Setting the digging to proceed at a torturously slow pace took the inventor the best part of an hour of balancing the blaster’s abilities against the relatively softness of the soil and rock it was going to be digging through. He also had to take into consideration the gentle angle needed to actually pierce into the cavern below. It required one additional hop into space and a good sweep with the Deep Peek to satisfy him he had things right.
He hoped that nine degree slope was some indication he would be traversing the original shaft dug down in order to place the stone. With no spin to the moon it was most likely any escaping gases would have left behind a shaft straight up.
At its lowest power setting the blaster barely stirred up a steady stream of dust as most of the materials were vaporized before they could travel much more than the length of the device.
“Talk about slow,” Bud commented to Hank.
“Sure, but the skipper has a method behind that. You wouldn’t want him to push things and find that we have another planetary body like Eris to reassemble, only this time we have hours rather than weeks to do it.”
It was true. On the TranSpace Dart’s first trip outside the solar system they encountered a small planet with a moon and both were directly in the path of Halley’s Comet as it swung back in for another visit. The comet hit the planet’s moon and the moon plowed into the planet in slow motion but with enough force to break the surface crust and let most of the gigantic chunks begin to drift apart.
It required a near-Herculean effort and an equal amount of luck to put Eris back together and keep all that debris from eventually entering the solar system and potentially crashing into Saturn, Mars and the Earth.
“I get your point,” the flyer admitted with a sheepish grin.
It took more than half an hour for the rear end of the blaster to disappear and get about a foot under the surface, and all that time the inventor kept a very close look at several instruments including a seismograph that would be their first indication that something was breaking apart down there.
With the orientation of Phobos meaning everybody’s heads were pointed toward the planet and most of the crew stood transfixed at the incredible and almost too close geographical features of the planet below—or above—them.
Bud straightened up from where he had been crouching next to Tom and stretched. As comfortable as Tom had managed to design their spacesuits, they still had a tendency to pinch and tighten a bit as you moved. He took a quick look straight up—or down—to the surface of Mars.
Little Phobos was just coming up on an area of the Red Planet some believed had been the impact site of an even smaller moon—perhaps only a mile across—eons earlier. An incredible gash had been made showing the destructive power and the scar that survived possibly hundreds of thousands of years.
“Will you look at that? What a nasty big gouge that is!”
They were just passing high over a deep set of canyons dug deep into the surface.
“Those are known as the Valles Marineris, and some scientist believe they are yet more proof of water having once been a part of the Martian surface. Personally, I believe with the large minority who think that is the crash site of a third moon this planet once had. Some have even named it as Thlipsi, the Greek word for sadness. It is as if whatever that moon, or even an incoming asteroid coming in at a fairly acute angle, broke up as it hit the atmosphere and more than a half dozen chunks of various sizes hit.”
Bud made a hmmmm sound. “I think I’m with you. It is too… too… Uhh, too gougy to be something that came straight in from deep space. That would have made a crater. As for the water thing, could it have collected water?”
Tom nodded inside his helmet. “It likely did if it happened far enough back in the planet’s history. It is stark but sort of beautiful.”
“Sort of in the same way the Grand Canyon is, huh?”
Tom agreed. “Reminds me of a line in some novel I read years ago, something along the lines of, ‘What a vicious cicatrix!’”
“Sick-a-what?” Bud asked.
“Cicatrix, with a couple c’s in there and an x at the end. Basically, a nasty scar.”
“Oh,” Bud responded looking at the feature disappear around the planet as their moon ride raced on. “Now I give it some thought, that one that looks like a spaceship out of an old TV show! I wonder what size it was?”
Tom had also noticed the similarity from their recent orientation. He chuckled. “Yes, and you are correct except you can tell whatever made that had been fairly large, but not as big as Phobos, and that gives us an indication of what sort of damage might happen if this moon crashed onto surface.”
Bud gulped. “And Phobos does or does not pass right over the colony?”
“Almost directly over every ninth orbit and not much more than nineteen degrees off at its farthest point, although there is the short set of hills behind the habitat domes that could provide enough protection, but I, for one, don’t want to put that to the test!”
“I’ll bet Haz and the colonist don’t want to try that either. But, if we can’t find a way to get to that gravity stone and either take it away or somehow get the Space Friends to help turn it off or fix it, our choices for keeping this little fellow up here are pretty slim.”
“No truer words, Bud. But, I’d like Duanne and Red to stand guard here while the rest of us go up and I take another pass over the area with the sensors and Deep Peek.”
The team members trooped back to the ladder and climbed into the airlock and then up to the command center.
Their much slower flyover this time gave them an incredible insight into what they might encounter if they could get down to the cavern. Not only did the readout show the floor was mostly flat—something that spoke of a constructed empty space rather than natural cave caused by a bubble—it showed exactly where the object likely to be a gravity stone could be found.
Tom wasn’t surprised to see it was almost exactly in the center of the cavern.
The unfortunate thing was they now could see the stone was encased in something the Deep Peek could detect, but not identify. It almost seemed as if some sort of protective field encased the gravity stone. It could be semi-solid or even invisible; only time and standing in front of it would tell. Nor could it tell how thick this covering might be.
It was going to depend on them getting into the cavern and seeing for themselves.
Tom decided to continue their survey from above and out an additional one-thousand yards. He hoped there would be some indication of a more gentle-sloped access shaft down to the cavern. How else would the beings responsible for the gravity stone have been capable of getting it down there?
Almost as if reading his friend’s mind, Bud asked, “Do you believe that place we’re digging is the only access spot to the space below?”
“That’s what I hope to find, Bud, but it isn’t looking too good. I could almost believe the stone was placed inside the cavern and the access shaft was backfilled. If the spot we’re digging is that access shaft, then I believe we will be safe to widen our own little access hole to let people inside.” He sighed. “We’ll see.”
Their wide survey complete with no additional pockets or shafts to be found, Tom set the ship back on the surface.
When they arrived at the hole, Red announced the earth blaster was just passing thirty-six feet.
“It’s been nearly all solid materials,” he told the two younger men. “Nothing out of the ordinary like fabulous riches in diamonds or gold. Just the same uninteresting grey and light brown rocks we’ve found all around us.”
“Don’t worry, Red,” Bud told him. “Someday Tom is going to take us all back to the asteroid belt and let us each lay claim to a chunk out there to mine for all those riches you’re hoping for.”
Red looked at Tom expecting the inventor to be shaking his head, but was surprised to see the younger man grinning.
“It could easily happen, Red,” he said. “You will recall that we
mined several billions in precious metals from the asteroid chunk we used as the anchor for building the Space Queen.”
They stood in silence looking around them and over at the small fountain of particles being blown back out of the blaster’s hole.
“Fifty feet,” Tom announced a quarter hour later. He pressed a button on his small remote and the blaster paused its digging. “I want to look over the materials coming up.”
They walked the one-hundred feet to the tripod rack and the hole. There was a ring of debris about five feet away from the bore hole rising only a few inches. Tom stepped over it and got down on his knees to shine a powerful light down the hole.
“Smooth and solid-looking,” he announced. “Although, I can only see down about twenty feet. Could someone go back to the ship and bring a tethered camera and light set?”
Bud hustled back to their ship, returning three minutes later. “I was going to look for a portable monitor when it hit me we can just send the images to our helmet screens.”
Tom smiled and agreed it was his thought as well.
“I’ll send the video to the ship to be recorded so we can show it to Haz and the geologists and sent it down to dad.”
As the camera probe was played out, and headed down slowly due to the reduced gravity, the images it sent back were uniformly smooth with only the tiniest of lines showing where one rock ended and the next one had smashed tightly against it. By the time they reached five feet above the rear end of the blaster—the lowest safe point according to Tom—there was nothing telling either of them they were in danger of causing troubles with this dig.
They retrieved the probe and Tom started the blaster up again.
Over the next hour it traveled just another fifty-three feet as the inventor was running it on its lowest setting to ensure they didn’t get things out of control.
Again, Tom paused the dig and the video probe was lowered.
This time the results were different.
At about eighty-nine feet the sides of the six-inch tube were seen to be crumbling. It was in such slow motion from the low gravity that it did not appear to be real, but both young men knew it was not a good sign.
“So, some eighty feet of solids and then powdery mush?” Bud asked.
“I’m not sure about that. We would not be detecting the several large voids if the entire moon was like that. Let’s mark and temporarily cap this hole. I’m going to retrieve the blaster and while Red and Hank get a coating of plastic down the hole to stabilize things you and I will move a quarter way around the moon to about where there is a house-size void just down only seventy feet. We’ll see.”
Two hours later everything was set up in the new location and Tom let Bud take the control box for the launch.
“Want me to keep to the same foot-per-minute rate?” he asked.
“Yes. At least until we get to about twenty feet and can take a quick look. Then we’ll go for about double that until the blaster reaches sixty feet and then we go nice and slow until we get breakthrough.” A though hit him. “No, check that. Once we get to sixty-five we pull back out and make a check. Then, I want to use the electric drill to punch into the void and capture any gas coming back out. And, to do that we’ll need to cap this hole once the blaster is back.”
“I’ll go bring out one of the small two-man emergency tents and enough sealant to plaster it to the surface. We can capture anything that comes up. Well, within reason, that is.”
“Great idea, Bud. Thanks.”
The materials under them proved to be mostly what they had encountered in the first hole and the digging speed was increased as Tom had suggested. As they approached what would be the top of a cavern the vibration patterns registering in the blaster changed, and Tom stated this was because they were close to breakthrough.
“Now we inch down until we are about two feet from entering the cavern,” he told them.
Twenty minutes later he called a halt to their digging and had the blaster withdrawn. Once it was back in its launch rack he called for the special breakthrough kit consisting of a high torque drill that featured self-expanding armatures to hold it in position so the bit could do its job.
The drilling took just four minutes before the tip of the bit hit… emptiness.
Tom detached the drill bit from his remote drill leaving it to partially plug the hole while he could put in a more permanent solution to keep anything inside from leaking out. The drill was withdrawn and checked to see if it had picked up anything such as a liquid; it was absolutely dry. He next sent down a special plastic plug and a capsule of a self-expanding foam that would quickly harden and close the shaft around the plug forming an airtight blockage while allowing him to insert instruments through the plug.
Once hardened and ready, down went a small instrument package. It contained both a needle-like probe to get past the plug as well as a camera with its own light source.
“Move the needle to our left, Bud,” Tom requested as he watched the monitor. “About an inch more… and…there. Okay. Set it to insert and let’s see what might be down there.”
The needle typically used gravity, but with that being as low as it was currently, Bud had to pull it up several feet and let it drop. On the second try it displaced the drill bit and entered the cavern below.
An LED camera light on the end of the probe began glowing, but the light shed by it was insufficient to see anything inside other than a ghostly image of the nearby walls.
“Well, visuals will have to wait,” Tom said as he shut that portion of the probe down. Shortly thereafter he announced there was some pressure inside the cavern, “…and that means we have some sort of gas or mixture of them. Let’s draw some off for testing.”
With Bud’s assistance, he drew off a large sample of the gas that filled the cavern. That there had been anything under any sort of pressure inside the ancient void was a surprise, but nothing as shocking as what he saw when he fed the sample into the spectra-analyzer in the spacecraft.
He turned to face Bud, his face a mask of shock.
“What is it, Tom? You okay?”
The inventor nodded. “Yeah,” he said, softly. “It is just what that gas we took out tells me.”
“And…”
“Bud. That gas wasn’t some ancient methane or something like that. In fact it isn’t a single gas at all. It is a mix of mostly carbon dioxide, less than one percent oxygen, two percent nitrogen and a few other gases thrown in.” He looked expectantly at his friend.
Then, the import of those gases hit Bud.
“But… that’s the atmosphere of Mars!”
CHAPTER 14 /
PRINCESS STEFANIE OF MARS
ALL TOM could do was nod. He was shocked and his mind was racing for any explanation other than the one he had immediately registered.
Finally, he managed to gather his thoughts and speak. “You’re right, of course, and I have zero idea why that should be unless astrophysicists have been wrong all these years and at least Phobos was once part of Mars, perhaps the top of a mountain with caves, that was hit by something, broke off and was flung into space. The heat of such a collision and fast exit might have melted the surface and sealed in those caves.”
Bud looked at his friend. “And, the likelihood of that scenario?”
The inventor shrugged. “As good a guess as any in the absence of some type of proof.”
“Come on, professor. Take the thinking cap off and tell me what you really believe. Could that be at all likely, or could this be or have been our Space Friends’ base of operations?”
After letting out a deep breath between his tightly pressed lips, Tom responded with, “I have to believe that is a real jump in logic. First, if the gravity stone was placed inside Phobos by them, why part way around the moon and not here. Of course that means this might have been something else, like a storage area and where the stone is was where they once were, but I still can’t believe with their spaceships and technology they dug a shaft
down to a cavern and had to climb back out to go anywhere. No, Bud, I think these caverns are here for other purposes.”
They returned to the downward shaft and took several more samples at various depths inside the cavern. When tested they would universally be the same mixture of gases.
While Bud packed up the blaster and their other equipment Tom got on the radio to call his father.
“That’s… well I hardly think incredible is sufficient as a descriptive, don’t you?” Damon told his son.
“It is pretty hard to digest all this,” Tom admitted. “Bud and I are heading back to the original dig site, where the gravity stone lies, and resume that dig. In the meantime I need to rig up a more powerful light for the camera at the end of the probe. We could barely see thirty feet in the smaller cavern.”
An idea hit him so he asked his father, “Do you think the gas mixture inside the smaller cavern might have been close to solidifying and that caused the difficulty is seeing very far?”
Damon, although Tom could not seen him, was no doubt rubbing his chin in thought, a habit he and Tom shared and one that was being adopted by Tom’s son, Bart as well.
Finally, he answered. “There would have to be an almost liquid thickness of that gas mixture to get to actual liquid state and that would mean very high pressures. You didn’t mention that the gases came shooting out, so I think perhaps the carbon dioxide was so cold that it was a bit like the CO2 coming out of a fire extinguisher. In other words, white and cloudy. In any case, Please be careful in piercing the larger cavern.”
Tom Swift and the Martian Moon Re-Placement (The TOM SWIFT Invention Series Book 23) Page 15
