. Almost as important, his father, Damon, and the accountants at Enterprises were also quite pleased.
* * * * *
Tom’s mother, Anne Swift, was a bit of an enigma. Trained and highly skilled as a biologist with a Masters in Microbiology and Doctorate in Molecular Biology, she appeared to give it all up when Tom and Sandy were young and the family moved from Florida to Shopton so Damon could take over the family business.
The only thing was, she had not given it up. For about two decades she put her skills and education to work on occasional top secret projects for the FBI in a secret lab hidden under a cover bank that was a real bank, only it was operated and staffed by the FBI. Her double life was kept from her family until about the time Sandy turned seventeen and had been one of the people brought to the lab when another girl maliciously poisoned some of her classmates. And the rest of the family was “read in” to the truth a few months later.
When Tom had been getting the first of his underwater growing domes running, both a strain of a virus and a cyanide-like poison had been introduced into the domes by the henchmen of an old, grudge-bearing enemy of Tom’s. She couldn’t refuse her son’s request for help identifying all aspects of these attacks, so even through she was officially retired, the FBI had allowed her to use the secret lab for that work. In return, she worked one final project for them determining how more than a hundred house cats had mysteriously died from the same thing even though none had ever been in proximity of any of the others. And, it had nothing to do with anything they all ate or played with.
Now, sitting in her favorite easy chair in the living room of the house she and Damon had decided to remain in even with both their children married and living in their own houses, she was reading an anthology paperback of medical mysteries when she dropped it in her lap, letting out a grown.
“Oh, gawd! Not that one!” she said to nobody. Picking up the book she started to laugh. The story that caught her eye was one titled, Anne Swift and the Incendiary Insect Infestation, one of her cases from several years back that had been declassified and put to paper by a nice author she’d spent several days describing that project to. It had been the project seeing her retire for the first time.
Might as well see how bad it was, she told herself as she picked the book up and flipped back to the start of the story.
An hour and a half later she set the book aside, sighed at the memories the story brought back, and got up to prepare their dinner.
As she entered the kitchen she glanced back at the book sitting next to the chair. “She was such a clever girl,” she said with a sigh.
* * * * *
Flying was Bud Barclay’s life—other, of course, than his wife, Sandy—and he was a truly great test pilot. His brain remembered each and every snap roll, climb, dive and Immelmann from every test flight he’d ever made. Nearly all were like fond memories of good friends.
But, a few haunted him. Those were the flights that ended up in losing the aircraft for some reason. He was the sort of pilot who would not just bail out unless he was absolutely certain why something failed and there was no hope of recovery. Most of the time he got closure on crash results, but one relatively recent crash still nagged at him at night and even sometimes as he sat in his office out in Hangar 6 on Enterprises’ northeast corner.
It had been a new, small, two-seat jet built for both fun and for fast travel for businessmen. During the scheduled second to final flight test something had locked up and he had nearly no stick control. All he could do was reduce the throttle and use his feet to steer the falling jet away from Enterprises and toward an uninhabited area of woods a couple miles away.
The damage was total and the wreckage had been hauled way for investigation, but nothing found would say for certain, ‘this is the piece that failed or locked up.’ And so, another test jet had been prepa
red and Bud and three of the other test pilots at the company—Art Wiltessa, Zimby Cox and Red Jones—had flown it, giving the little jet eight of the more demanding test flights it might ever encounter.
Nothing came of it and it was put down to failure of a “component, unidentifiable,” and the jet went into production. Bud was not satisfied and asked that all wreckage be brought to his hangar. It was spread out in an approximation of the aircraft shape and some parts sported paper tags identifying them if their condition made them unrecognizable. In his spare time he picked at the pieces, sometimes rearranging them when he decided one or more were out of place.
Today, he was sitting on a very tall chair, something like either a life guard or tennis umpire might use, looking down at the bits and pieces. He had nearly a full binder of notes about various things and was looking through some of the middle pages now, often placing his finger on one note and looking over the wreckage.
With a nod, he closed the book, left it on the seat and climbed down. Three minutes later he had wheeled out a strange rather insectoid-looking aircraft featuring a wide disc on top, not a rotor. It was one of Tom’s Wasps and used the principles of lower air pressure over a moving wing disc to pull the craft into the air. He radioed for and got permission to take off with a destination of a couple miles away.
When he landed, he got out and looked at the area still staked out showing where the overwhelming majority of parts had been recovered. Bud reached back into the Wasp and pulled out a collapsible rod with a small circular pad at the bottom and headed for the far side of the debris field. He turned the small metal detector on and began sweeping around five or more feet outside the area.
Two hours later he’s managed to cover a two-hundred degree arc out an additional fifty-five feet and was about to give up when the light on the handle flashed and he heard a beep. He moved the pad over an area three times and receive that many more beeps before setting things down and pulling out a small trowel from his back pocket. With great care he prodded and dug down two inches until he felt the tip touch something more solid than the dirt. Then, using only his hands, he pulled away the dirt until he’d exposed a small piston with a rod sticking from one end.
Bud smiled. He knew what that component was and also knew it was missing from the assemblage of parts in his hangar. He reached up and tapped his TeleVoc communications pin and silently mouthed, “Tom Swift.” A couple seconds later he heard the inventor’s voice inside his head.
“Yeah, Bud, What’s up?
Bud told him where he was and what he’d hoped to accomplish. “You’ll never guess what I found, skipper. The starboard mini-actuator for elevators. It’s in great shape all except for the really bad place it twisted apart. And, my bet is it happened before the crash. Otherwise it would have snapped. I think I know what happened when things went bad, and I’m really happy it turns out it wasn’t me doing somethings stupid after all!”
CHAPTER 2 /
THE CALL FROM HAZ
TOM WAS at his desk in the big office when a radio call came in.
“It’s Mr. Sampson up on Mars. He needs to speak with you, Tom,” his secretary, Munford Trent, announced. “Line five has the tie-in to the radio room.”
Tom thanked the man and pressed the line number. “Haz? It’s Tom. What’s happening up on our favorite Red Planet?”
Hazard Sampson had been the commander of the Swift’s Mars colony since day one. He’d originally signed up for a one year contract but quickly discovered he loved the challenges of living on a remote and somewhat barren planet brought to them all. His one year assignment stretched out to two, then three and now he had been the commander for nearly five entire years. In fact, another three months and a few days would see that anniversary.
“Well, I’ve got to talk to you about a small issue we’ve started to see up here.”
“Nothing wrong with the domes, I hope,” Tom said recalling he’d finally provided the colony with a trio of Attractatron drones to patrol the skies so nothing could drop unannounced from space and hit any of the now five habitat domes. A puncture would not be as catastrophic as, say, on the Moon, but damage and loss of life could result.
“No, not the domes, but I’ll take a guess and say you are familiar with our two little moons.” Tom said he did. “Fine. Well, our larger of the sky stones, as we call them, Phobos, has long been known to be coming a little closer with each passing orbit.”
“Right, Fractionally, but to the tune of something like seven feet a century if I remember correctly,” Tom said. “Been that way since we were able to first measure things up there.”
“Yeah, something like that. At least through last year’s measurements. But we did this year’s yesterday, and we may have a problem. Phobos is more than three-hundred feet closer to the surface than before.”
Tom sat up straight. “Say that again.”
Haz repeated the measurement number. “Deimos is staying up where it’s been give or take its own few feet a year. It’s the larger one we’re worried about but, as you well know, we don’t have the wherewithal to do anything about it. I did send the drones up to try giving it a push and one of them nearly shut down from overheating. We were lucky to get it back in one piece. All we got for our troubles was maybe a foot of distance back out.”
It was known that the larger of the two moons of Mars—irregular chunks of rock that possibly had been snagged by the planet’s gravity long after the planet was created and were not “native” satellites at all—was coming in closer, but all experts pretty much agreed that it would be between twenty million and forty million years before it either dropped from the sky and made a big impact crater on the surface, or what was more likely, it would break up into small pieces that might continue to orbit in a sort of ring.
Phobos was thought to be more or less a loose set of dirt and stones that were just looking for a reason to break apart.
They talked about the need to make daily checks to ensure the previous measurement was right and that the moon was not decreasing in its orbital speed.
“Could it be that Phobos has rotated a little and the point of this latest measurement is on a bulge that spun to reveal those three hundred feet?”
“I wish that were the case, Tom,” Haz stated with a sigh. “We have our megascope looking up and I have the past five shots taken concurrent with the laser measurement. They are identical in orientation to within two degrees. Now, I’m not saying there can’t be coincidental rotation up there, and Phobos might have taken an impact on the back side when it was on the other side of the planet causing this, but if it is coming closer and faster than ever before, I’m thinking we are going to be in trouble at some point. If it breaks up there isn’t enough density to the atmosphere to burn all the larger pieces up, and our current trio of mules might not be able to keep up with everything that might rain down on us. Is there any way to get you up here to take a close look?”
Tom pondered the question a moment. “The good news for you is that I have a spot on my dance card, so yes, I can come up. You guys are within weeks of coming into a good position orbitally speaking for the next few months of travel between planets. The people I would want to bring along might take a week or so to pull together and one of them is elderly and we’ll need to keep travel speed to no more than one-point-two Gs so the trip will take two weeks. Then, there is the fact you are retrograde to us by a twentieth of an orbit. Having you sitting that far behind our orbit makes the trip longer.”
“We know, but one of our sky-peekers tells me that if you wait for the planets to come closer for a short trip it will actually put you here five days later. So, we accept whatever you can do. And, thanks, Tom. Really!”
After consulting with his father, Tom called one of the astronomers up at the Swift Observatory.
“Doctor Heller? It’s Tom down at Enterprises. First, I want to ask how are you?”
“Hmmm. Ahh, now that you start a conversation like that I am cautious. Well and h
ealthy is the answer I believe you want, but wondering what is really behind this call.”
Tom told him about Phobos and the possible lower orbits.
“Oh, dear. Then the little observation we made last week would seem to be true.”
Tom was amazed. “You’ve seen the change?”
“Yes, but we wanted to make five additional night observations this week before announcing anything. This tells me those extra sightings are important, but not as much as before your news. How did you hear about this?”
Tom told him of the radio call from Mars. “They have checked to see if some odd rotation might be the cause for this, but nothing they are seeing indicates this is anything other than Phobos coming closer for an unknown reason.”
“Could your Space Friends be responsible?”
Tom thought, “I doubt it. Even if they’ve gone almost completely silent on us, I can’t think they would not tell us if they were doing something like this or at least know about it. They have proved to be capable of moving large objects—I’m thinking of Nestria—in the past but always for mankind’s good; this is not in that category!”
While Tom and his father had once been in relatively frequent contact with a small outpost of aliens stationed near, but not on, Mars for more than seven years, and had even managed to get them down to the surface of the Earth for a brief visit, the fact was nearly eighteen months earlier they announced their “Masters”—another race they served—had “changed” and since that time had been hesitant or unable to communicate very much at all. The last time Tom got anything from them was more than a year earlier and only said it was, “Difficult to communicate.”
After telling Dr. Doctor Heller he would like the man to consider coming to Mars—eagerly accepted without any questions—the inventor decided he might just go ahead with a message to the aliens, and so he headed for the Communications department building.
He TeleVoc’d his father who was finishing a meeting at the Construction Company asking if he concurred with trying a message.
Tom Swift and the Martian Moon Re-Placement (The TOM SWIFT Invention Series Book 23) Page 2
