“I will, but I have had a couple thoughts. See if you agree. If our friends used the large cavern for their gravity stone to give them sufficient gravity to live, why didn’t we register increased gravity before? After all, they were still around and communicating when we put the colony up here. And then, if they did drill a shaft and place the stone, when they backfilled it, do you agree they must have placed some sort of seal down there to keep the fill from just dropping down into the cavern?”
“Very good point, Son. I have no idea about the gravity situation, but only a fool would backfill a shaft without plugging the bottom of the hole, and we know our friends are or were anything other than fools.”
They took off once he got off the radio with his father and Tom related the conversation.
“I was wondering about that as well,” Bud told him as they neared the first dig site.
It was getting close to the dinner hour for them all so Tom called a halt for food and a ten hour rest period before setting the blaster back up over the original hole and continuing that dig.
“That’s good because I’d love to give that coating we sprayed in the hole a bit longer to totally set up. Something in the makeup of the rocks and dust has been making it set about one-third as fast as normal,” Hank told the two returning men.
It was tempting to take off and set back down at the colony to have a good Chow-cooked meal and to breath the clean air inside the habitat domes, but Tom wanted them to get an early start.
When the meal packs were taken out, everyone smiled seeing Chow had thought about each of them and included some of their favorite meals like a bean-less chili for Bud, chicken noodle casseroles for Tom and Hank, roast beef in gravy for Red and several other selections.
When they were awake and back outside Tom and Hank set the blaster back on it’s launching rig and anchored everything down again. Once the inventor had assured himself the sealant on the walls of the shaft had set, the blaster was lowered to within a foot of the bottom of the shaft. Down it went, foot by foot until it seemed to jam at the hundred-and-five-foot mark.
Tom used the built-in side treads to back it up a little before trying again. But, as before the blaster refused to move downward any more.
He brought the blaster all the way to the top and set it in the launch rack before lowering a video probe.
What they saw once the probe got to the bottom astounded them all.
“Is that a solid block of some sort of metal?” Hank asked.
“It sure looks like it,” Tom replied with a puzzled shake of his head.
Red asked, “Is that some sort of ‘Keep out’ sign for us, or just possibly a natural metal block?”
“Or, it might be the plug whoever built this cavern placed to keep the fill from just dropping down. One way to find out, lets’ lower the blaster down to, oh, maybe ten feet above and head off to the side and see how far it extends,” Tom said.
The earth blaster went to work again, this time encountering nothing more that the standard mix of rock and dirt about a foot to the side of the shaft. When Tom tried one more time at a more acute angle he found the metal extended only four feet in the direction of their new side shaft.
More side holes were bored and by the time they stopped again everyone had a good idea that the metal was a nearly square slab, some nine feet across and about seven feet thick.
And one more thing. No matter what the setting, the earth blaster with its atomic heat could not make a dent in the slab.
“I’d say we have a keep out situation here. But, only for anyone just digging straight down the probably wider shaft to the cavern. We can certainly get around it but I am a bit wary of digging outside of what must have been the original shaft. Too much possibility of shifting materials.
Tom looked at each man in turn. “I think we need to bring up someone who understands how planets and things like this moon are put together. Someone whose expertise might be more in tectonic plates and volcanic eruptions, but a person I believe can give us an insight into all this,” he said.
* * * * *
With its inertial dampening capabilities and high speed, Tom’s flying saucers were about the best method of getting to Mars as quickly as possible given the widening gap between orbital positions. And, with the TranSpace Dart and Challenger already there, it was the only good choice.
The Goliath might have been an alternative, but as Bud had once pointed out, “Given they fly about at the same speed, why drive a delivery truck when you can cruise in a sports car?”
Deke Bodack had selected the newest of Enterprises’ test pilots to accompany him and his wife, Stefanie. Rollie Jones was a quiet young man with the most serious demeanor Deke had ever seen, but he had to admit the kid had flying in his blood.
At just twenty, Rollie had been qualified on everything from single engine propeller planed to the U.S. Air Force’s giant refueling and troop transports featuring six high-bypass jet turbines. He was only slightly less qualified than Bud had been at that age.
To allow them to travel at even higher speeds, Doc and some technicians had pulled the old “waterbed” couches from storage and installed them in the circular main (and only) room. Actually a gel-filled cushion, once a person climbed in and pressed a button, the gel went loose and liquid allowing the outer sack to shape tightly around the person’s body and head. Then, five-seconds later the gel hardened to a stiff goo and it held the occupant in the couch and helped absorb a lot of the extra G-forces.
It meant they took off from Fearing on a Tuesday, passed the Moon seventy-two minutes later and headed for the place Mars would be in nine days. Half of the way they were under nearly constant acceleration—except for food and bathroom breaks—and the other half was spent decelerating with the same break structure.
When Deke radioed the Mars colony they would be touching down in fifteen minutes Stefanie excused herself and headed for the bathroom. He was so busy showing Rollie everything that needed to be done for a good landing in the less dense air and lighter gravity of the Red Planet he forgot she had not come back to her couch or even to stand next to him.
He set the saucer down on the small pad in front of the very first dome to have been raised and he and Rollie got into their Martian environment suits.
“We’re here, Steff!” he called out. “Get into your suit and meet us in the dome. Tom wants us in there pronto.”
“Coming,” she called back. “Be there in two minutes.”
When she did come out it was inside the special suit that had been downsized to fit her shorter body. Deke and Rollie were standing outside the dome’s airlock shaking hands with Tom and Hank.
“There she is,” the inventor said, his smile showing through the clear oxygen concentrator mask he wore. He was a little surprised when she marched past him and into the open airlock without her customary jumping into his arms. He put it down to her wanting to wait until they were inside and he was less protected.
Inside, everyone spent a minute opening their suits and climbing out. Tom had his back turned to Stefanie and it wasn’t until he turned around he got the full effect.
She stood there, looking proud and even a bit haughty, in a sort of chain mail skirt, slit up the sides to her hips, an ornate headpiece and a solid metal bikini bra with very little else.
“Princess Stefanie of Mars reporting for duty!” she declared before launching herself up and into Tom’s arms.
“Sorry. She’s been reading a lot of Burroughs lately, Tom,” Deke explained. “If that bra thing hits you too hard it’ll knock the breath out of you. Be careful, munchkin,” he warned his wife.
To be truthful, Tom had felt the solid jab of the right side as it impacted just about at the base of his breast bone. And, it did hurt just a little. But, with the rest of Stefanie Brooks-Bodack pretty much uncovered he wasn’t exactly sure where to grab her to move her back to the floor.
After standing there in a pose holding an imaginary spear or something she relax
ed.
“Okay. Happy, fun time, jokey costume is feeling both uncomfortable and letting a lot of cold get into places I’d rather it didn’t, so if Lurch will go back out and fetch this princess’ suitcase, I’ll go change.”
The four men stood there looking at her and then at Deke, and then at her again. It was about to make her self-conscious when Haz Samson stroke around the corner, did a triple take and burst out in a deep, throaty gale of laughter.
“By golly, we actually have proved there is a beautiful Princess up here on Mars!” He walked to stand in front of her and bent down to give her a small kiss on her right cheek. “Welcome, your Majesty and I’ll bet you’re going to want to get out of that garb pronto.”
She smiled and nodded. “Yes, kind sir. Dejah Thoris, Junior at your… umm, well diaphfragm. Please do not get used to this appearance. The Princess sort of under-thought this outfit and would like to cover a few of her assets before the general population starts to stare.”
Ten minutes she had her suitcase and a quick change happened in a nearby equipment storage room. When she stepped back out it was in a plaid shirt tucked into knee-length shorts and a pair of running shoes. She also had pulled her red hair back into a pony tail.
Haz laughed again. “Just as impressive. I’ll assume that you do not wish to be addressed as ‘Your Majesty’ or ‘Princess’.”
She walked over to him and looked up into his eyes. “Thank you, kind sir. Sometimes I get these odd ideas and do not think out the consequences. So, I’ll appreciate everybody just forgetting my tiny ha-ha.”
Deke had been standing back, allowing his wife to have her moment, but now stepped forward, picking up her suitcase as well as his own and taking hold of her hand.
“Bring your tiny ha-ha along and let’s get your fancy clothing back on the ship before we go a-visiting to see our friends.”
Once inside the main area of the dome and after she had practically bowled over both Tom and Bud, Stefanie settled down and said she was willing to go meet with them and Haz in the commander’s office. “I’ll catch up with you in an hour or so, Stretch,” she told Deke before practically climbing him like a tree to give him a kiss.
Once in the office, Tom showed them the video from the one cavern they managed to get into, the makeup of the air found inside, and then the metal blockage to the larger cavern.
“Mars air?” Haz all but exploded on seeing the levels of the main gases. “That’s impossible!”
“Nope, Haz, it is there. I’ve seen it for myself,” Bud stated with an emphatic nod. “Or, seen the same readouts as Tom here.”
The inventor admitted, “I can’t explain it adequately myself. A couple theories I can come up with on the fly include Phobos being a broken off piece of a mountain from Mars with a cave system that somehow got sealed before it ended up in space. Or,” and he shrugged to say the next was a guess but as good as the first idea, “either the Space Friends or their ancestors originally lived on the Martian surface but migrated to the moon because they were having problems with the higher gravity levels.”
“But, how does that explain what I hear you believe to be a new gravity stone?” Stefanie asked, now all serious and business.
Tom laughed. “If that is the correct scenario, then I think they found the gravity on Phobos to be just a bit too light for them, so they augmented it. Like on Nestria where we found another stone giving the planetoid about five percent that of Earth.”
“And, then it was jussssstttt righhhhtttt,” Bud said voicing the joke most had been thinking.
Everybody in the office stopped smiling and looked thoughtful. This theory appeared to fit the stone discovery and the small amount they understood about the space beings.
“Okay. And as much fun as it was spending nearly one-and-a-half weeks cooped up in one large room where my idea of intimacy was so far from met that I began having nightmares,” Stefanie told them, “I really need to know and understand why you asked me to come up here. I’m sure I can’t add to the knowledge base on those aliens as they came and went from their Earth visit while I was in Antarctica studying the accelerated breakup of the main ice sheets. So?
Tom cleared his throat so she turned to face him.
“We have begun digging a couple shafts down into a couple caverns under the surface. These seem to not be natural caverns created when something gaseous bubbled inside liquid rock. The floors are almost flat and even for one thing. Then, there is the evidence of a gravity stone. Here’s the problem.”
He told her about the metallic block and how the makeup of the moon changed from solid rocks to a powdery substance not all that far down.
“Ahhhh,” she said, the light of understanding coming on. “So, you need me to tell you if you are going to get into danger, huh?”
“And,” Tom told her, “whether we are going to cause damage or even partial breakup of the moon if we continue to dig.”
* * * * *
Stefanie insisted on a visit to the two dig sites.
“I need to see what is inside that one cavern you did pierce, so is there some way to enhance that itty, bitty light of yours?” she asked after viewing the earlier video
With a shrug Tom replied, “I can try, but we are limited in the size of what can be sent through the seal we made at the bottom of that hole.”
“Make a bigger seal,” she stated as if it were a foregone conclusion and not something she was ready to discuss.
He thought about it before asking,” And, how do you suppose we go about replacing the current seal without losing the atmosphere inside?”
Stefanie stood up—an act that only made her nominally taller but nobody dared to laugh about it—and began pacing. The one point where it seemed Bud was going to make a comment, she stopped holding up a finger in warning.
He said nothing.
Three minutes went by before she spoke.
“Okay. You start by making the new seal that can have a large enough light shoved through it. Then, you plant it just above the current seal. Next, you shove something through the new seal onto the top of the old one and give it a good shove down and into the cavern. Unless you had plans for retrieving it, it is lost anyway. Besides, if we do get into that cavern I will personally pack it away and carry it out for you!”
Tom found her logic to be nearly flawless and he told her so.
“Then, you can do that? Good! You can get a larger light down there and even maybe a way to turn the camera around so we see everything in there? Even closeups of the walls so I can see if we are looking for trouble?”
“Short of trying to build another mini-Geotron and sending you, or you and I going down together,” Tom told her, “that would seem to be the best option. Give me until tomorrow to make that new seal and we’ll head up.”
Everyone enjoyed another of Chow’s fabulous meals made in part from some new supplies Deke, Stefanie and Rollie brought along with them, and in part from some of the array of vegetables and vegetable-based meat substitutes grown and created at the colony.
“I’d swear that was one-hundred percent beef in that stroganoff,” Deke declared, “including the first honest old-fashioned sour cream I’ve had in two decades. Someday somebody is going to have to tell me how you do it.”
Gordon Tapp, the chief food biologist for the colony, the man sitting across from the tall pilot smiled. “First, thank you for your kind words. Second, the sour cream is easy. First, we grow a plant up here that produces a sap that is closely akin in viscosity, color and workability to whole milk. A little manipulation, a little home-grown vinegar and three days under about five-hundred psi of pressure and… well, it becomes what you have been tasting. Better for you as well as it has a high level of protein and some incredible amino acids we might otherwise miss out on in our diets.
Bud, who wasn’t certain why he knew this, added, “All courtesy of a mistake our very own Chow Winkler made on the first visit he made up here after the crops began coming in.”
The young man smirked but said it sounded wonderful to him.
“At last… square walls!”
By the time the small team gathered at the saucer the next morning, both Bodacks were awake and ready to go.
Tom, who remained up until well past two a.m. was also ready with his new and improved shaft seal and a new camera/light setup.
He first flew them to the site of the deeper and larger cavern with the probable gravity stone inside. He asked everyone to wait while he went out and made a gravity measurement.
“Back down to thirteen-point-five percent of Earth,” he announced as he removed his helmet and took a place standing behind Bud who piloted them to the second site.
“Deke and Steff? You can come out with us while we do the seal switch or you can stay in here. Your choice. It’ll take us about an hour.”
Stefanie nodded. “Thanks and all that, but I want to stretch these short gams of mine out on the moon. I take it I will be the official first woman to set foot on the surface?”
“First and possible the only one until Mars gets back around and closer to the Earth and we bring up a few more scientists. So, get suited up and we’ll head out.”
Stefanie looked around them and then down at her upper body. “Uhhhh, in case you don’t recall I am built along different lines from your boys, and the bathroom in this ship is barely big enough for me to turn around in much less don a spacesuit. And, I’d like to get into something with more give before pulling on the outerwear.”
Tom blushed a deep red. He stammered a few things before suggesting that he and Bud and even Deke go out first and wait for her.
She joined them on the surface eight minutes later still tugging a little at the waist of her suit to get it into proper position.
Tom Swift and the Martian Moon Re-Placement (The TOM SWIFT Invention Series Book 23) Page 16
