“Those are the symbols of the Space Friends all right!” Bud exclaimed excitedly. “Skipper? You hit it right on the head when you said there was a gravity stone down here.”
Without wanting to sound like he might be bragging, Tom replied, “It almost had to be to give the fluctuating gravity readings we’ve encountered. I suppose now it is a matter of what to do about this one—”
“—and to see if this is the only one on Phobos.” Stefanie finished, making the inventor wonder what they might run into on the second moon, Deimos.
The robots made a complete survey of the cavern and their videos were being fed into the saucer’s computers to create a detailed 3D map.
When they finished, both returned to the point below the bore and internal magnets drew in their tethers. Each one was pulled back up and the camera equipment withdrawn.
“We’ll leave the seal in place,” Tom told them. “It’ll make it much easier to do any further looking around such as trying to find a way in.”
As they returned to the ship, Tom remembered he had left the recon robots’ controller sitting on a rock over by the bore hole.
“Back in three,” he called over the radio as he spun and bounded back to the dig site.
Suddenly, and without any warning, all gravity on Phobos seemed to disappear and his latest bound now caused him to launch himself upward at a sharp angle.
Just as fast as it disappeared, gravity approximately that on Mars itself grabbed them all. The three at the ship braced themselves, but Tom, now fifty feet up, was grabbed and yanked downward. It was as if the very moon was attacking them all.
At the first sign of the gravity drop, Bud had raced back outside and looked to where his friend was continuing to rise into space.
When gravity returned with a vengeance, he let out a horrified scream.
The inventor was plummeting straight down toward the rocky surface!
CHAPTER 16 /
SUCCESS COMES BEFORE… AWW, NUTS!
GRAVITY ON the little moon fluctuated wildly and before Tom could hit the ground, it had all but disappeared again. However, he was already dropping and hit hard; it was immediately evident to Bud that he was injured.
The flyer ignored the possibility he might find himself in danger should gravity play any more games and raced to aid his friend. He got to Tom within half a minute only to find the inventor was mostly conscious and clutching at the leg of his suit.
The flyer assessed he situation immediately and grabbed the upper suit dragging Tom toward the nearby emergency tent.
He got them both inside before Tom’s last strength faded and he passed out.
“Deke,” he radioed. “Get out here with an emergency suit patch kit. Tom’s fall tore his suit leg. Hurry!”
The man reached the tent two minutes later with both the patch kit as well as a first aid kit designed for decompression accidents.
He helped peel Tom out of his suit and while Bud checked for broken bones—fortunately there was no sign of anything other than skin being broken—before turning to the job of repairing the three-inch tear, Deke read the instruction card before he jabbed a self-administering syringe into Tom’s upper thigh with an anesthetic to numb the pain he would feel as soon as he regained consciousness.
“Is he gonna be okay?” Deke asked Bud.
Bud shrugged. “I think so… I hope so, but we need to get back to the colony pronto. The doc down there will do what is necessary.”
“What happened out there,” Stefanie’s voice came over their radios.
“If this moon were occupied I’d say it was some sort of attack on the skipper. All of us for that matter. But, maybe something we did down in the cavern set off a protection program in the gravity stone. Once we get Tom back to the colony and fixed up he might be able to shed some light on this,” Bud responded.
Groggily, Tom groaned but said, “I don’t think it was an attack, folks. I think it might have been the gravity stone continuing to malfunction, which is my latest theory on why the orbit shifting. Now, get me suited up and down to see the doctor. I think I’m about to throw up from the pain.”
His companions eased him back into his suit. He did not vomit as the pain drugs took effect and the last thing Bud saw before they laid him into a couch inside the saucer was a silly grin on his now sleeping face.
Stefanie had not been idle waiting for them to return. She had contacted the colony and a special protective sleeve and docking structure had been brought out so that Tom would be transported on a gurney in a heated space with Earth-normal air inside.
The colony physician took charge of the inventor and three helpers got Tom rolled inside the main habitat dome.
With little or nothing they might do, Deke and Stefanie headed for the cafeteria while Bud remained with Tom and the doctor.
“Do you know how to set up one of the SimpsonScopes?” she asked him.
The flyer nodded. He had been with Tom when he’d demonstrated the special scanning device to Enterprises’ doctor years earlier. A thin flat plate was slid under the portion of the body to be looked into and a trio of armatures positioned over the top. A combination of sonic waves, invisible high-intensity light waves and a small amount of tightly contained radiation pierced the body and the results were displayed, in full color, using a variation of Tom’s 3D Telejector. Images in real time appeared directly above the body and the exact position and depth of what was being viewed controlled by the physician.
“Okay. No internal damage other than about nine bruised ribs in the upper torso,” she reported to the anxious Bud ten minutes later. “They’re gonna hurt every time he coughs or sneezes for a month or two.”
The only other injury of any note was a twisted right leg, the one that had sustained the suit damage.
“I’ve got to hand it to the man,” she said almost to faintly for Bud to hear. “He managed to grab that suit tear and fold it over so he never was exposed to the complete vacuum. Lucky!”
“He generally is,” Bud told her. “But he’s also very fast at sizing up any situation and not panicking. I can’t even tell you how many times he’s saved both of us with his lightning fast reactions.”
“Glad to hear that, and now some of the things your Doctor Simpson has told me over the years make even more sense. Oh, and that reminds me, I need to contact him and send him the images from the scan. He seems to be keeping a rather compendious file on both of you.” She smiled at the flyer. “He believes the two of you might be setting some sort of records.”
Now, Bud grinned back at her. “Yeah. We sort of have become magnets for injury over the years. But, as Doc says, nothing we can’t live long and fruitful lives with once he finishes with us. Well,” and now he blushed but also looked a little sad, “there’s the whole dose of radiation I got at age sixteen that is now haunting me by not letting my wife and me have a baby.”
The doctor knew nothing of this, but as a professional she understood there are times you pry and times you just listen. This was a listen situation, but Bud had nothing more to say on the matter.
“I can’t say anything about that, but I know I was unable to conceive so my husband and I adopted. She’s twenty-six now and living in Alaska while her husband is doing research on their non-migratory sea birds. Sounds awful!”
“Sounds cold!”
They shared a laugh as they made certain Tom was covered and comfortable before they turned the lights down and left the small recovery room.
* * * * *
“Did everything stop just because of me?” Tom’s voice came from behind Hank, Art and Bud who were having some of the local coffee substitute the following morning.
The three whipped around, concerned looks on their faces until they saw that Tom was standing there, unaided, and smiling.
“I want to thank my every faithful brother-in-law for his rescue. I had a good hold on the suit leg, but enough of the cold vacuum seeped in to make me feel like passing out. So, I owe you one. A
nother one.”
The three men rose and shook Tom’s hand.
“Nope. I still owe you so many I can’t keep track. The fact is, we all owe you, skipper.”
They all sat down and Tom accepted a cup of the brew.
Twenty minutes later they had discussed some of the next steps to take regarding the gravity stone and the Phobos situation.
“I promised Steff and Deke to get them back home to their kids, and I believe Bud and I need to remind our ladies that we still exist, so the TranSpace Dart will be taking off tomorrow, and the two of you are coming along.”
With them would be Chow, Professor Brandon—whose studies on Mars had concluded, and his regular job was calling for his return—Stefanie and Deke Bodack (obviously) and two other men from Fearing Island.
Before leaving orbit Tom radioed to Enterprises to tell them his intent was to push the ship to the top speed it could reach given the distances to travel and be landing in just four days and nine hours.
“If you can have one of the saucers waiting at the Space Queen we can just transfer over, drop the Professor off at the old Outpost and then land directly at Enterprises. Dave and Allan can take the saucer back to Fearing.”
Everything was arranged and Tom picked up the small black hole he’d left in an orbital position safeguarding it from drifting too close to the planet.
“Stand by for acquisition,” he announced to the crew who were in the mid level while he and Bud were up in the small control cockpit.
“Are you going to be able to handle the sitting up here?” Bud asked thinking of Tom’s ribs.
“The doctor gave me some pain pills that have just enough narcotic to cut the pain down but not make me loopy… or even sleepy. So, yes.”
It was a moderately tricky balancing act to get close enough to the black hole while keeping the repelatron focused on it always pushing it away. Even then, he knew he had to start from several thousand yards away and ease up to a point where everything was equalized and the ship was less than a hundred feet away.
Then, physics took over and as the black hole drew them in, the repelatron pushed the hole away at the same rate and, despite what one might believe, instead of simply canceling each other out, the ship and its new propulsion system began moving forward… and accelerated constantly and at an increasing rate until—if enough distance were to be traversed—they could reach nearly the speed of light.
For this trip back to the Earth they would only manage to achieve about 39% the S.O.L. during the acceleration phase and then everything would be swung so the tail of the ship was pointing at the planet and they slowed as quickly as they sped up.
On reaching the orbit of the Moon, Tom eased the ship backwards from the hole by increasing the repelatron until they were moving forward at just fifty-thousand miles per hour. Then, at the halfway point they slowed even more.
Tom dropped the black hole off at a special point where its orbit speed would keep it at a constant distance from the planet and the space station. It would remain there until called upon again.
“I can hardly wait to get home,” Bud stated as they were putting on their spacesuits for the transfer to the saucer.
It had been decided to bypass entering the station and so they would be drifting over in the void of space.
“No need to accompany me over to the station,” Professor Brandon announced when they pulled up to within fifty feet of the space wheel. “I’ve been doing the free drift the past three times I’ve come up. Besides, I can see one of the transfer techs shooing the sticky line over here.”
Sure enough, they all heard as the end of the line struck the hull of the saucer sticking to it so the Professor could clip on and just push off to glide over.
When he was safely attached to the station and heading into the airlock, the tech send a signal to the end piece which detached and was reeled back in.
“Home, Jeeves!” Bud declared to Hank who had volunteered to pilot them down.
“A little less of that or you walk,” came back the rejoinder.
* * * * *
Two days after coming home, Tom came back to work. It was Thursday and his father was in an all-day planning and review meeting at the MotorCar company with Charlie deGroot, the manager at that facility.
“Welcome back and your father wanted you to handle his daily correspondence,” Trent greeted him when he arrived at the outer office.
“Good to see you, too, Trent, and is there anything I need to know before I mark up things?”
The secretary bit his lower lip. “Just that your dad has been receiving a series of mildly threatening letters coming at random intervals, from random and all fake addresses and in a variety of envelopes and handwritten or printed addresses. Harlan Ames has asked that the mailroom send all his and your letters to his department for scanning, so everything you get today actually came in yesterday. I have a basic paragraph of apology for delayed responses when needed.”
Tom headed into the office, saw the moderately short stack of letters and a few key email printouts on his desk and made a short detour to the side table where he poured himself a cup of hot and strong coffee.
Sitting down he reached over and took the top page. It was a letter supposedly from one of his father’s old NASA friends asking if Damon might come down to Florida to discuss an old project that was being updated.
He was about to note this one needed his father’s attention when something in the wording caught his attention.
What with the great times we all had with that original space shuttle program, until everything fell apart, I thought you might jump at this chance.
Tom knew his father had not been involved in the original shuttle program but in the second program coming about a decade after the first one shut down.
He noted that this needed further Security investigation.
Five letters down, all of them variations on begging letters but most probably things Damon would want to send a personal response to, he came to what looked to be an email printout, but it had been scribbled on by Harlan himself.
See if you can spot the trouble with this—H
Some of the time people must write to you and say that
we are all in this world together. I must assume that you and
I are cut from the same bolt of cloth in that whenever I
find something that seems to shout injustice I really have
to say or do something.
Do you understand what I am trying to say? Do you feel as
I do?
Even if you do not, please contact me at my address.
Tom read it three times before he spotted what Harlan had.
The first letter of each line spelled out another threat to his father: SwIft DIE
It made his stomach feel sick.
“Harlan?” Tom said when he called the Security man. “I just got to that note from dad’s crackpot. Do you believe he’s in any jeopardy from this guy?”
He heard a sigh from the other end of the line.
“If you want the absolute truth, Tom, I do not know. If you want my gut feeling, I believe the sender is unbalanced but harmless. Also, and this is based on handwriting analysis we’ve had done on a few of the notes with actual pen and ink words, this is no guy. Our expert is willing to swear it is a woman who wrote those little bits, but nobody can say for certain if all the letters were from just the one individual.”
“I see, or I don’t, actually. Are you saying this could be a group and one of them is a woman? Would that mean the rest might be men?”
“If there is a rest and this is a group, then that is a possibility. If, however, it is a lone female sending all these letters, and there have been a total of nineteen so far, she had either a lot of money or friends who forward her letters. They’ve come from at least fifteen cities in the U.S. and two in Canada.”
“As Bud would say, Jetz! and not in a good way.”
After being given assurances the investigation w
as a priority one and in full swing, Tom hung up.
His next call was to Marylynn Dick.
“I wanted to tell you I’m back at Enterprises and wondered if you have a little time today to meet. I’ll even come to your office and bring pastries,” he offered.
“Thank the makers you are back,” she told him. “And, boy have I got some news for you. Sure, come on over, and mine’s a cherry Danish. Or, two. I’ve got the rest of this morning free.”
“Be there in fifteen minutes.”
He stopped by Chow’s kitchen down the hall to see if there were any pastries available.
“If’n ya can wait five minutes, I’ve got a rack o’ Danishes and some mini fruit pies coolin’, but they need a little bit longer or they’ll fall all apart!”
The two men passed the time in conversation with Tom starting by thanking the chef for his extended stay up on Mars.
“Haz told me, as did their resident psychologist, that your food did more for morale than just about anything. Well done, old timer.”
His compliment made the chef blush.
He left a few minutes later with a box of a dozen assorted pastries. They were still quite warm and he needed to switch hands several times as the bottom of the box was too hot on his hands.
“Danish Delivery Service,” he called out as he poked his head around the door jamb of Marylynn’s office. “Hope you have fresh coffee to go with these.”
She nodded, not taking her eyes off the box and its tempting contents.
“Sit and open that thing within reach then we’ll talk, and I think you’ll want to hear this so the sooner you come all the way in and sit down the sooner I’ll spill what I know.”
Over their first mouthfuls of the desserts she informed the inventor that a few things had happened since their conversation about the mangled repelatron/Attractatron array.
“It turns out that your father had authorized the folks out on Fearing island to make some significant changes to the Goliath,” she said. “Really significant, but ones I hear you might have previously discussed.”
Tom Swift and the Martian Moon Re-Placement (The TOM SWIFT Invention Series Book 23) Page 18
