Tom Swift and the Martian Moon Re-Placement (The TOM SWIFT Invention Series Book 23)

by Victor Appleton

  They left the office a few minutes later telling Trent where they were going. The stroll over three buildings was brisk and refreshing for them both, and they walked into the front doors happy for the little exercise.

  A pretty nurse in her early twenties was looking over a tablet computer screen when they came in. She looked up.

  “Oh. Hey, Mr. Swift. Hey, Tom,” she greeted them with a big smile.

  “Hello, Debbie,” Tom returned. “You’re back again?”

  She nodded. “Yes. A two week school break and then back to the books. I’m zooming along on my Physician’s Assistant studies and might earn the diploma in eight more months.”

  A a teenager, Debbie Bates had once patched Tom’s heavily bleeding scalp when he got clobbered by an attacker using nothing other than instant glue. Her work was so good Doc Simpson had hired her for after school work, sponsored her for an accelerated BS at nursing school right out of high school, and now had her on the road to a PA license and then, they both hoped, on to a modified version of Medical School.

  She was that good.

  “Are you two looking for Doc? I ask because Mr. Winkler came in and they went to the back, then Doc called for an ambulance and he and Mr. Winkler raced off for Shopton General.” She looked at them in anticipation of any questions.

  His face blanching, Tom asked in a slightly choked voice, “Is Chow okay?”

  Debbie shook her head. “I don’t know. I just came on duty when they were putting him in the ambulance and it left before I could go back outside. All I know is Doc said something about shoving a spring in there. I guess he means a stent.”

  Tom and Damon left on the run.

  CHAPTER 5 /

  THE FIRST SERIOUS MEETINGS

  SHOPTON GENERAL Hospital was experiencing a lull in medical cases and only Chow was currently checked into the Emergency Ward. The ER doctor was chatting with two nurses and their admin person was leaning back in her chair sipping a coffee.

  Greg Simpson, clad in his Enterprises’ physician’s white coat, stethoscope draped over the back of his neck, was sitting on the edge of the bed in the cardiac suite occupied by the western chef. Chow was looking more than a little embarrassed at all the attention.

  His expression changed on seeing the two Swifts and then again the moment his wife, Wanda, rushed in shoving Tom to one side in her haste to get to the side of the man she loved.

  Doc had only a second to jump up and sidestep her as she nearly threw herself on the bed.

  “Consarn it, Wanda!” Chow’s baritone voice boomed. “Have a little care. Ya darn near knocked Tom there on his keister.”

  Startled, Wanda looked around and saw the others in the room for the first time. She turned bright red and had to sit down.

  “I am so sorry,” she declared. “When I heard Chow was heading here and was having a heart attack I—”

  “Not a heart attack, Wanda,” Chow told her, his voice softening on seeing her distress. “Just a little disagreement in there. Doc can explain it, but it looks like they got to send in the dig-em-out team ta get a little clog inside me, then put in one o’ them…” he looked at Doc. “Whatcha call ‘em?”

  “A stent. Just a little wire mesh tube to hold things open once we pull out what I’m assuming is a tiny blood clot. Pretty mundane stuff, but it is the source of your discomfort, Chow. Forty-five or fifty minutes will do it. Oh, here comes your scrub nurse now.” He pointed down the corridor at the approaching young man clad in operating scrub blues.

  After introductions had been made and Doc assured Wanda and Chow he would be right in the operating room during the procedure, the nurse, Pete, unset the brake of Chow’s bed and wheeled him away with Doc following.

  “Don’t worry, Wanda,” Damon assured her. “Harlan Ames had this a couple years ago and he can now get back out and chase the bad guys. Chow’ll be fine.”

  And, he was. Less that fifty minutes later Doc came out to the waiting room to say they could go in and see the patient. Before they went it he warned then, “The Cardiologist went in through his right wrist. That means three things. First, a lot less recovery so once he gets through this afternoon’s three-hour observation, he goes home. Two is he absolutely has to keep that wrist straight for the next four to five hours so no shaking his hand, and,” he looked at Wanda, “no grabbing it and holding on.”

  Damon raised a finger. “And, three?”

  “Number three is he can’t pick up or hold anything heavier than about three pounds for a full week. After that, he’s pretty much cleared for anything other than handstands and arm wrestling.”

  Wanda had tears running down her face, but she was smiling. “Does that mean I get to tell him he can’t cook for a week? That I finally get to treat him to my own home cooking?”

  Doc nodded and she turned, running through the double doors and to the small recovery cubicle.

  “Doc here tells me I got ta behave and keep my hand out o’ business fer a bit. Someone’s got ta remind me ‘cause I already got the riot act read by one nurse fer trying ta pull my carcass up a little in this bed thing.”

  Ten minutes later after assuring Chow they expected him to stay home for at least a week, Tom and Damon left to go back to work.

  As they approached the final country lane leading to Enterprises, Tom asked, “Is there any time you can give me in the next couple days? I need some help to try to figure out what to do about that moon around Mars, and could use your help or advice.”

  Damon had to shake his head. “Sorry, Son, but I’m heading down to New Zealand in a couple hours on that replacement ferry service project their Prime Minister has been trying to get approvals to move on. We got the contract and it has actually started; now there are suddenly five hundred things to be attended to all at once.”

  Tom had to grin. “Yeah. You have fun with that.”

  After parking his sports car, Tom headed for his underground office and lab while his father walked into the side doors of the Administration building.

  Once he settled down on the sofa in the office space, he pulled out his tablet computer and began reviewing all the data from the Challenger and her several attempts at shoving the moon, Phobos, back into position. It was, he already knew, nearly an effort in futility as the root cause still needed to be discovered. Until that happened, he might go out there, or send a crew, and shove the moon three times a day only to have it slip back that same amount, or more or less, before the next Martian day came.

  The data did show all had not been in vain. Phobos’ orbital altitude had been moved several feet back out and it had only slipped downward toward the planet a dozen feet in the past week.

  He picked up his phone and made a call to the department involved in all things repelatron. Once part of Propulsion Engineering, the new department was still unnamed but had a team of fifteen professionals who had all been involved in the original development of the amazing repelling technology along with some who had helped Tom turn the tables one-hundred-eighty degrees with the development of the Attractatron.

  “Marylynn Dick,” the person a the other end answered.

  “Marylynn, it’s Tom. I need to come over in a little, so I hope you have some time for me. Perhaps a couple hours.”

  “Hmmm? Well, can I get a hint what this will cover? I am supposed to get my teeth cleaned in three hours and, like everyone I know, would hate to miss that… oh, wait. No, I misspoke. I would treasure missing that so come over and take up as much time as you need. I’ll change the appointment.”

  Marylynn had come to Enterprises from a key position in a German firm where she had been involved in everything from ion propulsion experiments to efforts to fine tune a technology known as QVPT, or Quantum Vacuum Plasma Thrust, something that could provide propulsive power with no fuel, just electricity. A deep space probe had been launched a year earlier atop a repelatron-powered rocket taking the probe, its nuclear power supply and the small quantum engine out well past the moon and releasing it
at a speed of over ninety-thousand miles per hour.

  So far it was keeping up that speed even against the constant pull of the sun.

  “Oh, and I dearly hope this is some real brain twister. I have the need to stretch a few ganglia.”

  Tom chuckled. “I think I can promise this will not be a slam dunk situation.”

  He realized some foreigners might need a reference such as that explained, but Marylynn Dick had been born in Maryland to a mother and father who both had played several years of professional basketball. She had inherited their drive and athletic capabilities, just not their height. At five-foot-seven, she was still a presence in any room.

  She agreed to a small team meeting in half an hour.

  When he arrived it was to find she’d arranged to have the cafeteria bring them lunch and so the first twenty minutes were spent more in chewing than in conversing.

  Once they finished he brought up screen after screen and several videos of the action taking place on and above Mars. The team was in absolute awe at the amount of details he was sharing. Often, they found themselves with product requests and suggestions, but nothing as stunningly shocking as what they were seeing and hearing about to help them tie everything together.

  “Gee!” one of the young women of the group stated. “I’ve got goosebumps that don’t seem to want to go away after all that. We have to do something.”

  Tom nodded. “Right. The question is what can we, all of us, do? You’ve seen the Challenger making those pushes and know the power of her repelatrons. Goliath obviously has nine times that power and can carry more than enough power pods for the work, but she would need to be reconfigured. That costs both money as well as time. Money we can find but time we might not have in abundance.” He looked around at the group. “Any initial thoughts?”

  Three of the attendees raised their hands.

  With a small grin Tom reminded them that Enterprises wasn’t a school and anyone could speak up.

  The first to do so was a man formerly with NASA. “I once read a book, well, actually I read it three times over the years, about how the Moon suddenly starts to get nearer to Earth and the world finally comes together to try to build a giant machine on the lunar surface to force it away and back where it is supposed to be. The title character helps a gravely ill scientist whose idea it originally was to fix things at the very last second only to die from his efforts. Well,” he looked around a little embarrassed, “not a happy ending for him, but the Earth is saved.”

  One other of them remembered the book and nodded.

  Tom asked, “So, this thing they built on the Moon did what? Was it a giant rocket engine or something like that?”

  The first man, Alan, shook his head. “Believe it or not, it was a sort of repelatron. They called it a shield, but the effects were that it repelled the larger Earth and pushed itself back into position where they shut it down.”

  Tom sat in thought a moment, undisturbed. Finally he looked up. “So, I’d have to believe this wasn’t just a single unit. The thing had to be spread out over a great distance to be effective and not punch a hole backward through the Moon.”

  Alan admitted it was more of a giant array running more than a thousand mile.

  “Well,” the inventor told them all, “that is definitely something to think about. For us it would need to be a line of such shields along the path of Phobos. Each time it passes over the array they push out in order keeping pressure on the surface and shoving everything.”

  “What about the nature of their moon? Isn’t it more a conglomeration of rocks, solar dust and other things that have just enough attraction to hold together?” This came from one young woman recently acquired from Stanford.

  Tom looked at her long enough to make her feel self-conscious. “Actually, that is a popular notion but we don’t know for certain. It could be Phobos has a solid core and just a dusty coat gathered throughout the millennia. It might even have been a comet at one point that was in just the right, or wrong, place at the correct moment to be captured by Mars.”

  Now, he scanned the team. All seemed eager to come up with a solution but just about everyone also looked as if they were lacking enough information to continue.

  “That,” Tom said, rising from his seat, “tells me it is time to plan and execute an actual visit to Phobos. I’ll do that, but in the meantime can this team work up a possible design, or even a couple as alternates, for what such a repelling system might entail? I’ll also need costing and production time estimates. Thank you all for coming and for your contributions today.”

  On his way out Tom stopped Alan and asked the name of the book.

  “It is part of a British series about a character named Chris Godfrey. That book is near the end of the series and is called The Last Disaster. It gives a very dim view of how man can barely be bothered to work together in spite of the impending end of everything. Petty jealousies, money-grubbing industrialists, religious zealotry, the whole sordid lot.”

  “Well, if I can find a copy I intend to read it!”

  “If you want it, I can ask my parents to pack it up and send it.”

  Tom patted the man on the shoulder. “That, Alan, would be wonderful. Thanks!”

  His next stop was to the Communications department and their teleconference center. The duty operator set up a call out to Fearing Island and to the lead of the construction team.

  “Hello, skipper. What can we do for you?”

  “Hello, Jerry. I have a real headache and I need your input to see if something we have can be reconfigured in time to be of any help.” He gave a brief description of the Phobos problem. “Obviously with the repelatrons on the Challenger not being adequate my thoughts went to Goliath. But, since I designed her to have the central spire and high-sitting control center she can’t exactly be used to press up into the moon.”

  Jerry’s face showed recognition of what his young boss likely was going to ask about. “So, can we move the control and living quarters to below the cargo deck? Is that your question?”

  Tom shrugged but also nodded. “Right. I guess it is pretty obvious. So, can it be done and if yes, how long a job? I’m afraid we’re up against a bit of a short timeline.”

  “Can I have five minutes to get a few of my top people in on this call?”

  Tom agreed to stand by and Jerry disappeared from the camera’s view.

  It took nine minutes but four other people joined the Fearing man.

  Tom repeated his brief description of the Martian problem and his interest in Goliath. All were bright and caught onto the issues immediately.

  One man, Malcolm Service, cleared his throat. “Not sure I ought to mention this, but I’ve spent more than a few days trying to figure out how to reconfigure our giant and still keep structural integrity as well as providing for the same crew space.” His face said a lot but Tom let him continue.

  “It would require everything from the cargo deck on up be removed, a new sort of cage of braces be constructed to not only hold the command levels but to give back strength that would need to be removed to give the necessary space. Then, the current giant power pod would need to be moved from on top of the dish and probably replaced by a trio or quad of smaller pods arranged around the outer perimeter.”

  Tom had to snort. “So, the only easy part would be welding a plate to cover the hole in the deck, right?”

  Malcolm’s eyes lowered but he nodded. “I might be wrong about some of that, like if you wanted a smaller command and crew area so we have less bracing to put in, but the work would take at least four months and probably closer to six, Sorry, skipper. I know that’s not the news you wanted.”

  Tom shrugged. “Malcolm. You have likely saved us weeks trying to come up with a suitability plan and then devising a schedule for something we'd likely not do. That is time we just don’t have, so I thank you for having taken that time already. That leaves me with what to do. Do any of you believe we might create a new Goliath-like ship build
around one giant repelatron? Something with perhaps a crew of five and sensors embedded on the deck to replace what would be covered?”

  They talked the matter over and the only thing they came up with was it would be slightly shorter but possibly still in the three to four month range assuming enough people were assigned to allow for twenty-four hour a day and at least six days a week work.

  “Okay. I’ll ask you to keep your thinking caps on, and also to not spread around word about what is going on out there. We really need to keep this out of public view for the time being. Thanks you, everyone.”

  * * * * *

  Trent transferred the call.

  “Tom? This is Admiral Greg Sawyer, United States Navy. Have I caught you at a good time to discuss a possible aircraft purchase?”

  “Well, I have the next half hour free, but if this is just to place or check on an order, I will probably need to transfer you to the correct department.”

  “Oh, no. This is to talk, albeit briefly, about a need we have that you’ve previously addressed, only now we need and want more.”

  When Tom suggested the man tell him what is was, the Navy man laughed. “Quite possibly the impossible. You see, your Wasp helicopter is such a hit that the men and women out in the fleet want more. Submariners want one that folds down so small it can be shoved down the same hatch our torpedoes do—which, by the way is just one-inch less wide than the current model—and our surface ships are asking for one that carries two or three people and can carry a thousand pounds with a single pilot.”

  Tom had to chuckle. “You aren’t half asking for that impossible thing, sir. Without studying your exact needs list I’d have to say there are a couple things going against that happening. First, the rotor would need to be widened to the point it never could be tilted to the side for storage. Second, I suppose a pilot in the front, centered, with two seats behind might be possible, but they would need to be very close together. As in, shoulders jammed against one another.”