The following morning Tom took Bart by his little hand and led him to the living room where they sat down in Tom’s easy chair with the boy in his lap.
“Whatsa want, daddy?”
Tom laughed. “I guess I’m not being very sly about this, but now that you ask, I need to tell you something that makes me very sad. You turn four years old in three weeks. Do you know that?” The boy nodded and grinned. “Well, daddy has to be away when that special day happens.”
He tried to explain the Mars situation. Little Bart listened and looked like he was trying to decide if not having his daddy around was worth what needed to be done out in space.
“Will you be here before that?”
“Sure I will. Why?”
“Can we have my birthday before, just you and me and mommy and Mary?”
The young inventor—who had bravely faced death many times, faced the dangers of the deep oceans, deep space and the worst conditions in between—felt a lump coming to his throat. He cleared it and replied, “I’d really love that, Bart. I think your mommy would as well. But, you have to tell me what you want as your birthday gift. Okay?”
Bart had already picked up the Swift men’s habit of rubbing his jaw when he was deep in thought. After nearly a minute his face brightened.
“A helicopiter,” he announced. “One that flies and comes back when I tell it to.”
Tom laughed. He also had pronounced the flying machine with and extra “i” when he was very young. “Helicopter, Bart. And, I think we might be able to do something about that for you.
When he arrived at work he called Arv Hanson into the big office to explain what he hoped to have the model maker build for him.
“Piece of cake, skipper. I’ll assume this needs a safety ring around the blade ends.”
“Sure, and breakaway blades that’ll detach before any skin is endangered.”
With a nod Arv agreed to have something based on the Whirling Duck design ready in two days. “I’ll rig up a transmitter Bart can wear so the thing goes out, oh… maybe fifty or even a hundred feet before it does a controlled bank and comes back to him either on auto or when he vocalizes the command. Want it to be able to grow with him and someday let him program or directly control everything?”
His young boss’ smile told him the answer he needed.
After Arv left and he had handled his morning correspondence, Tom headed for the Communications department and a ten a.m. call he’d arranged with the Mars colony commander.
“Well, a precisely-timed good morning to you, Tom. The only thing on my agenda is our friend, little wayward Phobos. I won’t press you for a solution… that is unless you have one for us?” When Tom did not answer in the affirmative, Haz continued. “We have a slew of new data for you and some of it is encouraging.”
“I’ll take anything you have, but the encouraging news sounds like a great place to begin.”
“Well, to start with Phobos has not come back in as quickly as before. That has the experts up here pulling their hair out. Words like, ‘Impossible,’ and ‘Flummery,’ have been bandied around. Frankly, we’re stumped. I’ve had everybody keeping such a close watch on the darned thing I doubt a rock the size of a golf ball could have impacted it and your last push seems to be holding. People come wake me up at night to tell me it isn’t any closer. The heck if I can figure this out!”
Tom had to admit he was at a loss for any ideas.
“I think I might put off my next trip by a week or so while I run this past a bunch of people down here,” he told Haz. “I’m still coming up because I want to make another and more detailed landing on Phobos to see if we can spot anything new, but the trip will be delayed at least five days and maybe seven.”
“Well, don’t wait too long because we’re about to be passed by the Earth and that will make your trip home a very long one.”
Tom well knew that each day he delayed the trip—the travel time to Mars, and the accompanying trip back home—meant at least five hours of additional time spent at acceleration or deceleration. If he could not get there and come home within a three-month window then the trip might need to be postponed—if it could be!
“Let me see if I can cut that in half, Haz. I may have a few things to try once we get up there. I’ll keep you posted. Uhh…” he hesitated, “how are the rest of the colonists feeling about this?”
“You really ready to hear this? Well then, the consensus, and by a very large margin, is to get rid of the thing. Actually, only a single dissenter.” He held up his hand and grinned. “It serves no purpose we can find, and the small gravity influence is barely felt or even registered on its direct overflights. Water in the hydroponic tanks only rises by a half millimeter for about fifteen seconds on those occasions. So, and as one woman said, ‘For the greater good of the Mars colony, can we just shove it into the sun?’”
Tom chuckled before explaining that the “greater good” phrase was something he’d heard just a day earlier.
“It makes me wonder if doing anything really is for the greater good or just expediency. But, I agree that we can’t just let it come down on you, so let’s see what might have gone on to keep it farther out this time and not the other times. See you in a couple weeks!”
When the inventor reported the status of both Phobos and his forthcoming trip to his father, the older Swift nodded and looked thoughtful.
“Have you or anybody else done the computations to see if removing Phobos, even as small as it is, will make any difference? By that I mean even minuscule differences in the planet or its orbit or anything?”
“Professor Brandon has. He says as far as he can tell, Phobos is a useless chunk of rocks that strayed into the Martian gravitational influence a dozen million or so years ago and has nothing to offer other than an impending show in another twenty-million or so years. He believes, as many other do, that it would be a great loss if we removed and destroyed it, but if it comes to that very thing to save lives, he sees nothing negative other than the loss of some other moon to investigate besides out own.”
Damon grinned, He knew his son, so he barely had to ask, “And you believe a more thorough exploration is called for before you do anything. Right?”
“Yes. The first touchdown we did was in what might have been an interesting place, only it wasn’t very. I want to make a slow multi-orbital pass around Phobos using all the sensors we have including the Damonscope and a new multi-phase laser measuring device that I should have finished in a few days.”
“Tell me more,” his father requested.
“Well, there have been laser-based temperature measurement devices and even vibration sensors, but mine uses a trio of lasers to act as the carrier of a vibration wave that will give us a good indication of what lies up to five hundred feet below the surface. It will map out solids and differentiate them from voids, and is going to be precise enough to show the shapes of rocks and other objects inside a void to about an inch in accuracy.”
Astonished, Damon asked for verification. “Five hundred feet deep? In the void of space?”
Now, Tom’s face dropped. “To tell you the truth, I’m not certain about the vacuum effect. But, even if I can only peer a hundred feet or fifty feet inside Phobos, think of what we might discover.”
“Well,” his father said picking up a short stack of folders and heading for the door, “I will be most interested in that. I have a wonderful probe instrument package meant to give the best ever look at the surface and subsurface of Venus and that could be a real boon.” With that, he left Tom alone.
Tom now felt some small level of doubt setting in regarding the new invention, something Bud had dubbed the Deep Peek, he called up the files and looked through everything. It turned out to be a good thing. Part of the way in which the Deep Peek operated was based on an equilibrium between the power of the output and the sensitivity of the input.
He spotted the problem about an hour later.
Right there, in the scanner hardwa
re that worked to keep itself centered on the returning laser reflections, was a drop-off. A place where the numbers ought to have been in the range of 50 ms to 127 ms, but were sitting at 22 ms - 29 ms.
He called up the scans of his original notes and let our a groan.
Right there were the correct numbers, numbers that should have been—and as far as he could recall were—identical on the keyboard-entered data.
Tom sat back slowly shaking his head.
Could this be some sort of sabotage?
CHAPTER 11 /
THE SECOND LANDING
THE EXPEDITION took off five days after Tom had asked Arv to build the model helicopter for little Bart. The machine, complete with shiny chrome effects on the blades and body parts, had been an absolute hit with the boy who had spent the rest of the afternoon first studying the instruction booklet the model maker had put together, took the removable parts off and replaced them with minimal help from Tom, and then had flown it for more than an hour before telling his father he had some ideas for improvements.
The Challenger took off accompanied by three of Tom’s flying saucer spaceships each with a crew of three plus an enormous range of supplies. They headed for the Space Queen where Tom’s light speed ship, the TranSpace Dart, was kept along with the very small black hole—parked at a safe distance—that powered the ship by dragging it forward at faster and faster speeds all the while the ship’s repelatrons kept the anomaly in a fixed and safe position in front.
The saucers would be mounted at the bottoms of three of the fast ship’s fins. It would go ahead and be in orbit days before the repelatron ship arrived. Challenger would fly only on robotic control so it would arrive just three days after the Dart travelling much faster when a human crew was not involve.
With the exception of a core team consisting of Bud, Chow, Hank Sterling and Professor Brandon—all of whom could travel back home in the fast ship whenever they needed to—everyone else had no family or other reasons they could not travel around the sun with the rest of the colonists out on Mars, waiting for a better window to come home.
Tom’s new invention, the Deep Peek, had been rebuilt to the correct specs and was sitting down in the hangar of the ship. It would need to be pulled out and mounted to the lower, outer rail of the ship for use, but he’d ensured that would require only five or six minutes to accomplish.
The other addition to the ship was a three-emitter Attractatron array installed on one of the arcing rails to the left of the command cube. Knowing there would not be enough solid matter to push against for most of each orbit, Tom felt this was the only way to hold onto and maneuver around the small moon.
The possible sabotage had been corrected and nearly forgotten by all… except for Harlan Ames. As Tom headed for Fearing with his team for the trek to Mars, he was spreading a net all around the company in the hope of catching nobody! He truly wished it had been an oversight or a mistake in the data entry, but he knew he needed to fully investigate the matter.
It was his job, and Harlan Ames took his job seriously!
* * * * *
The first orbit of Phobos at an altitude of just five miles was more like driving a racecar around a tight-cornered short track. The Challenger had to heel over at a sharp angle and it was only because of the Attractatrons they could manage the maneuver.
All sensors and instruments were focused on an area just three-hundred feet across.
This orbit was along what might be considered the equator of the moon. Orbit two would start with a slight course change to have them passing three degrees “higher” by the time they got to the opposite side.
Succeeding orbits would hold to this small angle change, and by the time they made fifteen orbits Tom believed they would need to reset and start the process again running directly over the poles.
Since one orbit took them only about an hour, he called a halt to their work after the first fifteen orbits and ordered everyone to get a good night’s rest. Ten hours later they resumed the orbits and by the end of the third full set of orbits had covered all but about one percent of the surface.
“I think we’ve done enough,” he declared as he set the ship for a landing course a the colony. “Now comes all the review and number crunching.”
Bud turned in his seat nest to the inventor. “And, what can your faithful sidekick do to assist?”
Hank, who had been passing behind the pair piped up with, “Coffee, doughnuts and lots of them both. Midnight oil by the gallon and kind and compassionate words when needed. Oh, wait. We are talking about Barclay, aren’t we.” He grinned at the flyer who was looking not at all happy. “Sorry, Bud. Three long days and I get a little snippy. I’m sure whatever the skipper needs we all will be chipping in.”
“Forgiven, but since you mentioned coffee…” Bud said glancing innocently at the engineer.
Hank laughed but he headed for the small galley where Chow helped him dispense a piping hot cup of coffee in a sippy bag which he gladly took to the copilot.
To ease stress on the food supplies and the air within the colony, all three of the saucer ships had been crammed full of food and large oxygen cylinders. These had all been offloaded during the time Tom and the Challenger crew had been surveying Phobos. Most of the food could be considered luxuries such as ice cream and some types of fresh fruits that the colony could just not grow themselves.
Tom walked into Haz’s office and sat down.
“Thanks for all the goodies, skipper. So, what is the news from Phobos?”
“I need a twenty hour sleep and then I intend to dig into all the data we brought back, but I wanted to tell you I took a sneak peak at what was coming in at various times and believe we have something quite unique with your little moon. So much so I want to ask you to try to swing the colonists’ ideas of shoving the thing into the sun. I’m not at all certain what will become of this but one thing is certain. Scientists all over the world and up here will be begging for the chance to go see for themselves.”
Haz looked at his visitor, a bemused look on his face. “And, you’re not going to tell me what this all is about?”
Tom shook his head but smiled. “Not quite yet because once I get everything together I want to go back up and take a close look at one particular spot before announcing anything.”
“Can you at least give me a heads up before the grand announcement?”
“Exactly my plan. You and dad will be in on the same conversation.”
“I think I’m looking forward to that, only I can’t be certain it isn’t from the same perspective of the death row prisoner who is anxious to get to the gallows to see what sort of workmanship went into it.”
The comment made Tom chuckle, but inwardly he was hoping it would never come to a “gallows” situation. He fully intended to get a grip on the Phobos situation and put things back to what they once were.
Nineteen hours later Tom had been awake from his rest nearly nine hours and had begun to develop a map of both the surface and, in most locations, the interior one-to-two hundred feet. Bud found him in the control room of the Challenger studying the resulting 3D map six hours later.
“Color decode that for me, please,” he requested.
“Sure. The light gray is the surface with all of the features. We can zoom in to a point where we can see everything more than six-inches across. Red is anything other than solid rock down to fifty feet, blue is between that and one-hundred feet, and the green is the few spots lower than that the Deep Peek managed to give us some data.”
Bud looked at the map as Tom slowly rotated it around several possible axis points.
“Well, and forgive me if I can’t grasp simple things, but I’m seeing a lot of hazy yellow. Are those the places where there are pockets of air or whatever?” When Tom nodded, Bud’s face scrunched up in concentration “Go back about a quarter of the way around on this same trajectory.”
Tom complied asking, “Think you saw something?”
“Yep, bu
t it might just be something where a couple of the colors overlapped. Stop!” He pointed at a spot on the image that was slightly in the purple range. “What’s that?”
Tom leaned forward. After more than five non-stop hours of looking at more than a thousand features he had evidently missed that.
“Not certain, but let me zoom in.”
The image began to change as he brought things in so the surface of the moon was no longer visible.
“We’re at about twenty feet inside the moon,” he told Bud. As he continued the slow zoom in he announced their approximate depths.
At one-hundred fifteen feet he stopped.
“That’s odd,” he stated. “Now that I’m in close it appears we have a void that did not appear in the longer shots. Hmmmm.” He sat back studying the image. A minute later he took the control joystick and moved the image to the left, right and up and down. Then he zoomed in and out until he felt he was at the very top of the void. He placed a “marker” at that location and zoomed steadily in until he hit solid rock again
“Jetz!” Bud exclaimed looking at the depth indicator. “That’s nearly two-hundred feet down. How the heck are we supposed to get in there to explore, and don’t tell me that isn’t exactly what you intend to do, Tom Swift!”
Bud knew his friend and brother-in-law better than anybody and he could see on Tom’s face that this was exactly what he now wanted to do.
Bud made an “I give up” shrug before asking, “So, do we get out the colony’s earth blaster and dig down to one side of the cave?”
With a shake of his head, Tom said he did not believe that was prudent.
“You see, Phobos is a tenuous arrangement of stones and dust held together with a little gravity and a lot of determination by Mother Nature. I’d be afraid of breaking too many bonds and causing a chunk to detach, Then, all hell would break loose and we could have an uncontrolled disintegration of the moon. That could spell trouble for the colony, so no. Not the earth blaster… for now.”
Tom Swift and the Martian Moon Re-Placement (The TOM SWIFT Invention Series Book 23) Page 12
